Crystal Eddins tracks how captive Africans carried to colonial Saint-Domingue drew on inherited religious practice, kinship and social ties, and skills learned in labor and warfare to endure conditions designed to break them. Out of those resources, she argues, came something more than survival: durable connections linking African-born and creole fugitives, people still held in bondage, and a thin layer of free people of color.

Ritual life and marronnage are the two threads Eddins follows most closely, treating both as machinery for building the racial solidarity that made a successful revolt possible. Her evidence comes largely from archival material historians have left aside, including newspaper notices posted for people who had fled slavery; read together, these fragments show recurring shapes of refusal and signs of a shared political awareness among the enslaved.

The study is offered as a corrective to gaps in the existing scholarship on the revolution that produced the hemisphere's only free Black nation.