No one was ever meant to know the true events at Belmont
Plantation in the spring of 1847. Official records were sealed,
witnesses silenced, and the story buried beneath decades of fear and
superstition. Yet history has a way of surfacing in unexpected ways. A
water-stained courthouse ledger, discovered decades later, revealed a single
line in fading ink:
“Ezekiel, property of Master Fontineau, executed by
his own hand the transformation that law and God alike forbade.”
By the winter
of 1848, Ezekiel had achieved the unimaginable: a rise from enslaved
laborer to plantation master, from servant to
husband, dining on fine china with Clare Fontineau, the young
widow of the man whose death had made it all possible. In Louisiana’s whispered
histories, the question was never if Ezekiel acted—but at what cost.
The Dying Master
of Belmont
Belmont Plantation stretched across three thousand
acres of fertile
Mississippi Delta soil, producing wealth and power for its
masters. In spring 1847, Jean-Baptiste Fontineau,
the fifty-four-year-old patriarch, was dying slowly from an unnamed disease.
His cruelty was infamous: he once declared,
“They are
tools. And tools that don’t work get broken.”
Fontineau
feared not death, but irrelevance. With no legitimate heirs, he married Clare
Deveau, twenty-three, a young woman of New Orleans pedigree whose family had
fallen on hard times. To Clare, the marriage was gilded imprisonment—a trap
disguised as social advancement. She had no idea that Belmont was poised for
revolution.
Ezekiel: The
Slave Who Observed Everything
Born in 1817 to Sarah, a field worker, Ezekiel
learned early the harsh realities of plantation life.
People were numbers, life was currency, and survival demanded cunning. But
Ezekiel was exceptional. He taught himself to read by tracing letters in the
dirt, mastering literacy in secret. By fourteen, he read better than many
overseers; by twenty, he kept Belmont’s financial records.
Fontineau
admired him, trusting Ezekiel as a personal attendant and business assistant.
What the master did not realize was that Ezekiel was observing him in
turn—studying every weakness, every fear, every blind spot. And when Clare
arrived, young and intelligent, Ezekiel saw opportunity.
The Secret
Alliance
By June 1847, Clare and Ezekiel shared conspiratorial
glances. He revealed the plantation’s hidden truths—the
corruption, the violence, the exploitation. Clare began to understand her
husband’s empire and her own role within it.
Fontineau’s
health declined rapidly. Mercury tonics and medicinal potions accelerated his
suffering. And the daily food and wine—meticulously prepared by Clare under
Ezekiel’s guidance—remained unchecked. By autumn, Fontineau could barely sit.
His will, drafted under “gentle persuasion,” left the plantation to Clare and
named Ezekiel executor and beneficiary.
On October 26,
1847, Jean-Baptiste
Fontineau died. The coroner called it “organ failure”; the
parish whispered “divine justice.” For Clare and Ezekiel, it was freedom
realized through audacious means.
From Slave to
Master
The revelation of the will shocked Ascension
Parish. Fontineau’s relatives raged—yet the document was
unassailable. Witnesses who might have challenged it vanished: a doctor, an
overseer, a servant. By May 1848, Clare and Ezekiel appeared before a distant
judge and did the unthinkable—they married legally,
defying societal norms.
By summer,
Ezekiel ruled Belmont. White overseers took orders from
him, merchants negotiated with him, and the plantation
prospered under his command. Yet the freedom he obtained was built on a
paradox: he did not emancipate the enslaved workers immediately, telling Clare
it would be financial ruin. He had become what he once despised—a master whose
power relied on the bondage of others.
The Trail of
Death
Ezekiel’s rise came at an extraordinary cost. Between
1847 and 1851, at least twelve people connected to Belmont
died under suspicious circumstances.
·
Micah Holstead, the inquisitive overseer — found
in a swamp.
·
Dr. Raymond Quimo, questioning Fontineau’s symptoms
— dead of “stroke.”
·
Marcus Fontineau, a cousin challenging the will —
found floating in the Mississippi.
·
A
priest aware of a confession — succumbed to fever.
Each death was
swift, silent, and untraceable. Belmont’s shadows seemed to serve Ezekiel’s
cause.
The Queen in the
Gilded Cage
Clare’s journals, discovered later, reveal her
psychological torment. Initially passionate, her feelings curdled into dread.
“I am afraid
of my husband. Not that he will harm me, but of what he has become… We are
prisoners, chained together by blood.”
Ezekiel,
consumed by paranoia and power, trusted no one. Even Clare became a liability
in his mind. Freedom had made him untouchable, but isolated. Power
had made him alone.
The Collapse of
an Empire
By 1851, the myth of Ezekiel
had consumed the man. Parish elites, threatened by a Black man commanding white
laborers, attempted plots that ended mysteriously. A rebellion led by a former
ally failed, ending in exile. By 1854, Clare died of tuberculosis, Belmont was
abandoned, and Ezekiel vanished.
Later accounts
from Mexico and letters recovered in 1890 confirmed his dark path:
“I murdered at
least twelve people… Each death brought me closer to freedom—and further from
my soul.”
He called
himself a “monster born of monstrosity,” shaped by a system that offered no
moral salvation.
The Legacy
In 2003, archaeologists excavating Belmont found a
hidden chamber: ledgers, journals, and the rifle that killed Fontineau.
Engraved on its stock:
“Remember the
cost.”
Ezekiel’s
story resists simple judgment. He was victim and villain, hero and
horror—a man forced to choose between submission and moral
damnation. History tried to bury him because he defied conventional narratives
of slavery, proving that oppression corrupts both the powerful and the
powerless.
“Liberation
achieved through evil methods is not liberation. It is another form of
captivity,” he wrote.
Ezekiel
escaped chains only to become enslaved by guilt and
memory. And in that paradox lies the terrible brilliance of his
legend: the slave who became master, the man who revealed that freedom
and power are never the same.
Remember the cost.
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