As for your mother...you know how she is. We might be twins but we’re like night and day. She doesn’t come with an off switch (or even a place to remove her batteries) and hasn’t been doing much relaxing. The last time I saw her eyes unglued from her phone was when we had a blackout a few days ago and the battery died. She was forced to go outside and fraternize with her relatives, poor thing. I may or may not have been behind said blackout. ;)
P.S. Our Haitian ancestors did what they needed to do to win their freedom and become the first Black republic in history. I am proud to descend from them, as I know you are too. Your mother made the most delicious soup joumou to celebrate the holiday.
P.P.S. The issue of deforestation in Haiti is much more complex than a pithy line in an email. Don’t tell me your school is saying that Haitian children eat trees too.
Bisous,
Estelle
——
Estelle Dubois
Haitian Minister of Tourism
CEO of PATRON PAL
L’Union Fait La Force
Wednesday, January 6
Alaine Beauparlant
Latin American History/Creative Writing
Sister Wagner
PART 1: THE LIST
DUE—WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6...... 10% OF FINAL PROJECT GRADE
Instructions: Create a list of notable individuals in your chosen country’s revolution. Include the defining moments of five or more principal actors (at least one should be from your prominent family) and describe his or her claim to fame. Use the List as a framework for both the Presentation and Story sections of your project. Be sure to also include a short paragraph describing your presentation plans.
Who’s Who: The Major Players of the Haitian Revolution
History wasn’t made for the folks who “win” participation ribbons. There were a lot of people who were instrumental to the eventual formation of Haiti as an autonomous state. Just being there as a Conscious Observer or having the smallest part in the making of a country is admirable—and more than I’ve done in these past seventeen years. Sadly, we don’t know the name of the woman who might have watered Toussaint Louverture’s horse and allowed him to keep riding into the night to warn my people that the French were coming, the French were coming. History has left us with only a few names to attribute to Haiti’s inception and, unsurprisingly, they’re all men. These are the guys who would win superlatives in the high school yearbook of antiquity. They were operating at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, which explains the lack of a strong female presence in their freedom fighting. I’ll cut them some slack, I guess.
Who am I kidding? I won’t.
Without further ado, a sneak peek of some of the “Who’s Who” of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804):
Vincent Ogé: Freeman known for sparking a two-month rebellion against French colonials near Cap-Français (now known as Cap-Haïtien) in 1790, which was considered a precursor to the 1791 revolt that began the Haitian Revolution. Ogé was rich, educated, and what people in the olden days called a quadroon, which sounds like a type of pirate but is a person who’s of one-quarter African and three-quarters European ancestry and also an offensive word. He was in favor of giving other free men of color in the colony the right to vote, but nothing too outrageous like the women or slaves. Ogé and his fellow free supporters were able to overthrow numerous white colonial militiamen before eventually being captured. He was executed on the Catherine wheel, which entails tying the offending party’s limbs onto the spokes of a large wooden wheel and hitting him with something hard and heavy to break his bones while the wheel turns. Don’t worry, it’s named after St. Catherine of Alexandria, no relation to our school namesake, St. Catherine de’ Ricci. I checked.
Jean François Papillon: An African slave who worked on the Papillon Plantation. Papillon means “butterfly” in French and that’s exactly what he wanted to be. Papillon yearned to escape that horrible cocoon of slavery and morph into a free butterfly. He was also a maroon until the 1791 slave rebellion he helped lead. And although maroon sounds curiously similar to something pirate-related, it refers to African slaves who ran away and set up settlements separate from their bondage systems. Think of 1791 as the Big Bang of the Haitian Revolution.
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: French commissioner in charge of the free people of Saint-Domingue (aka modern-day Haiti). Sonthonax also had ties to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, a group of French abolitionists. In fact, on August 29, 1793, the day he announced the emancipation of slaves in the colony, Sonthonax said he had “a white skin but the soul of a black man”—which I guess is the closest the eighteenth century ever got to meeting Justin Timberlake.
André Rigaud: So-called mulatto military leader who became the mentor of future presidents Jean-Pierre Boyer and Alexandre Pétion. He liked to wear a wig with straight brown hair to look whiter. No comment. Even though we can clearly see why that’s problematic. Something else that’s problematic? The word mulatto.
Dutty Boukman: A slave who was born in Jamaica who eventually became an early leader of the Haitian Revolution. On August 14, 1791, Boukman (along with a vodou priestess named Cécile Fatiman) led the religious ceremony at Bois Caïman that served as the catalyst for the Haitian Revolution. To show their loyalty, attendees of the ceremony had to drink the blood of a pig. There’s really no going back from that.
Cécile Fatiman: One of the few women in Haitian history that you can find a bit of info on. (A bit = not much, but more than the others.) Cécile was the mambo, or vodou high priestess, who co-led the kickoff to the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caïman. In fact, she was the one who slit the throat of the pig whose blood the attendees supposedly had to drink. Some scholars believe that she died at 112 years old. She’s probably still alive to this day.
Alexandre Pétion: The first president of Haiti. The John Adams to Henri Christophe’s Thomas Jefferson.1 Pétion and Christophe were such ideological enemies, they split Haiti into two separate countries. Pétion took the south with the gens de couleurs (mixed-race free people) and Christophe established his kingdom in the north with a predominantly black population. Rumor has it Oprah was inspired to produce her documentaries about colorism on OWN after traveling back to 1806 in her time machine and visiting Haiti during this tenuous period.
Like Jefferson and Adams, Pétion and Christophe died within hours of each other on the fiftieth anniversary of the country they helped create.2
Henri Christophe: Built the Citadelle Laferrière in Milot. To avoid an attempt by the southern government to steal his throne, Christophe killed himself at fifty-three years old after falling ill, leaving the crown to his son Jacques-Victor...who was assassinated ten days afterward by enemies of his father’s reign. Historians aren’t sure, but Christophe was likely buried in the Citadelle, or the location for the most adorable meet-cute ever. #shoutouttomymomanddad