SOURCE: "The Black Face of Freedom," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. 100, October 29, 1995, p. 12.

In the review below, Vernon appraises All Souls' Rising, concluding that there "are flaws, but flaws dwarfed by a powerful and intelligent novel."

Haiti's 18th-century slave rebellion—an object lesson for slave owners in the United States—played itself out against the unfolding revolution in the colony's mother country, France. The result was a complex struggle among Haitian groups trying to align themselves with a shifting template 5,000 miles away with each arriving wave of rumor and news, loyalties switched, authority changed hands, the last became first, retribution threatened. It takes a skillful rage for order to make sense of the moral and political morass that was Haiti in the midst of its historic uprising. Toward the end of Madison Smartt Bell's novel about the revolt, All Souls' Rising, his central character notes...