Toussaint Louverture Read Online Free Page B

were allowed to carry swords, as an emblem of their authority and perhaps as a practical tool of enforcement as well.
    Nocturnal gatherings of Saint Domingue's slaves were prohibited in theory, but often tolerated in practice, as a means of defusing tensions that might otherwise be released in the rebellion which all the French colonists had excellent reason to fear. Commonly called “cal-enda,” these gatherings featured drumming and dancing and sometimes competitive stick-fighting and were officially regarded by the French as innocuous peasant dances—though some observers did report that rituals drawn from African religion were performed on these occasions.
    On the night of August 14,1791, an assembly of
commandeurs
took place in a wooded area called Bois Cai'man, or Crocodile Forest, part of the Lenormand de Mezy Plantation in Morne Rouge, on the border of the richest cane-growing area in all Saint Domingue, the Northern Plain. The
commandeurs
came from all the important plantations of the Northern Plain and the foothills surrounding it: Limbe, Quartier Morin, Petite Anse, Port Margot, and Limonade. Their purpose, confessed to the French colonists by a couple of conspirators captured several days later, was to plan an enormous insurrection that would lay waste to the entire Northern Department of Saint Domingue and annihilate the white population.
    This practical purpose of the meeting at Bois Caiman was set down on paper by European reporters, soon after the fact; Haitian oral tradition holds, with equal conviction, that the most important event that took place there was a huge Vodou ceremony. In real time, it had taken a century of slavery in Saint Domingue to consolidate the religions of various African tribes (along with a dusting of the Catholicism to which all slaves were theoretically supposed to be converted) into a single religion which all the slaves could share. The legend of Bois Cai'man makes this transformation happen in one apocalyptic day.
    Vodou practitioners believe that the souls of the dead do notdepart. Instead they go into a parallel universe invisible to the living, but quite nearby—and not impossible to reach. Ceremonial observance begins with opening the gateways between the visible and the invisible worlds. When the passage is open, spirits constituted from the vast reservoir of spiritual energy into which the souls of the dead have pooled begin to pass through it into the world of the living. These spirits, called either
Iwa
or
zanj,
cover the range of personalities of any polytheistic pantheon, or may as easily be identified with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Aided by hypnotic chanting and drumming, the
Iwa
take possession of the bodies of their human believers and servants, suppressing the individual consciousness of the people they “mount” and often endowing them with superhuman powers for the duration of the ride. Tradition has it that the angriest, most warlike spirits appeared at Bois Caiman: Ogoun Ferraille, Ezili Ge Rouj. The
Iwa
lent their power to the rebellion being planned; a black pig was sacrificed to seal the compact.
    Toussaint Breda belonged to the class of
commandeurs
who presented themselves as leaders of the insurrection, but whether he attended the meeting at Bois Caiman has never been known for sure. Almost certainly, given his position of trust and authority among both blacks and whites, among slaves and free, he would have been well aware of which way the winds were blowing and that an insurrection was being planned. As for the Vodou element of the meeting, Toussaint's ostentatiously devout Catholicism might have kept him away from any African, pagan rite. * On the other hand, from the 1700s until now, many if not most blacks in Haiti have practiced Vodou and Catholicism simultaneously with next to no discomfort or sense of paradox in the combination. In fact, the two practices are often seen as different aspects of the same religion.
    If Toussaint