Stumbled across references to a couple of Toussaint-related productions. Danny Glover starred as TL in a production at Carnegie Hall on May 23rd of this year. Also, I had been aware of the play For Love of Freedom, produced in 2001 at the Robey theatre in LA, but not that it was a trilogy! Apparently, “FOR THE LOVE OF FREEDOM;TOUSSAINT THE SOUL part I in the year 2001. Part 2 if the Haitian trilogy, DESSALINE; THE HEART, was produced in 2002, and part three is slated for 2004.
Korngold p 101 Speculates on Toussaint's reason for choosing the name Louverture. I would prefer to avoid speculation on such things. Who knows whether Toussaint himself consciously knew the reason? Sometimes our psyches assimilate circumstances for us. Perhaps, though, Toussaint did see himself as a savior. Perhaps he was aware of himself as uniquely positioned to deliver emancipation. P 110 Toussaint claims to have spent 640,00 Francs of his own money.
I got my new PowerBook today, so I can hardly concentrate, but here goes... Korngold makes the astonishing claim that Toussaint was in on the revolution from the beginning in 1791! I'm stunned. I never heard this part before. According to Citizen Toussaint, the then-Governor of St. Domingue was convinced that the best way to quell any talk of independence among the plantation owners was to stage a slave revolt. The governor visited the Breda plantation, where Toussaint either volunteered or was suggested as a suitable candidate to organize the mock rebellion.
p 61 "[Toussaint} knew that the Negroes were oppressed not becase they were Negroes, but because they were weak. Epictetus and millions of other white men had been slaves. The chieftains who sold war prisoners and even their own subjects into slavery were of the same race as their victims. White planters were often cruel, but mulatto planters were said to be even worse." This quote is exactly what I've been looking for.
It's cold and rainy in Seattle today. The wind was whipping around this morning, rippling Puget Sound like a leaf blower on a puddle. I could see the snow-capped Olympics in the distance. Gosh, it's beautiful here. I spent the day with a couple of my current hobbies - IMAP, Blogging, and avoiding work. Still, I managed to get a fair amount done with my grandfather's files. I have set aside everything related to his actual writing or to marketing of the book.
I'm not sure what I want this site to be. I want it to track my progress with Toussaint research, yet I can see it's useful to capture other thoughts and ideas about my day as well. Question is, am I willing to share that with the world? I'm completely ignorant of what that might mean.
I spent a couple hours sorting through the rest of the cards that I found in one of the boxes my mom sent me from my grandfather's house. I sent a lot of stuff to my brother, ditched a bunch, and I still have a small boxful. It was quite the nostalgic adventure to sift through the cards. Most of them were from between 1967 (my birth year) and 1973. Some of the highlights:
I'm reading Ralph Korngold's Citizen Toussaint today. Uncle Jay says this book, published in 1944 seems to be the definitive book of Toussaint. The author certainly has good credentials and a chunky bibliography. Korngold was a French professor at one point and therefore was able to translate the French documents of the period.
On page 14, Korngold paints the picture of Le Cap as a bustling, transient village, with white men itching for the day they could leave and return to France. One wonders, if this is so, whether white planter's hearts would be in revolution, or whether they were only interested in protecting their investments.
From page 15, "...a free Negro would not have attempted to own a mulatto slave, who would have preferred death to such a humiliation." I wonder if this dynamic came into play with Toussaint. What were the racial tensions he had to deal with, besides the obvious black/whte ones?
I've spent the last 3 hours sorting Grandfather's Toussaint-related files. Man there's a bunch of stuff! My strategy is to separate all of Grandfather's writings, then organize the rest and use that as the supporting research to get me started. I'd love to get rid of a lot of this - looks like there's a lot of duplication - but I don't know what's important and what isn't just yet. I just know that there's a lot of it!
My girlfriend pointed out this newspaper article to me about the horrendous living conditions of modern Haitians, who are preparing to celebrate the 200th anniversary of independence as the world's first black republic. On the same page of that November 23rd, 2003, Seattle Times was this article about child slavery in Haiti. The first article, entitled "Haitians too poor to celebrate 200 years of freedom" (Letta Tayler, Newsday) describes the abject poverty suffered by the 8 million residents of that island nation.