So he spoke. I thanked him, then took my leave.
OCTOBER 16, 1793
WEDNESDAY, 9:50 P.M.
Unable to sleep, I walked the streets for long hours after dark this evening, and at every alleyway, park, and corner I came to, where the sick huddled round a fire, or wild dogs nibbled the flesh off a dead man's fingers, I saw a memento mori. A reminder that Dr. Rush and I had been foolish to believe the hearts of (white) men might ever change in the Earthly City. No, our salvation awaits only in that house not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. Wandering tonight after another day of delivering five sermons, I did see signs that the yellow fever was lessening its grip upon the city. I mused that perhaps soon that plague would be gone. Things would be as they were before. I stepped through now-healing white neighborhoods, ones I'd delivered medicines to only a month ago; I saw lily-white faces glaring at me through the windows, twisted lips drawn down in disgust at my very presence, and I knew at last, and with the certainty of revelation, that the exoteric lesson the good Lord wanted me to see was that, despite the best efforts by men of goodwill, some plagues never end.
A Report from St. Domingue
SIR,
I beg that you will forgive me for the inordinate lapse between this letter and my last. As I mentioned in that hasty missive of 4 July 1801, my initial meeting with Governor-General François-Dominique Toussaint went poorly. No, I mustn't lie. It was, Mr. President, a disaster of diplomacy, with Toussaint being haughtily unimpressed by my credentials, despite my previous work in President Washington's administration. He strutted about his chamber with the air of a Coriolanus, and all but looked down his nose at me (You know this expression of disdain — it is thoroughly French), asking why I had not brought from Monticello a personal greeting from you, for he fancies himself to be a freedom fighter like yourself; he insisted repeatedly that I must have misplaced such an important item of protocol; then he summarily postponed any further meetings with me until I (bund it. I daresay, it would have helped matters considerably if you had, in fact, written such a letter, though I understand your refusal to acknowledge in any way whatsoever (or treat as an equal head of state) St Domingue's governor-general and the bloody Revolution he and his cohorts Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe have created on what was once the richest European colonial possession.
In this letter our consul is fictitious (ThomasJefferson, in fact, sent Tobias Lear to represent him), but his fears are real.
But, as I say, it was my intention to write you much earlier concerning your plan to help Bonaparte re-establish Gallic rule and Negro slavery on this sea-girt island. And I would have done so, I assure you, had not your consul gotten off to such a bad start, and then (bund such difficulty acclimating himself and his family to the extremes of this savage post to which you have assigned him. My health has been exceedingly tender. During the day the temperature here is well nigh 95 degrees. My French, as you know, is flawless, but most of the people I meet speak Creole French: a blend of Indian, French, and Spanish that I must at times strain my ears to decipher. In addition to this taxing problem of translating their native tongue, the (bod is unfamiliar; the favorite dish is a rice-and-bean concoction called pois ac duriz colles, which the natives wash down with rum and tafia, a head-ruining spirit made from sugarcane. G astronomically, this diet of Negro dishes for the past several weeks has wreaked havoc with my digestion, that of my wife, and especially my eight-year-old son, Cornelius, who suffers from borborygm and stomach cramps, as do I, though if the truth be known, I suspect our physical distress has a darker cause, which I will try to summon the courage to speak of shortly.
Yet all that, Mr. President, is nothing compared to the fear.
To a man, the natives of St. Domingue believe in voodoo. During the nights of sweltering heat, when one's bedsheets are soaked through before dawn, we can hear from our lodgings in the capital the endless pounding of drums — the same tom-toms that one heard on August 22, 1791, when the voodoo priest Boukman, his leaders (among them Toussaint), and the blacks they incited swept from one village to another, torching buildings and killing every white man, woman, and child they saw. (Yes, it is true that the insurrectionists hoisted on high dead white babies impaled on their swords, but as to the report of cannibalism, which you inquired about, I have yet to receive confirmation.) The smell of that white massacre lingers on the air. I have been informed that for weeks the sky glowed with sheets of fire, and that more than 6,000 coffee plantations and 200 sugar refineries were destroyed. It is a chilling sound, these drums. Three are employed: the natives call them the Mama Drum, Papa Drum, and Baby Drum, and as they are played, the blacks perform a wild dance called the Meringue. I have personally witnessed them crooning a half-spoken, half-sung chant at their voodoo rites, where witch doctors transmogrify the dead — and sometimes living men — into zombies (The Enlightenment, I assure you, has yet to reach the outlying villages here), which are mindless slaves who do the bidding of their masters. (I've been told the witch doctors who conspired with Boukman and Toussaint took a special pleasure in turning their former owners into such spectral creatures.) For a white man, there is the fear here of being murdered in one's sleep. Since hearing of these unholy practices, my poor Cornelius has not slept well in days, and he screams at every sound in the night I must assure him each evening that I keep a firearm by my bed in the room next to his own where my wife, Emma, and I sleep, and that we have trustworthy sentries — the more-Europeanized mulattoes — stationed with rifles just outside our doors.
Lately, I have been rereading your splendid Notes on the State of Virginia, partly because some nights sleep and I are strangers, and partly because my position as consul in the first all-black nation in the Western Hemisphere has whetted my curiosity to better understand what transpires beneath the ulotrichous skull of the Negro. You are right, I believe, when in your Notes you observe the inferiority of pure-bred blacks at Monticello, their childlike nature, their physical proximity to the apes, and their inability to grasp the arts and sciences as, for example, you have so wondrously done in your writings and studies on architecture, geology, natural history, and scientific forming. Clearly, as you state, the white race is blessed with greater beauty and in America is destined — as if by divine decree — to be the black man's master, to guide him as the parent does the child, and surely this is for the Negro's own good, lest he, in our state of freedom, fall deeper into savagery. No, none of these matters do I question as I revisit your Notes. But I have begun to wonder since our arrival at Le Cap, and after such A Report from St. Domingue 63 close contact with Negroes like Jacques Dessalines (during their Revolution he cried to the other slaves, "Those who wish to die free, rally round me now," which is hardly different than our own Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me death"), if perhaps the lower standards and performance you so precisely observed in the Virginia slaves are not innate, after all, but rather the product of the severity of American slavery itself.