The nights of August are in Saint Domingo the hottest of the year. The
winds then cease to befriend the panting inhabitants; and while the
thermometer stands at 90 degrees, there is no steady breeze, as during
the preceding months of summer. Light puffs of wind now and then fan
the brow of the negro, and relieve for an instant the oppression of the
European settler; but they are gone as soon as come, and seem only to
have left the heat more intolerable than before.
Of these sultry evenings, one of the sultriest was the 22nd of August,
1791. This was one of five days appointed for rejoicings in the town of
Cap Francais--festivities among the French and Creole inhabitants, who
were as ready to rejoice on appointed occasions as the dulness of
colonial life renders natural, but who would have been yet more lively
than they were if the date of their festival had been in January or May.
There was no choice as to the date, however. They were governed in
regard to their celebrations by what happened at Paris; and never had
the proceedings of the mother-country been so important to the colony as
now.
During the preceding year, the white proprietors of Saint Domingo, who
had hailed with loud voices the revolutionary doctrines before which
royalty had begun to succumb in France, were astonished to find their
cries of Liberty and Equality adopted by some who had no business with
such ideas and words. The mulatto proprietors and merchants of the
island innocently understood the words according to their commonly
received meaning, and expected an equal share with the whites in the
representation of the colony, in the distribution of its offices, and in
the civil rights of its inhabitants generally. These rights having been
denied by the whites to the freeborn mulattoes, with every possible
manifestation of contempt and dislike, an effort had been made to wring
from the whites by force what they would not grant to reason; and an
ill-principled and ill-managed revolt had taken place, in the preceding
October, headed by Vincent Oge and his brother, sons of the proprietress
of a coffee plantation, a few miles from Cap Francais. These young men
were executed, under circumstances of great barbarity. Their sufferings
were as seed sown in the warm bosoms of their companions and adherents,
to spring up, in due season, in a harvest of vigorous revenge. The
whites suspected this; and were as anxious as their dusky neighbours to
obtain the friendship and sanction of the revolutionary government at
home. That government was fluctuating in its principles and in its
counsels; it favoured now one party, and now the other; and on the
arrival of its messengers at the ports of the colony, there ensued
sometimes the loud boastings of the whites, and sometimes quiet, knowing
smiles and whispered congratulations among the depressed section of the
inhabitants.
The cruelties inflicted on Vincent Oge had interested many influential
persons in Paris in the cause of the mulattoes. Great zeal was
exorcised in attempting to put them in a condition to protect themselves
by equal laws, and thus to restrain the tyranny of the whites. The Abbe
Gregoire pleaded for them in the National Assembly; and on the 10th of
March was passed the celebrated decree which gave the mulattoes the
privileges of French citizens, even to the enjoyment of the suffrage,
and to the possession of seats in the parochial and colonial assemblies.
To Europeans there appears nothing extraordinary in the admission to
these civil functions of freeborn persons, many of whom were wealthy,
and many educated; but to the whites of Saint Domingo the decree was
only less tremendous than the rush of the hurricane.
It arrived at Cap Francais on the 30th of June, and the tidings
presently spread. At first, no one believed them but the mulattoes.
When it was no longer possible to doubt--when the words of Robespierre
passed from mouth to mouth, till even the nuns told them to one another
in the convent garden--"Perish the colonies, rather than sacrifice one
iota of our principles!" the whites trampled the national cockade under
their feet in the streets, countermanded their orders for the fete of
the 14th of July (as they now declined taking the civic oath), and
proposed to one another to offer their colony and their allegiance to
England.
They found means, however, to gratify their love of power, and their
class-hatred, by means short of treason. They tried disobedience first,
as the milder method. The governor of the colony, Blanchelande,
promised that when the decree should reach him officially, he would
neglect it, and all applications from any quarter to have it enforced.
This set all straight. Blanchelande was pronounced a sensible and
patriotic man. The gentlemen shook hands warmly with him at every turn;
the ladies made deep and significant curtseys wherever they met him; the
boys taught their little negroes to huzza at the name of Blanchelande;
and the little girls called him a dear creature. In order to lose no
time in showing that they meant to make laws for their own colony out of
their own heads, and no others, the white gentry hastened on the
election of deputies for a new General Colonial Assembly. The deputies
were elected, and met, to the number of a hundred and seventy-six, at
Leogane, in the southern region of the island, so early as the 9th of
August. After exchanging greetings and vows of fidelity to their
class-interests, under the name of patriotism, they adjourned their
assembly to the 25th, when they were to meet at Cap Francais. It was
desirable to hold their very important session in the most important
place in the colony, the centre of intelligence, the focus of news from
Europe, and the spot where they had first sympathised with the
ungrateful government at home, by hoisting, with their own white hands,
the cap of liberty, and shouting, so that the world might hear, "Liberty
and Equality!" "Down with Tyranny!"
By the 20th, the deputies were congregated at Cap Francais; and daily
till the great 25th were they seen to confer together in coteries in the
shady piazzas, or in the Jesuits' Walk, in the morning, and to dine
together in parties in the afternoon, admitting friends and well-wishers
to these tavern dinners. Each day till the 25th was to be a fete-day in
the town and neighbourhood; and of these days the hot 22nd was one.
Among these friends and well-wishers were the whites upon all the
plantations in the neighbourhood of the town. There was scarcely an
estate in the Plaine du Nord, or on the mountain steeps which overlooked
the cape, town, and bay, on all sides but the north, which did not
furnish guests to these dinners. The proprietors, their bailiffs, the
clergy, the magistrates, might all be seen along the roads, in the cool
of the morning; and there was a holiday air about the estates they left
behind. The negroes were left for this week to do their work pretty
much as they liked, or to do none at all. There was little time to
think of them, and of ordinary business, when there were the mulattoes
to be ostentatiously insulted, and the mother-country to be defied. So
the negroes slept at noon, and danced at night, during these few August
days, and even had leave to visit one another to as great an extent as
was ever allowed. Perhaps they also transacted other affairs of which
their masters had little suspicion.
All that ever was allowed was permitted to the slaves on the Breda
estate, in the plain, a few miles from Cap Francais. The attorney, or
bailiff of the estate, Monsieur Bayou de Libertas, was a kind-hearted
man, who, while insisting very peremptorily on his political and social
rights, and vehemently denouncing all abstract enmity to them, liked
that people actually about him should have their own way. While
ransacking his brain for terms of abuse to vent on Lafayette and
Condorcet, he rarely found anything harsh to utter when Caton got drunk,
and spoiled his dinner; when Venus sent up his linen darker than it went
down to the quarter, or when little Machabee picked his pocket of small
coin. Such a man was, of course, particularly busy this week; and of
course, the slaves under his charge were particularly idle, and
particularly likely to have friends from other plantations to visit
them.
Some such visitor seemed to be expected by a family of these Breda
negroes, on the Monday evening, the 22nd. This family did not live in
the slave-quarter. They had a cottage near the stables, as Toussaint
Breda had been Monsieur Bayou's postillion, and, when he was lately
promoted to be overseer, it was found convenient to all parties that he
should retain his dwelling, which had been enlarged and adorned so as to
accord with the dignity of his new office. In the piazza of his
dwelling sat Toussaint this evening, evidently waiting for some one to
arrive; for he frequently put down his book to listen for footsteps, and
more than once walked round the house to look abroad. His wife, who was
within, cooking supper, and his daughter and little boy, who were beside
him in the piazza, observed his restlessness; for Toussaint was a great
reader, and seldom looked off the page for a moment of any spare hour
that he might have for reading either the books Monsieur Bayou lent him,
or the three or four volumes which he had been permitted to purchase for
himself.
"Do you see Jean?" asked the wife from within. "Shall we wait supper
for him?"
"Wait a little longer," said Toussaint. "It will be strange if he does
not come."
"Are any more of Latour's people coming with Jean, mother?" asked
Genifrede, from the piazza.
"No; they have a supper at Latour's to-night; and we should not have
thought of inviting Jean, but that he wants some conversation with your
father."
"Lift me up," cried the little boy, who was trying in vain to scramble
up one of the posts of the piazza, in order to reach a humming-bird's
nest, which hung in the tendrils of a creeper overhead, and which a
light puff of wind now set swinging, so as to attract the child's eye.
What child ever saw a humming-bird thus rocking--its bill sticking out
like a long needle on one side, and its tail at the other, without
longing to clutch it? So Denis cried out imperiously to be lifted up.
His father set him on the shelf within the piazza, where the calabashes
were kept--a station whence he could see into the nest, and watch the
bird, without being able to touch it. This was not altogether
satisfactory. The little fellow looked about him for a calabash to
throw at the nest; but his mother had carried in all her cups for the
service of the supper-table. As no more wind came at his call, he could
only blow with all his might, to swing the tendril again; and he was
amusing himself thus when his father laid down his book, and stepped out
to see once more whether Jean was approaching.
"Lift me down," said the boy to his sister, when his head was giddy with
blowing. Genifrede would fain have let him stay where he was, out of
the way of mischief; but she saw that he was really afraid of falling,
and she offered her shoulders for him to descend upon. When down, she
would not let him touch her work; she took her scissors from his busy
hands, and shook him off when he tried to pull the snowberries out of
her hair; so that there was nothing left for the child to play with but
his father's book. He was turning it over, when Toussaint re-appeared.
"Ha! boy, a book in your hands already? I hope you may have as much
comfort out of that book as I have had, Denis."
"What is it? what is it about?" said the boy, who had heard many a story
out of books from his father.
"What is it? Let us see. I think you know letters enough to spell it
out for yourself. Come and try."
The child knew the letter E, and, with a good deal of help, made out, at
last, Epictetus.
"What is that?" asked the boy.
"Epictetus was a negro," said Genifrede, complacently.
"Not a negro," said her father, smiling. "He was a slave; but he was a
white."
"Is that the reason you read that book so much more than any other?"
"Partly; but partly because I like what is in it."
"What is in it--any stories?" asked Denis.
"It is all about bearing and forbearing. It has taught me many things
which you will have to learn by-and-by. I shall teach you some of them
out of this book."
Denis made all haste away from the promised instruction, and his father
was presently again absorbed in his book. From respect to him,
Genifrede kept Denis quiet by signs of admonition; and for some little
time nothing was heard but the sounds that in the plains of Saint
Domingo never cease--the humming and buzzing of myriads of insects, the
occasional chattering of monkeys in a neighbouring wood, and, with a
passing gust, a chorus of frogs from a distant swamp. Unconscious of
this din, from being accustomed always to hear more or less of it, the
boy amused himself with chasing the fireflies, whose light began to
glance around as darkness descended. His sister was poring over her
work, which she was just finishing, when a gleam of greenish light made
both look up. It came from a large meteor which sailed past towards the
mountains, whither were tending also the huge masses of cloud which
gather about the high peaks previous to the season of rain and
hurricanes. There was nothing surprising in this meteor, for the sky
was full of them in August nights; but it was very beautiful. The globe
of green light floated on till it burst above the mountains,
illuminating the lower clouds, and revealing along the slopes of the
uplands the coffee-groves, waving and bowing their heads in the
wandering winds of that high region. Genifrede shivered at the sight,
and her brother threw himself upon her lap. Before he had asked half
his questions about the lights of the sky, the short twilight was gone,
and the evening star cast a faint shadow from the tufted posts of the
piazza upon the white wall of the cottage. In a low tone, full of awe,
Genifrede told the boy such stories as she had heard from her father of
the mysteries of the heavens. He felt that she trembled as she told of
the northern lights, which had been actually seen by some travelled
persons now in Cap Francais. It took some time and argument to give him
an idea of cold countries; but his uncle Paul, the fisherman, had seen
hail on the coast, only thirty miles from hence; and this was a great
step in the evidence. Denis listened with all due belief to his
sister's description of those pale lights shooting up over the sky, till
he cried out vehemently, "There they are! look!"
Genifrede screamed, and covered her face with her hands; while the boy
shouted to his father, and ran to call his mother to see the lights.
What they saw, however, was little like the pale, cold rays of the
aurora borealis. It was a fiery red, which, shining to some height in
the air, was covered in by a canopy of smoke.
"Look up, Genifrede," said her father, laying his hand upon her head.
"It is a fire--a cane-field on fire."
"And houses, too--the sugar-house, no doubt," said Margot, who had come
out to look. "It burns too red to be canes only. Can it be at
Latour's? That would keep Jean from coming.--It was the best supper I
ever got ready for him."
"Latour's is over that way," said Toussaint, pointing some distance
further to the south-east. "But see! there is fire there, too! God
have mercy!"
He was silent, in mournful fear that he knew now too well the reason why
Jean had not come, and the nature of the conversation Jean had desired
to have with him. As he stood with folded arms looking from the one
conflagration to the other, Genifrede clung to him trembling with
terror. In a quarter of an hour another blaze appeared on the horizon;
and soon after, a fourth.
"The sky is on fire," cried Denis, in more delight than fear. "Look at
the clouds!" And the clouds did indeed show, throughout their huge
pile, some a mild flame colour, and others a hard crimson edge, as
during a stormy sunset.
"Alas! alas! this is rebellion," said Toussaint; "rebellion against God
and man. God have mercy! The whites have risen against their king; and
now the blacks rise against them, in turn. It is a great sin. God have
mercy!"
Margot wept bitterly. "Oh, what shall we do?" she cried, "What will
become of us, if there is a rebellion?"
"Be cheerful, and fear nothing," replied her husband. "I have not
rebelled, and I shall not. Monsieur Bayou has taught me to bear and
forbear--yes, my boy, as this book says, and as the book of God says: We
will be faithful, and fear nothing."
"But they may burn this plantation," cried Margot. "They may come here,
and take you away. They may ruin Monsieur Bayou, and then we may be
sold away; we may be parted--"
Her grief choked her words.
"Fear nothing," said her husband, with calm authority. "We are in God's
hand; and it is a sin to fear His will. But see! there is another fire,
over towards the town."
And he called aloud the name of his eldest son, saying he should send
the boy with a horse to meet his master. He himself must remain to
watch at home.
Placide did not come when called, nor was he at the stables. He was
gone some way off, to cut fresh grass for the cattle--a common
night-labour on the plantation.
"Call Isaac, then," said Toussaint.
"Run, Genifrede," said her mother. "Isaac and Aimee are in the wood.
Run, Genifrede."
Genifrede did not obey. She was too much terrified to leave the piazza
alone; though her father gently asked when she, his eldest daughter, and
almost a woman, would leave off being scared on all occasions like a
child. Margot went herself; so far infected with her daughter's fears
as to be glad to take little Denis in her hand. She was not long gone.
As soon as she entered the wood she heard the sound of her children's
laughter above the noise the monkeys made; and she was guided by it to
the well. There, in the midst of the opening which let in the
starlight, stood the well, surrounded by the only grass on the Breda
estate that was always fresh and green; and there were Isaac and his
inseparable companion, Aimee, making the grass greener by splashing each
other with more than half the water they drew. Their bright eyes and
teeth could be seen by the mild light, as they were too busy with their
sport to heed their mother as she approached. She soon made them
serious with her news. Isaac flew to help his father with the horses,
while Aimee, a stout girl of twelve, assisted her mother in earnest to
draw water, and carry it home.
They found Genifrede crouching alone in a corner of the piazza. In
another minute Toussaint appeared on horseback, leading a saddled horse.
"I am going for Monsieur Bayou myself," said he; adding, as he glanced
round the lurid horizon, "it is not a night for boys to be abroad. I
shall be back in an hour. If Monsieur Bayou comes by the new road, tell
him that I am gone by Madame Oge's. If fire breaks out here, go into
the wood. If I meet Placide, I will send him home."
He disappeared under the limes in the avenue; and his family heard the
pace of the horses quicken into a gallop before the sound died away upon
the road.