Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

But Victoire is familiar with the unthinkable. The liberation of her motherland was unthinkable even as it happened, for no one in France or England, not even the most radical proponents of universal freedom, believed that slaves – creatures they never thought fell under their categories of rational, rights-holding, enlightened men – would demand their own liberation. Two months after news broke of the August 1791 uprising, Jean Pierre Brissot, himself a founding member of the Amis des Noirs, announced to the French Assembly that this news must be false, for as anyone knew, slaves were simply incapable of such rapid, coordinated, defiant action. A year into the revolution, many still believed that soon the unrest would be quelled, that things would go back to normal, for normal meant white dominance over Blacks.

They were, of course, wrong.

But who, in living history, ever understands their part in the tapestry? For the better part of her life, Victoire was not even aware she hailed from the world’s first Black republic.

Here is all she knew, before Hermes:

She was born in Haiti, Ayiti, in 1820, the same year that King Henry Christophe, fearing a coup, took his own life. His wife and daughters fled to the home of an English benefactor in Suffolk. Victoire’s mother, a maid of the exiled queen, went with them. She referred to this always as their great flight and, once she set foot in Paris, refused ever to think again of Haiti as home.

Victoire’s understanding of Haitian history is of curses in the night; of a magnificent palace named Sans Souci, home to the first Black king in the New World; of men with guns; of vague political disagreements she does not understand that, somehow, uprooted her life and sent her across the Atlantic. As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe.

‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’

But her mother did not survive France. Victoire never learned how her mother, a free-born woman, was sent from Suffolk to work in the household of a retired Parisian academic, Professor Emile Desjardins. She does not know what promises her mother’s friends made her, whether or not money changed hands. She knows only that in Paris, at the Desjardins estate, they were not allowed to leave – for here, forms of slavery still existed, as they did all over the world; a twilight condition, the rules unwritten but implied. And when her mother fell ill, the Desjardinses did not send for a doctor. They merely closed the door to her sickroom and waited outside until a maid went in, felt for her breath and pulse, and announced she had expired.

Then they locked Victoire in a cupboard and did not let her out, for fear the illness would catch. But the contagion took the rest of the household regardless, and once again the doctors were powerless to do anything but watch it run its course.

Victoire survived. Professor Desjardins’s wife survived. His daughters survived. The professor himself died, and with him, Victoire’s only connection to the people who purported to love her mother, and had yet somehow sold her away.

The house fell into disrepair. Madame Desjardins, a tight-faced blonde woman, kept bad accounts and spent prodigiously. Money was tight. They fired the maid – why keep one, they argued, when they had Victoire? Overnight Victoire became responsible for dozens of tasks: keeping the fire, polishing the silver, dusting the rooms, serving the tea. But these were not tasks she’d been trained to fulfil. She’d been raised to read and compose and interpret, not manage a household, and for this they scolded and beat her.

She found no comfort from Madame Desjardins’s two little daughters, who took great delight in announcing to houseguests that Victoire was an orphan they’d rescued from Africa. ‘From Zanzibar,’ they would sing in unison. ‘Zaaanzibar!’

But it was not so bad.

It was not so bad, they told her, compared with her native Haiti, which was overrun with crime, which was being driven to poverty and anarchy by an incompetent and illegitimate regime. You are lucky, they said, to be here with us, where things are safe, and civilized.

This she believed. She had no way of knowing anything else.

She might have run away, but Professor and Madame Desjardins had kept her so sheltered, so isolated from the world outside that she had no idea she had the legal right to be free. Victoire had grown up in the great contradiction of France, whose citizens in 1789 had issued a declaration of the rights of man but had not abolished slavery, and had preserved the right to property including chattel.