Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [33]
It was difficult for slaves to marry in colonial Saint Domingue, as the Code Noir made it illegal for a married couple and their children to be separated by a sale. Perhaps for that reason, Toussaint married rather late in life, when he was over forty. However, his life before his marriage did not lack for romance. Though he was never a handsome man, Toussaints unusual skills, intelligence, and status as a commandeur and trusted personal servant of Breda's manager seem to have made him attractive enough to women that he was able to father eight enfants naturels outside the confines of wedlock: four sons (Jean-Pierre, Didine Gustave, Benjamin, and Rainville) and four daughters (Martine, Marie-Noel, Rose, and Zizine).
Toussaints wife, Suzanne Simon Baptiste, was mother to a ten-month-old son named Placide at the time of their marriage in 1782. By some accounts, this infant's father was a mulatto named Seraphin Clere. Placide was light-skinned, and once identified himself in a legal document as a griffe (one of sixty-four officially recognized permutations of combined European and African blood). However, Toussaint acknowledged paternity of Placide when he married Suzanne, at which point his capacity to father children out of wedlock had already been thoroughly proved. Placide's skin tone might well have been accounted for by Toussaint's Arada heritage. And Toussaint's relationship to Placide was markedly closer than what he had with the two younger children of his marriage, Isaac and Saint-Jean; in 1802 Placide joined Toussaint's army in resisting the Napoleonic invasion, while Isaac declared himself incapable of taking up arms against the French. Later on, during their exile in France, the issue of paternity soured the relationship between the two (half?) brothers, and Isaac tried legal means to prevent Placide from using the Louverture name. Portraits of Isaac and Placide (almost certainly drawn from life) show a marked resemblance between Isaac and the most credible portraits of Toussaint Louverture, while the Placide-Toussaint resemblance is slight to nonexistent. On the other hand, when Toussaint enumerated all of his eleven children to the interrogator Caffarelli in the prison of the Fort de Joux, he pointedly included Placide among his three legitimate sons.
The four dots enclosed by the last extravagant loop of the signature which Toussaint deployed for the first time in his proclamation from Camp Turel indicate that he was a Freemason, and of a very high degree; all his subsequent signatures also include this symbol. Toussaint's name is not to be found in the membership list of any Masonic lodge; yet those lists do include the names of many of his proteges—men who were officers in his army and would figure prominently in future governments of Haiti, not only his brother Paul Louverture and his nephew Charles Belair but also many white men who were close to him. The implication is that the ever-secretive Toussaint occluded his own name from the membership rolls while discreetly using the Masonic temple structure to reinforce the position of his closest associates—whose presence there strongly suggests that Toussaints sponsorship was very influential.
Freemasonry has preserved its essential secrets from its origins up until the present day. During the eighteenth century it was established in Saint Domingue by French colonists, but even in the colonial period the Masonic lodges included (surprisingly) some free blacks and gens de couleur as well as whites. Toussaint's membership in the organization would have furnished him a relationship—on exceptionally equal terms—with some of the most powerful white men in the colony. Via this network, he and other leaders of the first insurrection are supposed to have been in contact with significant figures among the grands blancs before