Before the collapse of the ancient regime, as a matter of fact, the mother country had made infant steps towards recognition of the rights of mulattoes (many of whom owned considerable amounts of property and slaves themselves). While the revolt was caused primarily by the inhumane treatment of the imported African slaves by their French masters, the uprising was also a byproduct of the revolutionary fever that had recently swept through colonial America and France itself. Once you’ve waded far enough in, All Souls’ Rising pulls you away with the tide and gives you a thorough drubbing for the next 400 pages.
And for the first 100 pages or so of All Souls’ Rising, Bell does indeed seem out of his element chronicling the daily activities of haughty 18th-century slave owners.īut then one of history’s most violent slave revolts comes crashing into the novel and we are more firmly planted than ever in Bell’s disturbing territory of conflicting ethical systems. It might at first seem a strange move for Madison Smartt Bell (author of Soldier’s Joy, Zero db, and Save Me, Joe Louis) to abandon his milieu of disturbed drifters and world-weary veterans for a period novel set in French colonial Haiti.
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