Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [8]
With life such a misery, suicide, abortion, and infanticide were shockingly common among the slaves, though these too were severely punished—even the bodies of suicides were mutilated so that they would be disfigured in the afterlife, for the whites had an inkling of the blacks' belief that death was a route to a metaphysical Africa. Even for slaves who made no attempt on their own lives, life expectancy was extremely short, thanks to overwork, malnutrition, and general abuse. Women's resistance to bringing children into the world of slavery was widespread.
Thus a huge annual importation of slaves from Africa was required to maintain a stable workforce in the colony. Between 1784 and 1790 a total of 220,000 slaves were brought in. One unintended consequence of this situation was that two-thirds of the more than half a million slaves in the colony had been born free in Africa—and nearly half of the whole slave population had been deprived of freedom within the past ten years. Therefore the atmosphere in Saint Domingue was infinitely more volatile than in other slave regimes like the United States, where by the end of the eighteenth century the majority of slaves had been born into servitude. Moreover, the example of marronagevras ever present to the slaves of Saint Domingue. While the maroon groups were not large enough to threaten the stability of the colony on their own, the idea of them was revolutionary in the slave communities—all the more so if exaggerated—and the idea was constantly refreshed by petits marrons who came and went from their plantations, sometimes, it seemed, almost at will.
From 1789 on, the whites of Saint Domingue were so caught up in their own class conflict that they were careless of what they said in earshot of their slaves. Even if they had been more circumspect, it would have been very difficult to keep news of the Oge rebellion and of the revolutionary ideology sweeping over France from the slave population. Though literacy among slaves was severely discouraged, some slaves could and certainly did read the newspapers. The fevered political discussions of the whites were bound to be overhead by mistresses, household slaves, and the black overseers and managers called comman-deurs. And indeed, the whites were at least sometimes aware of their risk. They knew they were sitting on a powder keg, and that there were open flames nearby, but none of them seemed to know what to do to prevent the increasingly inevitable explosion.
Though the written record does not say much about it, it's safe to assume that this whole situation was being quietly and carefully observed by a man then known as Toussaint Breda, his surname taken from Breda Plantation, out on the fertile Northern Plain not far from Cap Francais, where he had spent much of his life as a slave and as a manager of slaves. Toussaint claimed to be over fifty in 1789—a remarkable age for a black in Saint Domingue, where thanks to exhaustion, overwork, and abuse, most slaves died much younger. He had not only survived, but conserved all his faculties; events of the next few years would prove his health, intelligence, and vigor to be absolutely extraordinary.
ONE
Opening the Gate
On August 29, 1793, a curious proclamation emerged from Camp Turel, one of numerous small fortified positions in the mountain range that runs from Gonai'ves on Saint Domingue's west coast eastward to the Central Plateau and the Spanish frontier, and which had been occupied, since 1791, mostly by groups of revolting slaves, but sometimes by French soldiers and militiamen who were trying to suppress the revolt. The proclamation was a brief one:
Brothers and Friends,
I am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps