Caribbean (85 page)

On 5 June 1802, after a month of idleness at his plantation, Toussaint was invited to a gala dinner at the neighboring headquarters of the local French commandant, a General Brunet, and he looked forward so avidly to an afternoon of relaxed military recollections that he asked his aide, General Vaval, to join him: “Give the French a bottle of wine, they talk better than anyone, and I’d enjoy that,” but as they neared the plantation where Brunet waited, Vaval had a blinding apocalyptic vision. Reining in his horse, he ordered the black troops accompanying the two generals to move ahead, and said, with panic in his voice: “Toussaint! Death awaits if you go in there. For God’s sake, turn back. For God’s sake, don’t go!”

“What’s the matter, old friend?”

“Terror! I’m shaking with terror,” and he held out his trembling hands.

“Fool! Grab your reins and let’s get on with our little celebration.”

“I cannot! The angel of death hovers above that house,” and with that, Vaval turned back and galloped away as if the fiends of hell were at his heels, never to see his hero again.

Toussaint and his nine enlisted attendants rode on, entered the plantation compound, and saluted the French soldiers waiting there. They, in turn, saluted Toussaint, who threw his reins to one of his
men: “Rest the horses out here,” and, giving the French soldiers orders to feed his people, he went in to join the officers.

He had barely stepped into the room when General Brunet hurried forward, embraced him like a brother, and excused himself for a moment to tend the wine. The moment he left the room, the French officers around Toussaint drew their swords, pointing the sharp ends at his heart and throat. “Citizen Toussaint, you’re under arrest,” and when Brunet, visibly shaken by the disgraceful thing he had been forced to do, returned to the room, thus able to avow in later questioning “I had nothing to do with the arrest of General Toussaint,” he said merely: “You’re to be sent back to France … bound hand and foot.”

Betrayed by a breach of honor so foul that all men in uniform reviled the act, Toussaint was immediately thrown aboard a small French ship, abused as a prisoner who had dishonored France, and taken to Brest, from where he was whisked to a fortress prison on the Swiss border. There, in the care of a sadistic jailer, he was starved and ridiculed as a black who had preposterously aspired to equality with the French.

Often during the days of his degradation he reflected upon the contrasting treatment he had received from his two enemies. “The English, who suffered greatly from me,” he told his jailer, “gave me a banquet, toasted me as an honorable foe, and embraced me as they sailed away. You French? You lured me to a meeting, your general betrayed his honor, and you threw me into this filthy dungeon.” He stared at the jailer and asked: “How could you do these things to a French citizen who fought for France against the Spanish and the English to protect your rights?”

The jailer understood not one aspect of this moral dilemma, and on a spring day in 1803, when he came to bring General Toussaint L’Ouverture his breakfast, he found the great black general dead of exposure in his ice-cold cell, protected by only one thin blanket.

With the arrest and deportation of Toussaint, General Leclerc felt certain that final victory was near, for as he assured Espivent’s associates during a dinner at the château: “I have only to subdue that pestilential Vaval and the pacification of St.-Domingue will be complete. Our troops can then return to France.”

Had Leclerc been able to consult at that moment with his last
major opponent in the field, General Vaval, he would have found that the black commander had assessed the situation in identical terms, for the general was deep in the mountains with only a handful of black troops, and even that force diminished each week. His fellow generals, the murdering monster Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the mercurial Henri Christophe, had gone over to the French side, while the free-colored leaders, André Rigaud and Alexandre Pétion, had fled to Paris, where men with their cast of skin were safe for the moment.

Only he was in the field with anything that might be called an army, and one night, when defeat and surrender seemed inevitable, he sat with his wife at the edge of a forest and lamented not his fate, for he was prepared for anything, but that of his noble leader, Toussaint: “Marie, he defeated everyone. He was magical, a genius. He beat the Spanish before we joined them. He drove the English back into the sea. He defeated armies of free-coloreds when they came at him, and most of all, he defeated the French before they threw thousands of fresh men at us. And what did he achieve? Nothing. He won all the battles and lost the war.”

His wife would not accept that: “He won us our freedom. We’re not slaves anymore.”

“From what I understand, that was mostly the work of good-hearted men in France.”

“But we are free, and even if you have to surrender tomorrow, you can’t change that. Even in his jail, Toussaint couldn’t take credit for that.”

Such a nebulous victory gave little consolation to Vaval, who could foresee only the impending defeat of the last of his army and his own surrender as the black general who had held out to the end, and he slept that night on a rude paillasse under the trees, assailed by this gnawing sense of failure.

But he was awakened at dawn by sentries bringing before him a pitiful black straggler who had tried to infiltrate the lines. He was in his seventies, an emaciated man whose lank, bent body showed the hurt and hunger he had undergone in order to join the rebelling slaves of St.-Domingue. He stood head bowed as his captors pushed him before their general.

“Who are you?” Vaval asked, aware that the shuffling fellow who was afraid to look up could be of little use to an army, and he and the black soldiers standing by were surprised when the man replied in
excellent French: “I was a slave on Guadeloupe … joy like never before when the people in Paris sent us the wonderful news ‘You are slaves no more, freemen forever, just like us in France.’ We could buy land, work for wages, marry, and have homes like men and women are supposed to.”

“Like we have here,” Marie Vaval said. “Slaves no more.”

The man turned to look at her, and said: “My wife said the same: ‘Slaves no more!’ but then he came, that monster Napoleon, and shouted at us: ‘You’re slaves again, and slaves you will remain forever.’ ”

“What?” Vaval shouted, and the soldiers who had captured the stranger called for others to move close to hear the appalling news.

“Yes! Slavery crushes us again in Guadeloupe. And it will return here too, unless you fight it to the death. It will come here on the next boat … or the one after that. Look at my back,” and the man pulled up his flimsy shirt to show a crisscross of welts on his black skin. “They did this when they caught me trying that first time to sneak off the island: ‘You’re not to tell any of the other islands about slavery coming back. They’ll receive word when we think it’s proper.’ They were desperately afraid some slaves might hear the news at a bad moment for them—like now, on this island—while you still have armies in the field. They’re afraid the news might make you fight harder.”

Although Vaval was thrown into a sullen rage by this news, he could not be sure that the man was telling the truth; he might well be an agent sent by the French to goad the final black army into precipitate action: “How did you get to us? All the way from Guadeloupe?”

“With difficulty—hiding from the search dogs, beaten near to death on my first try, relying on companions who lost heart when they saw the bigness of the sea they were supposed to cross. No food … fight in the cane fields … a stolen canoe …”

As the refugee spoke, Vaval heard only the first portion of his words, for he was remembering the days in the sugar fields in the southern part of St.-Domingue when his father, the slave Vavak, told his children almost the same story: “A stolen boat … a beach in Puerto Rico … escaping the chase dogs in Santo Domingo …” The story of black refugees seeking freedom never ended, never changed, and sometimes, as in this dawn confrontation, the words and images exploded in terrible fury, blinding men to the risk even of death.

“You are one of us,” Vaval broke in. “You are to work with me … 
close … because I need to hear your words:
Napoleon will drive us back to slavery
. No! By God, he will not!” And he gathered about him his wife, the messenger of doom and all his lieutenants, and they swore there at the edge of the forest overlooking a gully that stood between them and the French troops in Le Cap: “We will defy Napoleon to the death! We will never again be slaves!” And from that day on, General Vaval, fighting alone, became a military hurricane comparable to the natural ones that periodically ravaged the Caribbean. In battle after battle he surprised the trained French armies whose troops outnumbered his sixty thousand to ten.

But because Charles Leclerc was also a heroic man who knew how to use his superiority in numbers, he was able to drive Vaval’s ragtag army slowly backward into the final valley from which there would be no escape. Vaval, realizing this, grew ever closer to his wife, who had supported him during so many bleak midnights, and they took an oath between them: “We will never again be slaves. The French shall not capture us alive.”

Despite the valiant boast of its general, Vaval’s collection of former slaves certainly would have been pushed back into the final closed valley had not an ally stormed into St.-Domingue to fight on his side. It was a remorseless antagonist, General Yellow Fever, and the prediction made earlier by Vaval was about to come true in terrible dimension. The disease struck the French troops with such fury that the Europeans were overwhelmed by the assault. Carried by mosquitoes, a fact then unknown, it attacked the liver so that jaundice resulted, but it also produced a debilitating fever which caused unrelieved aching in the head and back; then tiny ruptures occurred in the soft tissues of the throat and lungs, resulting in dreadful hemorrhaging from the mouth.

The speed with which these various manifestations struck, one cascading upon the other, was appalling, death often coming within three days of the first attack, and once the disease started, there was no known cure; sometimes—at least often enough to keep hope alive—the disease dissipated of itself, rest, sleep and good diet aiding the process, and then the patient was immune for the rest of his life. And that was what differentiated old-timers in the colony like General Vaval and his black troops from General Leclerc’s French newcomers:
the blacks, having had mild attacks when young, were immune, while Leclerc’s men from northern climates were pitifully susceptible.

The fatalities were much worse than Vaval had suggested that night in his talk with Toussaint: of an average thousand-troop unit, eight hundred fifty might die, a hundred might be in a hospital of some kind, leaving fifty, if the commander were lucky, available for limited service, limited because a mild form of the disease might be enervating them. It was a monstrous affliction, and when fresh troops were imported from Europe, they provided not replacements in the line but merely new targets for the mosquitoes.

So the betrayal of General Toussaint accomplished little, for although some black units did defect to the French in hopes of landing decent work when the civil war ended, stubborn patriots like Vaval retreated to forest refuges, emerging stealthily now and then to punish careless French units. And they maintained relentless pressure by initiating their own imaginative responses when the French committed barbarities against them.

At Port-au-Prince, the French defenders of the town—assisted as always by the free-coloreds who still trusted that if they helped the whites when the latter were in trouble, the whites would accept them as equals when the trouble ended—thought to discourage Vaval by erecting a tall gallows at the edge of town where the black troops could see the hangings; there each day at noon they executed a black prisoner. Vaval told his men: “Erect me a tall gallows on that rise and fetch me all the white prisoners we have,” and next day at noon, after the whites in the town had hanged a black, the blacks outside did the same to a white. After three days of this, Vaval summoned all his white prisoners and told them: “Write your names on this list, then nominate one of your group to take this message into town: ‘We can play this game as long as you. Here are the names of the next to go.’ ” And the public hangings stopped.

The extent to which St.-Domingue had become a phantasmagoria, without reason or justification, was illustrated in General Vaval’s experience with the Polish Second Battalion. Napoleon, deeply worried about the possibility that his Polish troops serving in Europe might turn their energies to establishing a free Poland and stop fighting for France, impulsively decided to ship them all off to St.-Domingue to assist Leclerc. Five thousand Poles, unaccustomed to and fearful of the tropics, debarked at Cap-Français in late 1802 and
were thrown immediately into action against the black troops of Toussaint’s successors.

After a series of skirmishes in which the Poles fought reasonably well, they found themselves supporting French troops in a beautiful town overlooking the Caribbean, the seaport of St.-Marc, where they, the Poles, were forced to become the villains in a cruel conflict. A black general who had been fighting as a trusted ally of the French suddenly decided that a brighter future awaited him if he and his men switched over to General Vaval’s slave army. This was a prudent decision, but in leaving, he abandoned one unit of his army containing over four hundred black troops stationed inside the town of St.-Marc in the midst of the French and Polish units.

When the French general commanding the Polish battalion was apprised of his former colleague’s shameful act—his taking more than half the combined army over to the enemy—he gave crisp and secret orders to his subordinates: “The blacks out there don’t know yet what’s happened. Quick, disarm them and assemble them in the public square.”

Quietly, his junior officers, all French, explained to the blacks: “The general wants to talk with us about the forthcoming attack. Stack your guns and follow us.” When the trusting blacks obeyed, moving forward to hear the general’s plans, they heard him cry to his own men and the Poles: “Close ranks!” and around the perimeter of the beautiful square the armed French and Polish soldiers formed a rigid barrier, bayonets pointed outward. Then came the quiet, dreadful order: “Men, kill them all!”