Jenson reopens a question historians had treated as settled, whether Jean-Jacques Dessalines was born in Saint-Domingue or in Africa. Every source from his lifetime that mentions his background calls him African-born, and that remained the accepted account until the middle of the nineteenth century. The story of a birth on the Cormiers plantation surfaces piecemeal only afterwards, with no plantation register, baptismal certificate or contemporary testimony behind it. Jenson argues that later historiography is what made Dessalines a Creole, and sets the case beside the disputed origins of Olaudah Equiano to show that African and Creole functioned as social positions people grew into rather than simple facts of birth. Runaway advertisements, Moreau de Saint-Mery's list of African ethnonyms and colonial naming practices supply the evidence. A postscript assembles French observers who described the facial scarification of his nation, markings that vanish from the record as the Creole story takes hold.