Dayan returns to Haiti's past to trace how one place came to carry pride and contempt at once. The essay settles on 1889, when Frederick Douglass took up the post of minister resident and consul general to the government of Louis Florvil Hyppolite, and on the American push to obtain the Mole St. Nicholas.

Douglass's own account, set down in the closing chapters of Life and Times, supplies much of the material. There he casts the Americans pressing the claim as men after money regardless of what it cost others in life and misery, calling them sharks and pirates. Dayan sets that judgment beside the "badge of servitude," a mark its holders found far too useful to give up.

The terms of that stigma, the essay contends, underwrote and continue to sustain the arrangements that keep paired opposites such as civility and brutality in working order, and that fix the rules for a modern idea of servility.