Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
magical packets.” One of those he made included a crucifix, and Makandal
invoked Allah, Jesus Christ, and God when he created them.37
Like these packets, Makandal’s life and the legends that emerged from
it were the result of a potent encounter between African traditions and the
world of plantation slavery. Makandal was a slave on a plantation in the
parish of Limbé in the Northern Province, where he lost one of his arms
while working in a sugar mill. Subsequently relegated to guarding the ani-
mals on his plantation, he eventually ran away into the hills. Later legends
claimed that he gathered together a large band of fugitive slaves who at-
tacked plantations, but in fact he sowed terror primarily by using poison.
f e r m e n ta t i o n
51
He knew how to make it from harvested plants, and coordinated its use
against livestock, slaves who were deemed enemies, and masters. In order
to carry out his attacks, Makandal developed an extensive network among
the slaves of the Northern Province, including those who worked as mer-
chants traveling from plantation to plantation. Makandal was not the first
or the only slave rebel who used poison in Saint-Domingue. But the extent
of his activities and the publicity they gained helped set in motion a cycle
of paranoia and violence that continued in Saint-Domingue for decades.38
The practice of
marronage
—running away from the plantations—was
as old as slavery itself. In Saint-Domingue it took many forms. Africans
brought into the colony by slavers, refusing their condition as property,
often ran away soon after their arrival. They were prone to recapture be-
cause they lacked knowledge of the geography of the island and connec-
tions who could help them hide, although some residents did help them,
sometimes by telling them the way to Spanish Santo Domingo. Plantation
slaves sometimes left the direct supervision of the managers but remained
nearby. The organization of plantations, with cultivated land, fields for
grazing, provision grounds, and slave quarters scattered in different loca-
tions, facilitated this evasion. Some maroons stayed on the margins of their
plantations for years, eating cane from the fields or food brought to them
by friends and kin. Sometimes they also stole from provision grounds or
garden plots, impelling slaves to build or grow fences around them. Other
slaves ran away to the towns, where they could often blend into the popula-
tion of urban slaves and free-coloreds, especially if they were trained in a
craft. The towns were a preferred destination for women, who were a mi-
nority among maroons.39
Administrators did what they could to prevent such illegal mobility.
Those who left the plantations, even to go to markets on Sundays, were re-
quired to carry a pass from their masters permitting them to do so. Any
white person could stop a slave and ask him to show these documents. But,
as one commentator lamented in 1778, it was easy to counterfeit them. Es-
caped slaves took advantage of “friends who know how to write” to create
false passports, and moved about “with impunity,” coming into town to sell
and buy provisions before returning to the woods. There was also a traffic
in real passes, whose dates could be forged.40
Shorter-term absences were often tolerated by planters, who referred to
this form of escape as
petit marronage.
Individual returns might be negotiated by whites, sometimes an older woman in the planter’s family or a
52
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
neighbor, with slaves promising to return if they were spared punishment.
On absentee-owned plantations, mass
marronage
was sometimes used as a form of protest against a manager. On a plantation in the Cul-de-Sac plain
in 1744, for instance, sixty-six slaves left the plantation during the day but came back to sleep in their quarters at night, demanding the removal of
the overseer. One day the overseer killed one of the protesting slaves, a
pregnant woman, with a knife. Two months later the slaves surprised him,
carried him away, and executed him. They were condemned to death, but
the governor intervened on their behalf, recognizing that their actions
were justified by the particular brutality of their overseer. Such strikes
occurred with some regularity and often led to the negotiated return of
the slaves. Masters had a great deal of capital invested in their human
property, and it was often cheaper to negotiate a return and to replace a
white manager than to risk the loss of many slaves and the disruption of
plantation labor.41
Maroons who were repeatedly absent for several weeks or more were,
however, usually punished harshly. The Code Noir stipulated that a slave
who had been away from the plantation for more than a month was to have
one of his ears cut off and a fleur-de-lis branded on his shoulder. A slave
who ran away again for a month was to receive a second brand and have a
hamstring cut. The punishment for the third offense was death. Rather
than follow these prescriptions for mutilation, however, most masters and
managers devised other punishments that caused suffering but did not
damage their property. Maroons were usually whipped, and sometimes
their garden plots were confiscated. They might be locked up in the planta-
tion hospitals, which often doubled as prisons and were outfitted with bars
or posts used to immobilize punished slaves at night, or else in the
cachots,
small stone prisons that proliferated on plantations during the late eighteenth century. Chains might be attached to the slave’s legs, sometimes
with a ball added to make running difficult, and iron collars with spikes
placed permanently around the neck. Only a blacksmith could remove
them. Even such devices did not always keep slaves from running away
again; some maroons were caught wearing them.42
Some individuals broke permanently with the world of the plantations
by escaping to the mountains and forming or joining maroon bands. Such
bands were a presence in the colony throughout the eighteenth century,
and they left their traces on the landscape. As Moreau reported of the
eastern parts of the Northern Province, hills with names like Flambeaux
f e r m e n ta t i o n
53
(torches) or Congo “recalled the era when fugitives lived in nearly in-
accessible locations.” Many remembered “Polydor and his band, his mur-
ders, his banditry, and most of all the difficulty we had in capturing him.”
Polydor was killed in 1734, but another maroon leader named Canga
emerged in the same region in the 1770s, and after his execution there
came another named Yaya.43
These bands, who conducted raids against plantations, were a major
concern for colonial administrators. The administration maintained the
maréchaussée
to police the slaves and hunt maroon bands. In one case they opted for negotiation. In 1785 the colonial administrations of both the
Spanish and French colonies signed a treaty with a group of more than 100
maroons living in frontier region of Bahoruco. The treaty granted them
amnesty and liberty in return for their promise to pursue any new run-
aways in the area and hand them over to the authorities. Many whites
decried such agreements, believing that the only way to deal with rebel
slave communities was to destroy them. But in pursuing this policy Saint-
Domingue’s administrators were simply following the lead of those in Ja-
maica and Suriname who had signed such treaties with maroon groups in
the 1730s as a way of ending long wars and creating a buffer against contin-
uing escapes.44
During the eighteenth century the maroon communities of Saint-
Domingue maintained open, armed conflict with the plantation society
that surrounded them, claiming and defending their liberty. As a result
some consider them the precursors—and the ancestors—of those who
rose up in the slave revolt of 1791. (During the reign of François Duvalier,
a statue to the “Unknown Maroon” was erected across from the National
Palace in Port-au-Prince to celebrate these nameless rebels as the found-
ers of the nation.) Others express skepticism about the relationship be-
tween
marronage
and revolution in Saint-Domingue. The maroon com-
munities of the colony were much smaller than those in Jamaica and
Suriname, in part because many of the mountainous regions where ma-
roons might have sought refuge had been invaded by coffee plantations.
Indeed it may have been the limits on the expansion of maroon communi-
ties that propelled slave revolution, since those who wished to escape slav-
ery had to develop a direct and systemic attack against the world of the
plantations rather than seeking a refuge outside it.45
The presence of maroon communities in Saint-Domingue contributed
to the fissures in colonial society. In order to fight maroons the administra-54
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
tion ultimately turned to free people of color. In so doing they laid the
foundation for demands for inclusion that ignited the colony during the
revolution. Maroons, by successfully flouting slavery, were also an inspira-
tion and example for the enslaved, as well as for antislavery writers. The
1791 revolt, however, emerged from the heart of the thriving sugar planta-
tions of the northern plain, and the existing maroon communities were not
involved in its planning. More important for the revolt were the practices
of
marronage
on the edges of plantations, or in the towns, which had helped sustain a culture of autonomy and the networks that connected various plantations. Like religious ceremonies and Sunday gatherings, the
practice of running away laid the groundwork for an uprising that united
slaves across plantations and in so doing enabled them to smash the system
from within. Once they had risen up in 1791, however, slave insurgents
did use tactics pioneered by maroons in defending their mountain camps
against French attacks.46
Makandal was a part of the long tradition of
marronage
in the colony.
In developing his cross-plantation network of resistance, meanwhile, he
also drew on another long-standing practice: the use of poison by slaves.
Starting in the seventeenth century, colonial legislation outlawed the use of poison, in the process repressing forms of traditional healing practiced
within the slave community that whites often used as well. The reasons for
this proscription were clear enough. Poison granted power. Slaves who
used poison against whites aimed “to dominate their masters” and humili-
ate them by making them feel “a power that was hidden, but very close.”
Poison could be placed in food by the domestics who surrounded whites,
and there was often no way to detect it or to identify who had placed it
there. Commentators pointed out that since many planters put stipula-
tions in their wills granting freedom to certain slaves, there was a strong
incentive for those named slaves to accelerate their access to freedom by
killing their masters. Poison could also be used against the master’s prop-
erty, killing animals in ways that were often difficult to distinguish from
death by disease. Often it was used by slaves against other slaves. Those
who knew how to use poison could gain power and respect within the slave
community.47
It is difficult to know how extensive the use of poison by slaves actually
was. Evidence of its use comes primarily from trials conducted in a context
of rampant paranoia. Masters often imagined that poison was being used
when in fact their animals were dying of disease, and their slaves of over-
f e r m e n ta t i o n
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work and misery. Surrounded by slaves, knowing that some might know
how to concoct poisons, and that many had plenty of motivation to use it,
many masters responded by burning suspected slaves alive without the for-
mality of a trial. In 1775, according to one doctor, every plantation had its stake. “To intimidate the other negroes,” he wrote, the masters forced
“each of them to carry a bundle of wood for the stake, and to watch the ex-
ecution.”48
It was illegal for masters to torture and kill their slaves in this way. A
few masters were in fact deported from Saint-Domingue after committing
atrocities against their slaves. For the most part, however, they acted with
impunity. In 1788 a planter name Nicholas Le Jeune tortured two female
slaves whom he suspected of having used poison against other slaves. He
burned their legs, locked them up in a cell, and threatened to kill any slave who attempted to denounce him. Nevertheless, a group of fourteen slaves
brought a complaint to the local court. White judges who went to the plan-
tation to investigate found the two women chained, their burned legs
decomposing, and one being strangled by the metal collar around her
neck. Both died soon afterward. The judges also found that a small box that
Le Jeune claimed contained poison in fact contained “nothing more than
common smoking tobacco interspersed with five bits of rat stool.” Le Jeune