The Pregnant Woman Who Led a Legendary Slave Rebellion
In 1794 the people of Guadeloupe briefly tasted freedom. A woman named Solitude decided she’d rather die than go back into chains — but her heroism was nearly lost to history.
tory by Mary Kay McBrayer · Illustrations by Alice Yu Deng · 4.22.21
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The woman’s name was Solitude. Historian Laurent Dubois writes that she was born into slavery through the rape of her enslaved mother in about 1772. Many of the stories about Solitude note that she had two different colored eyes, and that her skin was light. In her childhood, she enjoyed the preferential treatment that lighter-skinned slaves received. She may have been the barefoot playmate of the white girls in the big house, yet at some point she was still sent to work in the cane field, which suited her just as well. Her muscle memory propelled her forward even as she dreamed while awake, her eyes unfocused as her wiry arm swung a machete as heavy as she was.
These details are all somewhat unclear because the story of Solitude comes mostly from oral histories passed down through the generations. Solitude was born to an enslaved woman, and enslaved people were largely forbidden to read or write, even if they knew how. The era’s winners wrote down Guadeloupe’s histories, and at the time her story was not important to the winners. Yet her legend has survived.
Dubois states that “the existing facts about [Solitude] all go back to a single paragraph in Auguste Lacour’s 19th-century Histoire de la Guadeloup. … [That] short, hostile reference to Solitude ultimately lay the foundation for her monumentalization as a hero of courage and resistance, [and it] illustrates the complex ways in which the confrontation with the past in the French Caribbean has depended on oral history written into historical texts, and the work of historical evocation practiced by novelists.”
So much information is lost when it is not written down, when lives are considered so void of value that they are not documented. What you read here is a quilting together of facts written much later, referencing oral histories and the stories of those who entered Solitude’s world.
More:
https://narratively.com/the-pregnant-woman-who-led-a-legendary-slave-rebellion/
