Juste Chanlatte, among the first authors published in independent Haiti, left almost no biographical trace beyond hostile asides in nineteenth-century histories. Bongie sets out to recover him as a central figure in the writing of the years just after 1804, when a French-educated man of colour who had manoeuvred through the revolution turned to composing for the new state.

The essay reads Chanlatte's pamphlets and his Cri de la nature alongside Vastey, tracing a shared vocabulary of veils and unveiling and a counter-history answering European accounts of the colony's destruction. What holds Bongie's attention is how unstable race becomes in these texts, held in becoming rather than fixed.

The second half turns to what happened next. A minor French abolitionist writer reissued Chanlatte's book in Paris under his own framing, unprompted, and Bongie reads the editorial changes, most trivial and one decisive, as an exercise of power that shuts down the questions the Haitian original had opened.