JULIEN FÉDON

A Caribbean writer’s biography focuses on a Grenadian folk hero.

As an award-winning journalist and publisher of the Caribbean American magazine Everybody’s, Hall has written extensively about Caribbean life and history. Born and raised on Julien Fédon’s Belvidere Estate in Grenada, the author has a particular affinity for the 18th-century revolutionary. In this, his second book about the insurrectionist, Hall challenges the predominant narrative in published histories of Fédon's Rebellion that are mainly based on the written records of the Caribbean leader’s British enemies. They portray Fédon as misguided, violent, and cruel. Rather, this book suggests he was, and remains to this day, a hero “in the minds and hearts” of Caribbean citizens for his brave fight against the “mighty British Empire” and for his strategic acumen that pieced together a “ragtag army” of free and enslaved Africans, mixed-race elites, and liberal French Whites. Given how little is known about Fédon’s early life beyond his birth to a free Black woman and a French immigrant, Hall pieces together a remarkably cohesive narrative that avoids the temptation to overly speculate and that effectively places the revolutionary’s life and legacy in a wider Caribbean historical context. While most of the volume is a traditional biography that understandably concentrates heavily on the hero’s military exploits, its final two sections explore the French and Caribbean “influences” and “inspirations” on “the enigmatic” Fédon as well as addressing his enduring legacy, parsing “Fact and Fiction.” Though noting that he is “not a professional historian,” Hall has a solid grasp of the relevant scholarly literature and an expert command of the limited primary source material relating to Grenada in the late 1700s. Accompanied by an ample assortment of original illustrations by Robinson, maps, and reproductions of important sources, this well-written book succeeds in its goal of offering a “reader friendly” work. And though occasionally unfulfilling given the dearth of sources that were written by Fédon himself or that reveal key information about his pre-revolutionary life, this work is a definitive biography of a Caribbean legend too often distorted in official histories.

An incisive and illuminating account of a Caribbean revolutionary.