Marie-Roze Adam was born around 1742 on the western half of the island, in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue—which she and Romaine would later, in small part, help make the free nation of Haiti.T,R:46-47,236 Romaine Rivière was born roughly a decade later, around 1750 or '51, on the opposite side of the isle, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo that is today the Dominican Republic.a,R:27-28,47-48,50-51,232,M,P
From the moment Christopher Columbus had arrived there and began a genocide of its native Taíno people, driven by racism and gold-greed, vying colonizers had made the island a site of vicious inequality to their own benefit.Ko Their callous capitalism then took only another form as the Spanish began to re-populate the plantations they had worked so many Taino to death on with enslaved Africans, and the French then expanded that system with even greater ruthlessness and rapacity.Ko,W
: : : THE BEGINNINGS : : :
Romaine’s youth in that land is marked by many lacunas. Even the church in which the child is said to have been baptized in the Roman religion is otherwise unheard of in records from the region, and the very names of Romaine’s parents are unclear as well: they are given in French records as Jean Rivière and Gabrielle Joseph, but may in fact, in Santo Domingo, have been Juan Rivera and Gabriela Jose.a,R:47-48
Whatever their names, the two raised their child as a free Black boyb,R:27-28,47-51,232,M,P in a society that subjected even its free Black members to rampant racism. On the French side of the island, the Code Noir or Black Code said that free Black people were to have rights like the whites’, but this was rarely respected, and racists in the colonial government often regulated even what clothes Black people were allowed to wear.Ga,He,Hm,C:16-18 The situation on the Spanish side was similar.Hm
In the 1770s, twenty-something and an up-and-coming trader, Romaine moved to the mountainous south of that French-colonized half of the island, Saint-Domingue, to take advantage of a boom in the popularity of coffee.R:27-28,47-48 There, in a deep, narrow, crater-like valley in the mountains near Léogâne—likely in what is now Fondwa—Romaine acquired land and built a small plantation named Trou Coffy (pronounced like the English words “true coffee”, but in fact most likely Haitian French for “Kofi’s Valley”).c,R:28,46-47
Within two decades, 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe would come from Saint-Domingue, as would 40% of the sugar.O,Sp But such exports were lucrative only for the tiny minority of colonizers who owned the plantationsO,Sp—and owned eighteen or nineteen of every twenty of the island’s other inhabitants, nearly half a million people by 1789—in chattel slavery, exploiting them for free labor.d,Ja:45,55
This small capitalist class was initially all-white, but had come to include a free minority of the island’s Black majority as well, who—finding that coffee grew well on the higher and hillier side-plots to which they had been relegated (because those were less valuable for the production of sugar)Hr,R:46—benefited from the boom in the bean’s popularityQ and became class-allies of the whites in a brutal plantation system.Sc
These whites often showed no loyalty to the island, and no compassion for the people on it, seeking only to extract as much money as possible from both and then take it back to France.N To this harsh end they brought as much as one-third of the Atlantic slave trade to the island, as they continually kidnapped ever-more Africans to replace those they killed through overwork and undernutrition, psychological trauma, and exposure to the island’s rampant malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.Br,C:16 As many as a third of the people imported to the colonies as slaves died within a year, and the average African lived no more than ten years after being brought there.C:16
In 1772, Romaine met one person in particular enslaved by this system who would prove life-changing, and system-changing: Marie-Roze Adam.R:47,T,Q
Little is known of Roze’s early (and indeed later) life, but what is known is striking. Typically, slave-owners preferred creoles (people born into slavery within the colony, often—as in Roze’s caseb—with mixed ancestry) rather than “bossales”, a word initially used of untamed animals and then of people who had been born free in Africa and only later enslaved.C:17 Slave-owners considered creoles “easier to manage”, as most knew no life apart from the slave systemC:17—but Roze did. In 1763, when she baptized her daughter Marie-Louise, she gave the notary documents to show that she and the infant were free people, establishing a record Louise would later use to prove her own free status.T
There are two basic possibilities that could explain her apparent change in status, from free in '63 to slave in '72: either the earlier record was wrong and she was not free then, but cleverly tricked a notary (or convinced one to help her) by “borrowing” documents from a free woman of a similar name and age, or the record was right and she was indeed not born but rather sentenced only later in life to slavery, a punishment put upon those who committed an act the colonial authorities opposed most extremely: helping other humans escape enslavement.T Either possibility suggests that Roze was a woman of courage, of cunning, and of longstanding (and crucially, events would later suggest, infectious) commitment to the cause of freedom.Q
In contrast, Romaine, like many other wealthy free-born Black islanders, appears to have initially at least partially accepted the enslavement of others as a fact of economic life.Q In the 1770s and 80s, the future revolutionary was a prominent coffee grower and trader, buying and selling dozens of acres of land and at least one enslaved man in the area around Léogâne and Grande Marre.R:47 It was perhaps as a trading partner that Romaine had repeatedly visited the plantation of Rene Guindet, and thus met Marie-Roze.R:47,T
: : : THE POWER COUPLE : : :
Whatever led to their meeting, the two fell over time in love, and Romaine would spend the next thirteen years working to free Roze and the three children they had in that time—ultimately saving 6,000 French pounds (livres) to buy them from Guindet on August 10, 1785.R:46-48 Twelve days later, on August 22, they married, taking advantage of a clause in the Code Noir that freed slaves and their children if they wed their owners.T,R:46-47,236
Roze was 43 when they married, and Romaine a decade younger, roughly 34.R:46 Of their three children, all named for the Virgin Mary, Louis-Marie was 11, Pierre-Marie was 9, and daughter Marie-Jeanne was 7.T,R:46-47,236 Romaine owned 40 carreaux or about 127 acres of land at Trou Coffy, two horses, and two humans; Roze owned clothes and jewellery and other items worth nearly 900 pounds.R:46-47,55
Two years later, when Marie-Louise (Roze’s first daughter) married a free Black man in 1787, Romaine—listed on the certificate as her stepparent—promised to buy the newlyweds a pair of Africans for themselves off the next slaver ship to arrive in Léogâne.T Over time, however, Roze appears to have radicalized the planter, ultimately convincing Romaine—especially as racial tensions in the colony increasingly mounted—to identify with enslaved Black people like she had been over other, white members of the wealthy slave-owning class.Q
Together, Roze and Romaine became one of the colony’s power couples, respected in the region.R:49,Q Between 1785 and 1791, they served (individually or together) as godparents to eleven people, linking them to several other families in a culture that attached great weight to such socio-legal connections.R:49 The two also served as witnesses to at least one marriage, and befriended three successive priests of the parish of Léogâne.R:49,135,232
Though notarial and parochial records consistently describe Romaine as illiterate, or at least unable to make a signature, and other records say the same of Marie-Roze, each seems to have been at least otherwise well-educated, and aside from correspondence with various priests, Romaine would later produce other written documents (ostensibly from the Virgin Mary).R:49,R9,R8:350-352,T
: : : THE TWO REVOLUTIONS : : :
In the fall of 1791, as tensions between white and Black islanders increased towards open conflict and became the Haitian Revolution, Joseph-Marie Tavet (one of the region’s richest and most powerful residents) gathered a hundred armed men at his plantation near Trou Coffy,R:27-31,49 a place called Coq qui Chante.e,R:91 Fearing “the mistreatment that the whites of the colony never ceased to mete out against the people of color” and feeling obliged to protect them, Roze and Romaine called on all of their friends and community connections to gather with arms at Trou Coffy.R:31,49,J The group of Black and poor white allies who assembled there significantly outnumbered Tavet’s gang.R:31,49,J
Over several days beginning on or around September 24, 1791, this gathering pre-emptively attacked Tavet’s plantation, injuring several of the slave-drivers, and eventually burning the plantation to the ground.R:32
With this shocking raid, two revolutionary actions began.
The first was the Haitian Revolution in the south, ignited there at nearly the same time as the legendary vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman kindled it in the north. As news of their raid on Tavet’s plantation spread, thousands of men and women flocked to Trou Coffy in what became a general uprising against slavery.R:32-34,48-49,Bs Short-sighted slave-owners’ deadly maltreatment of their slaves and greedy, merciless abduction of ever more into the island meant that at the time this Revolution began, nearly half of the colony’s population had known life as free people in Africa, and many had military experience, having fought and been caught in the wars in the Congo.C:16
The second, and much more personal, revolution that began then was Romaine’s coming-out.Q
 | |
| Romaine-la-Prophétesse |
She told the world she was possessed of a female spirit, explaining it in much the same terms in which some vodouisants today talk of being possessed by divinities of another sex.R2,C:51 She began to dress and act in a flamboyant, feminine way, and wear “women’s” clothes with many ribbons and rosaries.f,R:52,A,F4,F5 (Whether naturally or from careful shaving, she had no beard.R:51) She said the Virgin Mary was her godmother,g,P and it was at this point that she adopted her now-notorious name: Romaine-la-Prophétesse—Romaine the Prophetess, prominently using the feminine rather than the masculine form.R2,R4
Leading biographer Terry Rey and I connect Romaine to the transgender feminine religious figures of West Central Africa,R4,R:52-53 as, it seems, did many of her followers who were born there. Although Romaine was not born in the Congo herself, her parents may have been, and many of those who flocked to her, like the majority of slaves in Haiti, certainly were.R:27,158,Rm,Ki They saw her as a healer with herbal remedies and a prophetic figure in the mold of generations of Congolese prophets.R2,R:59-66
Some biographers, and perhaps followers, have also compared her to the Congolese Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who professed to be the incarnation of a male Catholic saint, as both of their religious self-identifications “transcended gender” (or perhaps simply transed gender).R2,R4
Rey and Mary Grace Albanese write that Romaine was indeed perhaps transgender herselfA,R:52 or, Rey speculates (saying that letters Romaine dictated use masculine pronouns to refer to the Prophetess),RP perhaps genderfluid.R:52-53 (The latter could be lent further credence if Romaine did, as critics of questionable veracity claimed, propose to be “king” of Saint Domingue,F or identify specifically as a “godson” of Mary.g,R:58-59,P Alternatively, she might have been bigender.Q) Rey cautions that applying a term like “transgender” could be anachronistic,A,R:52 though he shows no similar qualms about the use of words like “men” and “women” to describe French-speaking hommes and femmes who in many cases never described themselves with those words and would not have even understood them (or understood the English language at all).j,Q
: : : RELIGION : : :
Contemporary and later critics often alleged that Romaine only opportunistically adopted prophetesshood and feigned her religious faith merely as a means to fan the fires of fanaticism, but she had in fact long been religious, seeking the friendship of priests for years.R:49 She and Marie-Roze had named all three of their children after the Virgin MaryR:47 (this Marianism was, itself, typically Congolese in form),R:27,158,Rm and it was indeed her piety and desire to have a priest in her camp which one of her enemies would later exploit to gain and then betray her trust.R:159 Rey argues that to describe her “own identity, it is most likely that [Catholic] would be among the most defining descriptors [she] would choose.”R:47,56
Like many Haitians, however, Romaine blended her Roman religion with West African practices and beliefs.R:63,247 Some writers have called her outright a vodou priest or priestess,P,R4,R:59-66,Fo while others have argued that “not one reference to this leader can be found that even vaguely suggests genuine African voodoo practices”F (though in fact her herbalism is one such suggestion, and at least one contemporary directly said the Prophetess combined Catholic ideas and what he called “superstitions from Africa”).R:63,R8:353-354
In truth, she existed at the very time vodou was just emerging as a distinct layer of religion.P,R4,R:59-66 Her religious practices differed from Makandal’s, Dutty Boukman’s, and others’, but as Rey argues, “it would be fallacious to conclude therefore that [she] was not practicing Vodou—or, perhaps, that any of these figures were practicing Vodou—for during the revolutionary period [...] there was more variety than uniformity” in the syncretic, part-African, part-Caribbean, part-Catholic religion.R8:353-354
Thus it was that in a small chapel at Trou Coffy, Romaine said Mass with a sword in hand,R2,R:57-59 and from the tabernacle, produced written messages that she said came from the Virgin Mary, announcing that God was Black and that his mother had ordered the overthrow of slavery and white supremacy.F,R:1,58-59,62,JP Mary, Romaine said, wanted those gathered at Trou Coffy to be free, and to free all those still held on the island as slaves.F,R:1,58-59,62,JP To fulfil this moral imperative, the insurgents took weapons and supplies from—and often burned down—slavers’ plantations and other businesses.R:32-35 With sabres, they maimed or killed slave-owners, symbolically (and pragmatically) cut their whips, and told enslaved people that the king had freed them.R:32-35
: : : THE REACTION : : :
Outraged at the challenge to their authority and the threatened “theft” of the people they considered their property, the white and slave-owning free Black leaders of the important southern city of Jacmel sent a delegation of forty men towards Trou Coffy, backed by several brigades of the maréchaussée: armed, horse-mounted police forces usually employed to catch escaped slaves.R:34
Ostensibly, these delegates were to negotiate a peace treaty, and some authors have speculated that they decided only en route to attempt to subdue Trou Coffy by force.R:34 More likely, however, an attack was their real intention from the start, given their expansive armed escort,Q and that the man who sent them was Joseph-Marie Tavet himself, the man who had first threatened Romaine and Roze and thus ignited the rebellion, who had escaped their destruction of his plantation and become the mayor of Jacmel not long thereafter.h,R:95-96
Couriers carried these attackers’ request for assistance to Léogâne.R:34 Romaine and Roze defended themselves with overwhelming force. In late 1791, with thousands of armed free Black and white and formerly-enslaved insurgents, the couple cut down the countryside plantations that supported both cities, and lay siege to first one port and then the other.R:14,52,F
By November 1791, more than three thousand insurgents had begun to encircle Jacmel in a ring of satellite camps commanded from Trou Coffy.R:14,39 Their numbers increased over time, as many of the people they rescued from slavery on the surrounding plantations joined their siege, blocking supplies and searching travellers to the city.i,R:14,39 By Christmas, these forces had established an important base on the former DesMarattes plantation from which their cannons, some captured from their colonizers, could fire on the port.R:39 This camp was commanded by another of the Trou Coffy rebellion’s leading lights, a Black man named Alexandre Boursiquot.R:39
In January, Jacmel counter-attacked. On the 4th, the city’s dragoons retook the recently raided La Conte plantation after a fierce fight, pushing the rebels back to DesMarattes.R:40 On the 17th, they attacked the important Camp Pasquet,R:40 the commanding site from which Toussaint Louverture would base his own siege of the city seven years later,R:235 and which was commanded at that time by the area’s literal as well as figurative Big Fish, a Black man named Gros Poisson who was said by the whites to be a particularly fierce fighter.R:130 The dragoons again managed to push the insurgents back to DesMarattes and captured two cannons at a cost of five of their own men—but while the city’s forces and focus were there, the rebels pounced on the Cyvadier plantation in the east, cutting Jacmel off from a source of water in the river to the east.R:40-43
: : : THE “MIS-”ALLIES : : :
The man who led that pounce, and directed Trou Coffy’s fight for Jacmel, was a poor white—a petit blanc—named Delisle de Bresolle.R:39-43 Third or fourth in command of the overall uprising under Romaine, he was noted by his allies and enemies alike for his “mortal hatred” of racism and his ruthless violence against the rich men of all races who profited from it.R:39-43 Initially, he ransomed captured slavers in exchange for rebels the city held prisoner, but when further exchanges proved unforthcoming, he asked a delegation of the city’s masters to a meeting, ostensibly to negotiate, and then killed as many as he could,R:39-40 because anyone who would wage war to keep owning other humans did not deserve to live.Q
French officials denounced the man and the move (which killed seven slavers) as “deceitful”,R:43 a description he deserved only as much as they did, for such dishonest invitations to “negotiate” were a tactic they themselves used and would repeat most notoriously a decade later to lure Toussaint Louverture to the meeting where they arrested him. The French also denigrated Delisle as a “mésallié”,R:39-43 a word of double meaning, suggesting both that he had “misallied” by siding with Romaine and that he had “married beneath his station” because he wed and thus freed a Black fellow freedom-fighter, like Romaine did Roze.R:43,133
Like the Prophetess, Delisle believed a radical kind of Catholicism, and brought two similarly radical white priests into her fold to great effects.R:43 First, he recruited Jérôme Blacé, parish priest of Cayes Jacmel, who came to stay among the insurgents and perform marriages for them, most radically ones on the model of Roze and Romaine’s own: marriages (perhaps including Delisle’s) between free men and rebel women who were thus legally manumitted, without their ostensible owners’ approval or state taxation—something for which the French considered him a traitor.R:43-44,131-133 Second, Delisle befriended the radical Abbé Aubert of Marigot, who commandeered that city’s three cannons, powder, and shot for Trou Coffy, forged loading rods for them himself in the captured Cyvadier plantation’s forge, and directed them to the hills above Jacmel to target that city’s fort, at the same time as he helped the rebels build a fort of their own in Marigot.R:41-44,129-133
: : : LIBERATING JACMEL AND LÉOGÂNE : : :
By January 19, Romaine’s forces had stationed nine more cannons close to Jacmel, for a total of twelve, and at six o’clock that morning, began to bombard the city.R:41 Dragoons attempted to counter-attack, but the rebels ambushed them and forced them to retreat, and that night snuck into Jacmel with torches and firebombs, burning over 130 houses and businesses in the northern and northwestern quarters.R:14,41,52,F Delisle led a contingent to the church and courthouse, taking up positions in a house near the fort, hoping the fire would smoke its soldiers out.R:41 Though it did not, Trou Coffy’s forces now completely surrounded the city and fort, upon which they kept up attacks through February.R:41-42
Meanwhile, on the northern shore of the peninsula around Léogâne, to which Romaine had increasingly turned her own attention as 1791 had drawn to a close, many slave-owners fled as insurgents burned their plantations there as well.R:42,97,153 Liberating thousands of Black Haitians from the plantations and jails that dotted the peninsula, and swelling in this way their own ranks,R:97 Trou Coffy’s forces encircled the city, blocked all shipping to its port, and starved the slavers inside until they could no longer sustain even minimal resistance.k,R:97,153,F,D
Though the masters had hoped to hold out until they could be reinforced by France, they were compelled to sue for peace.R:96-98,153,F,D On their behalf and that of the free Black confederacy, which also desired an end to the violence, the white French Catholic priest and doctor Félix Pascalis Ouvière travelled to Trou Coffy to seek a structured peace.Z
The treaty he negotiated on Christmas Day, 1791,J,F was “unprecedented not only in Saint-Domingue but also in the entire revolutionary Atlantic world”: it put a Black leader and her formerly-enslaved wife in charge of one of a European colony’s most important cities, the rich port of Léogâne.R:14,52,96-98,106,152-154 Romaine, the Black trans woman—or, as the mayor privately decried her, “the hermaphroditic tiger”—was named Commander of the city’s inhabitants.R:52-53,96-98,152-154
That mayor, the royalist de Villards (the city’s leading white voice), had been named to his post in November in a deal between the local whites and the political and military leaders of the free Black confederacy based in Port-au-Prince, Pierre Pinchinat and André Rigaud.R:96 With the additional approval of Trou Coffy, he remained in his post,F,R:69,96-98,101 but it was Romaine who issued the orders to “all whites and persons of color”, including de Villards.R:98
Where the whites of Saint-Domingue had formerly banned Black people from carrying weapons or assembling without slave-masters’ permissions, they now found the tables turned.R:98 Trou Coffy confiscated their weapons and issued a prohibition, enforced by attentive guards, against their assembling.R:98 Rich men who had all their lives kept others in chains (and sometimes in nothing but their own skin,Ga comparing clothing enslaved Black people to clothing livestock)Bu now whined that they felt like hostages inside their own (sometimes opulent) homes.R:98 Conservative free Blacks like Pinchinat were also appalled, feeling Romaine was too far left (and jeopardized their position in the economic hierarchy and the eyes of whites), and disliking the Prophetess as an immigrantl and (they felt) a religious fanatic.R:151,157
By February, however, Trou Coffy’s strategy of relentless deadly bombardment and starvation had successfully forced Jacmel’s masters, too—like Léogâne lacking reinforcements—to surrender the city and fort.R:14,43,52,134,F
Romaine, as Rey put it, now “possessed more power over a large swath of West Province than any single [person] on the ‘so flourishing island’ ever had”.R:103-106 Trou Coffy’s control reached everywhere from Léogâne on the north shore of the peninsula to Jacmel on the southern one, from Marigot, 25 kilometers east of Jacmel, to Bainet,m 45 kilometers to the west of it, where Trou Coffy’s successes against Jacmel had inspired local slaves to kill their masters and join the rebellion.R:32-34,36,48-49 Roze and Romaine and their myriad supporters had liberated thousands of the island’s inhabitantsR:97 and pressured slave-masters even elsewhere in southern Haiti to make concessions to those slaves who did not revolt, giving them two days a week off from forced work.D
But although Haiti’s revolutionaries and abolitionists would ultimately succeed, this chapter of the fight was already nearing an end.R:103-106
: : : A CHANGE OF SIDES AND FORTUNES : : :
Two factors were crucial to Trou Coffy’s change of fortunes. The first was the arrival of reinforcements for their enemies from France. The second was the increasing alliance of the island’s free-born Black slave-owners with their white class-allies over their enslaved Black skinfolk.
Roze and Romaine’s charisma and community connections had initially helped keep reluctant conservative free Blacks in the south on the couple’s side,R:31,49,152,J,F but among the slaves the pair had freed, and among the plantations they had burned, were those of rich and influential Black leaders like Léogâne’s Messrs. Lemaire, Brunet, and Labuissonnière.n,R:96-97 These free-born Black Haitians had rebelled to secure their high status in the plantation society and economy, a very different goal from that of the self-freed slaves who wanted to secure their liberty.R:42
The rebellion was thus increasingly pulled by the latter towards revolution—and Trou Coffy, led increasingly leftward by the former slaves there (perhaps most particularly Roze),Q had come to embody a “far left-wing fringe” of it.R:39-43,129-130,157,F While a few poorer whites like Delisle and Aubert sided with the revolution, many of the conservative, confederated free people of color increasingly opposed it,R:39-43,129-130 and the more it attacked their own injustices and wealth as well, the more they came to desire an end to it by any means available.Z
When this conservative coalition of the colony’s slave-owning whites and Blacks was reinforced by the colonizer government in Paris, they saw a chance to suppress the slaves militarily, and seized it.R:96-98,103 Free Blacks broke ties with Trou Coffy and took sides with with the French commissioners who had arrived in the colony offering amnesty to insurgents who would “lay down their arms and cease their assaults”, and announcing they would put the rest down by force.R:42,157
Trou Coffy had learned of these commissioners’ arrival,R:42 and in particular that one, Edmond de Saint-Léger, was making his way to the capital city of Port-au-Prince, mustering troops with which to retake Léogâne.R:103,158-159
At the same time, sending forces not only to Léogâne but also Jacmel had spread Trou Coffy thin,R:101 and moreover, its leaders were losing control of their troops: ex-slaves who opposed any treaties with their former masters had begun to execute attacks of their own initiativeR:98,103-106 or desert.R:103,158-159 Custom in Haiti during the Revolution was for Black and white groups to solemnize treaties between them by celebrating a Te deum Mass,R:98 but during the one held back on New Year’s Day to seal the peace between Trou Coffy and Léogâne, insurgents no longer under the pious Prophetess’s control had disrupted the homily.R:98,101;222 Others continued attacks on slave-owners across the surrounding plain.R:98 Ouvière’s own unreliability was becoming apparent as well: just before the peace treaty was signed, and too late to stop it, Julien Raimond (another confederate leader) had learned of racist and seemingly royalist writings by Ouvière, and rightly realized that free people of color on either side of the treaty could no longer trust his intentions.R:167-168
Seeking to ally with free Black confederate forces led by André Rigaud, whose poorer soldiers esteemed the Trou Coffy insurgents as effective and dedicated freedom-fighters, Romaine ordered Léogâne to send food, clothes, and munitions to Rigaud’s camp near the capital.R:96,103 But citing the destruction wrought by the rebels even on the plantations of the confederacy’s slave-owning political leaders (his friends)—and despite the Prophetess’s attempts to distance herself from these movesR:102-103—Rigaud refused to ally with her.R:103
As Saint-Léger approached, Romaine’s second-in-command Elie Courlongeo,R:49,101 thus arrived in Léogâne with a new proposal for peace, claiming Trou Coffy would compel ex-slaves to return to their masters and chains, something to which the slave-drivers in Léogâne eagerly agreed.R:153-154 The freedom fighters, however, had no intention of doing any such thing: the treaty was an effort to buy time, in the hope the ex-slaves could catch Saint-Léger with his guard down.R:153-154
On the 12th of March, 1792, around 4 o’clock in the morning, Trou Coffy’s forces began a final raid on Léogâne, initially taking its defensive canons.p,R:154 Saint-Léger, however, moved with a swiftness that surprised both the attackers and his own allies, rallying white and free Black militiamen, whom he armed with French canons and muskets, repelling the slaves—many of whom had only melee weapons—from the city center and then, when they surrounded the city as if in a renewed siege, driving them off with fire from his frigate La Galathée.R:154-155
: : : RETREAT TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY : : :
According to hostile accounts, the retreating rebels torched Léogâne; other accounts say some whites had a hand in setting the fires.R:154,M,D Whatever the case, the ex-slaves then retreated into the country’s mountainous interior, where they hoped their enemies could not easily follow.R:155,D Looking out for his own skin (and skin color), however, Ouvière had double-crossed the Prophetess, and as soon as he left Trou Coffy after negotiating the peace treaty for Léogâne, he had provided a detailed description of the camp site to the colonial government, which was almost certainly given to Saint-Léger.R:158-159
With this intelligence, the colonizer commissaire located and decisively destroyed the site on March 25, 1792, with a battalion of 400 men led by two free Black men named Singlar and Baptiste Boyer.R:137,155-159,Sl He captured and arrested Marie-Roze and her daughter Marie-Jeanne, and “restored [many of] the Negroes to [enslavement on] the plain”, though many rebels escaped, including Romaine, like countless Congolese and Haitian freedom fighters before her.R:137,155-159,Sl,MF Many of the escapees likely joined the Black confederate army; others, perhaps even Romaine herself, likely became maroons and joined later, ultimately successful battles for Haitian freedom and independence.R:155
A letter dated April 12, 1792, published in the Mercure de France and likely written by Ouvière, states that the Prophetess not only evaded capture but “still preaches”R:157,MF—and, it seems, may have known of Ouvière’s betrayal.Q,R:270 At the end of March, three hundred armed Blacks attacked the Foucault plantation at Bois Blanc, 65 km west of Léogâne, where Ouvière was staying, prompting Rey to wonder if the assault “might have been orchestrated by Romaine as [...] revenge against a traitor.”R:270,MH After 1792, however, nothing further is known of the Prophetess to history.R:6,158
: : : HISTORIOGRAPHY : : :
Contemporaneous and subsequent white accounts of Romaine were long hostile. French officials considered Romaine’s claim to have a feminine spirit “ridiculous”,R2,C:51 and regarded the Prophetess as a “villain”, a “maniac”, or an “adventurer”.R:59-66 Other writers have exoticized Romaine as a “sorceror” or “shaman”.R:59-66 Victor Hugo’s first novel, Bug-Jargal, characterizes Romaine-la-Prophétesse as a man and a charlatan, while Mayra Montero’s more recent fiction, In the Palm of Darkness, has her as a bloodthirsty reanimated woman leading a pack of zombies.R:219,PB Some recent historians, like Mary Grace Albanese and Hourya Bentouhami, however, count Romaine-la-Prophétesse among the women who led the Haitian Revolution.A,Be Over time, I can only hope it will be recognized that Romaine and Roze were as important in that Revolution’s southernmost theatre as the more well-known men who led its ultimately successful uprisings from further north.
: : : FOOTNOTES : : :
- [a] A minority of references and various records instead use the masculine spelling Romain,TH,T and because the planter was born on the Spanish side of Hispaniola, biographer Terry Rey suggests the French records may be giving the name, and those of Romaine’s parents, in gallicized form in any case—though it is also possible the family was originally from the French side, and only moved to the Spanish side prior to Romaine’s birth, and the French spellings are original.R:48 (Laurent Dubois, in Avengers of the New World (2009), erroneously gives Romaine’s “official” name with the chosen name’s article interpolated, as Romaine la Rivière, “Romaine the river”.)
- [b] A few records instead describe Romaine as a “griffe”: three-fourths Black and one-fourth white.R:27,51,57,P Racial classification in the French colony was not as clear as in Spanish or British colonies, and people of “mixed race” could be either white or Black.R:27,51,Sc Romaine, however, was clearly counted as Black.R:27,51 Roze is describe in documents of the time as a “mulâtresse” (mulatta).R:51,57
- [c] Other spellings found in records and reference works include Trou-Coffi,L Trou Coffey,M Trou Caffee,D,R:155 and in older literature like Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, Trou-Coffé. “Trou” (“hole” in standard French) is used of many a small valley in Haiti, and though “Coffy” superficially resembles the English word “coffee”, it is quite unlike French or Spanish “café”: the valley was more likely named for an African called Kofi, which in French would be pronounced /kɔ.fi/, like “coffee”.
- [d] In Santo Domingo, at that time [1790], a third of the population of 125,000 were whites, a fifth were free Blacks, and just under half were enslaved Blacks.W
- [e] Rey (2017), p. 96, observes that although both Trou Coffy and Coq-qui-Chante were closer to Léogâne than to Jacmel, Tavet is listed as a representative of Jacmel in some negotiations in October 1791 of “peace treaties with free coloreds in Port-au-Prince”, and he became mayor of that city around that same time. Coq-qui-Chante (whether Tavet’s or a place homonymic with it) is elsewhere said to have been a rural commune of Jacmel, despite its geographic location: for example, S. Rouzier, Dictionaire géographique et administratif universel d’Haiti (1892), p. 51, speaks of “la section rurale du Coq-qui-chante, commune de Jacmel”.
- [f] Ouvière added that Romaine wore a turban, but it is unclear if there was any difference between this and other islanders’ customary headwraps besides the Frenchman’s hostile slant; he said she looked like “a prophet of the Roman religion [in] the clothing of a Turk”,R:52 and later denounced her as “the Muhammad of Saint Domingue”, continuing his efforts to paint her in a negative and Islamic light.R:31-32,159)
- [g] French in that era had no grammatically-gender-neutral word for “godchild” (nor for many other things), and used grammatically-masculine terms as the default or “unmarked” terms. Thus, while Romaine would have been aware that the term “prophétesse” was markedly feminine, and seems to have intended this (given that she adopted that designation around the same time as women’s clothes), it is unclear whether any use of a grammatically-masculine but potentially unmarked term “filleul” (rather than the feminine homophone “filleule”) should be read as merely stating a relationship, that she was a “godchild” of Mary, or as a gendered identification as a “godson” specifically, though the decision not to use feminine terms uniformly would stand out. (Some options for gender-neutral word formation in more modern French are covered in Florence Ashley, “Les personnes non-binaires en français”, in H-France Salon, volume 11, issue 14, #5 (2019).)
- [h] Les papiers du général A. N. de La Salle, Saint-Domingue 1792-93 (the papers of Adrien Nicolas Piedefer, marquis de La Salle, 1897), p. 48, has some of Tavet’s correspondence as mayor.
- [i] On one occasion, they even stopped J. P. M. Bloüet, the city’s priest: but the rebels, like their leaders Roze and Romaine, were often religious, and although not recognizing him personally, they let him pass upon recognizing his church robes.R:14,39,264 (See also: “Rapport fait à l’assemblee coloniale le 14 fev 1792, signé J. P. M. Bloüet, Curé de Jacmel.”)
- [j] Compare the point by Leah: one should not “historicize and deconstruct the ‘transgender’ category when you have not finished and promoted the harder labor of historicizing and deconstructing ‘male’ and ‘female’ sex categories. Cis cultural anthropologists, leave trans people alone. What concepts we choose to relativize and what concepts we choose to universalize are functions of power.”
- [k] Critics alleged terrible war crimes, claiming rebels killed sixty people in the city hospital in December 1791, or mistreated “matrons, virgins, and infants”.R:97
- [l] Some scholars indeed suggest that free Blacks may have been among the few islanders to feel that Haiti or Saint-Domingue was their home, as many rich whites were in it only for profit, and African-born people often longed to return there,N which could explain Pinchinat’s dislike of Romaine’s migration to Saint-Domingue from the Spanish half of the island.Q
- [m] Bainet is spelled “Bayenette” in some records, suggesting a different pronunciation may have been used at the time (with the final t pronounced) than the one modern French orthographic-phonetic rules and the Hatian Creole spelling “Benè” suggest, /bɛ̃.nɛ/. (Saint-Léger, in a report, even (mis)spells in Daynette.)R:36,Sl
- [n] This man, whose first name was JulienPF and whose last name is spelled Labuissonnière in many records,Ga,Ma,Md though la Buissonnière in some,R:96 was influential enough to serve as mayor of Léogâne at one point in the 1790s.Ma
- [o] Elie’s surname is given in Saint-Léger’s report,Sl Madiou’s history,Md and a number of other old books, as Courlonge, while Rey, who consulted the man’s letters, consistently gives it as Courlogne.
- [p] A minority of works, e.g. S. Rouzier, Dictionaire géographique et administratif universel d’Haiti (1928), p. 152, misstate or mistype the raid on Léogâne as being in March 1795, which may be why The Louverture Project wiki erroneously says Romaine died in 1795. Madiou has the correct date (the night of 11‒12 March 1792),Md as does e.g. Jules François Saintoyant, La colonisation français pendant la révolution (1789-1799) (1930), p. 99, Jean Bouchary, Les faux-monnayeurs sous la révolution française (1946), p. 23, and Rey.
- [q] Parts of this post were previously published on a WMF site (see history there for attributions).
: : : REFERENCES : : :
- A = Mary Grace Albanese, “Unraveling the Blood Line: Pauline Hopkins’s Haitian Genealogies”, in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, volume 7, number 2, Fall 2019, p. 234.
- Be = Hourya Bentouhami, “Notes pour un féminisme marron. Du corps-doublure au corps propre”, in Comment s’en sortir? 5, 2017, p. 111.
- Br = Jim Bradshaw, The Saint-Domingue Revolution, 64 Parishes.
- Bs = Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The breached citadel (2004 [1990]), p. 60.
- Bu = Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves (2015), p. 266 (on slaveowners in Jamaica).
- C: = Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (2011), p. ___.
- D = James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution (2016), pp. 65–67.
- F = Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (1990), p. 128.
- F4 = Maria Cristina Fumagalli et al. (eds.), The Cross-Dressed Caribbean (2014), p. 11.
- F5 = Fumagalli, Maria Cristina; On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015), pp. 66 and 111.
- Fo = Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons / Marrons de la Liberté (1981), p. 225.
- Ga = J. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (2006), p. 241 and, for Labuissonnière, p. 373 (quoting Raimond, Julien. Copie de la lettre écrite par M. Raymond, aux citoyens de couleur de St.-Domingue, le 8 avril 1792, et adressée à M. Labuissonnière, à Léogane. Port-au-Prince: J.B. Michel [ca. September], 1792.).
- He = David Head, Encyclopedia of the Atlantic World, 1400–1900 (2017), pp. 141–143.
- Hm = Harry Harmer, Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation and Civil Rights (2014), pp. 192–193.
- Hr = Melville Jean Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (2007), p. 3.
- J = Erica Johnson, “Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana”, in The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective (2017), ed. by Bryan Banks, Erica Johnson, p. 54.
- Ja: = C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (2nd ed., 1963), p. ___.
- JP = Erica Johnson, Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution (2018), p. 27.
- Ki = Stewart R. King, Blue Coat Or Powdered Wig (2011), p. 97.
- Ko = Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth (1992), pp. 9, 83-84, 139.
- L = Pamphile vicomte de Lacroix, Pierre Pluchon, La Révolution de Haïti (1995), p. 111.
- M = Matthias Middell, Megan Maruschke, The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization (2019), p. 71.
- Ma = Col. Malenfant, Des colonies: et particulièrement de celle de Saint-Domingue... (1814), p. 84(-85): “Lapointe avait gagné le mulâtre Labuissonnière, maire de Léogane”.
- Md = Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (1847), pp. 97-98.
- MF = “Lettre au Rédacteur: Extrait d’une lettre de St. Marc, 12 avril 1792”, in the Mercure de France of 2 June 1792, pp. 69+; p. 71: “Romaine, qu’on a manqué, & qui reprêche encore”.
- MH = Mémoire historique des derniers revolutions des provinces de l’ouest et du Sud (2 June 1792), printed on its own (in which, see p. 114), as well as in the Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 (in 1894; in which, see p. 537).
- N = David Nicholls, Haiti In Caribbean Context, pp. 87–88.
- O = A. Oliver-Smith, “Haiti and the historical construction of disasters”, in the NACLA Report on the Americas (2010).
- P = Colin A. Palmer, Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (2006), pp. 1972–3.
- PB = Persephone Braham, From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America (2015), p. 160.
- PF = Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free (2010), p, 401, quoting “Labuissonnière, Julien, Adresse à la convention nationale, à tous les clubs et sociétés patriotiques, pour les Nègres... (Paris: Galletti, 1793).”
- Q = This is my own conclusion.
- R: = Terry Rey, The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World (2017), p. ___.
- R8: = Terry Rey, “The Virgin Mary and Revolution in Saint-Domingue: The Charisma of Romaine-la-Prophétesse” (1998), in the Journal of Historical Sociology, volume 11, issue 3, p. ___ (341–369).
- R9 = Terry Rey, Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti (1999), p. 140.
- R2 = Terry Rey, “Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism”, in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2002), ed. by Linda M. Heywood, pp. 270–271.
- R4: = Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (2014), pp. 119–120.
- RP = Rey, personal communication quoted on a WMF site.
- Rm = Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (2014), p. 45.
- Sc = Mark Schuller, Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (2016), p. (?)20.
- Sl = Report of Saint-Léger from 2 June 1792, published in 1894 in the Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, p. 510.
- Sp = A. G. Sepinwall, M. G. Vann, “Making French Connections: France in World History”, in the World History Bulletin (2010).
- T = Robert D. Taber, The Mystery of Marie Rose: Family, Politics, and the Origins of the Haitian Revolution, 6 January 2016, Age of Revolutions.
- TH = The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (2014), p. 95.
- W = Thomas E. Weil, Area Handbook for the Dominican Republic (1973), p. 36.
- Z = F,J,L,TH,R8:351,355-356,R:96-98 (abbreviated to Z for brevity).
(Edit, 28 October 2020: I was asked if this essay could be cited: yes, absolutely.)
No comments:
Post a Comment