Caribbean

  For a moment Solange, the daughter of a murdered father and a rebellious mother who had deserted her, looked in confusion at the man she had always loved, and felt near to collapsing. But with the same strength that her African mother had shown, she calmly shook the dust from her skirt, and then cried: ‘We go!’ And after Paul helped her mount and himself eased back into the saddle, she clasped him about the waist and they headed back for Point-à-Pitre.

  Eugénie Lanzerac was not surprised when she saw her husband ride up with their dear friend mounted behind, nor was she shaken by the burning of the Vauclain plantation, the murder of its owner and the decision of the widow to join the rebels. ‘These are dreadful times,’ she told Solange consolingly, and in succeeding days each helped the other during shortages of provisions or attacks by the enemy. The town was in a state of siege, and on days when Paul led a detachment of his cavalry out to forage for extra food, the two women, each twenty-one and mature, stood at the doorway to their house and bade him farewell and Godspeed. When he returned safely, it would have been impossible to detect which woman greeted him with greater affection or uttered the more sincere prayers.

  But when one of Paul’s three companions was wounded during a sortie, both Paul and Eugénie were in for a surprise when the next excursion set forth, because on the wounded man’s horse rode Solange, ready for the chase east. No one, not Eugénie or Paul or the other two horsemen, made comment; she was a creole woman, a daughter of the island, and her people needed sustenance. When she rode back with the men in late afternoon, Eugénie helped her down from her horse and embraced her.

  In the difficult days that followed, Solange rode regularly with the three men, and once as they came over a slight rise and saw a hedgerow composed of the glorious flowers of Guadeloupe, she cried: ‘Paul, this is an island worth saving!’ and they swore to do just that. During such forays, one of the riders, son of a sugar factor, fell obviously in love with this gallant young woman; he could not take his eyes off her golden-brown face and he spoke admiringly of her daring horsemanship. She knew well what was happening on their long rides, for he rode near her to protect her and lent her his horse when hers tired, but she could not find it in her heart to reciprocate his affection. Her attention was now, as it had ever been, on Paul Lanzerac, and after the other horseman had been rebuffed half a dozen times, he said to her one day: ‘You’re in love with him. Aren’t you?’ but she made no reply. However, on subsequent days the would-be suitor rode with the other men, and they watched as Solange and Paul galloped across the countryside, taking great risks and escaping danger primarily because they were superb riders.

  One afternoon when they came home exhausted, drooping in their saddles, the waning sun on their faces, Eugénie met them at the gate and thought: They are so handsome. As if they had been made for each other. But this obvious fact did not disturb the friendship, because when Eugénie appeared that night at supper with her baby son, Jean-Baptiste, tucked in motherly fashion under her left arm while she ladled up soup with her right, Solange thought: She is so much the mistress of a home, so much the mother. And Solange’s own participation in this curious arrangement remained on an even keel.

  Then in early 1794, when distant Paris was caught in a vortex of terror, when one after another of the bloody leaders was executed—Hébert, Chaumette, Cloots, Danton, Desmoulins, each dead with a hundred crimes on his hands, a thousand corpses—a minor terror of its own kind was about to strike Guadeloupe, but it appeared first in the guise of salvation from a most unexpected quarter.

  When it seemed that the rebellious slaves and their mulatto leaders were about to overwhelm the beleaguered town, a small flotilla of ships appeared in the harbor, and a watchman shouted: ‘My God! They’re British!’ Paul Lanzerac and two other daring men leaped into a rowboat, and ignoring the danger that they might be fired upon by the sailors, pulled right under the bow of the lead ship, and cried: ‘We’re Royalists! The slaves are besieging us!’

  The admiral in charge of the invasion force was a man from Barbados, a Hector Oldmixon whose great-grandfather had been a Royalist in his day, though in the English cause, and he was not a man to tolerate foolishness from slaves. When Lanzerac was hauled on deck, he listened to the Frenchman’s story and growled: ‘There’s nothing more infamous on this earth than the doctrine that niggers have souls. Equality, sir, will be the destruction of great nations. Now, how can we best get ashore on your island?’

  Since Paul loved the daughter of a slave and appreciated the qualities mulattoes could have, he was antagonized by Oldmixon’s crude dismissal of anyone with color, but could not forget that in the recent rioting, mulattoes had sided with slaves against the whites. Maybe the English rule as exemplified in nearby Barbados was correct—‘White with black, a forbidden mix’—while the French willingness to accept if not encourage such liaisons might be a mistaken policy. But he could not abide Oldmixon; the man was insufferable, seeming to take delight in lording it over the French, whom he apparently despised, but he was the potential savior of the island and therefore had to be accepted.

  For these tangled reasons, Paul Lanzerac, a Frenchman of such devotion to his native land that he wept when he heard of the disasters overtaking it, was constrained to help a British naval force capture both wings of the Guadeloupe butterfly. The occupation was made without much loss of life, since at Point-à-Pitre, Paul and his associates welcomed the British sailors, while at Basse-Terre the opposition was minimal. Within two weeks the island was secure.

  A curious event happened when the British army units that came ashore early in the battle marched inland from Point-à-Pitre to subdue the last of the slaves; when they thought they had the rebels penned into their final redoubt, they found to their astonishment that it was commanded by a ferocious woman whom spies identified as the widow of the murdered French planter Philippe Vauclain. Hearing of this preposterous affair, Admiral Oldmixon rode up on a horse provided him by Paul Lanzerac and demanded of his men: ‘What in hell goes on here?’ and they explained: ‘There’s an old black woman in there, every time we arrange a truce because they don’t have a chance … you can see that … she starts the fight again.’

  Oldmixon was outraged. A blustery type to whom everything not authentically English was anathema, even his fortuitous French allies here on the island, he was not about to allow a slave woman, and an elderly one at that, to hold up his occupation of Guadeloupe, so he bellowed at his men: ‘Storm that plantation and shoot the old bitch,’ but at this moment young Lanzerac, having heard of the impasse, galloped up, shouting: ‘No! No!’ and when he dismounted before the irate Englishmen he said: ‘You can’t. She’s the widow of a white man and the mother of a trusted friend.’

  ‘Whatcha sayin’, Frenchie?’ Oldmixon snapped, and Paul assured him that this was true. ‘I’ll go in and bring her out,’ and laying aside all arms and extending his two hands, palms open, before him, he walked slowly toward the plantation house, saying in a pleading voice: ‘I’m Solange’s friend. She sent me. I’m your daughter’s friend. She sent me,’ and as he came nearer he thought: She’s Grandmère Lanzerac come back to life … same thing … same courage against the English. And when at last he entered the house and saw her and the few remaining slaves ranged against the wall, their guns lowered, he repeated: ‘I’m your daughter’s friend. The one who rescued Solange that day.’ From the window where she still stood erect, holding her own gun, she said in a low voice, speaking perfect French: ‘Then you’re Lanzerac? Why didn’t you marry her?’ He said nothing as he led her to where Admiral Oldmixon waited.

  ‘Throw her into jail,’ the Barbadian said, and despite the most fervent pleas from Paul and Eugénie and Solange when they had Oldmixon to supper that night, he persisted, because, as he said: ‘She was once a slave, and she’ll never forget it. Can’t beat the urge for freedom out of ’em. Rebel once, rebel always.’ But as the night waned, Paul noticed that Oldmixon kept his eye always on Solange, and when the Engli
shman left the house to return to his ship he said at the gate: ‘That girl, if only she was white, what a beauty!’

  During the occupation the Lanzeracs repeatedly invited Oldmixon, as leader of the superior force on the island, to dine with them. He rightly suspected that they did this mainly because he could bring rations of scarce meat for their meals, but even so, he enjoyed the companionship of intelligent people and an opportunity to refresh his considerable mastery of French. ‘My goodness, you do handle the language beautifully,’ he told Solange one night, and she replied: ‘Small wonder, seeing that my father was from Calais.’

  ‘Indeed! A sailor perhaps?’

  ‘His father was. He feared the sea,’ and Oldmixon said: ‘So did I, but me father beat me over the head with a stool and said: “It’s the navy for you, me hearty,” and here I am, commander of an island which I’ve captured for the king.’

  During his frequent visits to the Lanzeracs’ he was increasingly attracted to Solange but equally determined not to surrender to the girl’s pleas that her mother be released from jail: ‘Sorry, my dear, but we can’t run the risk of her runnin’ wild again.’ However, as the weeks passed, while he became lonelier and she more attractive, he intimated that if Solange wished to move into his cabin on the ship, something might be arranged regarding her mother, and to the amazement of the Lanzeracs, he made this proposal not to Solange herself but to them. Paul considered the suggestion indecent, and as soon as Oldmixon left for his ship he told his wife so. But against her better judgment Eugénie, after putting her son to bed, sent Paul from the room and talked frankly with her companion.

  ‘Solange, your mother will die in jail, and I want to see her freed.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Admiral Oldmixon told us to tell you … if you’ll … if you wanted to stay aboard his ship till the fleet leaves …’

  Solange was sitting in a chair near the fireplace when Eugénie said this, and for a long time, while light from the fire shone on her handsome face, outlining its bony structure, she said nothing. Then, laughing almost irreverently, she said: ‘You know the four rules they teach us mulatto girls? First, attract a white man. Second, make him happy enough to marry you. Third, when you have a daughter by him, see that she too marries a white man. Move up, always move up, and make the family whiter.’

  ‘But Oldmixon would never marry you,’ Eugénie said, and Solange burst into laughter: ‘Then we bring in the fourth rule. Take every franc the poor fool has.’ But then her face grew grave and she looked long and deep into her friend’s eyes. ‘We never intended the rules to apply to us, did we?’ she whispered. For a long time they sat together, sadly silent, until Eugénie went to join her husband.

  ‘Solange won’t be going to the admiral’s ship,’ and Paul replied: ‘I was sure she wouldn’t.’

  During these momentous years when France struggled through the death throes of an ancient regime without finding a way to forge a new, the historic island of Hispaniola, where Columbus once ruled and where he was buried, was divided in curious ways—the result of a decision made almost a century earlier. The rather flat, unproductive eastern portion, Santo Domingo, was Spanish; the mountainous western part, St.-Domingue,† was French. Eastern spoke Spanish, western French; eastern, whose fine, flat lands might have been expected to produce bounteous crops, yielded little, while the rough and difficult lands of the west produced the world’s most valuable sugar crop; and, in some ways most important of all, Santo Domingo was populated with Spanish mulattoes, St.-Domingue with such an abundance of African slaves that at times it seemed an all-black colony.

  In the still-orderly year of 1783, in a small town in the French portion of the island a barbershop of mean dimension was operated in a grudging manner by a young Frenchman who seemed designed by both birth and development to be a prototype of the world’s average man, for he lacked any outstanding feature that would have distinguished him from the general mob. Victor Hugues (last name OO-geh) was then twenty-one, reputedly the son of petty merchants in Marseilles, but there was some confusion about this because he had an olive complexion, neither white nor mulatto but halfway between, and regardless of where he went, the rumor spread: ‘Hugues is part African. His mother must have been careless, Marseilles being a port town and all that.’

  He was of average height or slightly under, and of average weight or just a bit over. He had good teeth except for one missing on the left, a ratty type of hair of no distinct color, and a habit of staying off to one side and watching to see how an argument was proceeding, then suddenly intervening with great vigor and some skill in haranguing those opposed to the side he had arbitrarily taken. He did not read much, but he listened with the acute skill of a preying animal, and one thing was certain above all others: he was brave, always willing to flail about when debate descended into blows, and if he lost one tooth in such brawling, his opponents lost mouthfuls. He was a fearful adversary, and would allow nothing to stand in his way.

  How had he wound up in a St.-Domingue barbershop? Early in his life his parents had given up trying to make anything decent of him, and he had responded by slipping down to the Marseilles docks and offering himself to the first ship heading anywhere. Since it was destined for Mexico, he went there, and at age seventeen was doing the waterfront work of a man. Later he drifted to various exotic ports of the Caribbean, but regardless of where he went or in what capacity, he manifested the only characteristic that made those around him take notice: early in life he had developed an insatiable hunger to be with girls, and he had taken the first one to bed when he was eleven. In the Caribbean his appetite reached ravenous proportions: Mexican alley girls, a ship captain’s daughter at Porto Bello, a serving girl in Jamaica, a young Englishman’s newly wedded wife in Barbados, and others wherever his ship docked.

  Despite this fevered activity he was not a traditional roué who treated his conquests with contempt; he adored women, respected them, and let them know that he considered them individually and as a group the best part of life; few women he had known remembered him with animosity. Yet there was a darker side to his passion, one which could produce wildly aberrational behavior at the end of an affair, and some of his women mysteriously disappeared from the community.

  His ownership of the barbershop in St.-Domingue had come about because of this combination of rhapsodic pleasure and murderous opportunism, for when he arrived in Port-au-Prince a near-penniless youth of nineteen, he chanced to fall in with a mulatto who had both a barbershop and a young wife of exquisite amber coloring. Imploring the barber to teach him the skills of that trade, he spent much time with the barber’s wife and, perhaps by coincidence, just as Victor mastered the profession of cutting hair, the barber vanished and after a decent interval Hugues appropriated both the shop and the widow.

  This fortuitous disappearance occurred in 1785, and for the next two years Hugues ran a profitable barbering establishment, cutting the hair of white plantation owners who ran St.-Domingue and of the few mulattoes of marked ability who assisted them. Blacks, who comprised nine-tenths of the population, were forbidden entrance to the shop, though some later testified that: ‘At night, when the whites and mulattoes were not around, Victor invited any free blacks who had the money to come to a back door which led to an inner room, and there Hugues would cut their hair. He always had a great affinity for blacks, especially the former slaves, for he told me once: “They are the dispossessed of the world and merit our charity.” ’

  He manifested this concern in dramatic fashion, for in that year he closed his barbershop, rented a large house in Port-au-Prince, and, with the help of the beautiful mulatto he had inherited, opened a first-class brothel, employing six girls of varied color and from four different islands. His clientele was ostensibly restricted to white plantation owners and mulattoes of importance, but again, when no one was looking too closely, he opened a rear door to admit freed black men, and he continued doing so even after he had received warnings to stop, for as h
e told an official of the government: ‘I’ve been in all corners of this sea … all the islands … and it’s destined to be an area in which men and women of every color live together freely.’

  Outraged by such revolutionary thought, the official dispatched a secret report to powers in the home office, which neatly summarized this dangerous man:

  In the capital city we have a former barber who now runs a fancy house of convenience, one Victor Hugues who says he is from Marseilles and claims to be of white parentage generations back, an assertion which his skin coloring might refute. He is of a rebellious and contentious nature, but what is more potentially dangerous, he advocates the rights of noirs and frequently speaks out against slavery. I recommend that you order your people to keep a close watch on this Victor Hugues.

  This report reached Paris in November 1788, and a liberal spy in the office to which it was addressed made a copy for a fellow member of a private political club called the Jacobins, and it was in this oblique way that the barber-brothelkeeper came to the attention of Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, a member of the French gentry and a revolutionary whose ideas were germinating at a fantastic rate.

  In early 1789, when affairs in France were at a boil, Robespierre began thinking about the colonies, especially St.-Domingue, which associates assured him was ‘the greatest producer of wealth in the entire French system.’ Appointing a study committee of fellow Jacobins to advise on how the colonies should be handled if a revolutionary form of government ever attained power, he suddenly remembered this barber out in St.-Domingue and sent him a message: ‘Come to Paris. I require your presence on important matters.’