Words are themselves archives, and de Luna argues that historians of the Atlantic have not yet borrowed the comparative historical linguistics Africanists use to recover the terms of debate in oral societies. She works through four episodes rooted in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. The name of the poisoner Francois Makandal carries a spread of moral and political meanings across West-Central African languages, which helps explain why the enslaved, their enslavers and later historians could each hear something different in his actions. A vocabulary compiled by the planter Baudry des Lozieres preserves, alongside his own preoccupations, enslaved speakers arguing about hearing, deafness and the authority to speak for others. The regional term mundele, coined for Europeans out of the word for cloth, encodes a strategy for dealing with them. A final case follows the overlap of loi, lwa and roi. Zones of linguistic convergence, she contends, made political collaboration and disagreement possible across language boundaries.