Admiral d'Estaing's warships reached the mouth of the Savannah River on the coast of Georgia, swayed at anchor through a month of rain, and then, rather ridiculously, sailed south again. The expedition had been wholly futile—except in the effect it had upon one negro child.
When Henry Christophe returned to Saint Domingue he carried with him vivid, troubling recollections. He had seen tall blacks from Martinique, slender young mulattoes of Saint Domingue, grizzled soldiers of France, and lean-faced farmers of this new United States die with queer fraternity for a thing he'd never heard of: liberty, they called it, and the war a revolution.
A mulatto volunteer with the eyes and chin of a poet, a youth named Chavannes, had told him something of the cause they fought for—and had talked with fierce intensity of a half-formed dream of liberty at home.
The ships bearing the Saint Domingan volunteers reached Cap Francois. Again the town turned out, but not so gayly. Nor did those who came down to the waterfront stay long from their affairs.
The volunteers made their landing, got their pay, and went to their homes. When the last small boats had beached a few in the crowd found their men had fallen in the strangers' war at a siege that still continued. Henry's master, who was going home to France and had no further use for a black servant boy, sold him to a free negro at the Cap, an innkeeper named Coidovic, proprietor of the Hétel de la Couronne.
Coidovie wanted neither a stonemason's apprentice nor an officer's body servant, but the stables needed another hand. Christophe became a stable-boy and time and events slowed down for him.
If one may judge by the fine taste of horseflesh which he displayed later on when he had his own stables at Sans Souci, he took not unkindly to the trade of groom. His duties were simple. All inns of the time kept a black boy outside the door to take the bridles tossed him by guests who came in from the plantations or from the military barracks outside of town. If the customer indicated that he expected to stay for more than a glass, Christophe would find stable room and fodder for his horse in the open shed in the courtyard behind the inn... . But there were endless drowsy hours of tropic afternoon when no guests appeared and there was nothing for the serious, slender little boy to do but listen to the hum of the flies and snatch illegal naps in the shuttered gloom of the café bar. In a few years Coidovic raised Christophe to the position of waiter and billiard marker. It was a job any slave might envy. Apart from its pleasant and not very strenuous duties, it carried with it a chance of that unheard-of thing for those times, money in pocket, put there by generous gentlemen whose taste for rum and gambling made them contemptuous of small change. Evidently Christophe was popular both with the guests of the café and with Coidovic, for by the time he'd reached his early twenties he had saved enough to buy his freedom. This was a change of status made possible for a negro slave of Saint Domingue only by having at the same time an indulgent master and a full purse.
The Hôtel de la Couronne was patronized by the better class of whites, and of course they talked of their problems. Nor did they trouble to lower their voices so a young black waiter with a tray would not overhear. They talked of their negro mistresses and of the comely mulatto whores who supplied Cap Francois with whatever its quiet, oppressive nights had of glamour, passion and forgetful laughter. And they talked with cruel and fretful contempt of the children of these women who, a tradition of an earlier, less jealous time had ruled, must be freed by their fathers.
The class composed of these children and their descendants had grown too large and the whites had grown vindictive.
Saint Domingue, when one came to think of it, was a nervous sort of place. There were 40,000 whites, their number split in sharp division between planters and the class composed of artisans and traders, 24,000 free mulattoes, 500,000 slaves; certainly a very powder-barrel of a colony for all its wealth and ease and surface brilliancy.
Each class hated all the others. The guests of the café joked about it, finding comfort in voicing private worries in the carefree surroundings of a wineshop. They thought of new ways of showing their contempt for those less than human cattle whose hair had a reprehensible urge to curl.
The mulatto freedmen, the affranchis, were their particular absorption. They were technically as free as the whitest Frenchman, but the whites, urged on by the jealousy of wives who found it difficult in the enervation of the tropics to compete with the robust charms of negro women, sought every way to make them feel the inferiority of the black taint. Mulatto soldiers of the colonial militia wore a uniform of a different cut and color from that worn by similar regiments of white men. Even the mulatto planters, many of whom were as rich and as proud as their blond neighbors, were forbidden to wear certain desirable colors and textiles favored by the fashion of the time. They sat apart at church and at the play.
The common truth was that they were, as a rule, severer masters to their black slaves and therefore even more fiercely loathed and feared by them. This was something in their favor, the whites admitted. It was comforting, said the French, to think that the two classes would never agree for rebellion.
Christophe overheard and pondered. Once, just once, he dared put in a word of his own.
A rich planter and an officer from the barracks were playing billiards one night. Christophe was marking their scores. A point, forgotten more than a hundred years ago, came up in their talk on which they differed. Soon the two gentlemen, neither of whom was much the wiser for his wine, began to quarrel. Christophe interrupted to say the officer was right. Whereupon the planter spun around and slapped young Henry on the mouth... .
That is all there is to the story—except that twenty-five years later when King Henry ruled from his Palace of Sans Souci, he learned that the planter was still living in the town. It was a strange twist of fate that this man among all others had survived the terrible years that intervened. But the King and Fate were partners. One night when the palace was asleep Christophe put on his sword and walked twenty miles alone down the Royal Road into the silent city. He found a door and knocked. A head appeared at a window and he called the old man down. He reminded him of that quarrel long ago and of the slave he had struck across the mouth. Then they fought in the empty road and when the King had killed his enemy in fair fight he went back through the quiet dawn to his palace.
The Bastille fell in 1789 and the news lit the fuse of the powder-barrel colony of Saint Domingue. No one was contented. Even the whites wanted a change. They saw in the sudden blazing of the revolutionary mood a long-craved opportunity to get rid of the governor-general and the autocratic powers he held from the toppling King of France. They elected a colonial assembly and wrote a constitution that cut the colony almost wholly free from the domination of the mother country. In France representatives of the free mulattoes knew their chance had come.
The echo of the passions that were stirring Europe swelled the murmurous mood of even the blacks in the corrals that lay scattered over the warm hillsides. But the time was not yet ripe for them.
A year passed. Young Christophe, his straight-featured face expressionless save for the fire in eyes of exceptional size, wore a starched white shirt, carried a little tray of clinking glasses, and listened to the café talk. Word came that the National Assembly in Paris had granted the right of taking part in the election of the colonial assembly to all freemen irrespective of their color. The murmur grew to a sullen roar.
News soon found its way to the billiard room of the Crown Hotel. A white man in the southern part of the island had been dragged from his house and beheaded by a mob for daring to suggest that the mulattoes be favored. A seventy-year-old affranchi had been tied to the tail of a horse and dragged through the streets as an "example." Mobs of infuriated whites all over the island were burning the sugar refineries of yellow men who had made the insolent mistake of growing rich. Christophe heard—and marked the billiard shots of the men who still found leisure for a game or two.
Soon Cap Francois turned out for another holiday. The tradespeople put up their shutters. In the early afternoon the streets were filled with crowding men and women bound for the waterfront to witness an uglier show than the town had seen for many years. Two mulattoes were to be smashed on a wooden rack and then tied to a wheel in full view of the mob and peering sun—"To stay as long as it would please God to preserve their lives," so the indictment read.
A great number of the rich planters were there, besides the members of the Northern Provincial Assembly, who attended in full state regalia—but they did not look toward the place in the middle of the square where the crack of bones under the executioner's iron rod and the unwilling gasps of the dying men turned other ears and eyes. The whites watched the mulattoes who stood in silent little groups in the shelter of the house walls at the edge of the square. This show was being staged for them and it was important that they understand. The short, stout quadroon upon the rack, whose weak mouth let forth such piteous cries of pain, was Ogé, the man the affranchis had sent to France to represent them at the National Assembly. He had come back to Saint Domingue and dared demand the rights of his class. And the man dying beside him was his friend Chavannes, whom Christophe had known at Savannah. His crime had been that he had sheltered Ogé and that he had fled with him after the defeat of the tiny army they had gathered to defend their persons and their cause.
Young Christophe, in his starched white shirt and waiter's apron, stood in the crowd and watched. He remembered the youth who had whispered in the light of the swaying ships' lamps in the night mists of Savannah, who had dreamed so bravely of a future in which he would play a gallant part.
Ogé and Chavannes died bravely.
In the procession that filed in silence after the executioner who rode through the gathering twilight to put up the dead men's heads on poles beside the road, walked an ugly little old coachman named Toussaint and a hulking black man, slave of a black, barefoot and sullen, whom they called Dessalines. They scarcely knew one another. But each sensed in his comrade a kindred mood. The old coachman, who was known among the plantation slaves of his neighborhood as "the Physician," so great was the learning he had crammed into his ridiculously high and narrow head in his half-century of life, watched approvingly the play of the heavy muscles in the bare breast of Dessalines. And Dessalines, who kept a respectful distance and never quite dared lift his eyes to the face of the older man, knew in his half-savage African heart that here in this new and unhappy world the tricks, the indirections, and the careful wisdom that Toussaint had put away were vital to their mutual cause. They did not speak of that cause, but none who walked in the straggling, silent line behind the bobbing pipestaffs that bore the heads of Ogé and Chavannes doubted afterward that cause there was, a cause to kill and burn and die for.
