Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (11 page)

mestic slaves were the most likely to be emancipated. But they were also

isolated from the other slaves and more subject to sexual exploitation by

their masters.24

Coffee harvesting and processing was also difficult work, and involved

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some periods of night work. But on coffee plantations the labor was more

varied and in some ways less difficult and dangerous than that on sugar

plantations. Even large coffee plantations were generally smaller than

sugar plantations, so there was more contact between masters and slaves.

These plantations were also much less often in the hands of absentee own-

ers. Coffee planters often assigned their slaves piecework, in which they

had to harvest a certain amount of coffee and would get a small monetary

reward if they picked more. A prisoner of the insurgents in late 1791

claimed to have noticed a contrast between those who had been slaves on

the sugar plantations of the plain, who were “enraged,” and those who had

been slaves in the mountains, who were less ferocious.25

Enslaved women confronted particular challenges on the plantations:

they were responsible for both production and reproduction. Excluded

from the most prestigious occupations—drivers, sugarboilers, and arti-

sans—most of them worked in the fields. Those who worked as domestics

were in particular danger of rape and other forms of abuse by their mas-

ters. And those who were mothers faced particularly wrenching and dif-

ficult struggles and choices. During the second half of the eighteenth cen-

tury, some planters became concerned about the low birthrates among the

slaves and instituted incentive programs to encourage women to have chil-

dren. The manager of the thriving Gallifet sugar plantations in the North-

ern Province gave monetary rewards to mothers—one for giving birth, and

another, probably larger, for weaning the child two years later. Programs of

encouragement were often accompanied by new and cruel forms of pun-

ishment for those accused of having had abortions. In the Southern Prov-

ince some women suspected of having them were forced to wear a human-

shaped figurine symbolizing the lost baby around their necks. Women who

had had abortions were considered to have deprived their masters of a

piece of human property. In the late 1790s legends circulated about a mid-

wife named Samedi who during the time of slavery took advantage of her

profession to kill the children she delivered. She wore a belt with seventy

knots, each a reminder of one of her victims, for whom, she proclaimed,

she had been a “liberator.”26

Enslaved women were prey to sexual exploitation and assault by mas-

ters, managers, and overseers. Although some resisted, they had little power

to refuse predatory men who legally owned their bodies. Sometimes long-

term relationships developed between enslaved women and masters or

managers. The slaves involved in such relationships were rewarded with

f e r m e n ta t i o n

47

better clothes and food, and sometimes gained liberty for themselves and

their children. In seeking to understand these relationships it is difficult—

perhaps impossible—to disentangle emotion from interest, sex and senti-

ment from power and coercion. The little insight we have into them, as

with so much of slave life, comes from the sparse and distorted writings of

whites.27

Despite the deeply unequal relationship between masters and slaves,

life and labor on the plantations was the product of constant negotiation

and adjustment. The enslaved resisted in small ways as they worked in the

fields, and they developed, and defended, customary rights. The most im-

portant of these was access to garden plots of land on the plantations. The

Code Noir required masters to feed their slaves with a set number of pro-

visions each week. Relatively quickly, however, many masters began using

a practice borrowed from Dutch colonies, in which slaves were given a

small plot of land to cultivate rather than being given weekly provisions.

They were also given all or part of Saturday, in addition to the free Sunday

they already had, to cultivate these plots. This arrangement was a way for

planters a way to save money, although it could backfire if slaves were un-

able to grow enough food to feed themselves, as was the case especially in

times of drought.28

On most plantations the enslaved were fed through a combination of

common provisions, cultivated by groups of slaves taken from other

tasks under the command of a driver, and food they grew on their own

small plots. From the common grounds came potatoes, manioc, and other

staples, while from individual plots came squash, spinach, cucumbers,

peppers, and sometimes tobacco. Slaves also chewed bits of sugarcane

taken from the fields, and drank
tafia
—rum—which masters and managers sometimes handed out when the work was particularly hard. Some supplemented their diets in other ways, gathering oysters or land crabs. The

crabs, however, often ate the poisonous leaves of the mancenillier tree, and

the poison was transferred to those who dined on them. For this reason,

slaves sometimes burned down the mancenillier trees around their planta-

tions. Hungry slaves living around one lake took even greater risks, knock-

ing out crocodiles with stones so that they could take their eggs.29

What slaves caught or harvested, and what they grew on their own plots

of land, they also often sold, supporting an important internal economy. In

one section of the large market of Le Cap a “multitude of vendors” from

plantations offered oranges, pineapples, guavas, papayas, apricots, and avo-

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

cados. Other vendors sold decorative crafts such as calabashes that had

been carved on the outside in an “ingenious or bizarre” way. The inhabit-

ants of the towns, whether white or black, depended on such markets; the

residents of one southern town, Moreau noted, suffered during periods of

heavy rain or the coffee harvest, when plantation slaves did not come to the

market.30

To sell what they produced in their garden plots, slaves had to be given

permission to go to the towns on Sundays. Such journeys also provided

valuable opportunities for worship and socializing. Many slaves shed the

threadbare clothes they wore in the field—which were given them by the

master—for a clean, fancier set they had bought for themselves. In Le Cap

there was a special “messe des nègres” after the regular mass, during which

slaves and free people of African descent gathered to pray and sing, led by

elderly members of their community. The fact that slaves were leading

Catholic ceremonies bothered some authorities, and indeed the accusation

that Jesuits had encouraged such independent worship helped propel the

expulsion of the order from Saint-Domingue in the 1760s.31

In the afternoon, after the market was closed, there was music and

dancing. Accompanied by drums, calabashes filled with seeds, hand-clap-

ping, improvised singing, and sometimes the music of a four-stringed in-

strument called the Banza, pairs of dancers would enter a circle formed

by the others to dance what Moreau called a “Calenda.” Another dance he

described was the “Chica”—called the “Congo” in the French colony of

Cayenne—a “lascivious” dance in which women moved their hips while

keeping the rest of their bodies still. Slaves also gathered in “cabarets,”

which offered liquor and gambling. In Port-au-Prince there was a curfew:

the church bell rang at 9:30 to call slaves back to their homes. There were

also places to gather in the countryside. Near Petite-Anse in the north

were two
guildiveries
(where alcohol was made), which provided a “meeting-place for a considerable number of negroes,” especially on Sundays

and holidays.32

The Code Noir of 1685 had outlawed “slaves of different masters” to

gather “under the pretext of weddings or otherwise,” especially along roads

or in isolated areas. The stipulated punishment was whipping and branding

with an iron shaped as a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of the French crown; re-

cidivists could be executed. Masters who permitted such assemblies on

their property could be fined. These regulations were never consistently

enforced, although the
maréchaussée,
the colony’s police force, sometimes f e r m e n ta t i o n

49

broke up slave gatherings. It was impossible for authorities to prevent

slaves from socializing in either towns or countryside, and many masters

gave tacit approval to such gatherings, seeing them as harmless diver-

sions.33

Although they were able to carve out some spaces of autonomy, the en-

slaved remained subject to the control of their masters. This control was

maintained, as was the entire system of slavery, through violence. In 1802

the British abolitionist James Stephen would note that what had “secured

in great measure the tranquility” of the French colonies “before their revo-

lutions” was “the nameless and undefined idea of terror, connected in the

mind of a negro slave, with the notion of resistance to a white man and a

master.” Physical punishment was both a constant threat and a frequent re-

ality in the lives of the slaves. The most common punishment was whip-

ping, which according to the Code Noir was the only punishment allowed

on plantations. Masters or drivers tied the hands and legs of the enslaved

to posts stuck in the ground, or else tied them to a ladder or hung them

by their hands from a post. Whippings were used as torture and as specta-

cle. “Slow punishments make a greater impression than quick or violent

ones,” wrote one wealthy plantation owner to his managers. Rather than

fifty lashes “administered in five minutes,” he recommended “twenty-five

lashes of the whip administered in a quarter of an hour, interrupted at

intervals to hear the cause which the unfortunates always plead in their

defense, and resumed again, continuing in this fashion for two or three

times,” as being “far more likely to make an impression.” The message was

aimed as much at the other slaves, who were forced to watch, as at the

victim.34

Hot peppers, salt, lemon, or ashes were sometimes rubbed into open

wounds, which might also be burnt with an open flame to increase the

pain. Cases of even more extreme torture appear in the documents. One

man wrote in the 1730s about the practice of placing gunpowder in the

anus of slaves and lighting it. Another wrote of the castration of male

slaves. A master brought to court in the 1750s had tied a slave, suspended,

above a fire. Moreau documented cases in which slaves were splashed with

burning wax and women’s “shameful parts” were burnt with hot coals,

and one in which a master attacked some of his slaves and bit off pieces of

their flesh. Another late eighteenth-century writer described slaves being

doused with boiling cane juice and others being buried alive after having

been forced to dig their own graves.35

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Some slaves collaborated in the master’s violence, driven by the fear of

becoming its target or by the hope of channeling it elsewhere. Many other

slaves simply avoided it and survived as best they could, following orders

and trying desperately to work tiny plots of land to feed themselves and

their families, crafting small spaces of comfort and community. Some,

however, responded by sowing terror among their masters.

In January 1758 a fugitive slave named Makandal was made to kneel in a

plaza in Le Cap, wearing a sign that read “Seducer, Profaner, Poisoner.” He

was then tied to a post in the center of the plaza, and a fire was lit under-

neath him. As the flames reached his body, he struggled to break free, and

the post to which he was attached gave way. The blacks in the watching

crowd shouted, “Makandal saved!” and panic broke out. Soldiers quickly

cleared the plaza, and Makandal was tied to a board and thrown back into

the fire. Makandal had often boasted that he was able to change form, and

before his execution he declared that he would transform himself into a fly

to escape the flames. Few had seen him die, and many believed he had in-

deed escaped and was once again in the hills, plotting a new rebellion.36

Makandal, who became legendary among both blacks and whites in

Saint-Domingue, had been born in Africa. Though his occasional evoca-

tion of Allah suggests that he was a Muslim (and thus probably from West

Africa), his name may have been derived from the Kongo word for amulet,

mak(w)onda.
Moreau claimed that after his death slaves used the term

“Makandal” to refer to ritual talismans as well as to the priests who made

them. But in fact the term seems to have been used in this way before he

came along—he perhaps chose it, or was given it, for this reason—though

his life and death imbued it with a new significance. Makandal was con-

victed of “mingling holy things in the composition and usage of allegedly