Caribbean (79 page)

Caught in the middle between the two extremely powerful grinding stones of white plantation owner and black slave writhed a considerable mass of citizens who were neither white nor black. Their racially mixed brothers and sisters appeared on all Caribbean islands and always faced the same impediments, promises, hopes and crushing disadvantages; in those other colonies they might be called
mulattoes, coloreds, half-breeds, half-castes, creoles, criollos
or
bastards
, but in St.-Domingue all those terms were avoided, especially
mulatto
, which was deemed to have a pejorative ring. Here they were called
gens de couleur
, or, in English,
people of color
, or, more simply,
free-coloreds
.

Despised by whites, who saw them as parvenus striving to climb up to a level to which they were not entitled, and hated by blacks, who saw them as constituting a middle layer which would forever prevent the slaves from attaining power, the free-colored were spurned from above and below, and their history in St.-Domingue paralleled the experience of similar mestizo groups in the British Caribbean, in India and in South Africa: They had no real home, no ally whom they could trust, and no ascertainable future. But although there were these similarities to the situation in other world colonies, their role in St.-Domingue was especially frustrating because again and again they would come close to reaching a solution, only to find themselves betrayed and hunted down like animals.

In 1789 the whites in the colony numbered about 40,000, free-coloreds about 22,000, black slaves not less than 450,000, and because
the death rate among the overworked and underfed blacks was so appallingly high, some 40,000 replacement slaves had to be imported each year from Africa, and this lucrative trade was in the hands of great slaving companies situated in France’s Atlantic seaports like La Rochelle, Bordeaux and, preeminently, Nantes.

In 1770, when it became clear to commercial observers that the English colonies in North America must sooner or later fall into either trouble or rebellion, the great shipping house of Espivent in the French seaport of Nantes saw that its traditional business of running slaves from Africa to the New World would have to be increased dramatically in the frenzied time before war erupted. The major branch of the family, ennobled centuries before, decided to place in command of its nine slave ships the most daring captains available, and to tempt them with large bonuses to move their ships to Virginia and Carolina more rapidly than before in order to maximize their profits while slaving was still possible.

Finding only eight acceptable captains, they looked among the many members of the family who worked for them, and spotted Jerome Espivent, twenty-nine and a man of character who had served on many family ships. He knew the slave coast of Africa, the slave markets in Carolina and the Caribbean, and could be trusted to submit honest reports of his dealings. Assigning him to one of their larger ships, his noble relatives told him: “Make our fortune and yours,” and he had applied himself so assiduously that by the time the American rebellion broke out in 1776, he had amassed considerable wealth and a rare knowledge of the Caribbean. In 1780, as the war was waning, and running the English blockades no longer paid huge dividends, Espivent decided to quit Nantes, where he would always be under the thumb of the noble wing of his large family, and settle in the Caribbean. Naturally, he thought first of the French islands, Martinique in particular, for it was a place of high culture and rich social life, but he also considered the more plebeian Guadeloupe. Yet in the end he selected a fine hillside in the town of Cap-Français, for in most criteria it far excelled locations elsewhere.

On this hill he built his residence, a brutish kind of Rhineland stone fortress on the outside, a delicate valley château with spacious rooms and expensive decorations on the inside. It commanded views of both the Atlantic, so that he could see the arrival of ships from
France sooner than anyone else, and of the town which lay obedient at its feet. Here Jerome Espivent ruled as the social and political dictator of the seaport, the epitome of French influence in the Caribbean.

He was now forty-eight, a tall, imperial-looking man, with graying hair, a tightly trimmed mustache and a finely pointed Vandyke goatee. Despite the tropic heat, he favored the flowing capes worn by noble Frenchmen in the past century, so he asked a local shopkeeper to import from India cloths of the sheerest weight, from which seamstresses produced elfin-thin capes in light blue or shimmering black, and when he appeared at the theater in one of these, his cockaded hat at an angle, he seemed to be telling the citizens of Le Cap that he bespoke the ancient glory of France.

He was a Royalist, an admirer of the nobility of which he was a collateral part, and a shrewd investor of his savings, for it seemed that whatever he touched prospered beyond expectations. No longer commanding a ship of his own, he served as a kind of shore agent for those operated by other men, and year after year he appeared to make more profits from these ships than did their owners. He also bought coarse muscovado sugar from other plantations which lacked the facilities his had and refined it himself, importing for that purpose big shipments of clay from Barbados. He was a very rich man, but he was no miser, for he helped support the theater, sent bright lads to France for their education even though they were not his sons, and was available for all contingencies, for he felt that Frenchmen of station were obligated to maintain a public presence.

He had one curious concern that had started as a hobby but which had grown, as hobbies will, into an obsession. Believing as he did that God had put white blood into the world to help Him save it from barbarism, he had become fascinated by what he called “the contamination of the black,” and this led to a conviction that dominated his life: Even one drop of black blood mixed with white can be visibly detected through the seventh generation. Since this meant that a child in the seventh generation would have had 128 ancestors, he had devised a table which showed every possible combination from 128 pure white = o black, to the disgraceful end of the spectrum, o white = 128 black.

And he had codified in orderly form the popular names for these mixes, as he was fond of explaining to anyone who would listen: “Suppose a white man with totally clean blood marries a black
woman right out of the African jungle with dirty blood. Their child is a mulatto, half and half. Now, never again does one of the men in our example marry another black, always pure white. Next generation, three parts white, one black, and we call him a quadroon. He marries pure white, his child is an octaroon—seven clean, one dirty. Next generation, fifteen white, one black is a mameluke.”

Of course, the actual mixing was more confused than in his ideal example, and some of the names of the 128 possible mixes were fascinating: a child one part white, seven black was a sacatra; three parts white, five colored was a marabou; but he considered one of the most exciting mixes to be the griffe, one white, three colored: “Those girls simply do not know when to stop.” His incredible system reached the number 8,192, representing the ancestors a human being would have if one counted back to the thirteenth generation: “Only in that generation can a man win his way back to the respectability of being white from which his ancestor departed in shame.” He also warned young men: “Counting an average of twenty-two years to a generation, it will require your descendants two hundred and eighty-six years to correct your dreadful mistake if you marry a woman with black blood. The moral? When it comes time to marry, stay away from the free-coloreds.”

With such implacable views it was clear that Espivent would have strong feelings about the non-whites in his colony. He had to do business with them, have his beard trimmed by them, order cakes from their bakeries, and employ them to serve as overseers when men from France were not available. Wherever he moved in St.-Domingue he ran into them, bright young men with bright skins and fine teeth “trying always to be better than they are.” But the more he saw of them, the more he despised them, for he was sure he could detect in what he called their shifty eyes signs of the revenge they would one day seek. Everything about them infuriated him: “
Mon Dieu
, some of them speak better French than our own children. Did you know that Prémord, that speechifying menace over in the tailor’s shop has had the nerve to send his two sons to Paris for their education? These coloreds buy books, they fill the theaters, they attend our churches, they parade their pretty daughters before our sons and hope to trap them. They’re worse than mosquitoes, the curse of our colony.”

Sometimes he would walk the streets of Le Cap cataloguing each man or woman of color, reciting to himself: That one has three-quarters black blood, that one only one-eighth, that pretty one’ll be
trying to pass for white one of these days, but the stain will always be there and sooner or later it’ll betray her. The sight of an exquisite free-colored girl gave him pain, not pleasure, for he always visualized her trapping some innocent soldier just out from France, forcing him to marry her, and then slipping into the metropolitan with her ineradicable black blood to contaminate the homeland. He frequently felt that the colony and the homeland were doomed, but he stayed on in St.-Domingue because he had a spacious, cool château in town and a grand plantation in the country. Espivent’s racial attitudes were antithetical to those of most of his fellow countrymen, and sometimes he was accused of being worse than the English, but he never gave an inch in his dogma of extremism. In fact, he reveled in it.

Jerome Espivent called his huge plantation Colibri, or Hummingbird, and to cultivate its rich acreage he utilized some three hundred slaves—“the best in the Caribbean,” he boasted to his fellow planters. He could claim this because during the years that he supervised his slave ship and those of his family, he invariably anchored each new arrival from Africa first off Cap-Français, where he inspected the newcomers, selecting for his plantation the strongest and those who looked the most intelligent. The rejects he shipped on to the American colonies, where such high standards could not be enforced.

But his best slave, César, had reached him not in his own ships but by a most curious route. When the blacks on the Danish island of St. John rebelled in 1733, most of the rebels were executed in terrible ways, but one of the leaders of the revolt, a slave named Vavak, César’s father, had fled the island in a small boat, accompanied by his woman. In furtive rowing, they skirted the larger Danish island of St. Thomas, where certain death awaited any fugitive black, and made their way to the north coast of Puerto Rico, where they hid ashore for seven days before proceeding in their same small rowboat to the eastern end of the big island of Hispaniola. There they fell into the hands of a Spanish plantation owner who, predictably, enslaved them again, but they managed to flee to the French side, where they were once more thrown into slavery on a plantation just north of Port-au-Prince.

When, in 1780, Espivent began stocking Colibri, he heard about a slave for sale—whose owner was going bankrupt—who was considered “one of the finest slaves in these islands, a bright, hardworking
fellow, south of here.” When he went down to inspect, he found a young married man of twenty-four, named Vavak, after his father. It required only a few minutes for Espivent to decide that although this man was rather short, he was the one he wanted to serve as lead slave on his plantation at the north end of the colony. Having bought him at a bargain price, he listened when Vavak begged him in good French to buy his wife too. “That would make sense,” Espivent said. “Man works better with his woman at hand to guide and care for him,” and the three started back to Colibri, but on the way Espivent said: “Vavak’s not a proper French name.” After reflecting for a moment, he snapped his fingers and cried: “Vaval! First name César, your woman’s name Marie.”

César and Marie first saw the great plantation that would be their home on a stormy afternoon in the spring of 1780, and as they trudged behind their new master on his spirited horse, he suddenly reined in, ordered them to halt, and pointed to a magnificent landscape ahead: “The stone house on the right, that hill to the west, the lands sloping down toward the ocean that hides behind that rise, all mine. All yours to tend.”

César’s first reaction to the plantation was professional delight in the fact that it looked as if sugarcane would grow easily, then pleasure in seeing it was in fine condition, with roads that had been leveled, small houses with roofs, and land that had been properly tilled. But before he could comment, Espivent rose in his stirrups and pointed to a distant hilltop which he could see but the slaves could not: “That’s Château Espivent, my home. Sometimes you’ll work there, when the hedges need tending.” With that, the plantation owner spurred his horse and rode toward the collection of huts in which his new slaves would make their home.

In the years that followed, César did not see his owner regularly, for Espivent did not come often to his plantation, and when he did, it was to examine the cane fields, not the slaves. When riding inspection through his valuable hectares he could stare imperially down avenues of cane and never see his three hundred slaves. He did not ignore them; he simply looked past them as he did past the trees that edged the fields.

He was reasonably kind to the slaves, but he did subscribe to the theory that it was most profitable to treat them like animals—one pair of pants, one shirt, boughs on the ground for a bed, the cheapest food—and work them to death, replacing them with new bodies
bought at a bargain from his family’s ships. While they lived he did not abuse them, and whenever he found one of his overseers doing so, he discharged him: “Treat your slaves decently and they not only live longer, but they also work better while they do live.” An Espivent slave who started healthy survived about nine years, and since he paid for his cost in five years, he represented a profitable investment.