Sex and Race, Volume 2. J. A. Rogers

the caresses of the family at the house I was visiting and when it came to my turn to kiss it, I confess I could not notice the child; I only saw the beautiful dark face, coiffed with orange and gold and bending over it in an illumination of antique gold… What a da. She represents really the type of that belle affranclne of other days against whose fascination special sumptuary laws were made; romantically she imaged for me the supernatural god-mothers and Cinderellas of the Creole fairy-tales… . Really the impression of that dazzling da. I can even now feel the picturesque justice of the fabululist’s description of Cinderella’s costume: Ca te ka bailie ou mal zié! (It would have given you a pain in your eyes to look at her.”¹⁸

      ONE OF HAITI’S MOST ILLUSTRIOUS SONS

      XXXIII. Alexander Dumas, famous Napoleonic general, and founder of the great Dumas family, In hunting costume. Right: portrait of General Dumas In the Colonial Museum of Paris.

      Coleridge thought that the Latin American mulatto women were more beautiful than those of Anglo-Saxon origin. Writing on Martinique, he said, “Our mulatto females have more the look (color) of very dirty white women than that of the rich oriental olive which distinguishes the haughty offspring of the half-blood of French and Spaniards. I think for gait, gestures, shape and air, the finest women in the world may be seen on a Sunday in Port-of-Spain. The rich and gay costumes of these nations sets off the dark countenances of their mulattoes infinitely better than the plain dress of the English.”¹⁹ The English were less artistic by temperament, and consequently more commercial and drab—a nation of shopkeepers as Napoleon called them—and the blacks in their colonies reflected this.

      Vaissière, who did extensive research on the letters and documents of the period, reveals the great fascination that the black and mulatto women held over the white men in Haiti. He wrote, “We see in this country, writes M. de Arquijian in 1713, only Negro women and mulatto women who have bargained off their virginity for their freedom; and the supervisor, Montholon, declares in 1724 that if the French in Hayti are not careful they will rapidly become like their Spanish neighbors in Santo Domingo, who are three-fourths mixed. In fact in 1734, M. de la Rochalar observes at Jacmel nearly all the inhabitants are mulattoes or are descendants of them. This proves that the penalties placed from the earliest days of the colonies against masters having children by their Negro women was not very vigorously applied… . One governor even made pleasantries upon the manners of a certain Dupas of St. Louis ‘who amused himself by having male and female children by a Negro woman for whom il a des bontés.’ The example of race-mixing sometimes comes from on high and M. de Gallifet, the King’s representative at Cap Haytien was menaced for having kidnapped a Negro woman, who was the most beautiful of the four or five he kept about his bed. The love for the black woman inspired only illicit passions. Greed aiding … it was sometimes consecrated by marriage. In four months, writes M. de Cussy in 1688 there have been twenty marriages with mulattoes and Negro women. The desire to get the wealth of the black woman, as one governor acknowledged much later, will indeed determine unconsciously all the penniless white men, sojourning here, to marry these Negro women, marriages that are not made difficult by the church because of religious principles, and often by self-interest of the priests.”

      HAITIAN NOBILITY.

      XXXIV. Left: The Duke of Tiburon, Minister of War of Faustin I. Right: Princess Olive, daughter of Faustin I.

      Because of the manner in which they had been neglected, some of the white women were very cruel to the colored ones but others reconciled themselves to the situation, while still others entertained a genuine affection for the black and mulatto women who had grown up with them, and who they loved so much that they did not mind sharing their husband’s affection with them. Some even became god-mothers of the mixed blood children. Vaissière said, “Nearly every white young creole girl had a young mulatto or quadroon girl, or even a young Negro one whom she made her cocote. The cocote was the confidante of all the thoughts of her mistress (and the confidence was sometimes reciprocal especially in the affairs of love). She never left the cocote; they slept in the same room; she ate and drank with her, not at table and at feasts, but in eating the creole ragouts in places far from the sight of men.”²⁰

      These cocotes often became the concubines of the husbands of the white girls, and served as spies for bringing to the whites what was happening among the Negroes.

      As for the unmixed black women, they had little sexual liking for the white men, according to several writers. Moreau de St. Mèry said that it tickled their vanity to be “white men’s mistresses” but that they had an “invincible penchant for the Negro man.”

      As regards the white woman and the black man, one finds little mention of their cohabiting. Peytraud cites the case of Marie-Claire Boulogne, who was accused of having killed her new-born child. It was later discovered that the child had been born dead, but since she had confessed that its father was a Negro, she was banished on suspicion of murder. Labat also gives an instance of a white slave-holder’s daughter having a child by a slave.²¹

      But although there is little mention of the black man and the white woman, Napoleon must have had disturbing information on this matter because in his secret written orders to his brother-in-law whom he sent out against Toussaint L‘Ouverture he said that all white women who cohabited with blacks should be returned to France forthwith. As irony has it, his own sister, Pauline, Leclerc’s wife, is commonly said to have broken the order, among her black lovers being named Toussaint L’Ouverture and Christophe, later emperor of Haiti.²²

      The charges against Pauline are very likely true: One fact is indisputable: Toussaint L’Ouverture had many loves among the white women of the upper class, according to General Pamphile de LaCroix. La Croix relates how when he opened one of Toussaint’s trunks, after Toussaint’s capture, he found a secret compartment crammed with love letters and other tokens of love from society women to whom formerly Toussaint had been but a black slave. “Judge,” he said, “our astonishment when in forcing the double bottom of the safe that contained the secret documents of Toussaint L’Ouverture, to find tresses of hair of all colors, rings, hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrows in gold, small keys, necessaires, souvenirs, and an infinite number of love-letters which left no doubt of the success obtained in love by the old Toussaint. Yet he was black and of repulsive physique.”²³

      A LADY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

      XXXV. Madame Chasseriau, Mother of the famous painter, Theodore Chasseriau.

      La Croix, realizing the terrific scandal the letters would have caused, destroyed them all.