THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511210489
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
ALL SOULS' RISING
MADISON SMARTT BELL
Pantheon. 530 pp. $25.95.
Dr. Antoine Hebert has only been in Haiti - Saint Dominique, as it was known in the French colonial days of the 1790s - a few months. In that short time, though, the white Frenchman has felt the heat of the racial caldron that boils there.
Lost in the countryside as the book opens, Hebert passes by a slave woman crucified by a planter whose bastard she purposely aborted. She's not yet dead; he doesn't help her.
Passing through the fields, he watches from the porch of the planter's house as the slaves cut the tall sugarcane, their African and Creole chants mixed with the throb of giant mosquitoes.
Later, returned from a meeting of the philosophical society in the colonial city of Le Cap, Hebert asks a royalist officer friend: ``For all creatures - there is only fertility within their kind. . . . if a white man and a black woman come together, what will you call their offspring? Is it something else or is it human?''
That question and the whites' mute response power the musket and the machete as the island explodes into a war of shattering violence that reverberates to the Haiti of today.
In his eighth novel, All Souls' Rising, Madison Smartt Bell turns his eye to a moment and place in history when the white world's calculations of African slave ownership went up in flames, and the Christian slave Toussaint outgeneraled Europe.
It is hard to imagine a larger leap for Bell, whose last novel, Save Me, Joe Louis, was a small-stage tale of criminals' flight. Yet he has succeeded on the larger canvas - All Souls' Rising, nominated for the National Book Award in fiction, is a book that works its own revolution on the reader in its unyielding portrayal of human hatred based on color.
In the long annals of race war and of slavery, Haiti of 1791 may well stand as one of the hottest flash points. Bell notes in his preface that in that year there were about 40,000 whites, fewer than that of the 64 recognized shades of mixed blood, and 450,000 black slaves in the colony.
Most of the slaves believed in the reincarnationist vodoun, holding that after death they took a road leading under water to the Island Below Sea, which reflected the Africa above. These blacks thus were not afraid to fight or to die to free themselves from their masters.
Dr. Hebert arrives shortly after the French Revolution. France's rulers have been executed. The nobles both in France and its colonies have found their rights and values under attack as the workers and artisans agitate for liberty and political rights.
For the amount of colonial history and French and Creole expressions it must bear, Bell's story flows well. He provides a chronology and glossary at book's end, which really should be read first. His only references to the bloody 20th century of the Duvalier dictators and U.S. incursions are the Bob Marley lyrics that open each chapter - a simple and effective device.
Much of All Souls' Rising is Hebert's telling, as he arrives on the island in search of a sister and mingles with its people. In the first slave uprising, he is captured, and Toussaint, learning of his training, spares him, teaching him his own herblore before releasing him.
There are other narrators, among them a plantation owner also captured and humiliated by the blacks, his drunkard wife whose fierce will to live scares a mob, and a slave acquaintance of Toussaint who serves as his scribe.
Bell takes the story to Toussaint's journey to France in 1802 after his capture. During peace negotiations Toussaint had named himself governor-general for life of Saint Dominique, refusing to renounce the colonial system until Napoleon sent troops, pledging to re-establish white control.
Toussaint died a prisoner in April 1803 - at year's end, his lieutenant declared Haitian independence, having defeated the French with English aid.
Bell's take on Toussaint's rise is that initially he was a puppet insurrectionist whose strings were pulled by one of the grand blancs, or slaveholding plantation owners, who wanted to frighten the poorer whites into renouncing their republican leanings. Never quite what anyone supposed him to be, Toussaint allowed the fighting to rage, then learned the military tactics of the troops sent to oppose him.
Late in the book, Toussaint and his troops chance upon Hebert at a plantation. The two men are Bell's black and white moral compasses; they expose the possibilities and the limits of the accommodation between the races.
Toussaint points at his men. ``Do you believe that they are free?'' he asks the doctor.
Hebert is quiet. He thinks of his mulatto woman and their child, a new family he has not turned away from. Then he answers: ``I believe they are as free as I am.'' MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor. by CNB