Lovelessly

Lovelessly Moreau lives in a world of mirrors, where the reflections of life flash in all directions. Her father, Francois is French, her mother Carlee, African. A moment of lust shared between plantation owner and his slave had produced a child of mixed race. Lovelessly enjoys the privilege of being considered a free person, yet she is not allowed to sit at the dinner table when guests arrive. Basic household chores are reserved for the servants, including Carlee. Therefore Lovelessly suffers from the blight of slavery and the lack of education. She passes her days amid singing slave girls, few friends, or social life. Strongly brewed rum is cheap, the fame of the mulatto girls of La Cap is widely known, while countryside life is mental isolation, large plantation houses with sparse furnishings, devoid of taste. San Domingo is a place between heaven and hell. Francois came to the island seeking fortune. His plantation covers a vast area managing the labor of four-hundred slaves. It is beneath the dignity of a rich man to have less than four times as many slaves as he needs.

Francois Moreau’s wife Camille arrived in San Domingo with her husband. She accepts Lovelessly as her own child. Camille had encouraged her husband to lay with the slave woman to bear him a child since she was beyond the years for the fruit of the womb, and she wished to fulfill her husband’s desire for offspring. The scarcity of white women made relations between colonists and their black female slaves inevitable. Consequently their offspring can never enter the white class. For once considered white, they could lay claim to public office and honor. This was the hard truth, yet wise and necessary in a land of fifteen slaves to one white. Once the law of reversion takes hold, nature’s principle assumes its power and mulattos tend to lean toward the negro.

European nations found themselves in conflict with one another over the island, its population, and resources. In the past few years, French peasants had stormed the Bastille with cries of liberty and equality. These cries were heard in San Domingo where 28,000 whites owned 405,000 negro slaves. There are also 22,000 free colored persons. At the turn of the century, revolution in the motherland had spread to the island colony. The great planters or oligarchs held inferior whites in contempt, who in-turn despise people of color and free blacks, who in-turn look down upon slaves. Such are the foundations of the colonial system, that rests upon slavery and the prejudice of color. Only the smallest spark could ignite the highly inflammable material resting in the bosom of Francois Moreau.

Carlee loved to sit and talk with Lovelessly. Carlee informed the young girl of the perils she and thousands of other slaves experienced at Elmina castle on the coast of west Africa. The castle was a fortress, bound by cannons at ready fire. The captors utilized torture and beatings to maintain compliance. She explained the ruthless breeding tactics used against female slaves. Those who failed to conform were thrown into an open shaft in the ground of the dungeon which lead into the sea and drowning. A dungeon marked by a human skull and crossed bones housed the corpses of slaves tortured to death. A Biblical inscription over the dungeon read: “Servant be obedient to your master.” The dungeon of no return was the final exit onto awaiting ships that set-sail with their human cargo. Carlee explained that many slaves leap into the sea, choosing death rather than bondage. For every five-hundred that were taken away from the Gold Coast, only one-hundred arrived at San Domingo. “Once we arrived, we had nothing to look forward to morning after morning, but the sizzling heat, rawhide whip of the overseer, long rows of cotton.”

Francois hired a tutor who instructed Lovelessly in French, English, the piano, and the arts. The white children were sent on the six week voyage to the motherland for schooling and a break from the heat. The European must always be on guard, the sun is a danger. Good health is maintained by abstemious living. For whites, creole or European, rich or poor, criminal or governor, they are all white and determined to rule San Domingo.
“They are my friends, once the heart is engaged, then you suddenly realize that we are all just human,” Lovelessly explains.
“The great misfortune is to marry into a family that will carry you only as their shame,” Carlee replies.

San Domingo had obtained a height of prosperity unsurpassed in the history of European colonies. The greatest part of the soil is covered by plantations on a gigantic scale which supplies half of Europe with sugar, coffee, and cotton. The degree of prosperity increased by leaps and bounds. Sugar and coffee plantations covered every mountainside from Port au Prince in the west to Sabana in the east .La Cap is far superior in appearance to Port au Prince which has the appearance of a low-class area. Seventy-five percent of the white population is European born. It will take two generations before the race can strike foot in the island. This is a population of fortune hunters, not settlers, and the return to France is ever in mind. Slavery had become the very basis of society.