Sanité Bélair

Suzanne Bélair, remembered by her people as Sanité, was born free about 1781 in Verrettes, in the Artibonite region of Saint-Domingue. As an affranchie — a free woman of color — she came of age inside a colonial order that granted her a nominal liberty while still binding her to its hierarchies of race and bondage. That contradiction would shape the whole arc of her short, blazing life.

In 1796 she married Charles Bélair, an officer and close kinsman of Toussaint Louverture who rose to the rank of general in the revolutionary army. Sanité did not remain at the margins of his campaigns. She took up the cause as a soldier in her own right, rising from sergeant to lieutenant — a rank almost unheard of for a woman in that age — and fighting to defend the freedom won on Haitian soil against the French expedition sent by Napoleon under Leclerc to restore slavery.

During that campaign of 1802, a French column often identified with Faustin Répussard surprised the insurgents near Corail, and Sanité was captured; Charles gave himself up rather than be parted from her. Condemned to death, she was to be beheaded as the law prescribed for women, but she refused, claiming her standing as a soldier and demanding to fall as one. On 5 October 1802 she watched her husband die and then faced her own firing squad. She refused the blindfold, stood upright, and is remembered crying out for liberty and against slavery.

In 2004, for the bicentennial of Haitian independence, her likeness was placed upon the ten-gourde banknote. Sanité Bélair died at twenty-one, unbent before her executioners; may her courage stand honored as long as freedom is spoken of.