Insolence, Indolence, and The Ayitian Free Black

Abstract

This essay argues that “insolence” and “indolence” define two sides of the coin that is the figure of the free black on the island that now encompasses both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On one side of the coin is the insolent free black, who laughed in the face of colonial commonsense through exorbitant physical and geographic movement. On the other side is the indolent free black, whose stillness is suspicious and seems to hide malevolence. Either insolent or indolent, the free black on this island emerges in various cultural and historical texts as untethered to the fungible and laboring function of blackness in the Americas, occasioning horror and suspicion. This essay has three main goals. The first is to show that the anxieties that free blacks on this island instigated for the European colonizer emerged in relation to both French Saint-Domingue or present-day Haiti and Spanish Santo Domingo, or present-day Dominican Republic. The second is to illustrate how the colonial mind has innovated methods to repress, discipline, or compartmentalize the terror that the figure of the free black, especially on this island, occasioned. The essay explores the figure of the insolent free black through the historical case of a serial killer terrorizing the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in the early 1790s and who became known as El Negro Incógnito, or The Unknown Black (Man). It then turns to the figure of the indolent free black through the appearance of Carrefour, a character in the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie. Finally, it places in conversation mostly historical and anthropological scholarship about free blacks in the island of Haiti/Hispaniola with more recent, usually U.S.-focused theoretical works of critical black thought on blackness and liberal humanism.