The bloody birth of a nation
The Stone That the Builder Refused
By Madison Smartt Bell
Pantheon, 747 pp., $29.95
Short on history yet long on self-proclamation, America was never destined to inspire truly great novels about its past. There is no American Tolstoy, no Yankee Stendhal, because while historians argued and debated among themselves during the past half century, the United States slowly became a society where intellectuals do not matter. What passes as history in this country is actually what Roland Barthes dubbed myth, and novelists cannot compete with the great mythifying machine: television.
In this regard, it makes a certain kind of sense that the most powerful and complex historical epic to be written by an American since John Dos Passos's ''USA" trilogy should take place offshore, in Haiti. For the past 10 years, Madison Smartt Bell has been quietly amassing a masterpiece about this war-torn microcosm of our republic. The similarities are striking. It was in Haiti, after all, where large-scale genocide of Indians first began and where the idea of African slavery was hatched. American and Haitian history proceed from the same gash, but we've dealt with it in different ways.
While the United States fought a civil war, Haiti had the mother of all slave revolts. In 1791, the French colony imploded when 500,000 slaves revolted in response to the brutal conditions that had killed nearly 25,000 each year for the past 100 years. By 1803 they had expelled whites from the island, and thousands of colonists were massacred in the process. The key figure in this brief but potent victory was a 40-year-old former slave named Toussaint Louverture, who was eventually captured and died in prison. (His deputy continued to lead the revolt and declared independence in 1804, establishing Haiti as the first republic in the world to be led by a man of African descent.)
This dramatic period forms the backbone of Bell's epic. In 1995, he began with ''All Souls Rising," a hallucinatory novel about the slave revolt. Out of the ashes of this fire emerges his hero, Louverture, who animates ''Master of the Crossroads" (2000), which chronicled his rise to power. And now Bell brings this story to a close with his magisterial new novel, ''The Stone That the Builder Refused," which covers the last two years of the revolutionary's life.
Bell has taken a prismatic war between cultures, races, nations, and religions and turned it into a cohesive narrative, a dazzling feat considering the complexities of the Haitian Revolution. Black slaves, white European plantation owners, free people of color, and people of mixed races were pitted against one another in this violent conflict. Without ever appearing to do so, Bell finds a way to dramatize each warring faction.
Bell's books come together because he has not one but two heroes. Louverture begins the trilogy as a coachman. But then he rises up, shrugs off the yoke of servitude, and explodes in a welter of anger that is shocking to his masters and readers, too. He is a husband and a father, a lover, and finally a revolutionary who would sacrifice his own flesh and blood, not to mention his religion, in order to achieve total freedom.
Bell's second hero is Dr. Antoine Hebert, a white Frenchman who is by Louverture's side so much he begins to forget that he is white. Throughout the Machiavellian maneuvers of the last novel, he acts as Louverture's secretary and, essentially, the eyes and ears of Bell's readership.
''The Stone That the Builder Refused" opens with Louverture's imprisonment in a French garrison on the Swiss border. It is October 1802, and the great general is slowly coming to the realization that this is where he will die. Bell then cuts back in time to relive the sequence of events that led to Louverture's capture. This takes us back to 1801, when Hebert was trying to quell an epidemic of yellow fever that nearly obliterated the town of Cap Français.
Hebert eventually gets the epidemic under control, and it seems these people have escaped the worst of the violent struggles. Louverture has written a constitution and sent it off to Napoleon, a document that would abolish slavery and permit the three racial groups to live in peace. He expects this to be quickly ratified, but what he gets in return is Napoleon's wrath. Warships are dispatched for the island carrying troops.
What follows from here is an astonishing, virtuoso display of historical imagination. The book re-creates with stunning authority the day-to-day grind of battle. Schemes are hatched and dismissed, generals and agents betrayed, courage displayed and ignored. Chaos is evoked without being displayed in the tight prose.
And this is what makes Bell's achievement so magnificent. With assiduousness that does not flag even through the most detailed of battle scenes, he has taken this shadowy historical figure and revealed what is essential, heroic, and lasting in his legacy. Bell also allows him to carry contradictions to the bitter end. His Louverture is merciful, and yet his armies commit genocide. He fought to free slaves but sent them back to plantations as conscript labor, forbade the whip even though his deputy lashed prisoners with the best of them. This is what negative capability means today: being able to tell the heroic story of a nation's coming into being without smoothing over its failures, however brutal. Clearly, Bell has this ability in abundance. Now, if only writers with his energies would turn their attention to the American experiment.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
