Historians have settled Dessalines as a man born in the colony who performed Africanness when it served him. Jenson asks why that account needs so much explaining, and returns to what was said while he lived.

The few contemporaries who mentioned his origins at all called him African-born, and that stayed the standard view for another forty years once he was dead. The story of a birth on a named plantation to local parents appears only in the mid-nineteenth century, piecemeal, resting on no baptismal record, no estate register, no testimony from anyone who knew him. People connected to the families named in that story wrote about the revolution without ever claiming a tie to him.

Rather than settle the biography, Jenson uses the gap to question the categories themselves. As with the disputed origins of Olaudah Equiano, African and Creole look less like facts of birth than positions a person grew into.