The Stone that the Builder Refused (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: blanc soldiers, bwa dlo, third entrenchment, The Stone That the Builder Refused, The Roots of the Tree, Captain General (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers unfamiliar with the previous books in Bell's Haitian rebellion trilogy might feel like latecomers to an intense, raucous party in the first hundred pages of this final installment. Multiple characters and backstories form a somewhat opaque context for the events of 1802, when a French army commanded by Napoleon's brother-in-law, Leclerc, landed in Haiti (then called Saint Domingue) in an attempt to overthrow Toussaint's government and gradually restore slavery. The book moves from the burning of the town of Cap Francais—ordered by one of Toussaint's generals, Christophe, in response to Leclerc's demand to submit—to the war in the Haitian countryside, ending with Toussaint's unexpected surrender and his betrayal by Leclerc and Touissant's black generals Dessalines, Christophe and Maurepas. With a panoramic vision of battle reminiscent of Shelby Foote, Bell recreates the devastating counterstrokes the black generals devised against the French at Ravine à Couleuvre and La Crête à Pierrot. Through it all, he retains as a narrative anchor Doctor Hébert, who operates in both the worlds of the blanc and the nèg. Bell intercuts scenes of the war in Haiti with Toussaint's terrible last days in a French jail in the Jura Mountains. This lends an air of unbearable pathos to this tangled, tragic history. In exploring the line between atrocity and liberation, Bell's novel is unexpectedly and powerfully relevant to our times.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

For a couple of shining years -- a benign sliver excised from the slab of 19th-century Western history -- blacks and whites shared civil rights, if not outright equality. By 1801, the Haitian slave revolt of 1791 had evolved from a campaign of brutality and vengeance into a movement that absorbed much of the inclusive, egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution.

The bloody uprising of 500,000 black slaves against 60,000 white masters -- a successful rebellion on what was then called Saint Domingue, the western end of the island of Hispaniola -- wiped away the presence of the British and Spanish invaders. The Haitian slave revolt, as it came to be called, also effectively diminished the power of the island's ruling class, the French blancs, who were stripped of land and the wealth (created, as it was, by slaves) wrung from coffee and spice crops. It was French whites whose families had been brutalized as repayment for 100 years of kidnapping and enslavement. And, in one of history's rare moments of genuine irony, it was they whom Toussaint Louverture, leader of the rebellion and then of Saint Domingue, invited back, after the rebellion, to run the plantations and industries that could make the country strong.

Motivated by the spirited dispatch of the French ancien regime, the strong leadership of Napoleon, and sheer pragmatism, Toussaint (as he was called) envisioned -- and briefly achieved -- a Saint Domingue with no slavery, with people of many and mixed races, and with a fealty to Napoleon, whom Toussaint admired.

But by 1803 -- a mere two years later -- Toussaint and his hope for a liberated, prosperous homeland were gone. Toussaint's faith was also shaken by his traitorous black generals, who, after his capture and imprisonment by the French, won the country's independence by wiping the blancs off the face of the island to prevent them from retaking it. Toussaint would languish and die a prisoner in a fort in France, the victim of a failed military campaign concocted by Napoleon and led by his brother-in-law, LeClerc, to restore slavery and a maximum flow of cash crops from the island to the Continent.

Given that the two subsequent centuries of Haitian self-rule have resulted in despotism and the direst poverty in the hemisphere, Toussaint's enlightened plans are ripe for the retelling, as is the story of the only successful slave revolt in the West's malignant history of converting humans into chattel.

For the past nine years, Madison Smartt Bell has taken on the task of channeling it all into historical fiction. A chronicler of racial disharmony and disaffected drifters and searchers (Ten Indians, Anything Goes, Save Me, Joe Louis, among others), Bell has carved out a place in American letters by draping flesh and wounds on the myth of Toussaint, while conjuring up a fictional cast that aptly portrays the complex racial and interpersonal issues swirling around those caught up in a maelstrom of change.

The Stone That the Builder Refused, the final installment of a trilogy, ends the saga with a whimper of pathos, as Toussaint's dream is overtaken by the brutality that has come to define Haiti. As in his previous two Haiti novels -- All Souls' Rising (published in 1995 and a nominee for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards) and Master of the Crossroads (2000) -- Bell's latest book is a long and winding road of intertwined lives, shifting loyalties, battlefield bloodbaths, tropical diseases, forbidden trysts and constantly moving scenery.

Bell's immersion in the world he creates -- so complete that he includes a chronology, a glossary of Creole and French terms, genuine correspondence between Toussaint and Napoleon and others (in the original French, no less) and a preface that serves as an historical primer -- has an osmotic effect. His trenchant understanding of Haiti's one-of-a-kind history, the shadowiness of its spirit world, the unspeakable rigors of battle and the strength of those who survive get under one's skin. While hardly a page-turner -- the narrative's breadth and languorous pacing won't allow it to be -- The Stone That the Builder Refused carries us along.

Much of that momentum comes from Bell's reprisal of the best characters from the first two books. Besides Toussaint -- a small, pensive man with a surprising strength that can break large armies as well as the wildest of horses -- Bell returns Riau, a black man and occasional narrator who has a penchant for keeping an ear to the ground and his loyalties open. (It's hardly surprising, given his survival instinct, that Riau delivers the book's postscript.) Bell's thoughtful white protagonist, Antoine Hebert, is a physician who offers a faint mirror image of the battle-weary Toussaint and serves as a bridge between the black and white worlds. Hebert faithfully tends to the injured in Toussaint's army yet lives among the plantation owners and white families who head Saint Domingue's society. Like Toussaint, he believes in the equality of men but is powerless to do much more than observe man's inhumanity to man and care for those close to him.

Other whites, including Hebert's sister Elise and her friend Isabelle, are drawn skillfully to show how the islanders' shifting views of race can carry dire consequences. Fearing deportation and ostracism because of their dalliances with black men, the two women go to extremes to hide their pregnancies, with scandalous results.

The book's one flaw is that the majority of it is given over to the tales of whites. Riau and Toussaint are the only well-developed black characters here, while Hebert, Elise, Isabelle, four French captains and a handful of other whites receive fuller treatment.

Nonetheless, Bell compels our interest by straightforwardly examining the spirit of freedom embodied by Toussaint and the blacks and whites who entertained his notion of it. Without the use of literary gimmicks -- he doesn't rely on magical realism or lyrical pyrotechnics wrought from the island's fascination with spirits and fate -- the author artfully takes us to the end of a fascinating journey. Summing it all up, Riau says, "There is more of what we don't see than what we do." But for most of a decade, Bell has dared to show us as much as he can, in often astonishing and brutal detail. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have chronicled Haiti and the travails of Toussaint with an eye more unblinking or with a hand so steady.

Reviewed by Michael Anft
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400076188
• ISBN-13: 978-1400076185
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #587,283 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a depressing conclusion to an excellent story, January 3, 2005

By	Henry Scott - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Stone that the Builder Refused: A Novel (Hardcover)

I had read the first 2 books of this trilogy and looked forward to the third with a great deal of anticipation. After a hundred pages, however, I felt a sinking sensation as I realized that this story could not possibly have a happy ending. Bell had done such an excellent job realizing his characters that I felt deeply involved in their lives. After the horrendous atrocities of slavery and the slave revolts and subsequent battles, it seemed that the island was finally at some sort of peace.
But what a price! Then as the French arrived to re-assert their primacy and General Louveture succumbs to hubris the precarious peace falls apart and the bloodshed begins again with blacks against whites.
This last book completes the trilogy and tells a story that few of us know anything about. Haiti is a huge mystery to me and these books helped me understand a little why this country is the way it is. The legacy of slavery and the battles that were required to end it as well as the enduring suspicians between white and black are lessons for all of us even at this time (maybe particularly at this time).

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Great Series Of Historical Novels., December 22, 2004

By	Jim R. "thevulgarian" (Portland, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stone that the Builder Refused: A Novel (Hardcover)

The three novels in this series are the best historical novels I have ever read. They deal with a horrifying event, the slave rebellion in Haiti. Bell does not flinch from the horrors the contending groups and individuals inflicted on each other. The historical background is well covered in the plot and appendix. Written by a master novelist. Bell also covers fascinating subjects like the Voodoo mythos that still exists in Haiti today. Reading this novel, one begins to understand the chaos of Haiti today. A country born in this much bloodshed and hatred is destined for more. In terms of gallons of blood spilled, our own revolution was a mere skirmish.

If you are at all interested in Haiti, race, relations, history, or just reading a good story, you should read this and the other two novels in the series, All Souls Rising and The Master Of The Crossroads.

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievably good!!, September 18, 2009

By	TropicalDoc (Coeur d'Alene ID USA) - See all my reviews

This book was a masterful finish to a fantastic trilogy! If the subject were not somewhat obscure I am certain this series of books would be already be an American classic. I am so thankful for Professor Bell's exhaustive research and unparalleled writing skills. He brings the Haitian revolution to life. I have traveled back and forth to Haiti over the past 20 years and I will never look at the country or it's people in the same way! His development of characters and the seamless flow between chapters kept me in avid anticipation of my nightly reads. I am lost at the moment for what to read next!! If you want to understand the fierce national pride of the Haitian people this is a must read! Thank you Professor Bell!!!