Pierre gives the Haitian Declaration of Independence in Haitian Creole, working from the printed copy that Julia Gaffield located in Jamaica's national archives in February 2010 - no copy having been known in Haiti, and the whereabouts of the original still unknown.

A translator's note explains the choices. Boisrond-Tonnerre, one of Dessalines's secretaries, capitalized words in mid-sentence to mark their weight, and the translation keeps that habit so the emphasis the writer felt at the time survives into Creole. Punctuation is handled more freely, with very long sentences broken so readers are not lost. The work was undertaken through Duke University's Haiti Lab, on the conviction that a text amounting to the country's birth certificate should be legible to people who speak only Creole.

What follows is the January 1804 proclamation at Gonaives, the generals' oath and signatures, and Dessalines's address to the population, set beside images of the French original.