A furious storm raged during the night of August 22: the blackness was rent by the lightning that is known only to the hurricane-regions of the earth. The negroes gathered upon the Morne Rouge, sacrificed a black heifer with frantic dances which the elements seemed to electrify, thunder emphasized the declaration of the priestess that the entrails were satisfactory, and the quarters were thrown into a huge brazier to be burned. At that moment a bird fell from the overhanging branch of a tree directly into the cooking spell, and terrible shouts of encouragement hailed the omen. Is it an old Pelasgic or a Thracian forest grown mænadic over some forgotten vengeance of the early days? It is the unalterable human nature, masked in the deeper colors of more fervid skies, gathering a mighty breath into its lacerated bosom for a rending of outrage and a lion's leap in the dark against its foe.
"Listen!" cried Buckman. "The good God conceals himself in a cloud, He mutters in the tempest. By the whites He commands crime, by us He commands benefits. But God, who is good, ordains for us vengeance. Tear down the figure of the white man's God which brings the tears to your eyes. Hear! It is Liberty! It speaks to the hearts of us all."
The morning broke clear, but the tempest had dropped from the skies to earth. The costly habitations, whose cornerstones were dungeons, in whose courts the gay guests of the planter used to season their dessert with the punishments he had saved up for them, were carried off by exulting flames. The great fields of cane, which pumped the earth's sap and the negro's blood up for the slaveholder's caldron, went crackling away with the houses which they furnished. Rich garments, dainty upholstery, and the last fashions of Paris went parading on the negroes' backs, and hid the marks of the floggings which earned them. The dead women and children lay in the thickets where they had vainly implored mercy. There are long careers of guiltiness whose devilish nature becomes apparent only when innocence suffers with it. Then the cry of a babe upon a negro's pike is the voice of God's judgment against a century.
Will it be credited that the whites who witnessed the smoking plain from the roofs of Cap Français broke into the houses of the mulattoes, and murdered all they could find,--the paralytic old man in his bed, the daughters in the same room, the men in the street,--murdered and ravished during one long day? In this crisis of the colony, suspicion and prejudice of color were stronger than personal alarm. Every action of the whites was piqued by pride of color and the intoxication of caste. These vulgar mulatto-making pale-faces would hazard their safety sooner than grasp the hand of their own half-breeds and arm it with the weapon of unity. Color-blindness was at length the weakness through which violated laws revenged themselves: the French could not perceive which heart was black and which was white.