Authors: James A. Michener
“Indeed! A sailor perhaps?”
“His father was. He feared the sea,” and Oldmixon said: “So did I, but me father beat me over the head with a stool and said: ‘It’s the navy for you, me hearty,’ and here I am, commander of an island which I’ve captured for the king.”
During his frequent visits to the Lanzeracs’ he was increasingly attracted to Solange but equally determined not to surrender to the girl’s pleas that her mother be released from jail: “Sorry, my dear, but we can’t run the risk of her runnin’ wild again.” However, as the weeks passed, while he became lonelier and she more attractive, he
intimated that if Solange wished to move into his cabin on the ship, something might be arranged regarding her mother, and to the amazement of the Lanzeracs, he made this proposal not to Solange herself but to them. Paul considered the suggestion indecent, and as soon as Oldmixon left for his ship he told his wife so. But against her better judgment Eugénie, after putting her son to bed, sent Paul from the room and talked frankly with her companion.
“Solange, your mother will die in jail, and I want to see her freed.”
“So do I.”
“Admiral Oldmixon told us to tell you … if you’ll … if you wanted to stay aboard his ship till the fleet leaves …”
Solange was sitting in a chair near the fireplace when Eugénie said this, and for a long time, while light from the fire shone on her handsome face, outlining its bony structure, she said nothing. Then, laughing almost irreverently, she said: “You know the four rules they teach us mulatto girls? First, attract a white man. Second, make him happy enough to marry you. Third, when you have a daughter by him, see that she too marries a white man. Move up, always move up, and make the family whiter.”
“But Oldmixon would never marry you,” Eugénie said, and Solange burst into laughter: “Then we bring in the fourth rule. Take every franc the poor fool has.” But then her face grew grave and she looked long and deep into her friend’s eyes. “We never intended the rules to apply to us, did we?” she whispered. For a long time they sat together, sadly silent, until Eugénie went to join her husband.
“Solange won’t be going to the admiral’s ship,” and Paul replied: “I was sure she wouldn’t.”
During these momentous years when France struggled through the death throes of an ancient regime without finding a way to forge a new, the historic island of Hispaniola, where Columbus once ruled and where he was buried, was divided in curious ways—the result of a decision made almost a century earlier. The rather flat, unproductive eastern portion, Santo Domingo, was Spanish; the mountainous western part, St.-Domingue,
*2
was French. Eastern spoke Spanish, western French; eastern, whose fine, flat lands might have been expected
to produce bounteous crops, yielded little, while the rough and difficult lands of the west produced the world’s most valuable sugar crop; and, in some ways most important of all, Santo Domingo was populated with Spanish mulattoes, St.-Domingue with such an abundance of African slaves that at times it seemed an all-black colony.
In the still-orderly year of 1783, in a small town in the French portion of the island a barbershop of mean dimension was operated in a grudging manner by a young Frenchman who seemed designed by both birth and development to be a prototype of the world’s average man, for he lacked any outstanding feature that would have distinguished him from the general mob. Victor Hugues (last name OO-geh) was then twenty-one, reputedly the son of petty merchants in Marseilles, but there was some confusion about this because he had an olive complexion, neither white nor mulatto but halfway between, and regardless of where he went, the rumor spread: “Hugues is part African. His mother must have been careless, Marseilles being a port town and all that.”
He was of average height or slightly under, and of average weight or just a bit over. He had good teeth except for one missing on the left, a ratty type of hair of no distinct color, and a habit of staying off to one side and watching to see how an argument was proceeding, then suddenly intervening with great vigor and some skill in haranguing those opposed to the side he had arbitrarily taken. He did not read much, but he listened with the acute skill of a preying animal, and one thing was certain above all others: he was brave, always willing to flail about when debate descended into blows, and if he lost one tooth in such brawling, his opponents lost mouthfuls. He was a fearful adversary, and would allow nothing to stand in his way.
How had he wound up in a St.-Domingue barbershop? Early in his life his parents had given up trying to make anything decent of him, and he had responded by slipping down to the Marseilles docks and offering himself to the first ship heading anywhere. Since it was destined for Mexico, he went there, and at age seventeen was doing the waterfront work of a man. Later he drifted to various exotic ports of the Caribbean, but regardless of where he went or in what capacity, he manifested the only characteristic that made those around him take notice: early in life he had developed an insatiable hunger to be with girls, and he had taken the first one to bed when he was eleven. In the Caribbean his appetite reached ravenous proportions: Mexican alley girls, a ship captain’s daughter at Porto Bello, a serving girl
in Jamaica, a young Englishman’s newly wedded wife in Barbados, and others wherever his ship docked.
Despite this fevered activity he was not a traditional roué who treated his conquests with contempt; he adored women, respected them, and let them know that he considered them individually and as a group the best part of life; few women he had known remembered him with animosity. Yet there was a darker side to his passion, one which could produce wildly aberrational behavior at the end of an affair, and some of his women mysteriously disappeared from the community.
His ownership of the barbershop in St.-Domingue had come about because of this combination of rhapsodic pleasure and murderous opportunism, for when he arrived in Port-au-Prince a near-penniless youth of nineteen, he chanced to fall in with a mulatto who had both a barbershop and a young wife of exquisite amber coloring. Imploring the barber to teach him the skills of that trade, he spent much time with the barber’s wife and, perhaps by coincidence, just as Victor mastered the profession of cutting hair, the barber vanished and after a decent interval Hugues appropriated both the shop and the widow.
This fortuitous disappearance occurred in 1785, and for the next two years Hugues ran a profitable barbering establishment, cutting the hair of white plantation owners who ran St.-Domingue and of the few mulattoes of marked ability who assisted them. Blacks, who comprised nine-tenths of the population, were forbidden entrance to the shop, though some later testified that: “At night, when the whites and mulattoes were not around, Victor invited any free blacks who had the money to come to a back door which led to an inner room, and there Hugues would cut their hair. He always had a great affinity for blacks, especially the former slaves, for he told me once: ‘They are the dispossessed of the world and merit our charity.’ ”
He manifested this concern in dramatic fashion, for in that year he closed his barbershop, rented a large house in Port-au-Prince, and, with the help of the beautiful mulatto he had inherited, opened a first-class brothel, employing six girls of varied color and from four different islands. His clientele was ostensibly restricted to white plantation owners and mulattoes of importance, but again, when no one was looking too closely, he opened a rear door to admit freed black men, and he continued doing so even after he had received warnings to stop, for as he told an official of the government: “I’ve been in all
corners of this sea … all the islands … and it’s destined to be an area in which men and women of every color live together freely.” Outraged by such revolutionary thought, the official dispatched a secret report to powers in the home office, which neatly summarized this dangerous man:
In the capital city we have a former barber who now runs a fancy house of convenience, one Victor Hugues who says he is from Marseilles and claims to be of white parentage generations back, an assertion which his skin coloring might refute. He is of a rebellious and contentious nature, but what is more potentially dangerous, he advocates the rights of
noirs
and frequently speaks out against slavery. I recommend that you order your people to keep a close watch on this Victor Hugues.
This report reached Paris in November 1788, and a liberal spy in the office to which it was addressed made a copy for a fellow member of a private political club called the Jacobins, and it was in this oblique way that the barber-brothelkeeper came to the attention of Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, a member of the French gentry and a revolutionary whose ideas were germinating at a fantastic rate.
In early 1789, when affairs in France were at a boil, Robespierre began thinking about the colonies, especially St.-Domingue, which associates assured him was “the greatest producer of wealth in the entire French system.” Appointing a study committee of fellow Jacobins to advise on how the colonies should be handled if a revolutionary form of government ever attained power, he suddenly remembered this barber out in St.-Domingue and sent him a message: “Come to Paris. I require your presence on important matters.”
When Hugues arrived in June 1789 he could not locate Robespierre, but one of that leader’s friends, knowing of the invitation, introduced the newcomer to a powerful philosophical club, the Société des Amis de Noirs, whose revolutionary thinkers were delighted to find someone who had firsthand knowledge of the colonies and the problems related to slavery. Hugues was lionized, gave a series of explanatory speeches, proved himself to be at least as advanced in his practical thinking as they were in their speculative analyses, and marched with them on 14 July 1789 when they celebrated the fall of the Bastille. Late that night, when he finally went to bed with a young woman who had marched beside him screaming at the police, he told
her in tired, almost dreamlike sentences: “It was fated that I should come to Paris. Great things are about to happen and men like me will be needed.”
His prediction came true dramatically, for when he finally did meet Robespierre, then on his bloody ladder to ascendancy, the fiery leader embraced him almost as an equal. And when the new government which had replaced King Louis XVI, the Legislative Assembly, decided to send a French army to St.-Domingue to pacify an island disturbance which threatened to interrupt the orderly flow of sugar to European markets, Hugues was asked to brief the commissioner who would be taking the troops to the island. He submitted such a perceptive oral report that the leaders of the government heard about it and marked him for preferment:
“General-Commissioner, you’ll find three nations in St.-Domingue. The white French, who have all the apparent power; the mulattoes, who hope to inherit it if the French leave; and the blacks, who could possess it if they can ever organize themselves. No matter how large a French army you call in to help you, you’ll never have enough soldiers if you ally yourself only with the whites. If you can arrange a union of interest between the whites and mulattoes, you might achieve … well, at best perhaps a temporary truce.
“But if you want a long-range peace in that island which I know so intimately, it must be based fundamentally on the blacks, with concessions to both the other groups. Failing that, I see only continued revolution in the years ahead, especially when the island hears about what’s happening here in France.”
The commissioner asked: “Couldn’t a union of white interest, mulattoes and a determined French army preserve peace and keep the sugar flowing?” and Hugues said impatiently: “You’d never have an army big enough … or healthy enough. These are hot lands, Commissioner, and fever knocks down more men than bullets do.”
The commissioner did not appreciate such advice, and after Hugues had left the room he said to an aide: “What could you expect from a barber who runs a whorehouse? Probably got his ideas about black power from some African slave he’d been sleeping with.”
After this rebuff Hugues remained in shadows, living on the few
coins he could scrounge from his revolutionary friends, but after January 1793, when the king was beheaded and terror began to grip the boulevards, his peculiar talents were recognized by Robespierre, who assigned him the job of whipping into line the smaller towns surrounding Paris. Then the barber, reinforced by a traveling guillotine which could be disassembled and packed onto a small cart, had the opportunity of revealing a long-dormant aspect of his character: mercilessness. Showing no emotion and indulging in no personal display, this extremely ordinary man marched his grisly entourage from one little town to the next, following identical procedures, which he exhibited first in Brasse, some twenty miles southwest of Paris. Accompanied only by two officials in their tricorn hats, he halted at the edge of town his entourage of cart, two carpenters and the two constables, walked slowly into the rural town of seven hundred, and without making a great fuss, demanded to see the mayor: “Orders of the National Convention. I want everyone in your town assembled in the square immediately.” And when this order was obeyed, he indicated that local spies who had been identified long before should aid the two constables in keeping the citizens together.
Then Hugues walked slowly back to where his other men waited, signaled to them, and they brought their creaking cart drawn by two oxen into the center of the square, where he directed them in the fascinating process of reassembling their guillotine. First the two towers were brought upright, the ones that would guide the dreadful knife in its fall, then the supporting structure to keep the towers erect, then the platform on which the condemned would kneel, then the curved part into which the neck would fit and the movable piece that would hold neck and shoulders firm, and lastly the big, shining knife itself, heavy and swift and final. A test drop using a head of cabbage having satisfied Hugues that the miraculous machine was in working order, he signaled for his spies to point out the wealthiest landowner in the district and any others who might be assumed to be enemies of the new regime, and these frightened people, women among them, were immediately segregated and placed under armed guard.