Absalom, Absalom! Haiti, and Labor History

Abstract In 1791 slaves revolted on San Domingo. “The world’s richest colony” was overrun in a black revolution whose forces “defeated the Spanish; inflicted a defeat 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 re- public 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! 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 counterrevolution.