THE STONE THAT THE BUILDER REFUSED
By Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon. 747 pp. $29.95
For a couple of shining years -- a benign sliver excised from the slab of 19th-century Western history -- blacks and whites shared civil rights, if not outright equality. By 1801, the Haitian slave revolt of 1791 had evolved from a campaign of brutality and vengeance into a movement that absorbed much of the inclusive, egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution.
The bloody uprising of 500,000 black slaves against 60,000 white masters -- a successful rebellion on what was then called Saint Domingue, the western end of the island of Hispaniola -- wiped away the presence of the British and Spanish invaders. The Haitian slave revolt, as it came to be called, also effectively diminished the power of the island's ruling class, the French blancs, who were stripped of land and the wealth (created, as it was, by slaves) wrung from coffee and spice crops. It was French whites whose families had been brutalized as repayment for 100 years of kidnapping and enslavement. And, in one of history's rare moments of genuine irony, it was they whom Toussaint Louverture, leader of the rebellion and then of Saint Domingue, invited back, after the rebellion, to run the plantations and industries that could make the country strong.
Motivated by the spirited dispatch of the French ancien regime, the strong leadership of Napoleon, and sheer pragmatism, Toussaint (as he was called) envisioned -- and briefly achieved -- a Saint Domingue with no slavery, with people of many and mixed races, and with a fealty to Napoleon, whom Toussaint admired.
But by 1803 -- a mere two years later -- Toussaint and his hope for a liberated, prosperous homeland were gone. Toussaint's faith was also shaken by his traitorous black generals, who, after his capture and imprisonment by the French, won the country's independence by wiping the blancs off the face of the island to prevent them from retaking it. Toussaint would languish and die a prisoner in a fort in France, the victim of a failed military campaign concocted by Napoleon and led by his brother-in-law, LeClerc, to restore slavery and a maximum flow of cash crops from the island to the Continent.
Given that the two subsequent centuries of Haitian self-rule have resulted in despotism and the direst poverty in the hemisphere, Toussaint's enlightened plans are ripe for the retelling, as is the story of the only successful slave revolt in the West's malignant history of converting humans into chattel.
For the past nine years, Madison Smartt Bell has taken on the task of channeling it all into historical fiction. A chronicler of racial disharmony and disaffected drifters and searchers (Ten Indians, Anything Goes, Save Me, Joe Louis, among others), Bell has carved out a place in American letters by draping flesh and wounds on the myth of Toussaint, while conjuring up a fictional cast that aptly portrays the complex racial and interpersonal issues swirling around those caught up in a maelstrom of change.
The Stone That the Builder Refused, the final installment of a trilogy, ends the saga with a whimper of pathos, as Toussaint's dream is overtaken by the brutality that has come to define Haiti. As in his previous two Haiti novels -- All Souls' Rising (published in 1995 and a nominee for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards) and Master of the Crossroads (2000) -- Bell's latest book is a long and winding road of intertwined lives, shifting loyalties, battlefield bloodbaths, tropical diseases, forbidden trysts and constantly moving scenery.
Bell's immersion in the world he creates -- so complete that he includes a chronology, a glossary of Creole and French terms, genuine correspondence between Toussaint and Napoleon and others (in the original French, no less) and a preface that serves as an historical primer -- has an osmotic effect. His trenchant understanding of Haiti's one-of-a-kind history, the shadowiness of its spirit world, the unspeakable rigors of battle and the strength of those who survive get under one's skin. While hardly a page-turner -- the narrative's breadth and languorous pacing won't allow it to be -- The Stone That the Builder Refused carries us along.
Much of that momentum comes from Bell's reprisal of the best characters from the first two books. Besides Toussaint -- a small, pensive man with a surprising strength that can break large armies as well as the wildest of horses -- Bell returns Riau, a black man and occasional narrator who has a penchant for keeping an ear to the ground and his loyalties open. (It's hardly surprising, given his survival instinct, that Riau delivers the book's postscript.) Bell's thoughtful white protagonist, Antoine Hebert, is a physician who offers a faint mirror image of the battle-weary Toussaint and serves as a bridge between the black and white worlds. Hebert faithfully tends to the injured in Toussaint's army yet lives among the plantation owners and white families who head Saint Domingue's society. Like Toussaint, he believes in the equality of men but is powerless to do much more than observe man's inhumanity to man and care for those close to him.
Other whites, including Hebert's sister Elise and her friend Isabelle, are drawn skillfully to show how the islanders' shifting views of race can carry dire consequences. Fearing deportation and ostracism because of their dalliances with black men, the two women go to extremes to hide their pregnancies, with scandalous results.
The book's one flaw is that the majority of it is given over to the tales of whites. Riau and Toussaint are the only well-developed black characters here, while Hebert, Elise, Isabelle, four French captains and a handful of other whites receive fuller treatment.
Nonetheless, Bell compels our interest by straightforwardly examining the spirit of freedom embodied by Toussaint and the blacks and whites who entertained his notion of it. Without the use of literary gimmicks -- he doesn't rely on magical realism or lyrical pyrotechnics wrought from the island's fascination with spirits and fate -- the author artfully takes us to the end of a fascinating journey. Summing it all up, Riau says, "There is more of what we don't see than what we do." But for most of a decade, Bell has dared to show us as much as he can, in often astonishing and brutal detail. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have chronicled Haiti and the travails of Toussaint with an eye more unblinking or with a hand so steady. •
Michael Anft is a journalist and critic who lives in Baltimore.
