By MARLENE L. DAUT
I have been on blissful summer hiatus, well, mostly. But soon I will be fully announcing what I have been working on during these months—an art exhibit that I co-curated, which will be opening at the Peabody Museum here in New Haven this fall. I am currently finishing a couple of art historical pieces to accompany the exhibit too, and what I have learned about the nineteenth-century Haitian art world while doing this research has had me reflecting on how we know what we know in historical writing.
As you will see when my two essays are published, there were numerous mistakes to confront with respect to the name of the artist in question, the cataloguing and provenance of his paintings, and ultimately, the artist’s own biography. I am by no means a stranger to historical revelation, having written a book on the Baron de Vastey, in which I reveal his actual birth name to have been Jean-Louis rather than Pompée Valentin. Indeed, having worked so much on Vastey’s life is precisely what has driven me to continue to question received knowledge in secondary historical sources, especially if the “chain of recitation,” a term I use in The First and Last King of Haiti, is unclear, absent, or unable to be verified based on the presented evidence.
As I mentioned to a fellow scholar who recently asked me about the term “chain of recitation,” yes, it came from my brain. While writing Christophe’s biography, I was trying to figure out the best way to explain my method of examining how life stories can get unthinkingly repeated (and added to over time), and why we should (and must, as historians!) get to the origin points of biographical tales if we want to be able to evaluate the claims that invariably get attached to certain lives as unquestioned truths.
Following chains of recitation is tedious work. It requires pulling every, single thread all the way until its end, and just when you think you’ve figured it all out, there might be more: hidden threads, other strands that also need to be pulled, no matter how flimsy.
Most historians have probably had the experience of failing to pay attention to a small detail that initially seemed unimportant and then having to backtrack and do a lot more work to re-find the information once the greater significance of the detail becomes clear. Sometimes, you never find that thread again and wonder if you hallucinated. I still think about a key description that I once read in a newspaper about one of Christophe’s ministers, Julien Prévost. I have never been able to write about this detail because I did not jot down the date the article appeared and poof! the ability to verify the information disappeared (despite my best attempts to use digital search tools to try to recover what I had previously only accidentally come across in the course of good old-fashioned reading).
A more successful story of thread pulling from my research concerns the name of the owner of the Hôtel La Couronne in Cap-Français where observers spied Christophe working before the Haitian Revolution. This is a thread that I almost didn’t pull because it was such an outlandish name: Faxardo. I had never even heard this name and didn’t know how to pronounce it (hint, it’s Portuguese: Fass-ar-doh)!
Although Faxardo was a person who lived and worked in the colony, I couldn’t find his name in the indexes of any books on Saint-Domingue or the Haitian Revolution or in any writing about Christophe and the Kingdom of Haiti. And so, as I was sifting through archival records for the hotel property, I almost just thought, no, this can’t be right, this man can’t be the owner of the hotel; and I feared that trying to figure out who he was would only lead my research boat astray and waste my waning time at the archives when I had a pressing publisher's deadline. I hated the idea that I could do all this research on this person, and he could turn out to be someone who had nothing to do with Christophe.
The day that I confirmed that Faxardo was the right person, I was so elated, but I was also a bit irritated with myself. I couldn’t believe that I almost missed it, like all the other researchers, maybe, who came across this name at some point, but didn’t think it was important, and so possibly passed it by without a second thought?
(Pages from The First and Last King of Haiti showing La Couronne hotel and other known residences of Christophe)
What I learned from this scenario is to be always ready for the new to happen.
When you are writing about someone who has been studied a lot like Christophe—although not a household name anymore, his story was written many times over in the 19th and 20th centuries—you have to find new things to say, which requires approaching your subject with wonder and awe, like you are a newly born baby seeing faces for the first time, not a weary old researcher who thinks he has already seen every face in the world. You have to find a part of the person’s story that is both important and hasn’t yet been told. To do that, you must never be too cynical to be surprised.
The same concept of being open to the surprising and the new applies to telling parts of a person’s story that maybe have already been told, but without a clear chain of recitation, or an evidentiary roadmap for other researchers to follow back to the beginning. For me, this involved exploring Christophe’s birth on the southern Caribbean island of Grenada. If, in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot from Silencing the Past (1995), “what happened leaves traces,” then there had to be at least something out there in the world, however small, that would confirm (or refute) Grenada as Christophe's place of birth.
Even though a few previous researchers mentioned some feeble indicators of where people thought Christophe might have been born, many chroniclers of his life plainly doubted that we could ever know with any degree of plausibility (let alone certainty) if Christophe was really from Grenada, or if he was from Saint Kitts, or some other place entirely. Some others simply implied that even if he was from Grenada, this detail was not really important enough to belabor, given the momentousness of Christophe's later life as king of Haiti. I held a perspective opposite to both of these. Of course, where anyone was born is important, especially if you are writing a biography; and as a researcher seeking to do justice to Christophe’s much-maligned life, it seemed imperative to me to try as hard as possible to learn his birthplace and to let the reader know all the places I looked for confirmation, even if I might ultimately fail to learn anything definitive.
Just when I had exhausted the usual methods of trying to find Christophe’s birth or baptismal records (or marriage act or other civil documents), I decided to pull a different sort of thread: I began looking for someone who knew him from his early days (both before and after he arrived on Saint-Domingue) and who was, if possible, from Grenada himself. At the end of the day, I was able to link Christophe to someone from the island of Grenada who confirmed that Christophe was indeed born there: the French agent Roume.
Roume lived on Grenada at the same time as Haiti’s future king, but perhaps most importantly, Roume mentioned Christophe’s birth on their shared island of Grenada in a letter written while Christophe was still alive. Two other well-known Christophe associates—Hugh Cathcart and Baron de Vastey—had confirmed this place of birth in the king's lifetime as well, with Vastey being the most key, since his chronicle of Christophe's life was commissioned by the king himself.
(Both Cathcart and Vastey also confirmed that Christophe served in the American Revolution at the Battle of Savannah)
The final thing I would say to end on the concept of threads, concerns the importance of the cast of characters or other historical figures who surround the biographical subject. It is remarkable to think about how important the lives of other people are when you are writing a biography. Even though I was researching Christophe’s life, I had to pull threads that involved his family, his friends, his allies, and his enemies, as far as I could, not to the same in-depth degree, perhaps, but at least enough to not completely flail in the virtual tug-of-war with historical oblivion.
In the case of Christophe's wife, I learned (with much surprise!) that in the colonial era and before Haitian independence, she initially used a last name that is not the one that most people present. Marie-Louise Coidavid, or Queen Marie-Louise, was known by the last name Malgrin, which is the name she used in the early years of their marriage too. Again, I could have missed this by thinking, nope, this must be a mistake (everyone knows that the queen's last name was Coidavid), but instead I pulled that archival thread until it led to multiple corroborating documents, and in reality, we might say that the mistake was in not having the name Malgrin attached to the queen in other writings about her life.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes from Voltaire’s Candide:: “If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.”
Truly, I could go on and on about the new vis-à-vis Christophe’s life, family, and world, but if you're interested in learning more, I hope you'll be open to reading my book!
How to cite this article: Marlene L. Daut, "Be Ready When the New Happens," King of Haiti's World Blog, August 14, 2026 <https://marlenedaut.com/blog/be-ready-when-the-new-happens>