Opening a forum of three essays, Dubois takes a line from Cesaire wondering whether anyone can reconstruct what Dessalines actually did at Vertieres, and uses it to frame the difficulty of writing about Haiti's founder at all.

The figure he sketches is deliberately double. Dessalines rose from nothing to command and then to nationhood; he also built an authoritarian regime on the claim that he alone embodied the people and alone could prevent their re-enslavement, kept and accumulated plantations, and left behind a durable tradition of militarism. These contradictions, Dubois insists, belong to the ordinary history of power rather than to a story of Haitian exceptionalism.

He closes on memory. Killed in 1806 and gathered up for burial by a woman named Defilee, Dessalines survives most vividly in Vodou, where he joins the Ogou family of warrior spirits and where one song hails him as liberator while another accuses him of destroying the Ibo nation.