Soulcatcher (7 page)

So he spoke. I thanked him, then took my leave.

OCTOBER
16, 1793
WEDNESDAY,
9:50
P.M.

Unable to sleep, I walked the streets for long hours after dark this evening, and at every alleyway, park, and corner I came to, where the sick huddled round a fire, or wild dogs nibbled the flesh off a dead man's fingers, I saw a
memento mori.
A reminder that Dr. Rush and I had been foolish to believe the hearts of (white) men might ever change in the Earthly City. No, our salvation awaits only in that house not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. Wandering tonight after another day of delivering five sermons, I did see signs that the yellow fever was lessening its grip upon the city. I mused that perhaps soon that plague would be gone. Things would be as they were before. I stepped through now-healing white neighborhoods, ones I'd delivered medicines to only a month ago; I saw lily-white faces glaring at me through the windows, twisted lips drawn down in disgust at my very presence, and I knew at last, and with the certainty of revelation, that the exoteric lesson the good Lord wanted me to see was that, despite the best efforts by men of goodwill, some plagues never end.

SIR,

I
beg that you will forgive me for the inordinate lapse between this letter and my last. As I mentioned in that hasty missive of 4 July 1801, my initial meeting with Governor-General François-Dominique Toussaint went poorly. No, I mustn't lie. It was, Mr. President, a disaster of diplomacy, with Toussaint being haughtily unimpressed by my credentials, despite my previous work in President Washington's administration. He strutted about his chamber with the air of a Coriolanus, and all but looked down his nose at me (You know this expression of disdain—it is thoroughly French), asking why I had not brought from Monticello a personal greeting from you, for he fancies himself to be a freedom fighter like yourself; he insisted repeatedly that I must have misplaced such an important item of protocol; then he summarily postponed any further meetings with me until I (bund it. I daresay, it would have helped matters considerably if you had, in fact, written such a letter, though I understand your refusal to acknowledge in any way whatsoever (or treat as an equal head of state) St Domingue's governor-general and the bloody Revolution he and his cohorts Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe have created on what was once the richest European colonial possession.

In this letter our consul is fictitious (ThomasJefferson, in fact, sent Tobias Lear to represent him), but his fears are real.

But, as I say, it was my intention to write you much earlier concerning your plan to help Bonaparte re-establish Gallic rule and Negro slavery on this sea-girt island. And I would have done so, I assure you, had not your consul gotten off to such a bad start, and then (bund such difficulty acclimating himself and his family to the extremes of this savage post to which you have assigned him. My health has been exceedingly tender. During the day the temperature here is well nigh 95 degrees. My French, as you know, is flawless, but most of the people I meet speak
Creole
French: a blend of Indian, French, and Spanish that I must at times strain my ears to decipher. In addition to this taxing problem of translating their native tongue, the (bod is unfamiliar; the favorite dish is a rice-and-bean concoction called
pois ac duriz colles
, which the natives wash down with rum and
tafia,
a head-ruining spirit made from sugarcane. G astronomically, this diet of Negro dishes for the past several weeks has wreaked havoc with my digestion, that of my wife, and especially my eight-year-old son, Cornelius, who suffers from borborygm and stomach cramps, as do I, though if the truth be known, I suspect our physical distress has a darker cause, which I will try to summon the courage to speak of shortly.

Yet all that, Mr. President, is nothing compared to the
fear
.

To a man, the natives of St. Domingue believe in voodoo. During the nights of sweltering heat, when one's bedsheets are soaked through before dawn, we can hear from our lodgings in the capital the endless pounding of drums—the same tom-toms that one heard on August 22, 1791, when the voodoo priest Boukman, his leaders (among them Toussaint), and the blacks they incited swept from one village to another, torching buildings and killing every white man, woman, and child they saw.
(Yes,
it is true that the insurrectionists hoisted on high dead white babies impaled on their swords, but as to the report of cannibalism, which you inquired about, I have yet to receive confirmation.) The smell of that white massacre lingers on the air. I have been informed that for weeks the sky glowed with sheets of fire, and that more than 6,000 coffee plantations and 200 sugar refineries were destroyed. It is a chilling sound, these drums. Three are employed: the natives call them the Mama Drum, Papa Drum, and Baby Drum, and as they are played, the blacks perform a wild dance called the
Meringue.
I have personally witnessed them crooning a half-spoken, half-sung chant at their voodoo rites, where witch doctors transmogrify the dead—and sometimes living men—into zombies (The Enlightenment, I assure you, has yet to reach the outlying villages here), which are mindless slaves who do the bidding of their masters. (I've been told the witch doctors who conspired with Boukman and Toussaint took a special pleasure in turning their former owners into such spectral creatures.) For a white man, there is the fear here of being murdered in one's sleep. Since hearing of these unholy practices, my poor Cornelius has not slept well in days, and he screams at every sound in the night I must assure him each evening that I keep a firearm by my bed in the room next to his own where my wife, Emma, and I sleep, and that we have trustworthy sentries—the more-Europeanized mulattoes—stationed with rifles just outside our doors.

Lately, I have been rereading your splendid
Notes on the State of Virginia,
partly because some nights sleep and I are strangers, and partly because my position as consul in the first all-black nation in the Western Hemisphere has whetted my curiosity to better understand what transpires beneath the ulotrichous skull of the Negro. You are right, I believe, when in your
Notes
you observe the inferiority of pure-bred blacks at Monticello, their childlike nature, their physical proximity to the apes, and their inability to grasp the arts and sciences as, for example, you have so wondrously done in your writings and studies on architecture, geology, natural history, and scientific forming. Clearly, as you state, the white race is blessed with greater beauty and in America is destined—as if by divine decree—to be the black man's master, to guide him as the parent does the child, and surely this is for the Negro's own good, lest he, in our state of freedom, fall deeper into savagery. No, none of these matters do I question as I revisit your
Notes
. But I have begun to wonder since our arrival at Le Cap, and after such
A Report from St. Domingue 63
close contact with Negroes like Jacques Dessalines (during their Revolution he cried to the other slaves, "Those who wish to die free, rally round me now," which is hardly different than our own Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me death"), if perhaps the lower standards and performance you so precisely observed in the Virginia slaves are not innate, after all, but rather the product of the severity of American slavery itself.

I venture this hypothesis, sir, only because in the blacks of St. Domingue, living now free of whites—Spaniards and Frenchmen—for the first time since 1512,1 have seen a pride, independence, and ambition (as well as arrogance) that favors the confidence of our own patriots after they defeated King George. Nowhere is this pride more evident, or infectious, than in Le Cap, and in the person of the island's beloved leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture. As General Washington is to us, he is to them: a warrior legendary for his courage; the framer of their Constitution; and a statesman capable of forgiving his defeated enemies, for Toussaint has approved trade with France, and it is well known that he has sent both his sons to study at world-acclaimed institutions in Paris.

You will be interested to learn that after his cold rejection of my Commission, and of me as your consul, the governor-general relented and has now allowed me to visit with him on five occasions, the most recent being yesternight. Due to illness, my wife and son could not accompany me to dinner with Toussaint and other officials of this new republic. I must say I felt a bit light-headed during the aperitif, and
a little off-balance in that dining room of stunningly beautiful mulatto ladies and darker-skinned heads of state, but I smiled until the muscles round my mouth began to ache, and drank as lustily as my hosts, who seemed—I was sure of this—amused by my discomfiture. Perhaps it was the wine, or my generally fatigued condition in this horseshoe-shaped country's merciless heat, but when I looked at the head of the table, where Toussaint sat, he presented a magnific figure of manhood, one far better-looking and more dashing in his French uniform and black knee-boots than that runt Bonaparte. Gradually, I began to see why his people called him L' Ouverture ("the Opener"), and then later added "Deliverer" to his many honorific titles. He chatted now with Jacques Dessalines, who sat at his right side, and with Henri Christophe, at his left, ignoring me deliberately for as much as fifteen minutes at a time, so that all I could do was stare down at my dinner plate, shoveling down the entrée, then dessert, in humiliating silence until he deigned to politely ask me a question about you, our system of government, or our relations with the French. I believe he deliberately seated me on a chair shorter than the others at the table, so that even the women looked down at me all during the meal. Try as I might, I could not intimidate him or the others with my superior breeding, credentials as a representative of the United States government, or the color of my skin, which before their Revolution would have been enough to make most slaves treat me with deference. No, none of that worked on them. All during that evening, after we'd eaten, I fèlt a sharp pain slice through my abdomen, but you will be relieved to know, sir, that despite my weakening condition I was alert and overheard Christophe discussing with Toussaint his idea for constructing a mountaintop fortress to protect this fledging nation from attack. He wants to call it the Citadelle. His plan is to equip it with 365 heavy bronze cannons.

I must confess, sadly, that as your consul it seems to me that Toussaint knows that, despite the decision of Congress to continue trade with St. Domingue, you—as our president—have no plans to support his Revolution, indeed, that you consider its leaders to be property that has illegally seized a freedom it does not deserve, and that their successful example of insurrection sends a dangerous message to Negroes on our shores. It is this suspicion of you that led to the poor treatment I received last night, and to Toussaint's remark to Christophe that his color alone was the reason you failed to send him a greeting.

These, as I say, are the tribulations I have endured in your service since my arrival, troubles I gladly endure for my country. I list them here only for one reason. As I was leaving the governor-general's mansion, almost doubled over by the recurrent complaint in my lower regions, but smiling nevertheless, shaking the hand of my host, then Christophe's, I came to Jacques Dessalines, and swung out my palm. He took it in a firm grasp, but then I
saw
it. Just for a moment. There, in his left hand, which he kept behind his back, Dessalines held a clay homunculus—a white doll—of
me,
one with a pin stuck in its belly.

Sir, I have barely started my tenure as consul in St. Domingue. However, I pray you will consider the problems, political and personal, that my family and I have encountered and repeal my appointment. If you do not, I fear this may well be the last communication from

Your most obedient, and most obliged,
And most dutiful humble Servant,
Theobald Wedgwood

A NEWS ITEM
from the
Philadelphia Liberator
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 16, 1817)

Yesterday a reported three thousand black people packed into Bethel Church to vote on a proposal by the newly created American Colonization Society that free blacks in the United States should be resettled in Africa. The tempestuous meeting, which lasted most of the day, and was peppered throughout by passionate speeches for and against the proposal, ended with a historic vote that will no doubt be decisive—if not fateful—for the future of all people of African descent in this nation.

Fiction often changes the facts for dramatic effect. Paul Cuffe did not attend the meeting described here, and he learned of the vote by letter. There were no women present, and the actual vote was by voice, not paper ballot. The author hopes readers of this tale can forgive the liberties taken with facts in order to conjure a moment in time with feeling.

It was, some observers remarked, a debate on two equally powerful yet antithetical dreams within the black American soul.

The meeting came but fifteen days after the founding of the American Colonization Society, a creation of Robert Finley that has been endorsed with enthusiasm by President James Madison and former president Jefferson. Its mission, according to its founder, is to redress the evils of exploitation visited upon Negroes in Africa, and to establish on that continent a homeland for American people of color, a place to which they can emigrate, live free from white persecution, and pursue their interests without interference. The idea has great popularity these days, among both blacks and whites, who question whether the Negro, once released from bondage, will ever be accepted in or assimilated by American society.

In attendance at Wednesday's gathering were some of the most prominent leaders and luminaries from Philadelphia's growing black community. On hand was the ubiquitous Rev. Absalom Jones; maritime entrepreneur Paul Cuffe and his Indian wife, Alice; businessman James Forten; and Rev. Richard Allen, who, as on many occasions previously, provided his church as the site for this great Negro debate and introduced Mr. Forten as the day's first speaker.