Niles writes as a traveller, not a historian. The book opens in a New York elevator run by a sea captain temporarily without a ship, whose talk of small ports sends the author south, and then proceeds as a sequence of sketches: a Sunday cockfight where the birds arrive cradled against their owners' chests, market women selling tobacco, rum and plantains under the trees, a drunk gendarme reading a Dumas novel, a prisoner made to drum, a ruined palace and the great walls of the Citadel.

Colour is never far from the surface. Niles dwells on the Dumas ancestry and on the many children of French fathers and African mothers, and lets a guide explain how a lost election once sent him into the hills until the new president forgot who had opposed him.

Published during the American occupation and illustrated with photographs, the book is after atmosphere: light, noise, fear, laughter.