Caribbean Visions: Revolutionary Mysticism in “Theresa: A Haytien Tale”

Haiti achieved independence on three different dates. According to a good part of the world and to subsequent official histories, this date was 1 January 1804. But the nascent republic’s former colonizers, still following the French Revolutionary calendar, would have situated their loss on the 10 Nivôse, year XII. The Haitian Declaration of Independence itself offers yet a third date: “ce 1er Janvier 1804, an 1er de l’indépendance.”¹ Haiti’s foundational document established an alternative calendrical tradition that, although never systematized, would continue from the first Haitian Constitution (1805) to the writings of the 1843 revolutionaries, the empire of Faustin Soulouque, the US occupation, throughout the Duvalier regimes, and well into the present. Haitian institutions have long validated their authority using this temporal mode, one that marks, in Erin Zavitz’s words, “the beginning not just of a new year but a new era.”²

Yet such historiographical manipulations offer more than a means of auto-legitimation. The Haitian Revolutionary calendar establishes a logic by which the present is always subject to the tabula rasa of the past revolutionary moment; conversely, the so-called tabula rasa of revolution always indexes historical process. This doubling movement upsets rectilinear trajectories while refusing to collapse past and present into perfect synchronicity. In this respect, the calendar’s temporal structure operates similarly, although not identically, to twentieth-century Caribbean theories of history, recalling Derek Walcott’s claim that the “sea is history,” Maryse Condé’s playfully wry palimpsests, and the heady narratives of the Haitian Spiralists.³ Much like these later timekeepers, revolutionary chronologies in early Haitian print culture demonstrate how the persistence of history confounds ostensibly simple trajectories of national time, establishing a temporal mode that simultaneously looks backwards and anticipates the future. This system of parallel dating not only inflects how we read foundational fictions, to use Doris Sommer’s memorable terminology, but also foregrounds the heterogeneous temporalities through which the events eventually known as the Haitian Revolution were historicized.⁴

In what follows, I analyze this historicization within “Theresa; a Haytien Tale” (1828), a fictionalization of the Haitian Revolution, now widely recognized as the first work of African American short fiction.⁵ I suggest that we read “Theresa” through a temporal emplotment that mirrors the revolutionary calendar: as a complex counterhistory in which Haitian emancipation runs alongside US national time. Written by an author known only by the signature “S” and printed in four installments in the New York-based, predominantly African American Freedom’s Journal, “Theresa” takes place at an unspecified point between 1802–3 during Napoleon’s failed reconquest of Saint Domingue. “S” recounts the trials of the free woman of color, Madame Paulina, and her daughters, Amanda and the eponymous Theresa. Through various actions, which include crossdressing, forging papers, eavesdropping, and experiencing several overwhelming spiritual experiences, the three women help achieve Haitian independence, offering a feminine familial history within the framework of national historiography.

Through its celebration of revolutionary female action, “Theresa” powerfully counterpoises the masculinist Toussaint-centric chronicles that dominated nineteenth-century print culture.⁶ It comes as no surprise, then, that critics have largely foregrounded the tale’s representations of female agency. Dickson Bruce has called this story the “first attempt by an African writer to create a black romantic heroine,” while Frances Smith Foster uses “Theresa” as evidence that the readers of Freedom’s Journal were accustomed to “‘black’ women as heroic protagonists.” More recently, Marlene Daut has not only highlighted the story’s modes of female resistance but has also argued compellingly for its female authorship.⁷ Yet equally interesting is how even the unorthodox “Theresa” embodies early African American cultural formations that envisioned Haiti as a possible space for the realization of Enlightenment promises of universal rights—promises on which African Americans’ own government had so appallingly failed them.

Though traditional critical narratives have portrayed US black culture as reluctant to sympathize with Haiti, recent work by Robert S. Levine, Daut, Ada Ferrer, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Michael J. Drexler, and Sara Fanning has demonstrated how the nation provided an...