No longer overlooked: Pierre Toussaint, philanthropist and candidate for sainthood

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.

In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was fondly remembered by her old hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send him my love,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him that I think of him very often and that I never go to any of the churches of his faith without thinking of my own St. Pierre.”

By then, Toussaint, 68, had earned a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his time,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in 'Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom' (2015): He had mastered the trendy hairstyles of the French – powdered hair, or false hair added – as well as the newly fashionable chignons and curls that adorned the face frame that the Americans preferred.

Throughout his life, he was devoted to the church and to others: he donated to charities, helped finance the original St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, and risked his life during epidemics to care for the sick.

In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II declared Toussaint “venerable,” the first step toward sainthood. However, some disagreed with this move, feeling that Toussaint did not oppose his enslavement, either in Haiti or New York, and was therefore a poor candidate for canonization.

Records vary, but Pierre Toussaint is believed to have been born into slavery in 1781 on a sugar cane plantation in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), owned by the Bérard family. His mother was Ursule, the mistress's maid. His father's name is unknown. Pierre was the name given to him by the father of his owner, Pierre Bérard.

In 1797, as the uprising against slavery became more violent, its owners fled to Manhattan, with Toussaint, then a teenager, and several of his enslaved relatives.

Toussaint, who was literate, socially adept and a talented violinist, apprenticed as a barber and was allowed to keep part of his earnings; Schuyler and her sister-in-law, Eliza Hamilton – wife of Alexander Hamilton – were among his first customers.

Male hairdressers were becoming increasingly popular in France at the time, but in America, styling women for those who could afford it was largely the domain of the maid.

Schuyler told her sister that it was always a pleasure to talk to Toussaint while he was taking care of her hair. “I think of it as a daily relaxation,” she told Hannah Lee, a noted novelist of her time who would publish “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint: Born a Slave in St. Domingo” in 1854, the year after his death. .

Both Bérards were wealthy and had brought with them money to live on for a year, entrusting them to financial managers. But calamities followed. While Toussaint's owner, Jean Jacques Bérard, was in Haiti, he learned that his plantation had been lost, and he planned to return to New York to take care of his remaining funds, unaware that they were gone. But he died in Haiti of pleurisy, pneumonia. Shortly afterwards, Marie learned that she too was completely destitute.

Suddenly, young Toussaint was the sole breadwinner in the household. For the next four years, he supported Marie, her new husband, her extended family, and Toussaint's enslaved relatives.

Over time, as Marie's health began to deteriorate, Toussaint encouraged her to entertain, knowing she had the support of guests. If she agreed, he would buy treats like tropical fruit and ice cream before rushing back to straighten her hair. As a finishing touch he added a flower, usually a japonica or a rose.

In 1807, while Marie was on her deathbed, she freed Toussaint. Now that he had control over his time and money, he could shape his life.

In 1811 he purchased the freedom of his sister, Rosalie, and of a woman named Juliette Gaston, whom he married. A few years later he bought a house on Franklin Street in Manhattan. When Rosalie died, he and his wife raised Rosalie's daughter, Euphémie, as their own.

With his success he became a philanthropist. He and Juliette opened their home to orphans of color, educating them and helping them find jobs. He donated money to another Catholic orphanage, even though it did not accept children of color, and contributed money to St. Patrick's and other Catholic institutions. He received requests for financial assistance from enslaved men seeking freedom, impoverished seminarians, friends in Haiti, and strangers in trouble. He was also generous to his godmother, Aurora Bérard, who lived in Paris with little money.

He cared for the sick during several epidemics; at least once he brought a sick priest to his house to nurse him back to health.

New York allowed slavery until 1829; before that, as a young black man on the streets of Manhattan, he risked being kidnapped by bounty hunters and sold into slavery in the South. He was forbidden to use public transport.

Toussaint was not optimistic about his circumstances; he talked about how hard he had worked to master his “hot temper,” and he suppressed his talent for mimicry, realizing that it could be “dangerous.” He likely exhibited what WEB Dubois later characterized as “double consciousness,” where he remained aware of how he was seen through white eyes, according to Ronald Angelo Johnson, a professor at Baylor University and an expert on racial Haitian-American diplomacy in the age of revolutions.

In a 2020 article, “Enslaved by History: Slavery's Enduring Influence on the Memory of Pierre Toussaint,” Johnson argued that biographers focused disproportionately on Toussaint's slavery throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century and “seemed unable to To discuss Toussaint's life as a husband. , father, businessman and philanthropist.”

What Toussaint said out loud may have been intended for white ears, especially those of clients who had enslaved men and women in their households. And at least one comment suggested that he was not entirely an abolitionist. When invited to lead a parade of colored men celebrating the passage of a law that would end slavery in New York, he declined, saying, “I do not owe my freedom to the state, but to my mistress.” In the 1990s, such a comment led some black Catholics to oppose Toussaint's candidacy for canonization, as they felt he was an “Uncle Tom” and too accepting of slavery to be a good role model.

And yet he did not adopt the usual practice of taking his owner's surname. Instead, after Marie Bérard died, he chose Toussaint, giving himself the same name (and presumably in honor of) Toussaint Louverture, who initiated the revolution that abolished slavery and would lead to an independent Haiti in 1804:

When push came to shove, Toussaint spoke up. At Juliette's funeral in 1851, when it came time to take the coffin from the church to the adjacent cemetery at Old St. Patrick's on Mulberry Street, Toussaint asked outright that only black attendees would follow the procession, although white attendees were welcome were at the grave. .

Toussaint died two years later, on June 30, 1853, at his home. He is now believed to be 72 years old. At his funeral at Old St. Patrick's, those in attendance followed the same practice Toussaint requested at Juliette's funeral.

Toussaint's story could have ended with his funeral, but it didn't. Fifty years later, Mary Ann Schuyler's granddaughter Georgina founded the Toussaint archives in the New York Public Library, including “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint.” There his papers languished until the mid-1930s, when Garland White Jr., an African American student from Montclair, N.J., told his confirmation teacher, Charles McTague, said: “You can't call me one black Catholic white person who is respected.” McTague, who later became a priest, took up the challenge and found a Jesuit priest, John LaFarge, who remembered his grandmother telling him about the pious man who had been her hairdresser for years.

Toussaint's grave was found and interest in him grew. It was eventually confirmed that the remains in Toussaint's grave were Toussaint's when experts compared the skull to a photograph of Toussaint once taken by Nathaniel Fish Moore, the president of Columbia College, an amateur photographer and the brother of one of Toussaint's clients.

In 1990, Cardinal John O'Connor, then Archbishop of New York, had Toussaint's remains transferred to the crypt beneath the high altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, where he is the only layman and the only black man. .

So far, there is no black North American saint; Toussaint is one of six under treatment.

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