TOUSSAINT!

A portrait of both the man and the movement that transformed Saint-Domingue into Haiti.

Leslie places Toussaint Louverture within the colony’s rigidly divided society, where Blancs, free people of color, and enslaved Noirs held different relationships with freedom and power. Drawing a parallel with Spartacus, the enslaved gladiator who “led a revolution that shook all of Rome,” she follows Toussaint from enslavement through emancipation. Rather than smoothing that trajectory into inevitable heroism, Leslie makes room for her subject’s contradictions: Concerned with protecting his family, Toussaint initially refused to take part in the 1791 uprising before eventually recognizing the limits of individual freedom and committing himself to ending slavery. Military victories, political negotiations, shifting alliances, and disagreements among revolutionaries accumulate briskly; Leslie stresses that leadership was a skill that Toussaint had to develop over time and freedom was something thousands of people fought together to achieve. Cotard’s vigorous acrylic and oil-pastel illustrations never reduce revolution to mere battlefield spectacle. Traditional Haitian fabrics join sweeping scenes of armies and upheaval with intimate images of family and community, while recurring landscapes keep the country itself visually present as homeland rather than backdrop. An afterword and a further reading list carry the history beyond 1804, addressing the devastating post-independence indemnity that France demanded of its former colony and celebrating the transformation of soup joumou from a food forbidden to enslaved Haitians into a tradition of freedom (a recipe is included).

Ambitious and enthralling.