All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

He appears to be a simple, devout man, but he has ``learned a way to make his words march in more than one direction.'' A handful of chapters are set in 1802, when Toussaint is taken across the Atlantic as a prisoner. Toussaint, too, bears the mark of contradiction. Warned by a young married Frenchwomen that ``Who marries a black woman becomes black,'' the physician is appalled, yet heeds the very words he dismisses. Hebert, who spends time as Toussaint's prisoner, falls for a freed mulatto. Central to the narrative are Toussaint L'Ouverture, the enigmatic 51-year-old leader of the revolt, and Doctor Antoine Hebert, a Frenchman who shows up in Haiti just before the revolt breaks out.

Bell's principals here include a runaway slave looking for real freedom, the disturbed mistress of a razed sugar plantation and a royalist soldier in the embattled Cap Fran ais guard. During the next 12 years, to increase their power bases, four racial/political groups-white royalists, white republicans, free mulattos and black slaves-formed and dissolved a string of unlikely alliances at a dizzying clip. The country's 40,000 whites were themselves divided over the outcome of the recent revolution in France. But the fighting wasn't only between black slaves and white owners the colony had a Byzantine social structure that recognized 64 different ``shades'' of mulatto of the half-million blacks in Saint Domingue, some 30,000 were free mulattos whose political interests often ran contrary to those of the slaves. In 1791, when the Caribbean island that native Amerindians called ``Hayti'' was divided between a Spanish colony in the east and the French colony of Saint Domingue, a slave revolt broke out in the French territory that claimed 12,000 lives in its first months. In an astonishing novel of epic scope, Bell (Save Me, Joe Louis) follows the lives of a handful of characters from radically different social strata during the period of Haiti's struggle for independence.

All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell