Master of the Crossroads [Paperback]

Note: This review was published November 12, 2000, in the Seattle Times ...

The American Revolution helped inspire the French Revolution, which in turn sparked the Haitian Revolution -- an uprising of Africans against the sugar plantation owners who wrung their fabulous wealth from slave labor. Madison Smartt Bell's projected trilogy of historical novels tells the least well known of these momentous late-18th-century stories.

Volume 1, "All Souls Rising," traced the gruesome first stages of the rebellion in the French colony then called Saint Domingue, from 1791 to 1794. One who hasn't read that harrowing masterpiece can still enjoy Volume 2, "Master of the Crossroads," based on events of the next five years. In this novel the revolution is well under way, but the outcome is still uncertain.

It's a tumultuous, confusing time. The Spanish, who own the eastern half of Saint Domingue, and the British, who are at war with France, separately hope to oust the French, subdue the blacks, and possess the island known worldwide as the Jewel of the Antilles. Among the islanders, the French blancs, or white colonials, have split into factions: the royalists who want to enslave the Africans again, and the revolutionaries who believe that liberty is a universal human right. Old disputes flare between native-born Haitians and immigrants, between mulatto plantation owners and poorer mulattos, between rivals among the island's 500,000 rebellious Africans and, more broadly, between members of the resident races - 64 in all, according to France's official classification of blends ranging from Blanc to Négre.

Toussaint Louverture, whose amazing career Jacob Lawrence memorialized in a series of paintings, is at the center of the storm. Small and tough, formerly a slave, he possesses such extraordinary charisma and talent for leadership that he can force, frighten, mystify, or cajole various factions into agreeing to work for peace. Toussaint unites the armed, roving bands of blacks who seized their liberty and transforms them into a well-disciplined army. A brilliant military tactician, he regularly defeats the English and Spanish forces. His political gifts make him a formidable negotiator with the French and a master at switching alliances at strategic moments. He alone seems committed to protecting, regardless of the race or ideology of their owners, the lives and property that survived the time of bloodbath and burning.

Toussaint's motives are endlessly debated in the book. People close to him believe that he is unselfishly devoted to securing liberty and peace for everyone. But rumors that he secretly plans to crown himself King and reinstate slavery multiply. We view him from the perspectives of many different characters, yet he remains a mystery: a presence with a godlike power in crisis, an inscrutable Master of the Crossroads like the voudou deity of crossings and change, Legba.

Readers who can tolerate a little disorientation from chaotic historical events swirling around an enigmatic hero will have a wonderful time with this novel. Many of the episodes are works of literary art, the Haitian landscape is superbly rendered, and the characters are fully realized and memorable. We come to care deeply about them: Doctor Hébert; his beloved mistress Nanon; his sister Elise and her smuggler husband Tocquet; Hébert's friends the French captain Maillart and the African captain Riau; the African soldier Guiaou who is Riau's rival in love; plucky, wanton Isabelle; the dreamy boy-priest Moustique; the elusive, fascinating Toussaint.

Since Bell can't string their stories on a clear historical plot-line (this history is a tangle) he braids the everyday incidents and subtleties of their private lives into a central strand to which scattered public events can be tied. The characters, absorbed in ordinary pursuits, are regularly pulled into battles and intrigues, then released again into personal concerns. The point of view shifts from chapter to chapter, and we open each new one with the pleasure of greeting an old friend.

Nobody achieves an overall view of events -- which is partly the point. Yet even patient readers will wish for an index of characters keyed to page numbers. It's hard to keep people named Dessources, Dessalines, Desrouleaux, and Desfourneaux straight in a complicated narrative (sometimes set in Descahaux) with a cast of hundreds that also includes Delahaye and Dieudonné. The author's memory itself falters - the girl Paulette is called Pauline for a while -- but the Glossary and Chronology help.

Without them "Master of the Crossroads" would still be a stunning achievement: marvelously crafted, meticulous in its historical detail, magnificent in its sweep.

It is not clear to me who, precisely, is the master in "Master of the Crossroads". Mait' Kalfou, master of the crossroads between life and death, is one of the spirits that take possession of participants during voodoo ceremonies. Early in the novel he speaks through one of the central characters saying, "I want liberty and equality to reign throughtout Saint Domingue(Haiti)." That desire is never realized though thousands of Haitians -- white, black, and many shades in between -- pass through Mait' Kalfou's crossroads in the course of the novel. Madison Smartt Bell may have been thinking also of Touissaint Louverture, the brilliant Haitian general, whose rise to absolute power is the historical thread that stitches this novel together. It might also apply to some of the diverse cast of fictional characters who sucessfully negotiate dangerous moral crossroads in the course of the story. This is an ambitious novel. Bell sets out to show us the confusing welter of racial, economic and nationalist groupings that struggled for power and/or survival in Haiti 1793-1801. He succeeds by peopling the novel with fictional men and women drawn from those groups, whose lives and loves intertwine around the central figure of Touissaint Louveture. Through their eyes we watch Louveture defeat the English and Spanish invaders and gain control over the various warring segments of French society. The reader becomes immersed in the crises and tragedies experienced by the fictional characters at the same time we follow the military chess game Louveture is playing. Interestingly enough, Bell's creations--whose skin colors are as variegated as their backgrounds and social status -- tend to be either good or bad with very few moral half-tones. Louveture, himself, remains a "mystery wrapped in an enigma" even after 700 pages of viewing him from many perspectives -- including his own actual writings. Bell has made him fascinating nevertheless. One ends the book wishing to know more about this military and political genius who spent most of his life as slave and groom to one of the "Grand Blanc" landowners. Other things about the novel remain mysterious for me. The bulk of the narrative is written in thrid person from the perspective of whichever charater we are following at the moment. One character only, the ex-slave Riau, officer in Louveture's army speaks in the first person. Not having read any of Bell's other writing, I don't know whether magical realism is a banner under which he ordinarily marches, but there are events in this novel that stretch credulity.

I'm in the middle of the trilogy here, so I don't want to waste too much time writing about the unfinished work, but after 750 pages, let me note that I'm still spellbound by Bell's work. I love the way the title informs the whole work: at each crossroads (and there are many) I marvel at Toussaint's vision. Sometimes he slips out of his carriage or off the road at just the right time to avoid ambush or attack, more often than not in a kind of trance. The crossroads also seems like the meeting of two worlds, whether the spiritual and carnal, the Christian and Vodoun, or European and African. Riau and even Doctor Hebert have some mastery of those crossroads, as do some of the minor characters like Claudine and Moustique. I love the religious syncretism of this novel -- it's at once modern and ancient. Haiti is such a melting pot of culture, race, history, and belief that it's no wonder the stew is still bubbling. Even in poverty and despair, something so rich, so deeply, darkly true is being created that this reader feels compelled to journey there to taste it for himself.

The violence and politics continue to shock and delight. I particularly loved the story of Choufleur in this novel -- the kind of character you love to hate -- and the complex portrayal of Elise's new husband, Toquet. As for the many developments in the life of the characters -- births, deaths, victories, defeats, etc. -- one reads them passionately, but after 1500 pages they are threads in a tapestry that's still a work in progress. I'd love to discuss them with others, but I'm moving on.

In the meantime, there are the pleasures of Bell's trilogy to savor and enjoy. His writing is so confident, his grasp of the wide sweep of narrative and history so embracing, and his sense of the eternal so inspiring that I eagerly plunge on to The Stone that the Builders Refused.