Moreau de Saint-Mery's 1797 description of French Saint-Domingue contains a twenty-page taxonomy sorting colonial humanity into gradations between black and white. Garraway reads it as a fantasy of white sexual and political power, produced when free people of colour were growing far faster than the white population and whites were answering with exclusionary law. The taxonomy's arithmetic assumes an endless chain of unions between a white man and successively lighter women, which makes racial mixture a matter of white male desire and casts the mulatto woman as its imagined terminus. Enlightenment claims about hybridity, degeneration and fertility supply the machinery. The effect is to license the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and to install white men as the real and figurative fathers of everyone else in the colony, a logic of descent that then underwrote arguments for white political authority.