(2024); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015).
Daut applied the “Page 99 Test” to The First and Last King of Haiti and reported the following:
On page 99, I am in the process of describing the French colonists’ murderous response to the beginning of the Black freedom struggle to end slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that we now call the Haitian Revolution. One of the architects of the initial August 1791 freedom strike was a man named Boukman. In retaliation for the fact that he and the other freedom fighters set fire to the northern plain in less than one month, the colonists put a bounty on his head. Unfortunately, this offer of monetary compensation succeeded when a colonist named M. Michel brought the decapitated freedom leader’s head to French officials and claimed the promised 6,000 colonial livres. Because the hotel where Christophe worked in Saint-Domingue, called La Couronne, is centrally located in the colony’s principal port town, Cap-Français, I suggest that if Christophe remained employed there in the early days of the Revolution, he may have witnessed this flurry of revolutionary activity that ended with Boukman’s head posted on a pike as a warning to the other freedom fighters.Visit Marlene L. Daut's website.
At first glance, the page 99 test does not seem to work well for my book, which is about Christophe’s rise to King of Haiti in the post-revolutionary era, and his eventual downfall in 1820 due to a conspiracy that formed against him, resulting in his death. However, if we follow to the next page the story about Boukman, Cap-Français, and the French commissioners and soldiers who arrive in fall 1791 to stop the freedom struggle, something a bit remarkable happens. At the very end of page 100, I discuss how the remaining leaders of the post-Boukman freedom struggle, which included the famous Toussaint Louverture but not Christophe, attempted to negotiate with French authorities. In a letter they sent to French authorities in fall 1791 they state that if the French colonists give in to their freedom demands, “public prosperity will be reborn from its ashes.” This, of course, is a highly resonant and supremely relevant phrase, since as I wrote on this page, it “later became a part of Christophe’s motto as king of Haiti.”
The Page 99 Test: Awakening the Ashes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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