On January 1, 1804, the army of Dessalines regathered on the desert plains near Gonaives. The independence of Haiti (newly named by Dessalines after an old Indian name that meant "the high place") was to be officially declared.
Two learned mulattoes quarreled over the phrasing of the document. One of them composed an Act remarkable for its judicious weightiness. "What you have done," said the other, "does not fit our mood. To draw up an Act of Independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a saber for a pen!" and he wrote while the generals sprawled sleeping under the moon in the crowded town.
All night the roads and trails leading into Gonaives were pounded by the bare feet of blacks come to hear the phrasing of the dream their Dessalines had fulfilled for them. Some wore only ragged loin cloths, others broadcloth coats or breeches, rarely both, taken from French soldiers killed in battle. The slurring sing-song of the mob's whispering, in the faulty creole French that was the common tongue of all the blacks, made the warm night vibrant. This independence the generals talked of—did it mean no more wars, no more work, free rum and flour? Jean Jacques would tell them.
At dawn when the generals awoke they found the mulatto huddled asleep over the table. Under his elbows lay an Act of Independence. But in spite of his scorn of the other man's effort, his Act was brief and rather pallid.
However, the great day had dawned. There was no time for further debate.
The Act was read in the presence of the generals in full view of the gathered army. To the sound of war drums and battered French trumpets, Dessalines, stiff-fingered, affixed his mark. Christophe followed him and wrote down the only word he had learned to write. The other generals signed their names in full.
Dessalines flung out his thick, short arms, peered into the upturned faces of his adoring people, and spoke to them of their victories, of the hatred for France which must never dim, of the land, the hills, and the future magnificence that was theirs. In the afternoon, a baking afternoon of fearful heat and fine white dust that made one's sweat sticky, the generals did what was to be done. They declared Jean Jacques Dessalines Governor-General for life, with the privilege of choosing his successor.
That night when the sun went down it was red, close, glorious. Jean Jacques, child of the jungles, slave of a black, warrior, hero, conqueror, had had his day.
Poor Jean Jacques. His secretaries began to bring him papers. All day long they gave him not a moment's peace. "What, Jean Jacques, shall we do about foreign trade? About export duties? Land deeds? Jurisprudence? With what shall we pay the army? When?"
What did Jean Jacques know of these things? Sometimes in his impatience he would drive them out of his presence with a stick—then the problems of government would grow miraculously more easy for a space. But the conqueror was restless.
The high-ceilinged office of the State House, where his secretaries expected him to sit all day and watch the curtains flutter in the rare gusts of humid wind, was no place for Governor-General Dessalines. He cracked his knuckles, stared at the polished boots high on the desk before him, and brooded. Then he gave orders that all Frenchmen who still lived in Haiti were to be killed.
He rode himself, with the sweet taste of the tropical noondays in his mouth, to see his orders carried out. And carried out they were.
Christophe, who came second to Jean Jacques in authority, had been reinstalled in his old post as governor of the region of the north. He remonstrated at the massacres, but remonstrance was useless. Very well, then. Since Jean Jacques had so immutable a loathing for the French, Christophe invited English traders to come to the Cap. He guaranteed them safety for life and property. Haiti must survive. Christophe knew the eyes of the world were on her, cynical, curious eyes, puckered at the corners with contempt.
In August, 1804, Napoleon took the title of Emperor. Two months later Dessalines followed his lead, and was crowned Jean Jacques le Premier—First Emperor of Haiti. A jeweled crown was set on his head—and the eyes that had seen so much during the swift journey from a thatched mud hut in the Guinea swamps to an emperor's palace on a great island on the southern seas, filled, they say, with puzzled tears of pride.
The secretaries and the gentlemen of the Emperor's Cabinet had at last learned not to trouble him. Jean Jacques now had palaces, and some were so ungrateful as to say that he furnished them too liberally with ladies. No one found fault with an emperor's having twenty mistresses, black, brown, and tan, but it was hard for a struggling state to be expected to spend twenty fortunes on them every year.
Jean Jacques's star was setting. Slowly, behind shielding hands, a snicker ran through Haiti. They were laughing at great Dessalines. The Tiger had taken up dancing.
He imported from France—from hated France—two mincing professors of the minuet. Hour after hour every day they tried to lead the sweating master of the blacks through the intricacies of the latest Paris dances.
Jean Jacques was squat and as strong as a gorilla, but he was not graceful. He could ride a horse at full gallop down a rock-strewn hillside under a raking cannon fire; he could swing a sword and rout an army with a bellow rent hoarsely from the cavern of his chest—but guide his feet in a minuet, not at all.
No one dared tell him he was clumsy. It would have been more dangerous than calling him a coward. But at state levees, at private entertainments, even at Cabinet meetings, he always made opportunities for displaying the grace he fancied he possessed. The generals, the mulatto politicians, and the mistresses in favor at the moment would applaud, while he swelled like a turkey cock. He was far too busy to realize his state was falling to ruin through corruption, oppression, and disorder.
The long southern peninsula of Haiti, a narrow procession of steep, unfertile mountains, divided by a hundred precipices from natural intercourse with the rest of the country, had always been a center of rebellion. The old affranchi class was strongest there. In that region the prosperous mulatto planters had never accepted the blacks as their political or social equals. They scorned ignorant, fiery Dessalines and hated him for one of the few laws he had dictated—that all subjects of his Empire should be known as "blacks."
This outlawed more than a hundred words that had come into use to describe various shades of color and mixtures of blood. It had all been worked out with elaborate care. A man who could prove his veins bore 228 parts white blood to 94 parts negro felt himself the social superior of another who was known to be afflicted with 84 parts negro blood to only 112 parts white. And Jean Jacques, the clown of the minuet, had laughed at their little dignities! It was a thing not to be forgiven even an emperor and a conqueror. The very governors and generals he had appointed, who had risen to power under his protection and owed their authority to the luster of his name, began to rise against him. The mulattoes in all parts of the Empire joined with them. Murmurs of restlessness and gusts of laughter grew to active civil war.
The southern peninsula fell to the rebels. Word came to Emperor Jean Jacques, but he angrily dismissed the messengers. More of their tedious papers.
They were marching on Port au Prince. The capital was doomed to fall at any hour, they told him. Emperor Jean Jacques could not understand. They brought him news of a rebellion, but no mention of battles, of charges, repulses, and death. Was no one resisting, or had all the world gone mad? Suddenly Jean Jacques began to roar with the raging fury that had defeated France. The sneaking yellow men had betrayed him. He'd make all right and orderly with a few swift saber strokes. He had but to ride proudly in his finest uniform before his people and they would remember who was master.
He mounted his horse, gathered his personal staff about him, and started for Port au Prince.
The odor of a horse's sweating flanks was good to smell again. Jean Jacques had not lost the gift of wonder. These hills that made a ragged scroll against the sky were his. The valleys where the streams ran under bowing cacao trees were his—his! The slave of a negro grown to emperor!
The little cavalcade rode in silence under the dry heat of the sun. Only wind-twisted shrub and grotesque cactus bordered the road. Dessalines, because his horse was best and because he was Emperor of Haiti, rode ahead. Before long the Red Bridge, a way point on the highway into the capital, appeared in the distance, blurred a little by the murky stratum of the heat mirage that lifted from the road.
Dessalines turned his head and shouted an angry question to the officers who rode behind him. "Why has not the army ridden out to meet me?" He brought his spurred heel irritably into the flanks of his mount and faced forward.
The white road, empty an instant before, was filled with soldiers who had sprung from hiding in the ditches and from behind the dwarf trees that bordered the way. They carried guns tipped with flashing bayonets. The Emperor had ridden into ambush. In an instant they were milling about him, shouting, cursing. Dessalines knew them, but he saw in their black faces a look that he had never seen before—fury and hatred, mingled queerly with terror. A mulatto officer on the outskirts of the mob shouted an order: "Shoot! shoot!" Fifty guns were lifted and leveled toward the Emperor's head. But no one obeyed.
A stout club hung by his saddle. He seized it and shouted to the officers of his party to come to his assistance. A single horseman charged through the mélée to a position beside him. From the corner of his eye the Emperor saw the rest, already small in the distance, followed by a rolling ghost of dust. With a great cry he swung his club, knocking down the flashing bayonets that thrust up into his face.
Only a long minute had elapsed. The soldiers under the flashing feet of the two frightened horses were silent and confused. They were in the presence of the Emperor. This man they had come to kill was great Dessalines!
The mulatto officers were dancing in rage. Their coup was failing. Dessalines and his one faithful officer were slowly forcing their way through the mob. Jean Jacques's ugly face was twisting into a proud sneer.
"Kill him! Kill him!" they yelled. And no one did.
Dessalines's club rattled the bayonets down, now and then landed dully on a skull. The Emperor laughed, an ugly, revengeful laugh.
A fourteen-year-old mulatto boy, who was hiding in some bushes at the roadside, lifted a rifle and fired. The bullet killed the Emperor's horse. Dessalines crashed down into the mob. His cheek by chance was laid open by a bayonet blade. In another second he was dead. An Emperor's blood splashed on common soldiers' dusty feet had given them sudden courage.
In their mad anger they tore off his fine uniform, lopped off the fingers, the arms and legs, and thrust a hundred wounds into the still flesh.
The one faithful officer who had jumped down to stand over his fallen master was slain.
Then, afraid, trembling with the horror of their act, the mob slunk off, leaving an officer and a squad of men to escort the Emperor the little remaining way into his capital.
Along the road as the procession walked toward Port au Prince, black peasants came out of their thatched mud huts, and asked the soldiers what was the ugly thing they carried in a bloody burlap bag. When they were told they fell silent. Soon old men found their drums, beat upon them, and through the silent, droning summer afternoon sent word across the mountains and over the fertile plains that Dessalines, the Tiger, was dead.
It was late when they reached the capital and they had wearied of their burden. They flung the body of Jean Jacques on the grass in the open square before the State House.
Children came and stared and ran away, wailing for the shelter of their mothers' skirts. A few black soldiers swaggered up and spat on what remained of the man who had given them freedom. But soon, as the sun went down behind a distant island in the bay, the idlers disappeared and the broken body of Jean Jacques was left alone.
Then Défilée came. Défilée, "the Defiled One," was mad and a woman of the town. She was a butt for children's laughter and the snarls of dogs. Everyone knew her.
Défilée had grown old perhaps more quickly than her sisters, but the older and the madder the "poor fool" had grown the more she laughed. And the more she laughed the more she danced. The peasants who lived along the country roads where she wandered said her bare black feet, crusted with the white dust, were almost never still, and that with foolish flutter her hands kept time. She had no home. Her food she found on the trees that overhung the walls.
Défilée came into the place where the body of the Emperor lay and a gaping child told her what it was. With a sudden sob the fluttering hands dropped still, her twisted, laughing face grew pitiful. She threw her gaunt, half-naked body on the ugly thing that had been Dessalines. And after a little she put it back in its sack and, no longer dancing, carried it into the dark shadows under the trees of the cemetery.
The next morning they found her still guarding it, and drove her away. A friend of Dessalines dug a grave for him and marked it with a stone. Défilée disappeared. Wondering people, when they heard what she had done, remembered that long ago Jean Jacques had loved her, that through him she had won her name, Défilée, and by him had been taught to dance.
