King Christophe

BLACK MAJESTY--John W. Vandercook --Harpers ($2.50).

The Man. Haiti is a hot island, of listless winds, of low and cloudy mountains. Most of the people who live there are black or brown or yellowish because of their African blood; this was true also some hundred years ago, but then, beside the 500,000 sweating black slaves and the 24,000 effete, lazy, clever yellow freedmen, there were 40,000 whites--French planters, who danced and tippled in the big houses and ruled the island. Some of them often gathered in the billiard room of the Hotel de la Couronne where their scores were marked by a coal black nigger boy called Henry Christophe. He listened to their conversation, his clever gentle eyes following their shots with melancholy speculation. "They talked of their Negro mistresses and of the comely mulatto whores who supplied Cap null with whatever its quiet, oppressive nights had of glamour, passion, and forgetful laughter. . . ." Henry Christophe never interrupted his masters.

It was impossible that there should be peace on a crowded island with a population divided three times against itself. The blacks were the first to revolt. A man named Boukmann gathered his people in a forest, told them that the King of France had proclaimed three holidays every week for slaves, that an army was coming from France to make their masters obey. There was thunder in the sky above the woods, ". . . and, as if born of the darkness and storm, a giant Negress appeared in the midst of the crowded open space. A long knife gleamed wet in her upraised right hand, her naked body was streaked with rain." In August of 1793 Boukmann's rebellion started; a few days later it was over, the blacks had been beaten, a few of the proud houses had been burned to the ground. Henry Christophe watched the rebellion with careful sorrowing eyes, as he had watched the billiard games in the Hotel de la Couronne.

The failure of the rebellion was the beginning of a tragic and surprising war; battles were fought under the smoky sky, fugitives hid in the soft stillness of the mountains. A succession of dark generals led their ebony soldiers to cruel and bewildering victories. Ugly Toussaint, who beat a Napoleonic army, was captured and sent far away to die. Clumsy Jean Jaques Dessalines made himself emperor of the black island and imported two ballet masters to teach him how to dance; before he had time to learn, a soldier murdered him. Henry Christophe, the billiard marker, during all this time had done more than watch the sudden noisy game of war that his people were playing in the lazy island. He had learned how to write his last name and he had become a soldier, a general, a governor under Dessalines. When Dessalines died, Henry Christophe was made president for four years, then appointed King.

He ruled for nine years. His palace of Sans Souci had a brook that ran under it to cool the rooms. He imported two ladies from Philadelphia to take care of his children. With unique ingenuity, he literally found money growing upon trees and gave Haiti a stable currency. He encouraged trade, organized an enormous commerce in sugar, corresponded as an equal with European kings and built a fortress, on the top of a hill near his capital of Cap Hai'tien. In 1820, when an army was marching on his palace, Henry Christophe sent his children away and shot himself dead, with a golden bullet.

Haiti is a quiet island again now, a place in which infinitely indolent, ill-natured Negroes move slowly about their business. It would be incredible that wars had ever been waged under that muffling sky, as heavy as a curtain, that a splendid emperor had ruled the ruinous country-- were it not for the fortress which still stands up on the hilltop, a black fist against the sky, the citadel of Christophe, the monument of a man born no one knows where, mysteriously named, a slave and a king, whose enemies defeated him. There is a rumor that Christophe with his own hands, at night, buried gold in the huge walls of his astonishing battlement; and there are holes in its masonry where men have tried to find the king's treasure.

The Significance. The Literary Guild had the good sense to pick Black Majesty for its subscribers to read in March. The book is not written with genius either of style or of insight but it is written with intelligence and a proper sensitiveness to words. It can be asserted, with some justice, that, possessing these qualifications, no one could help writing a good book about King Christophe. Author John Vandercook, in a day when too many authors with abilities insufficient for their task attempt to decorate matters which are trite or trivial, deserves applause for choosing a superlative subject for human and highly spectacular biography.