The Sugar Islands (17 page)

It is from this moment that Dessalines appears in his full stature. Over a distance of a hundred years one reads now with a brooding wonderment the story of the next two years. Say what you will of him, Dessalines was on the heroic scale. He was of the lineage of Tamburlaine. Though his speeches and proclamations were prepared doubtless by another hand, the voice of a conqueror rings through them. Each phrase is like the roll of musketry. There is the heroic gesture, a reckless arrogance of hate, in his tearing of the white from the tricolour and making the colours of his country red and blue; in his re-christening of San Domingo; in his wiping away of the last semblance of white rule in the new name, Haiti. He let Rochambeau go on Rochambeau's own terms. He signed the papers that they brought him. He promised immunity to the White Creoles. They could go or stay as it pleased them. They would be safe, he promised. Why should he not promise if it served his purpose? A good many promises had been made in the last twenty years. Had any of them been kept? With Rochambeau safely imprisoned in Jamaica, he would decide what it was best for him to do.

He decided quickly. The French had scarcely sailed before he was thundering out his hatred of those that stayed, before he had issued orders that none of those who remained should be allowed to leave. As the weeks passed his intention grew more clear. Edward Colbert, the English representative, was writing back to Nugent that he had little hope for their safety, and that Dessalines was counting his own departure as the signal for commencing the work of death. He had wanted to intercede for them with Dessalines, but ‘as their destruction,' he wrote, ‘was not openly avowed by him, I was apprehensive that I might accelerate what I was anxious to avoid.' He reports Dessalines' visit to the south. ‘In his present progress through the southern and western parts of the island he is accompanied by between three and four hundred followers, the greatest part of whom have the appearance of being extremely well qualified for every species of rapine and mischief.'

Colbert had prophesied correctly. Within a week of his return to Jamaica the process of slaughter had begun. Dessalines knew that as long as there was a Frenchman left in Haiti his position
would be insecure. The total extermination of the French that he had planned was a task that he could entrust to no one else. From the south, through Jeremie and Aux Cayes, he marched north to Port au Prince.

‘Dessalines arrived here on Friday afternoon,' records a letter found among Nugent's correspondence. ‘Turned loose four hundred to five hundred bloodthirsty villains on the poor defenceless inhabitants. He gave a general order for a general massacre (strangers excepted).
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I had five in my house. It gave me great pain to be unable to save a single one of them. They were all informed against by black wenches... the murderers are chosen by Dessalines. They accompany him from the south to the north. What havoc when they arrive at the Cape. The poor victims were slaughtered in the streets, in the square, on the seaside, stripped naked and carried out of the gates of Léogane and St. Joseph and thrown in heaps. A few days, I fear, will breed a pestilence. . . . Had you seen with what avidity these wretches flew at a white man you would have been astonished.'

A few days later he was at the Cape. The massacre was carefully stage-managed. Guards were placed outside the house of every English and American. It was the French only who were to be killed. For a day and a night the narrow, cobble-paved streets echoed with groans and cries. Then, suddenly, Dessalines grew weary. It was a waste of time breaking into houses, searching cupboards, dragging people from under beds. He announced that he would give safety to all Whites provided that they came into the square to testify their allegiance to him. One by one the terrified creatures crept from their lairs into the open. Dessalines waited patiently beside his soldiers till the square was full. Then he tapped upon his snuff-box. It was the signal for his men to shoot.

Next day he issued the challenge of his own defence:

‘Quel est ce vil Haitien si peu digne de sa régénération qui ne croit pas avoir accompli les décrets de l'Eternal en exterminant ces tigres altérés de sang: S'il en est un, qu'il s'éloigne de la nature, indignè de rependre de notre sein, qu'il aille cacher sa honte loin de ces lieux; l'air qu'on y respire n'est point fait pour ces organes grossiers, c'est l'air pure de la liberté auguste et triumphante. . . .'

In the constitution of Haiti was drafted the proud clause:

‘Jamais aucun Colon ni Européen ne mettra le pied sur cette terre en titre de maître ou de propriétaire.'

Four hundred miles away across the Windward Passage, Nugent, in the yellow-coloured residence in Spanish Town, addressed Dessalines, whom he described to Hobart as the brigand chief, as ‘Your Excellency', and in the weary well-bred indifference of official English explained the terms on which Jamaica would be ready to trade with Haiti. Nugent had no doubt of what would happen. With a tired smile he listened to the accounts that came to him of Dessalines' extravagance, of the splendour and corruption of the court, of the troops encouraged to supplement by plunder a daily ration of a herring and half a loaf. Dessalines might declare himself an emperor. But the country was on the edge of bankruptcy. Dessalines might assert that Haiti, brown and black, consisted of one brotherhood. He might offer his sister to Pétion in marriage. But no declaration would convince the mulatto that he was not the superior of the negro. No declaration would persuade the negro to trust another negro. The negro could be ruled; on occasion he could rule. But he was incapable of co-operation, of rule by cabinet. When the news of Dessalines' murder was brought to Nugent—a murder, if not actually instigated, at least approved by Christophe—he was not surprised. He was not surprised six months later when history repeated itself; when the conflict of Rigaud and Toussaint, the conflict of brown and black that was to be the main issue in Haitian history for the next hundred years, had been resumed between Pétion and Christophe.

Christophe was Dessalines' second-in-command. With terror he had watched the gradual disintegration of the country under Dessalines, the disorganization of the troops, the emptying of the treasury, the abandoned plantations. What would happen, he asked himself, when the French returned? Once the invaders had been flung back. But Leclerc had advanced on a country prosperous and prepared by Toussaint's rule. What chance would a disorganized and impoverished country stand against Napoleon? Haiti must be made powerful and rich, proud of itself, respected by other nations. Dessalines stood in the way of Haiti.

Thus Christophe argued. He had no doubt of what was needed. He had no doubt of his own power to realize those needs. When, after Dessalines' death representatives of the various departments had met to draw up new constitutions, he was so sure that that convention would place him with unlimited powers at its head that he did not trouble to attend the meeting. He remained at the Cape with the quick-brained little mulatto who was to be raised to the dignity of rank under the title ‘Pompey Baron de Vastey', planning the details of his campaign. He was the only man in Haiti who could save Haiti; he knew that.

He had counted, however, without two things. One was his own unpopularity; a year earlier Leclerc had written home that Christophe was so hated by the Blacks that there was nothing to be feared from him. On that he had not counted, nor on Pétion.

Pétion was one of the few with intellect in Haiti. He was the son of a French artist and a mulatress. He was almost white; he had spent much of his time in Paris. He had served in the French Army and had studied in the military schools. He was mild and sweet-natured, with a poetic mind. He brought with him to the convention one firm resolution: that he had not driven out the French tyranny to authorize another tyranny and a black tyranny in its place.

Patiently, tactfully, diplomatically he argued clause by clause the constitution that was to defend the Haitians' liberty and limit the power of their ruler. It was no easy task. Sometimes, as he looked round at that black semicircle of surly, stupid faces, a feeling of discouragement came over him, a feeling of doubt. ‘This is not really what I meant,' he thought. It was something quite other than this that he had planned. What was it that he had planned? He had forgotten. It was so long ago. When one was young one saw life in clear issues. Afterwards things grew confused. You fought for people with whom you were only three parts in sympathy against people to whom with a quarter of yourself you still belonged. You could never enter whole-heartedly into any quarrel. There was always a part of you left outside. Just as in life he had never anywhere been quite himself. Not here in San Domingo, where his father had been ashamed of him; nor in Paris, where they had pretended to ignore his colouring. Not even in Paris among the young officers with whom he had joked
and drunk, with the woman he had loved. Always between himself and them there had been the veil of difference, this quartering of savage blood. Never anywhere had he been quite himself. That was the thing that he had dreamed of, that was the thing he had fought for: a condition of society with which man could be in tune, in which he could be himself. It was for that he was arguing now in this hot room, to these ignorant savages. It was this he dreamed of—a Utopia, where man could be off his guard.

Though even as he argued, his faith weakened in the thing he argued for. They were not educated yet to democracy, these negroes. Christophe would never accept these limitations to his power. Later Christophe's indignant repudiation of the constitution came as no surprise to him. It was with no surprise that he learnt of Christophe's angry mustering of men, of his forced march over the hills into the long, sun-parched, arid plain that stretches from Ennery to St. Marc.

Without surprise, but wearily, Pétion heard the news. Wearily and half-heartedly, he gathered together the remnants of the army, marched out with it into the plain, to be flung back, wrecked and scattered; himself escaping with his life and in the disguise of a peasant woman, upon the outskirts of Port au Prince. A few hours more and Christophe would be in the capital. Pétion, for one last effort, gathered his strength together; with the hatred of the brown for the black, with the hatred of brain for force, with the hatred of breeding for unsponsored vigour, he mobilized his troops, marched out with them into the plain and, employing fully for the last time all that France and his father's blood had taught him, he broke and dismembered Christophe's untutored powers; broke them, scattered them; then let them go.

His generals turned to him with amazement. What, was he about to let the tyrant free? Now, when he had him in his power, when the whole of Haiti was his for the plundering! Pétion shrugged his shoulders. That irresolution, that mulatto's doubting of himself that stood always between him and real greatness, mingled a little, possibly, with the poet's indifference, the poet's sense of the ultimate futility of all things, made him stay his hand.

Let Christophe, he said, go north beyond the mountains; the south was safe.

So Christophe went north to crown himself a king, and Pétion, in Port au Prince, drew up a constitution; a republican constitution with himself as president, and in Spanish Town, four hundred miles away, the Governor of Jamaica smiled.

It was less easy than Pétion had imagined. He needed money to strengthen his frontier against Christophe, to prepare his defence against the French. And Rigaud had come back from France. There was a year of civil war to empty the exchequer. An exchequer that it was impossible to fill unless the people worked. They would not work if they were not driven. He lacked the heart to drive them. In his way he loved them as they loved him; the simple people who laughed so readily, who would forgive you anything provided you could make them laugh. But to be loved was not enough when you were beset by enemies.

Pétion grew despondent. That doubting of himself—the mulatto's doubting of himself—and the mulatto's contempt and hatred of the Black, mingled with the mulatto's envy of the White, returned to him, making it easy for him to shrug his shoulders, to let things drift. Why worry? Why fight for a liberty that its possessors could not use ? Let the Blacks go back to savagery. Why try to inoculate them with a sense of mission?

There was a sneer on his lips as he listened to the tales of Christophe that his spies brought to him. So Christophe was making a great man of himself up there! He had a splendid court and many palaces and counts and dukes and barons. He had a gold currency. And English admirals called on him. Professors came out from England to establish schools. The country was rich and that meant that the people of the country were enslaved. He smiled when they told him of the palace of Sans Souci. The negro's love of vanity, he called it. They told him of the citadel above Milhot, of how the people of the plains struggled to carry bronze cannon up the slope. How when the slaves paused, panting at their load, Christophe would line them up, shoot every tenth man, with the remark: ‘You were too many. No doubt now you are fewer you will find it easier.' Of how to prove his authority he would give his troops on the citadel the order to advance and watch file after file crash over the wall to death.

Pétion sneered at Christophe. What else could you expect
from an illiterate negro? How long did they imagine it would last? Tyranny had its own medicine.

He sneered, too, at the citadel. What was it, he asked, but an expression as was all else that Christophe staged up there, of the negro's inordinate self-pride? What was the use of it, after all? It would be the easiest thing in the world to surround it, to starve it out. And as for all that gold stored there in its recesses, of what use would that be there? What could it buy but ransoms? Bullion was not wealth. One day he would take his troops up there to show what it was worth.