Codes of Law and Bodies of Color

Abstract

Codes of Law and Bodies of Color Joan Dayan (bio) Because of the inhabitants’ conduct, we cannot count on the return of any prosperity for Saint-Domingue, since the terrible lesson the men have received has not been corrected. Everyone has their mulâtresse that they have brought up or just found, and with whom they are going to produce a new generation of mulattoes and quarterons destined to butcher our children. Here is what must happen . . . prescribe the destruction or the deportation of every free man and woman of color, after branding them on their two cheeks with an “L” which will mean Libre. . . . The Marquise de Rouvray, in exile from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, writing from New York to her daughter, Madame de Lostanges, 13 August 1793 Those who came to Saint-Domingue in the last years of the eighteenth century came to a country where definitions were defied as they were made, categories mixed up as more rigorous labels were invented. Describing the ambivalence of the creolizing process in Jamaica, first from the perspective of the majority, the poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite explains: “‘Invisible,’ anxious to be ‘seen’ by their masters, the elite blacks and the mass of free colourdes conceived of visibility through the lenses of their masters’ already uncertain vision, as a form of ‘greyness’—an imitation of an imitation.” 1 Then, turning to the white colonials, he addresses not the troubled transparency of the masters’ lenses, but their mirror of projection: “White attitudes to slaves and to slavery were therefore, in a subtle, intimate manner, also white attitudes and sentiments about themselves. . . . They simply looked into a black mirror of subordinate flesh” (179). The ambivalence that threatened the codified structures of the Jamaican colonial system was exaggerated in Saint-Domingue. Regarded [End Page 283] as the “Babylon of the Antilles,” “a second Sodom,” or the most beautiful colony in the Americas by European visitors and residents, Saint-Domingue was known for its splendor, profligacy, and greed. Though the society boasted its caste-like distinctions (grands blancs, petits blancs, free coloreds, slaves, and aristocrats, what one historian called “the oldest blood of France”), the overwhelming opposition seemed to be between whites and nonwhites. 2 It seemed that no matter your status, distinctions disappeared if you had white skin. As Baron de Wimpffen wrote on the eve of the French Revolution: “The natural consequence of the order of things which prevails here, is, that all those titles of honour which are elsewhere, the pabula of emulation, of rivalry, and of discord; which inspire so much pride, and create so many claims in some; so much ambition and envy in others; shrink to nothing, and entirely disappear before the sole title of WHITE. It is by your skin, however branded it may be, and not by your parchment, however worm-eaten, that your pretensions to gentility are adjusted.” 3 Yet even this categorical exclusivity was riddled with qualifications. Though small in number, the white population—ancestors of buccaneers, filibusters, and nobles—was divisive and contentious, changing with every new influx of “French” settlers and calling into question the meaning of national identity. 4 Abbé Raynal, writing in 1785, described an inchoate place with anomalous individuals: “Ordinarily, we seek for the character of a people in its national point of view; but, in San Domingo, there is no real ‘people,’—only a mass of individuals, with common interests but isolated viewpoints. Even the Creole is not always an American; he is a Gascon or Provençal, if he has chanced to learn his father’s dialect or imbibe his principles.” 5 The wrangling between Creole whites (those born in the colonies) and European whites, whether aristocrats or vagabonds—what Lieutenant Howard in his Haitian Journal (1796–1798) called “a ramasse of every description” 6 —not unlike the discord between Creole blacks and “Congo” blacks—would determine how the French Revolution played itself out in Saint-Domingue. The conflict also infected relations between the sexes. European ladies ridiculed Creole ladies; the Creoles discounted the affectation of those polished remnants of the old regime; while the men, according to many observers, simply chose their mulatto mistresses. Baron de Wimpffen...