by Tom Reiss
In 1757, Charles and Antoine’s mother died; in 1758, the old marquis, their father, followed her, on Christmas Day. A French tax official tried to investigate the whereabouts of the family’s oldest son, the heir, but eventually threw up his hands, writing that “it is not known where he lives, what he does and if he is married or not. The rumor is that he is living abroad, but it is a mystery.” In another report, the tax official wrote that some people said Antoine “had married a wealthy woman in Martinique.” Yet others said that Antoine was dead.
BUT Antoine was not dead and had not gone to Martinique or to live with the marrons, though he had been across their land. He and Rodrigue, Cupidon, and Catin had walked for weeks across the densely wooded mountains, more than seven thousand feet high, that separated central Saint-Domingue from the long southwest peninsula. They had arrived in the highlands region called Grand Anse (“Great Cove”).
If Saint-Domingue was the Wild West, these were its badlands. Travel to the highlands was difficult, surrounded as they were by mountains, and communications usually went by sea rather than overland. The mountains gave ideal redoubts to fugitives of all kinds; two famous slave leaders led guerrilla wars from here against the French. Here the planters were often mulattos or freed blacks themselves. No one asked a lot of questions. It was an excellent place to hide.
The Great Cove highlands did not support big sugar farming, but the high mineral content of the red soil there was perfect for growing Saint-Domingue’s second-most-lucrative crop: coffee. (As with sugar, by the late 1780s Saint-Domingue had become the world’s largest coffee producer.) Coffee growers didn’t get as rich as sugar planters did, but they also didn’t need the same sort of capital to start up. Small hillside coffee plantations could be run with few slaves and at an entirely different pace of life. Here, carefully exploiting a few arpents of land—the French colonial unit of measurement, about 220 square feet—a man could sustain himself.
Antoine settled in the parish of Jérémie, which at the time was sparsely inhabited, with a total population of 2,643 souls—2,147 slaves, 109 free “men of color” (black or mixed-race), and 387 whites. It was named after Jeremiah, the prophet of Lamentations. Nearby lay the village of Trou Bonbon, which had fifteen houses, including a billiard hall, and a private cemetery. Only one of the parish’s settlements was large enough to classify as a city: its eponymous port town, which was officially founded in 1756 and would grow in importance as the parish rapidly expanded in the 1770s and ’80s.
Highland planters lived off coffee, but they also grew a little of every other crop—sugar, cotton, indigo, cacao, lumber. The weather was mild, and though the rainy season lasted from April to October, the highlands were largely sheltered from the hurricanes that ravaged the rest of the island. Bananas, plantains, melons, and sweet potatoes were abundant, and scorpions, tarantulas, and poisonous insects were rare. Giant lizards, up to three and a half feet long, were plentiful but harmless, though the area was plagued by mosquitoes, flies, ants, aphids, and blistering “sticky worms.” Not to mention the giant rats, though some people took these as pets. A kind of hybrid buffalo-cow roamed the hills, and the human inhabitants shared the land with all manner of feral beasts—wild pigs, cows, dogs, cats, monkeys; there were even reports, from around when Antoine arrived, of camels, imported by some colonist as souvenirs from North Africa, which spooked the horses.
The descendants of livestock and pets that had run away from the Spanish colonists had for a time provided a ready supply to the local buccaneers, who had roamed the highlands trading in untaxed meats.* When they joined pirate crews, the constant trouble they gave to the Spanish helped clear this part of the island for French settlement. The Spanish simply did not want to deal with it. The French authorities tried to eradicate them, but even in Antoine’s time some buccaneers still survived in the highlands. When they weren’t running meat—or rum—they worked as salt miners or piloted small boats along the coast. These highland Saint-Dominguans, along with more recent white immigrants, also from the middle and lower classes, were worlds removed from the sugar kings, businessmen, and royal bureaucrats of the central plains, and they were Antoine’s new neighbors, down the road from the coffee plantation he established at La Guinaudée in 1749.
HIDING from his family and the world, he buried the name “Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie.” In his new life as a coffee and cocoa grower, he called himself “Antoine de l’Isle”—“Antoine of the Island.”
Years later, the investigator hired by Charles’s son-in-law in France would follow Antoine’s trail and discover his false identity, though by then Antoine had long since cleared out. “The beginnings of Monsieur Delisle in this quarter were favorable enough,” the detective reported,
but having taken the farms, which served him poorly, and having done it in bad company, his good fortune was not long lasting: we do not know if he had any children from the negress Catin, but, finding her too old, he permitted her to live free, without having procured for her liberty according to the prescribed regulations. She still lives and resides with Sir Granfont, the former prosecutor, very aged now, and retired on the coast, three-quarters of a league from Jérémie.
The detective stated that Antoine had “of this one can be sure, four children who were mulattos and mulatresses.” These were not from Catin but, rather, from another black or mulatto woman—colonial records contain both assertions—whom Antoine had acquired “for an exorbitant price.”
Her name was Marie Cessette, and on March 25, 1762, she bore Antoine a son they named Thomas-Alexandre.
“MY father’s eyes opened in the most beautiful part of this magnificent island, queen of the gulf in which it lies, where the air is so pure that it is said no venomous reptiles can live there.” Alexandre Dumas’s rendering of his father’s birthplace is romanticized, but incredible as it seems, given the colony’s well-earned reputation for cruelty, the prospects for the half-white son of a slave born in 1762 were better in Saint-Domingue than almost anywhere else in the world. The French colonial empire’s Code Noir could not effectively protect black slaves from mistreatment, but it could offer certain protections, as well as certain opportunities, to the children of mixed-race unions.
Article 9 of the Code began with the kind of draconian language we would expect:
Free men who have one or more children from concubinage with their slaves, together with the masters who allow it, shall each be condemned to a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar; and if they are the masters of the slave with whom they have the said children, then beyond the fine, they shall be deprived of the slave and the children, who shall be confiscated to the profit of the hospital, without the possibility of being freed.
But then it provides an escape clause of sorts:
The present article does not apply, however, if the owner, assuming he is unmarried at the time of the concubinage, undertakes to marry his slave under the laws of the Church; in this case, the slave shall thereby be freed, and the slave’s children rendered free and legitimate.
Article 9 was drafted, at least in part, in response to widespread alarm over illegitimate unions in an environment that the colonists themselves frequently characterized as being awash in sensuality, temptation, and illicit alliances: “an empire based on libertinage.” But the effects of this legitimization—and of the resulting class of free men and women of color it produced—were immense and unpredictable. It was not the creation of a free mixed-race class that made the situation unique, for such a class did exist in the Thirteen Colonies, though it was much smaller. It was the social mobility and rapidly increasing wealth of this group. In a world where slavery was legislated by race and practiced savagely, these people of color gained a remarkable set of rights: to receive fair treatment under the law, to petition government, to inherit property and pass it down.† The gains were especially stunning among the free women of color: they owned shops, businesses, and plantations; they went to the opera, dressed in Creole versi
ons of the latest Paris fashions. Meanwhile, all around them, black and mixed-race slave women were losing their lives to backbreaking labor, often harder than that given to the men, because women could not apprentice themselves in the skilled artisanal trades. The Code made it possible for anyone’s situation to change overnight, and, especially for women, the line between those in finery and those in bondage was surreally fluid.
Louis XIV issued the Code in 1685. By the time the Pailleterie brothers arrived on the island, it would not have been impossible for Charles to have married a rich mulatto woman to acquire his plantation. In the 1730s, there were many free women of color with significant savings and land; a generation later, free women of color on the island were, on average, more financially independent than white women. Colony officials noted, with alarm, that it was becoming increasingly common for new white immigrants, seeking their fortune, to marry well-off free women of color rather than Creole whites, who were both scarcer and often poorer.
Further laws against “concubinage with slaves” were passed to try to limit legal relations across the color line and the mixed-race children that would result from them. One ordinance from 1713 began with a preamble against masters who “instead of hiding their turpitude, glory in it … taking their concubines and the children they had had with them into their homes and exposing them to the eyes of all with as much assurance as if they were begotten of a legitimate marriage.”
This, too, was a route to social mobility for people of color. But unlike official marriage, it also offered more chances for a common-law white husband to renege or choose to keep his “wife” enslaved in order to take advantage of her free labor, or to selectively free only some of his children. Such would be the case with Antoine and his favored son.
Like its detailed rules for the treatment of slaves, the Code Noir’s provisions on marriage were unenforceable. The ultimate authority on Saint-Domingue was the master’s will and, given the basic master-slave relationship, all sex was a form of rape. But masters were freeing their slave mistresses and mixed-race children at an increasing rate, now more often through unofficial, de facto manumission, producing a class of people called “libre de fait”—literally “freed by fact,” or circumstance. A callous planter might adopt his lighter mixed-race children while keeping the rest in slavery, though he would often run into legal difficulties doing this. He might easily bring up a child as his own while continuing to own the mother to the day she died—since to free her legally required the paying of hefty manumission taxes.
Despite the claims of Antoine’s grandson Alexandre Dumas, there is no evidence that Antoine and Marie Cessette were ever officially married. The chances that Antoine of the Island, a man doing everything possible to go undetected by the authorities, would have drawn attention to himself by a legal marriage to a former slave seem slight. No record of a marriage has ever been located and, unlike so much other material connected to this story, it is one document that would surely have been unearthed had it existed: the novelist Dumas later invested great sums in tracking down legal records of his own legitimacy.
FOR his first twelve years, Thomas-Alexandre got his introduction to the world, with its extremes of injustice and progress, on the streets of the unofficial mulatto capital of the Western world: the port city of Jérémie.
Less than a decade older than he was, Jérémie was rough and unfinished, with taverns and billiard halls but neither a proper church nor a real government building. The colonial administrator, prosecutor, and local admiralty court all shared a residential townhouse. The Catholic parish also rented a private house for its services, and the rectory shared space with the royal gunpowder magazine.
Dueling was an essential part of manly comportment at the time, but Thomas-Alexandre’s first exposure to violence was more likely to have been in the free-for-alls that daily spilled from the city’s scores of billiard parlors, saloons, and “closed houses”—the brothels. Prostitution, cockfighting, alcohol, and opiates were all around, and no town authority could, or would dare to, regulate them. The town had no safe drinking water—a boon for tavern keepers—and drinking from any of the wells in the area was, as the great chronicler of island life Moreau de Saint-Méry observed, “a courageous act.” A public fountain was promised for the upper town in the 1760s, but the pipes for it were still in transit from Port-au-Prince nearly thirty years later.
At least Jérémie did not need to worry about enemy attack. It was exceptionally well positioned for defense, perched on a hill overlooking the bay’s natural amphitheater, which made land assault nearly impossible and left a steep climb for any attacker attempting to storm the town from the sea.
From the town’s ramparts a boy could watch the sea’s changing colors, its gray metallic waves turning blue green as the coffee schooners breached the horizon. Or he might idle in la haute ville, the upper town, which was planted with elm trees on three sides, with the fourth side, facing the sea, used as a public market where traders and small farmers, including slaves, could set up stands for their wares. The town bustled with carts drawn by mules, donkeys, and goats. The unpaved streets filled with dust in dry weather and became rivers of mud in the rainy season. Mounted gentlemen hopped from their horses and carried ladies out of coaches in their finery, while slaves waded knee-deep through mud. La basse ville, or the lower town, was one long street lined with small shops where free men of color worked alongside whites as tanners, distillers, potters, saddlers, wheelwrights, cabinetmakers, and smiths. The street also contained, among its other warehouses, “slave pens.”
As one of the colony’s least economically developed parishes, Jérémie had nowhere to go but up, and from the time Thomas-Alexandre was born that’s what it did. By the early 1780s, its economy was expanding faster than that of any other area of Saint-Domingue, outpacing even the rich sugar plains in the north. The reason was a rise in global coffee prices (which should have allowed Antoine ever greater profits, if he had had an ounce of managerial skill). Ships lined the harbor to load the increasingly precious cargo for European markets. Sugar prices happened to be falling while coffee prices were rising, so the ranks of highland planters were swelled by ambitious newcomers both from France and from the rest of Saint-Domingue.
In addition to being unable managerially to take advantage of the coffee boom, Antoine could not have been pleased with the increase in police presence, as the local royal mounted-police force expanded its regional garrison to be headquartered in Jérémie—officially to combat marrons and buccaneers, but clearly also to bring government authority to this neglected outback. One fact about these new armed riders in their fancy white uniforms with gold brocade and fleurs-de-lis must have made an impression on young Thomas-Alexandre: they had faces as black as or blacker than his own.
The Jérémie mounted police were commanded by a white senior officer, but his deputy was a mulatto. And the corps itself was made up of four free black archers, as the policemen were called. Their bows or arrows now replaced by muskets and rifles, these men were trusted to go out among the white population armed with whatever they needed to maintain order and represent the state.‡
More important still for the son of a slave and an aristocrat would have been Jérémie’s increasing role as a mixed-race cultural mecca. While distancing themselves as much as possible from enslaved blacks and poor whites, free people of color learned to dance, ride, and fence like white colonists, whom they often surpassed in sophistication and snobbishness. As the coffee town boomed, the fashion-conscious femmes de couleur and filles de couleur copied the Paris styles—though the prevailing mode arrived a few months after the fact—and would change gowns multiple times during the course of an evening. On party nights, hostesses strove to outdo one another in imagination and spending. A fine lady of color would move from one ball to the next, each requiring a different style. At a first ball, reported Moreau de Saint-Méry, “One isn’t admitted unless you are adorned in taffetas; in the second, unless you are dr
essed in muslin; in the third, unless you are in linen.”
Births, weddings, and the birthdays of King Louis and Marie-Antoinette were all cause for lavish mixed-race balls. The hostesses wrapped their heads in sumptuous Indian silks and sported elaborate jewelry. Fashion wars broke out between white and black hostesses to see who could throw more impressive balls. The femmes de couleur nearly always won, Moreau reported. They strove to acquire as much education as possible, and to appreciate the opera and the theater.
Largely as a result of this kind of aspirational mixed-race society, Saint-Domingue and the other French colonies became cultural capitals of the New World, excelling in the performing arts. Between 1764 and 1791 some three thousand theatrical productions were staged on Saint-Domingue. Along with opera, commedia dell’arte and Creole interpretations of Molière were popular. While performances in British North America took place in made-over courtrooms and warehouses, the French sugar colonies built lavish theaters and opera houses. At first, predominantly French, Italian, British, and Russian performers satisfied the demand, but as local blacks and mixed-race men and women trained in ballet, theater, and opera, they began to appear in major productions alongside whites. By the late 1700s, Saint-Domingue was home to the world’s first black superstars, like the mulatto opera singers Minette and Lise, whose performances eclipsed those of visiting white divas from Paris and Naples.
The white colonists bristled, but the French colonial government encouraged such cultural pursuits among free blacks. An official colonial document promoting theater construction in 1780 argued for art’s transformative power on people of African descent. Through exposure to French theater, it said, the free men of color had shed “the barbarity of their origin and, thus become civilized in their manners and customs.”§