1902, October – 1904: (Tonton Nord, the Last Leaf: Nord Alexis and the Centenary of Independence): Firmin’s cause went to the bottom with La Crête-à-Pierrot,…

1902, October – 1904: (Tonton Nord, the Last Leaf: Nord Alexis and the Centenary of Independence): Firmin’s cause went to the bottom with La Crête-à-Pierrot, and on October 17 he departed for exile at St. Thomas, where — as foreign correspondent Stephen Bonsai wrote — ex-dictators mused and aspirant presidents plied their followers with white rum at Maloney’s renowned bar. Nord Alexis marched south to Port-au-Prince and entered the capital on December 14; three days later the army acclaimed him president and the assembly ratified with no dissenting voice. Pierre Nord Alexis, eighty-three, born in 1820 when Henry Christophe still ruled the North, was the last leaf in Henry’s mighty tree — his wife Mère Alexis, daughter of Pierrot and a manbo, was Christophe’s niece. By no means an illiterate noir, Nord Alexis nonetheless disdained intellectuals, feared foreigners and their intentions toward Haiti, and was consecrated to the point of obsession to three ideals: independence, La Patrie, and les aïeux. It took only four months for him to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies with a round of volleys; fearful of foreign debt-collecting forays, he would not borrow from the blan and resorted instead to the printing presses of Boyer and Salnave. Since the Semaine Sanglante, retail trade had been gradually taken over by Levantine immigrants, mainly Syrian and Lebanese, and in 1903 the regime made visible scapegoats of them — mobs led by soldiers plundered their homes and shops, and by April 1905 all Syrian businesses were ordered closed and their owners expelled from Haiti. But Tonton Nord’s greatest preoccupation was the approaching centenary of Haitian independence. When a politician suggested the anniversary might remind the world of Haiti’s turpitudes, the old man burst out fiercely that not to celebrate the centennial would be the most awful disgrace. Frédéric Marcelin, plunged in gloom, asked what folly it was to celebrate — what had Haiti accomplished to be proud of? — and answered his own question: they glorified an ideal that had permitted a tiny nation to remain free and independent, l’Indépendance ou la Mort. Read through the decolonial lens, Marcelin’s answer — the only possible answer — captured the irreducible truth that the plantation’s afterlife had bequeathed: the hundred years since 1804 had produced neither the prosperity the revolution had promised nor the equality it had proclaimed, yet the bare fact of sovereign Black existence in a world that had never ceased working to destroy it remained, in Wynter’s terms, an ontological achievement without precedent, a standing refutation of the colonial order’s foundational claim that the enslaved were incapable of self-governance.