Curtis and Mucher introduce the first English version of Haiti's earliest novel, written in exile on Saint Thomas by Emeric Bergeaud and published in Paris in 1859, a year after his death; his relative Beaubrun Ardouin arranged the printing, and the book never appeared in Haiti itself.

Bergeaud told his readers he had taken care not to disfigure history. His characters are invented, but the story they carry is the colony's transformation into an independent nation, related as a bloody and just fight whose sacrifice later generations are charged to remember. He wanted the appeal of fiction to reach people who would never study the annals, and he wanted to answer the hostile portraits of his country then in circulation.

The editors note that the little scholarship there is has dismissed the novel as derivative of French models, and argue that both the dismissals and the book deserve a fresh look.