'Absalom, Absalom!,' Haiti and labor history: reading unreadable revolutions.

9 On Vodun, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison and Busby, 1982), 85-86.

10 See William Faulkner, "Appendix Compson: 1699-1945," in The Sound and the Fury (New York: Norton, 1987), 227.

11 Frey (note 3), 235. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black, White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 31.

12 Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972), 91. In 1791 slaves revolted on San Domingo: "The world's richest colony" was over run in a black revolution whose forces "defeated the Spanish; inflicted a defea of unprecedented proportions on the British, and then made their country the graveyard of Napoleon's magnificent army."(1) By 1804 the Americas had their first black national state, the independent

republic of Haiti. In 1823 Thomas Sutpen leaves Virginia for the West Indies where, in 1827, he puts down an uprising among slaves on a French sugar plantation on Haiti. As due recompense, he marries the owner's daughter and achieves a son (1829). The dates are important since 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 counter-revolution.

Those Faulkner scholars who notice the anachronism urge error; I am unconvinced.(2) The Haitian revolution had lasting consequences for the slave holding 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.(3) Nor does the Haitian example fade with the onse of Civil War; in 1864, in Natchez, ex-slave Mississippi soldiers in the Union Army reacted violently when the city's military commander tried to force freedmen to work abandoned plantations: a Northern missionary, S. G. Wright, "trembled" fearing "blood equalling the day of vengeance in the island of Hayti."(4) Mary Chesnut's diary entry for 14 July 1865, notes that on our place our people were all at home--quiet, orderly, respectful and at their usual work In point of fact things looked unchanged. There was nothing to show that any on of them had ever seen a Yankee or knew that there was one in existence.

However, she follows her reassuring observations with a piece of unattributed gossip: "We are in for a new St. Domingo all the same. The Yankees have raised the devil, and now they cannot guide him."(5)