Family fortunes among the free people of colour on Saint-Domingue's southern peninsula rested on indigo and smuggling, and they were built early. Working from roughly nine thousand notarial acts for Aquin and neighbouring parishes, Garrigus shows the Raimonds, the Depas-Medinas and the Ploys accumulating plantations, enslaved workers, silver and libraries across three generations from the opening decades of the eighteenth century. Indigo demanded inherited expertise that newcomers lacked, and the region's isolation from French shipping made contraband trade with foreign vessels an advantage rather than a hardship. The coffee boom of the late 1760s accelerated a prosperity already in place. Garrigus also reads the notarial language itself, watching honorifics such as Sieur give way after 1770 to initials marking legal colour, so that men whose grandparents had been treated as local gentry entered the revolutionary decade classified as men of colour, which is what sent Julien Raimond to Versailles and then to the National Assembly.