There was still another powerful consideration for making the color line absolute. The “pure” white offspring that was decreed for rulership could be maintained only through the white woman, and if the white man did not marry or cohabit with her, except to a limited degree, how could white supremacy be maintained?
Thus the white slaveholders and the petits-blancs, or little whites, found themselves caught in a trap of their own setting. They had to choose between the white woman and the colored one. But few hesitated over this choice. Lespinasse writes, “The white man transported to St. Domingue in a burning climate the influence of which upon the temperament cannot be denied, could not resist the charms of the young African woman. She had in addition to her allure, a sympathy that Raynal, Moreau de St Mery, Ganau and Coulon have perfectly described. ‘The natural attractions of the Negro woman,’ said Coulon, ‘outshone nearly always the vain adornments and coquetry of the white creoles.’ The white European woman was the first to be disdained and then the white creole woman, who no matter how seductive, had no longer any empire over the heart of the white man.”10
Vaissiere said similarly, “Numbers of masters instead of concealing their turpitude glory in it, having in their houses their black concubines and the children they have had by them, and showing them off with as much assurance as if they were the offspring of marriage. Neither the color, nor the odor, nor any other natural disgust, nor the idea of having a slave as offspring and to see him ill-treated or worked at the vilest of labor, or sold, keep them from these monstrous unions… .
“One can thus see scions of the great names of France—a relative of Vaudreuil, a Chateauneuf, a Boucicaut, last descendant of an illustrious marshal of France pass their lives between a bowl of raw rum and a Negro concubine. Neither age nor absence of good looks is often an obstacle to these half-savage unions. Often these women are the most repulsively dirty and ugly that the Negro race can produce.”11
The law against intermarriage didn’t work either. First, the Church was against it, and some priests, in defiance of the order went on marrying white and black. Second, the Jesuits were then a power in Haiti. They had great farms and an increase in the number of their mulatto slaves meant more wealth. When the slave-trading was abolished, the Jesuits went in for slave-breeding precisely as did the white Virginians.
Impoverished French noblemen would come to Haiti, marry a rich mulatto girl, take her to France, and with her money re-establish his ancestral line. Pons wrote, “French noblemen went to the colonies for the express purpose of repairing, by a matrimonial connection, a fortune wrecked by losses or misconduct. In these cases they despised prejudice. They cared nothing about color, provided it was not absolutely black. Riches were the great desiderata and made up for everything else. They returned to France with their tawny escorts, where their Creole birth detracted nothing from their consequence in polite society.”12 Some of the white men who married the mulatto girls did not even take the trouble to return to France. They stayed in Haiti. Vaissiere wrote, “… this Saint-Martin of Arada, one of the leading citizens of Artibonite, possessing more than two hundred Negroes, which his marriage with a Negro woman, who owned about thirty slaves, alone permitted him to reach the position he now occupied; or like Gascard-Dumesny, who married a Negro woman of seventy years, widow of Baptiste Amat, who had left her a million francs, has become from a mere interne a leading colonist.”
Hilliard d’Auberteuil, writing in 1777, says, “There is in the colony three hundred white men married to mulatto women, some of whom are noblemen.”13 He adds: “There are so many colored people who are so fair that it is impossible to tell them from white, so many families whose origin is forgotten, and whose daughters are married to honest citizens… . The fair mulattoes, who have become rich, have an infallible way, so to speak of elevating themselves to the rank of the whites; even though there are eye witnesses to the dark color of their mother or grandmother. They claim they are descended from the Indians who came from St. Christopher in 1640 when the English drove the French from that island.”14
As for concubinage that was most common. A census taken in 1774 showed that of 7000 free women of color in the colony, 5000 were living as mistresses of white men.15 Very few of these women were public prostitutes. Later, however, according to Vaissière, the number of the latter did increase in the towns.
Not all of the white men were after money, however. Members, even of the high aristocracy lost their heads over the colored women, some of whom must have been of great physical charm if we are to judge by the manner in which certain writers of the time went into raptures over them. As Lafcadio Hearn says, “So omnipotent was the charm of half-breed beauty that masters were becoming the slave of their slaves. It was not only the creole Negress who had appeared to play a part in this strange drama which was the triumph of nature over interest and judgment; her daughters far more beautiful had grown up too, to form a special class. These women, whose tints of skin rivalled the colors of ripe fruit, and whose gracefulness—peculiar, exotic, and irresistible—made them formidable rivals to the daughters of the dominant race.”
So powerful was the charm of these mulatto girls, he says, that it was decreed, “that whosoever should free a woman of color would have to pay to the government three times her value as a slave”
Some of these colored women did not measure up to the European standard in facial profile, it is true, but their superb physiques, the rhythm, the primitive grace of their movements, and especially of their dancing, made them none the less irresistible to some of the most artistic of the whites.
Souquet-Basiege, Rufiz, Cornillac, and other writers thought that these mixed-blood French women—especially those in whom the blood of Europe, Africa, and America were blended—were the most beautiful specimens of the human race. Cornillac, a surgeon, was deeply impressed by those mixed-bloods, who still showed the aboriginal Carib strain. He says, “When among the populations of the Antilles we first notice these remarkable metis, whose olive skins, elegant and slender figures, fine straight profiles and regular features remind us of the inhabitants of Madras or Pondicherry (India), we ask ourselves in wonder while looking at their long eyes, full of a strange and gentle melancholy (especially among the women) and at the black, rich, silky, gleaming hair, curling in abundance over the temples and falling in profusion over the neck—to what human race can belong this singular variety in which there is a dominant characteristic that seems indelible and always shows more and more strongly in proportion as the type is further removed from the African element. It is the Carib blood—blended with blood of Europeans and of blacks, which in spite of all subsequent crossings, and in spite of the fact that it has not been renewed for more than two hundred years, still conserves as markedly as at the time of its first interblending the race-characteristics that invariably reveals its presence in the blood of every being through whose veins it flows.”16
Lafcadio Hearn, who was himself a connoiseur of black beauty, and a later arrival, raved about the black girls. He said, “There is something superb in the port of a tall young mountain griffone, or Negress, who is comely; it is a black poem of artless dignity, primitive grace, savage exultatation of movement.” In her walk “a serpentine elegance, a sinuous charm … With us only a finely-trained dancer could attempt such a walk; with the Martinique woman of color, it is as natural as the tint of her skin.”
He says of one black woman, a bread carrier, “a finer type of the race it would be difficult for a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall—strength and grace united throughout the whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx—she looked to me as she towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa.”17
Of the Haitian mulatto girls, he said, “If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone