The World полностью

Jefferson, scion of the Virginian slave-owning elite, was growing up nearby. His father Peter was an adventurous second-generation frontiersman who managed to survey new lands, pushing the frontier westwards, mapping a route to the Allegheny Mountains. He served in the House of Burgesses and as a justice of the peace, while amassing 7,000 acres and sixty slaves, and creating the genteel, intellectual lifestyle that produced Thomas. A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas read Locke, Newton, Voltaire and played the violin, telling his daughter that ‘there’s not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me nor anything that moves’. Six foot two, slim with light red hair, hazel eyes, pointed nose, Jefferson was sociable yet inscrutable, polite and ostentatiously frank yet privately ambitious. Behind his charming gloss, he was also passionate and highly strung, suffering stress-induced migraines. On his father’s death, he inherited 5,000 acres. At twenty-six, after training as a lawyer, Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses. Martha Wayles meanwhile had married and been widowed. In the compact colonial society, it was only a matter of time before he came to call.

Just as Elizabeth Hemings’s mother arrived in Virginia, Hippolyte, enslaved son of an Allada governor, probably captured and sold by King Agaja of Dahomey, was delivered to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, half of the island of Hispaniola (the other half being a Spanish colony, Santo Domingo). In one of slavery’s millions of daily tragedies, Hippolyte’s wife Affiba and their children were also captured but traded separately to Saint-Domingue. Without knowing they were toiling on a nearby estate, Hippolyte married a woman named Pauline, a fellow Allada. When Affiba discovered this, she died of sorrow. Hippolyte and Pauline had five children, the first of whom was a son: Toussaint.

‘I was born a slave but nature gave me the soul of a free man,’ recalled Toussaint, who grew up on the Bréda sugar estate owned by an absent French aristocrat, Count Pantaléon de Bréda, that gave him his name Toussaint Bréda. Working from a young age as a cattle herder, he was trained by his father in Allada medicine and baptized as a Catholic while also revering voodoo; he spoke Fon, French and creole. Toussaint knew the tragedy of slavery ‘to tear son from his mother, brother from sister’.

Both his parents died young, after which Toussaint was ‘adopted’ by an Allada freedman and African-born friend of his mother, an example of the informal affiliations that made the unbearable bearable. Most slaves in Saint-Domingue were worked to death before they reached thirty-seven, then replaced by new arrivals from Africa known as bossales. Sixty per cent of male slaves, who on average survived three years, were worked to death – approximately 500,000 in total. It was an environment that encouraged what the Haitian intellectual baron de Vastey later called ‘crapulous debauchery’. The Code Noir was widely ignored, and French masters treated their slaves atrociously: many were raped and tortured in ingenious ways, including by packing them with explosives to blow them up, known by the French as ‘a little powder in the arse’, buried alive, burned in furnaces, genitally mutilated, routinely forced to wear muzzles.

The French colons lived a life of luxury on Saint-Domingue,^* but all the while they were terrified of being murdered by their slaves, whom they characterized as both lazy livestock and menacing aliens. Society was strictly divided between the whites, the growing population of mixed-race people and black freedmen who often owned slaves themselves – and the slaves.

The way to survive was to become a coachman or a servant in the planter’s mansion:^* Toussaint was promoted by his estate manager Bayon to coachman. As he grew up, he witnessed the rebellion of François Makandal, a one-armed holy man (oungan) from west Africa – he spoke some Arabic – who practised rituals that, merged with Catholicism, became Haitian voodoo. The colons claimed that Makandal had poisoned them though new research shows this was an outbreak of anthrax. Nonetheless Makandal led an insurgency that was a lethal threat, so he was captured and burned alive in Port-au-Prince. The slaves believed that his spirit escaped the flames.

‘The virtuous Bayon de Libertad’ manumitted Toussaint, who leased his own slaves on his own farm. Although he married his godfather’s daughter Suzanne and had children with her, he was a prolific lover who had many paramours, black and white. Meanwhile he joined the underground of slave brotherhoods and voodoo believers who started to dream of revolution. Yet Toussaint’s worldview was never racialized. A product of both Makandal’s world of African voodoo and kalinda combat dances mixed with his Catholic faith and his Enlightenment, he believed in the potential of human nature.