Two estates on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue supply the subject: Haut-du-Cap, where Toussaint was born around 1745, and its larger sister plantation at Plaine-du-Nord. Geggus begins by testing what is actually known about his connection to them.

Documents published in 1977 show him already free by the 1770s, owning a slave and renting land at Grande-Rivière, which sits badly with the many contemporaries who took him for a slave in 1791 and with the silence of the estates' own correspondence. Geggus proposes that Bayon de Libertat bought and freed him before becoming the absentee count's attorney, and that Toussaint stayed nearby, perhaps supervising during Bayon's absences.

The second half turns from the man to the people around him. Both estates were unusually African, with Africans making up three-quarters of the adult population at Haut-du-Cap, and their age, sex and origin profiles are set beside those of the surrounding sugar plantations on the eve of the revolt.