Caribbean by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780804151535
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2014-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

During these momentous years when France struggled through the death throes of an ancient regime without finding a way to forge a new, the historic island of Hispaniola, where Columbus once ruled and where he was buried, was divided in curious ways—the result of a decision made almost a century earlier. The rather flat, unproductive eastern portion, Santo Domingo, was Spanish; the mountainous western part, St.-Domingue,† was French. Eastern spoke Spanish, western French; eastern, whose fine, flat lands might have been expected to produce bounteous crops, yielded little, while the rough and difficult lands of the west produced the world’s most valuable sugar crop; and, in some ways most important of all, Santo Domingo was populated with Spanish mulattoes, St.-Domingue with such an abundance of African slaves that at times it seemed an all-black colony.

In the still-orderly year of 1783, in a small town in the French portion of the island a barbershop of mean dimension was operated in a grudging manner by a young Frenchman who seemed designed by both birth and development to be a prototype of the world’s average man, for he lacked any outstanding feature that would have distinguished him from the general mob. Victor Hugues (last name OO-geh) was then twenty-one, reputedly the son of petty merchants in Marseilles, but there was some confusion about this because he had an olive complexion, neither white nor mulatto but halfway between, and regardless of where he went, the rumor spread: ‘Hugues is part African. His mother must have been careless, Marseilles being a port town and all that.’

He was of average height or slightly under, and of average weight or just a bit over. He had good teeth except for one missing on the left, a ratty type of hair of no distinct color, and a habit of staying off to one side and watching to see how an argument was proceeding, then suddenly intervening with great vigor and some skill in haranguing those opposed to the side he had arbitrarily taken. He did not read much, but he listened with the acute skill of a preying animal, and one thing was certain above all others: he was brave, always willing to flail about when debate descended into blows, and if he lost one tooth in such brawling, his opponents lost mouthfuls. He was a fearful adversary, and would allow nothing to stand in his way.

How had he wound up in a St.-Domingue barbershop? Early in his life his parents had given up trying to make anything decent of him, and he had responded by slipping down to the Marseilles docks and offering himself to the first ship heading anywhere. Since it was destined for Mexico, he went there, and at age seventeen was doing the waterfront work of a man. Later he drifted to various exotic ports of the Caribbean, but regardless of where he went or in what capacity, he manifested the only characteristic that made those around him take notice: early in life he

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