John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

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СКАЧАТЬ painful” elements of his father’s experience, Audubon seemed to be able to recall the deeds, achievements, and, on occasion, the exact words of his father with considerable clarity. This apparent memory for detail stands in sharp, perhaps surprising, contrast to the vague, secondhand, somewhat offhand information he offered his sons about his own mother and the circumstances of his birth. Again, he claimed to rely on his father for information about the “enigma” of his origins, but in conveying that information he gave it almost no authority, leaving it shrouded in the mystery of hearsay: “I can only say what I have often heard my father repeat to me,” or “I have been led to understand.” On the whole, in writing “Myself,” Audubon used his father as a valuable narrative device. When he needed a way to illustrate the virtues of strong character, the vicissitudes of life, or the violence of revolutionary times, he had his father for that. When he needed a way to evade the personal details and social disadvantages of his West Indian origins, he had his father for that, too.

      The Specter of Saint-Domingue

      Perhaps most important, he had his father to orchestrate his exit from France and his entrée into the United States, allegedly as a lad from Louisiana. Audubon’s father “greatly approved of the change in France during the time of Napoleon,” his son wrote, but the elder Audubon’s admiration of Napoleon apparently stopped short of committing his teenaged son to the First Consul’s military service. Because Napoleon had become determined to reverse the direction of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue—and to restore slavery there in the process—he began pouring upward of thirty thousand troops into Saint-Domingue in late 1801. In short order, about half of them quickly succumbed to the island’s most deadly disease, yellow fever, and thousands more fell to the revolutionary forces.³⁸ Then, needing more and more money to fund this desperate military effort, he decided to sell a huge swath of North American territory he had recently acquired from Spain, and at the end of April 1803, France concluded the Louisiana Purchase with the United States. What those high-level decisions might mean to ordinary people in France seemed a bit unclear at the time, but Jean Audubon knew that he didn’t want his son to become cannon fodder (or, equally likely, fever fodder) for Napoleon’s West Indian venture. In the summer of 1803, the elder Audubon booked passage for his son to cross the Atlantic on the American brig Hope. He also provided his son with another sort of hope, arranging for a passport that described the teenaged boy as a “citizen of Louisiana,” thus helping him dodge conscription and the unhappy prospect of being sent back to Saint-Domingue, the real place of his birth, as a soldier.

      In the following year, 1804, the “negro insurrection” eventually enabled Saint-Domingue’s people of color to gain their freedom from European colonizers. By that time, the movement from insurrection to independence had come to represent a menacing specter of black power for white people on both sides of the Atlantic, and the residual racial anxiety endured well into the century. Audubon had to know that. No matter what he knew about his early days in Saint-Domingue, he also knew that, as someone with a Haitian association in his background, he clearly needed to establish himself on the white side of the racial divide. Thus in his memoir, “Myself,” Audubon plays loose with the dates and details. His beautiful “Spanish” mother dies as a victim of the slaves’ violence, he writes, and he and his father have to flee to France to escape the uprising—along with their black “servants,” to be sure. Time is out of joint in Audubon’s story—the slave insurrection did not begin until 1791, but his mother actually died in 1785, soon after his birth, and his father sent the three-year-old boy to France in 1788—but chronology is not the issue. The more important point is to portray his family—and therefore himself—as white victims of the black unrest.

      In the end, the task is not to seek some essential, absolute truth about who Audubon really was, how “American” he was, or what sort of American he was, black or white, or whether he might have passed for white. Both in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and in twenty-first-century scholarship, questions about someone’s exact identity can often lead back to ambiguity, even with DNA-based findings. The point, rather, is to accept ambiguity as a possible element of individual identity and to see what the individual does with it. In Audubon’s case, the ambiguity of his background—not to mention his inventive, often evasive, sometimes duplicitous discussion of his origins—offers a valuable avenue of biographical approach. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in the preface to his poem Audubon: A Vision, “By the age of ten Audubon knew the true story, but prompted, it would seem, by a variety of impulses, including some sound practical ones, he encouraged the other version, along with a number of flattering embellishments.” Whatever the “true story” of Audubon’s background might have been, the real fascination still lies in the “embellishments,” including Audubon’s role as, to use Warren’s term, a “fantasist of talent.”³⁹

      Audubon kept up the deception throughout his life. In 1837, when he had become a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, he wrote to a close friend, “I am glad, and proud Too; that I have at last been Acknowledged by the public prints as a Native Citizen of Louisianna.”⁴⁰ For his own part, he never took to the public prints to acknowledge his own West Indian origins, nor did he discuss the larger geopolitical implications that might be attached to his place of origin. He offered only a simple explanation in the privacy of his personal memoir, noting that his father “found it necessary to send me back to my own beloved country, the United States of America.”⁴¹ In that regard, Audubon was coming “back” to a place he had never been. The United States, his “beloved country,” had indeed acquired Louisiana, allegedly the place of his birth, but he would not set foot in Louisiana until 1819, sixteen years later. Instead, he first came ashore in the United States in late August 1803, when the Hope docked in New York City.⁴²

      It turned out to be a bad time to arrive. Audubon immediately came down with a case of yellow fever, an epidemic disease that swept through the city between mid-July and late October, sickening over 1,600 people and killing upward of 700. At the time, physicians debated the origins of yellow fever, some saying that it stemmed from urban filth, particularly decomposing animal and vegetable matter in hot weather, with others arguing that it came in from outside the country. We now know that the latter explanation makes more sense: Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne illness that first came into North American seaports on ships from the West Indies, including Saint-Domingue.⁴³ Luckily enough, Audubon survived yellow fever, thus gaining a lifetime immunity. Still, he never noted the obvious irony of his illness. Before this West Indian–born, French-speaking immigrant could begin to fashion a new identity as an American—and eventually, as the American Woodsman—he first had to recover from a malady that stemmed, quite unpleasantly, from the place of his origin, the French West Indies. Try as Audubon might, there was no escaping the specter of Saint-Domingue.

       Chapter 2

       Hearing Birds, Heeding Their Call

      At a very early period of my life I arrived in the United States of America, where, prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and colouring.

      —John James Audubon, “Account of the Method of Drawing Birds”

      Audubon’s father didn’t send his son to America to become a bird artist. In addition to getting him well beyond Napoleon’s militaristic reach, he had a much more prosaic plan in mind. He wanted the teenaged boy to learn to speak and write better English, which could be a useful skill for another task that might soon be at hand: helping to manage Mill Grove, a Pennsylvania farm that the elder Audubon had acquired in 1789. Audubon père could hope that, with some combination of guidance and experience, his son would someday become a capable overseer of the Mill Grove operation; СКАЧАТЬ