Pierre Toussaint (review)

Arthur Jones, editor-at-large of the National Catholic Reporter, mentions that, when Pierre Toussaint died in 1853, "he was hailed as the most respected black person in New York City." Born into slavery in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) in 1781, Toussaint was brought to New York in 1797 by his owner, Jean-Jacques Bérard, a refugee planter from the revolution in the French colony. Apprenticed as a hairdresser, Toussaint established a lucrative business among the grandes dames of New York society. After the death of Bérard, Toussaint supported Bérard's widow, who emancipated him in 1807 on the eve of her own death. In subsequent years Toussaint became a well-known figure because of his piety and charity to the poor.

One of his many white admirers was Mary Anna Sawyer Schuyler, a Protestant socialite, whose sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, wrote a memoir of Toussaint in 1854 based on notes that her sister had made over the course of two decades. The memoir, together with several hundred letters deposited in the New York Public Library, remains the basic source for the life of Toussaint. Unfortunately, only five of the letters were written by Toussaint himself; the rest are from a wide variety of friends, both French and American. Jones has mined this material to present as complete a picture as we are ever likely to have of this extraordinary person. He is particularly good at filling in the background to Toussaint's life in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue and nineteenth-century New York City, and in identifying Toussaint's relatives and friends. Often enough, however, as Jones candidly admits, he can only speculate about Toussaint's motivation or reactions to important events in his life because of the lack of documentary evidence.

As a French-speaking black Catholic in antebellum New York, Toussaint was doubly disadvantaged, the victim both of nativist prejudice against Catholics and also of the racism of his white coreligionists. Toussaint's charity was not limited to monetary donations, although he gave generously to a horde of needy suppli-cants, white as well as black. He also nursed the sick during cholera epidemics, and he and his wife Rosalie found a place in their home for destitute black young- sters. One puzzling aspect of his life is his lack of involvement in the anti-slavery movement at a time when it was the great moral crusade in America. Part of the explanation, no doubt, was the anti-Catholic bigotry of many abolitionists, but an even more potent reason may have been his fear of a repetition of the violence and bloodshed that attended the emancipation of the slaves in Haiti.

The last three archbishops of New York have supported the cause of Toussaint's canonization, and in 1996 Pope John Paul II declared him Venerable. In 1990 Toussaint's body was exhumed from the cemetery of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street and placed in the crypt under the high altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Jones makes the sensible suggestion that it would be more appropriate to create a shrine for Toussaint, his wife, and adopted daughter, in St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street where he attended six-o'clock Mass every morning for fifty-six years.