Words are the archive Chelsea Berry opens first. Reconstructing roots across Romance, Germanic and Njila languages, she finds Europeans assembling their vocabulary of poison from Latin terms for a drink and for malevolent enchantment, then binding it to women, so that poisoning read as a crime of the weaker against the stronger. Speakers in West and West Central Africa framed harmful power as something the mighty abuse, and treated the bark that Portuguese observers called cassa both as a cure and as an ordeal draught whose effect turned on whether the person swallowing it had lied. Specialists able to compose such things were consulted and feared at once. Against that grammar Berry sets more than five hundred investigations from Virginia, Bahia, Martinique and the Dutch Guianas, worked up from court records, poison statutes and colonial correspondence, and argues that reading slave poisoning cases only as a weapon of the weak mistakes the European framework for the thing itself.