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Haiti's struggle, Toussaint revisited
Real estate news By Chauncey Mabe | Books Editor
February 13, 2008
Francois-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the father of Haitian independence, was by any measure a figure of towering historical significance. And yet, as Madison Smartt Bell discovered while conducting research for a possible novel about Haiti, no complete biography of Toussaint had appeared in English since Ralph Korngold's Citizen Toussaint in 1944. "I was surprised the whole Haitian revolution had not been mentioned in my education," says Bell from his home in Baltimore, where he teaches creative writing at Goucher College.
As Bell worked on what would become his monumental and acclaimed trilogy of novels about the Haitian revolution All Souls Rising (1995), Master of the Crossroads (2000), The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004) he discovered why Toussaint and his achievement were missing from American history books. "People in the American South, Martinique, Jamaica, they wanted to hush it up," Bell says. "They didn't want the idea of a successful overthrow of slavery to violence to proliferate. By the time of our Civil War, the story of Haitian independence had been systematically suppressed for three generations."
While writing the trilogy, Bell got the idea he could knock out a short biography of Toussaint with the information he had already acquired. Six months of additional research in France, however, led him to turn that notion into a full treatment of Toussaint's life. He liked Korngold's book, but a great deal of new information had come to light in the ensuing 60 years.
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