Reading canonical twentieth-century Caribbean writing about the Haitian Revolution, Léger asks why its revolutionaries so often appear as creoles indistinct from the colonists they fought. Her answer begins from the demographic fact that most captives in Saint-Domingue were African born, and from an argument built with Casimir, Trouillot, Fick, Fouchard and Eddins that bossales made Kreyòl, Vodou, marronage and the lakou into a working framework for knowing themselves outside French terms. She calls the holders of that framework Ginen, and treats their refusal to seek recognition from the master as the decisive intellectual move of the revolution. Works by Walcott and others are then read from this vantage, where the absence of African self-understanding becomes visible. Léger writes captives throughout instead of slaves, on the ground that those taken were free people losing liberty. An appendix offers ancestral homage to revolutionaries.