Before the man was Louverture he was Toussaint Bréda, named for the plantation where he was born to an African father who had survived the Middle Passage. The chapter sets that obscure life against the colony that made it: the destruction of the Taino, the French seizure of western Hispaniola, and a sugar and coffee boom importing some thirty thousand captives a year by the late 1780s.

Much of what circulates about his boyhood — Dahomean royal descent, the frail child nicknamed Fatras-Bâton, the precocious reader of Caesar and Raynal — comes from legend, from his son Isaac's memoir, or from C.L.R. James, and each claim is weighed against a thin archive. What holds up is a trilingual man of Fon, Kreyòl and French, taught by Jesuits and by his godfather, anchored in Catholicism and a wide network of kin, and free long before 1791 — a free man who, as he later took care to obscure, owned slaves himself.