Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti, and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions

Abstract

In 1791 slaves revolted on San Domingo: “the world's richest colony” was overrun in a black revolution whose forces “defeated the Spanish; inflicted a defeat of unprecedented proportions on the British, and then made their country the graveyard of Napoleon's magnificent army.” By 1804 the Americas had their first black national state, the independent republic of Haiti. In 1823 Thomas Sutpen left Virginia for the West Indies, where, in 1827, he put down an uprising among slaves on a French sugar plantation on Haiti. As due recompense, he married the owner's daughter and achieved a son (1829). The dates are important because they indicate that Faulkner has the hero of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) “earn” the properties upon which he will eventually base his plantation “design,” improperly. There were neither slaves nor French plantations on Haiti in 1827. Faulkner's chronology creates an anachronism that rewrites one of the key facts of nineteenth-century black American history, in what looks suspiciously like an act of literary counterrevolution. Those Faulkner scholars who notice urge “error” – I am unconvinced. The Haitian revolution had lasting consequences for the slaveholding states of the South where, during the 1790s, white panics about slave revolts were endemic. Indeed, “Saint Domingo [became] the symbol for black liberation struggles throughout the hemisphere and touched off a series of new insurrectionary attempts”: Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vessey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831; to turn to the major North American black rebellions is to discover allusions to Haiti.

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