23811: (pub) Slavin: NYTimes Sund Review of "The Stone That the Builder Refused" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

jps390@aol.com

 Slavin adds - although I've never met Madison, through the list I feel
 like he's a friend. I offer him hearty congratulations on this
 achievement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/books/review/14PYEL.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all

November 14, 2004

'The Stone That the Builder Refused': Finish the Revolution Without Me
By MICHAEL PYE
THE STONE THAT THE BUILDER REFUSED
By Madison Smartt Bell.
747 pp. Pantheon Books. $29.95.

YOUR standard 18th-century revolution comes with pictures to show what it all meant -- George Washington crossing the Delaware, the storming of the Bastille -- but not the other revolution, the one that turned the rich French slave colony of St. Domingue into the free, poor nation of Haiti. It was slave revolt, race war and colonial war all in one, more than 30 years of bloody murder. In books, it too often becomes a terrifying blur of violence, an awful warning; or else it is sanitized and simplified like many revolutions, turned into a tacky kind of ethnic inspiration in which we honor black slaves who made their own destiny and forget what actually happened. The greatest virtue of Madison Smartt Bell's extraordinary trilogy is that it has something powerful to do with reality.

What Bell has given us -- in ''All Souls' Rising,'' ''Master of the Crossroads'' and now ''The Stone That the Builder Refused'' -- isn't just a single picture. It's a somber hall of narrative, full of dreams and horrors. It draws you along like any authentic history, day by terrible day, nerve ends raw because you have no sense of an author ready to intervene to save his characters. And despite a few tics that are only apparent when you read all three books together -- a bit too much merely exotic voodoo; too many mosquitoes ''crumbled''; too many images, like centipedes crawling out of the eye socket of a corpse, that seem too close to horror flicks -- it has its own strange authenticity. Atrocities that open the trilogy, page after page of them, now generate their own suspense in this final volume, as dreams, hallucinations or plain memory.

The scale alone is extraordinary. But any fool can write 2,000 pages; that just takes time. What is truly impressive is the energy and concentration, right to the very end. Almost every moment is full, like some great narrative painting, alive with the detail that puts you on the road or in the house where some murder or meeting is about to happen. And almost every moment is imagined thoroughly. Late in this last volume, a sentry is killed on the front line, which is an ordinary enough event; but in Bell's supple, exact prose, the man's face changes as he falls -- because he's been beheaded from behind and his body seems to step forward to reveal his killer, giving battle its full, hallucinatory force.

There are dozens of characters running through Bell's trilogy, but only two who organize his stories. Dr. Hebert, a Frenchman, carries the burden of optimism in what can sometimes seem a relentlessly grim story. Toussaint L'Ouverture is a coachman at the start; he is, as one character observes, the classic ''good'' black on whom the planter classes rely. Toussaint becomes a rebel chief who wishes to ''show the white people what we are . . . and also what we are not.'' The times change him into a revolutionary who turns against Christ, riding into a church to burn it, a leader who writes, ''I am prepared to sacrifice my children to my color.'' The slave metamorphoses into the myth: the leader on a great white war horse, emerging ''through a wreath of fire.''

Toussaint is Bell's hero. He is a man who, as Dr. Hebert puts it midway through the trilogy, ''has worked for peace, in the main, and . . . has rendered justice wherever he was able.'' Bell loves Toussaint's virtues -- insisting that he fought for freedom and knew ''how to face death to keep it''; emphasizing his skill with healing herbs, his personal loyalty to his wife and children, his rather modern distaste for tobacco -- but he saves the man from becoming an icon. He even allows one strand of his plot to turn on the puritanical Toussaint's rumored flings with the white ladies.

Toussaint's ambiguities are what keep him alive in our minds. He is sometimes famously merciful, but he is also a general whose armies use massacre as a tactic. He's welcomed to Port-au-Prince by ''young white women with flowers in their hands,'' but his commanders slaughter whole white populations -- Toussaint, as someone remarks, ''prefers not to bloody his own hands'' -- and in the end he slashes and burns an entire country to show the invading French Army ''the image of the hell which they deserve.''

Toussaint fought for liberty for slaves and then sent them back to the plantations as conscript labor, forbade them to travel without permits, banned the whip even though his deputy Dessalines continued to punish miscreants with brutal bundles of thorny vines. ''It had been the same,'' Bell lets one ex-slave complain, ''in slavery time.'' In Bell's fiction, Toussaint is recognizably the man who, in one historian's view, ''sought to all intents and purposes to restore slavery with his Creole colleagues as masters and managers'' and ''hoped for power within the imperial system.'' Africans, naturally, disagreed.

Yet Bell's Toussaint goes into exile warning the French that ''when you faced me, you faced one leader. When you removed me, you would face 500,000.'' These books, most remarkably, tell the exhilarating tale of how those 500,000 came alive as armies, capable of routing the fever-ridden French, when once they had been only living corpses, zombies to be sold into bondage. We know the story did not end well -- Haiti's economic ruin brought even more African slaves across the Atlantic, this time to Brazil, and gave the English excellent arguments against freeing their own slaves -- but we can ride the surge of hope and passion for a while.

That is where Dr. Hebert comes in. If the books show Toussaint emerging as a leader, they also show the doctor going mercifully blind to race: a white man at Toussaint's side, as a healer rather than a fighter, who starts to call the French forces ''les blancs'' and asks himself, ''What had he become himself?,'' Hebert is a man who has ''forgotten that he was blanc, had come near to forgetting himself entirely.'' He's Toussaint's pupil in the matter of bush medicine, sometimes Toussaint's secretary and physician, a constant witness to battles and burning; and, at the end, when it comes to the matter of who will count as a citizen of Haiti, he is declared neg, or black, a citizen. He is our ambassador as much to the primping world of the colonial whites as to the world of Creoles, mulattoes and African blacks.

In part because of him, we see a rather bleached view of Haiti. Africans in Bell's novels don't organize by nation, as they did in reality, and what we see of the planters' brutality is the arbitrary, willful kind, not the viciousness that was built into the system. The detailed intimacy of the whites is shadowed by the sketchy connections between the novel's black men and women; we know more about the marriage of the French general Leclerc and his flighty wife, with her grand connections as Napoleon's sister, than we ever do about Toussaint and his Suzanne. And history seems to stop when Toussaint -- our hero, our mediator -- dies.

But that's a historian's objection. As fiction, these books do what novels are meant to do: they propose their own vivid and inexorable history.


Michael Pye's most recent book is a novel, ''The Pieces From Berlin.'' A film version of his novel ''Taking Lives'' was released this year.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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J.P. Slavin
New York
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