In Cap-Français, white residents watched nonwhite people move about the city and saw subversion. Joseph-Gabriel argues that such movement, whether walking the streets or carrying on trade and economic exchange, amounted to a claim on freedom, and that it was read that way by those who held power.

The essay follows three groups in Le Cap: Black prisoners, free Black property owners, and the traders who worked the city's racially marked market spaces. For each, getting about was a way of contesting where authority lay and who belonged where. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, that movement registered to white observers as a loosening of the social and political order on which the slave society rested.