Geggus reconstructs a small rising by free men of color at Fond d'Icaque, in Saint Domingue's Grande Anse, in December 1791, and the killing of a pregnant white woman that became one of the revolution's stock horror stories. Tracing the tale through Colonial Assembly minutes, private letters, printed histories and the 1795 Paris hearings, he shows that the death happened but that each retelling added a fresh mutilation, until the version historians inherited was largely propaganda. Notarial deeds, land grant files, parish registers and marriage contracts let him rebuild the families involved: Noel Azor, born a slave and freed, married into a wealthy mixed race landowning clan whose holdings had been squeezed by the coffee boom and by white newcomers with overlapping claims. The rebels armed their own slaves, and the whites who fought them armed theirs; that local conflict, Geggus argues, opened the practice of arming enslaved men that soon spread across the south.