The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781624661792
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2014-09-03T06:00:00+00:00

41) Women in Rebellion

Contemporary documents provide little information on women slaves. The revolution was led and fought mainly by men. Among slaves who took refuge in the towns or abandoned rebel camps women apparently predominated. The following extracts, however, offer some rare and tantalizing glimpses that add nuance to this picture. So do some, even rarer, reports of female bodies in men’s clothing found on the battlefield.

(a) (August 1791) [The rebels] went to citizen Flaville’s plantation, where they found all the whites fast asleep. They killed four in the most barbarous manner…. A fifth white, a young refiner, was left for dead after he’d been shot twice with a pistol, in the wrist and high up on the shoulder. Afterwards some slave women gave themselves the barbaric pleasure of making him smell their private parts. The poor white then had the misfortune of showing some sign of life, and he was attacked again by these terrible harpies, who hit him with floor tiles. They kept threatening him and said, “If we knew you weren’t dead [sic], we would go and get the men to finish you off.” Finally, he had the strength of mind to play dead so well that they thought he was. They then went off leaving him racked by terrible pain.

(Archives Nationales, Paris, F3/141, 211, memoir by the Clément plantation attorney)

(b) (Fall 1791) The slave driver shot [the Galliffet estates’ attorney] Odelucq dead. He went to the kitchen, got an ax, and chopped off his head. Some slave women hit the head with bricks either out of hatred or out of fear that he might recover. An overseer hid in a slave woman’s hut. She helped him escape in disguise….

[In the camps] slave women mocked white women prisoners: “You are now my slave.” They made them serve them, and in particular they undressed them and whipped them on a ladder for minor offenses and on the slightest pretext. There was no outrage or torment to which the white women were not exposed by the Negroes. The least of which was nudity and all that concerns modesty….

[In battle,] they sometimes came forward dancing, shouting, and singing, preceded by a great number of women and children, who served as ramparts. They then let out a terrible yell seeking to intimidate.

(Médiathèque, Nantes, Ms. 1809, ff. 188, 193, 195, history by Listré)

(c) (Fall 1791) They revived the savage practices of their homelands. The women were the most cruel. They used rocks to kill off the dying, mutilating them in a thousand ways and ceasing only when the body was in pieces.

(Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, Ms. 113, f. 657, history by Tanguy)

(d) (Late 1791) We must give credit to the leaders of the Dondon camp; they never gave us cause for complaint. They allowed us a great deal of freedom, but it was not the same with the other Negroes, who vexed us on every possible occasion. The slave women were infinitely more insolent, harsher, and less willing to return to their duties than were the slave men.

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