Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

This article is a part of Overlooked, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a rich New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, whereas visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”

By then, Toussaint, 68, had constructed a repute as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — in addition to the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.

Throughout his life, he was devoted to the church and to others — donating to charities, serving to to finance the unique St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life throughout epidemics to are likely to the sick.

In 1997, almost 150 years after his demise, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” step one on the highway to sainthood. Some disagreed with the transfer, nonetheless, as a result of they felt Toussaint, born into slavery in Haiti, didn’t resist his enslavement both there or in New York, and was subsequently a poor candidate for sainthood.

Records fluctuate, however Pierre Toussaint is believed to have been born in 1781 on a sugar cane plantation in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) owned by the Bérard household. His mom was Ursule, the mistress’s ready maid. His father’s identify shouldn’t be recognized. Pierre was the identify given to him by his proprietor’s father, Pierre Bérard.

In 1797, as an rebellion in opposition to slavery grew to become extra violent, his homeowners fled for Manhattan, bringing alongside Toussaint, a teen on the time, and a number of other of his enslaved kin.

Toussaint, who was literate, socially adroit and a proficient fiddler, was apprenticed as a coiffeur and was permitted to maintain a few of his earnings; Schuyler and her sister-in-law, Eliza Hamilton — the spouse of Alexander Hamilton — have been amongst his earliest shoppers.

Male hairdressers have been more and more common in France on the time, however in America, ladies’s hairstyling for many who may afford it was largely the province of the girl’s maid.

For Schuyler, chatting with Toussaint whereas he dressed her hair was at all times a pleasure. “I anticipate it as a daily recreation,” she informed her sister, a well known novelist of her day who would publish “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint: Born a Slave in St. Domingo,” in 1854, the 12 months after his demise.

Both Bérards have been rich and had introduced funds to stay on for a 12 months, entrusting them to monetary managers. But calamities ensued. While Toussaint’s proprietor, Jean Jacques Bérard, was in Haiti, he discovered his plantation was misplaced, and he was planning to return to New York to are likely to his remaining funds, unaware that they have been gone. But he died in Haiti of pleurisy, an irritation of the lungs. Soon after, Marie discovered that she, too, was fully destitute.

Suddenly, younger Toussaint was the one wage-earner within the family. For the subsequent 4 years, he supported Marie, her new husband, her prolonged household and Toussaint’s enslaved kin.

Over time, as Marie’s well being started to fail, Toussaint inspired her to entertain, understanding she was buoyed by visitors. If she agreed, he would store for treats like tropical fruits and ice cream earlier than dashing again to fashion her hair. As a last contact, he added a flower, normally a japonica or a rose.

In 1807, whereas Marie was on her deathbed, she freed Toussaint. Now, with management over his money and time, he may form his life.

In 1811 he purchased the liberty of his sister, Rosalie, and of a girl named Juliette Gaston, whom he married. A couple of years later, he bought a house on Franklin Street in Manhattan. When Rosalie died, he and his spouse raised Rosalie’s daughter, Euphémie, as their very own.

With his success, he grew to become a philanthropist. He and Juliette opened their residence to orphans of coloration, educating them and serving to them get jobs. He donated funds to a different Catholic orphanage, although it didn’t settle for youngsters of coloration, and contributed funding to St. Patrick’s and different Catholic establishments. He acquired requests for monetary assist from enslaved males wanting freedom, impoverished seminarians, buddies again in Haiti and strangers in bother. He was additionally beneficiant along with his godmother, Aurora Bérard, who lived in Paris with little cash.

He tended to the sick throughout numerous epidemics; a minimum of as soon as he introduced an ailing priest to his residence to nurse him again to well being.

New York allowed slavery till 1829; earlier than then, as a younger Black man on the streets of Manhattan, he risked being kidnapped by bounty hunters and bought into slavery within the South. He was prohibited from utilizing public transportation, placing him at better threat as he traveled on foot all through the day to his prospects.

Toussaint was not sanguine about his circumstances; he talked about how arduous he had labored to grasp his “quick temper,” and he suppressed his expertise for mimicry, recognizing that it could possibly be “dangerous.” He most likely exhibited what W.E.B. Dubois later characterised as “double consciousness,” remaining conscious of how he was seen by white eyes, in response to Ronald Angelo Johnson, a professor at Baylor University and an skilled on racialized Haitian American diplomacy within the Age of Revolutions.

In a 2020 article, “Enslaved by History: Slavery’s Enduring Influence on the Memory of Pierre Toussaint,” Johnson argued that all through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, biographers concentrated disproportionately on Toussaint’s enslavement and appeared “unable to discuss Toussaint’s life as a husband, father, businessman and philanthropist.”

What Toussaint stated out loud was maybe meant for white ears, significantly these of shoppers who had enslaved women and men of their households. And a minimum of one remark urged he was not completely an abolitionist. Invited to steer a parade of males of coloration celebrating the passage of a legislation that will finish slavery in New York, he declined, saying, “I do not owe my freedom to the state but to my mistress.” During the Nineteen Nineties, such a remark led some Black Catholics to oppose Toussaint’s candidacy for sainthood, discovering him to be an “Uncle Tom” and too accepting of enslavement to be function mannequin.

And but he didn’t undertake the same old apply of taking his proprietor’s surname. Instead, after Marie Bérard died, he selected Toussaint, giving himself the identical identify (and presumably in honor of) Toussaint Louverture, who initiated the revolution that abolished slavery and would result in an unbiased Haiti in 1804:

When it mattered, Toussaint spoke up. At Juliette’s funeral in 1851, when it got here time to switch the coffin from the church to the adjoining graveyard at Old St. Patrick’s on Mulberry Street, Toussaint forthrightly requested that solely the Black attendees comply with the procession, although white attendees have been welcome on the graveside.

Toussaint died two years later, on June 30, 1853, at his residence. He is now believed to have been 72. At his funeral at Old St. Patrick’s, the attendees adopted the identical apply Toussaint had requested at Juliette’s funeral.

Toussaint’s story may have ended along with his burial, however it didn’t. Fifty years later, Mary Ann Schuyler’s granddaughter Georgina established the Toussaint archives on the New York Public Library, together with “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint.’” There his papers languished till the mid-Thirties, when Garland White Jr., an African American scholar from Montclair, N.J., informed his affirmation trainer, Charles McTague, “You can’t name me one Black Catholic white people respected.” McTague, who later grew to become a priest, took the problem, discovering a Jesuit priest, John LaFarge, who recalled that his grandmother had informed him concerning the religious man who had been her hairdresser for a few years.

Toussaint’s grave was discovered, and curiosity in him grew. It was finally confirmed that the stays within the grave have been Toussaint’s when specialists in contrast the cranium with {a photograph} of Toussaint as soon as taken by Nathaniel Fish Moore, the president of Columbia College, an beginner photographer and the brother of one in all Toussaint’s shoppers.

By 1990, Cardinal John O’Connor, who was archbishop of New York on the time, had Toussaint’s stays transferred to the crypt below the principle altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, the place he’s the one layman and the one Black man.

As but, there isn’t any Black North American saint; Toussaint is one in all six into consideration.

Elizabeth Stone, an English professor at Fordham University, teaches the literature of immigration.