Daut examines what Atlantic writers made of the Haitian Revolution before 1865 and finds a fixation with little basis in events. Across European and U.S. American writing the revolt is told as a war of mixed-race sons against their white fathers rather than as an antislavery revolution led largely by enslaved people.

She names this the mulatto vengeance narrative and sets it against a rival story crediting the revolution to Enlightenment ideas. In the vengeance version the cause lies in blood: a supposedly degraded mixture is held to breed a natural appetite for revenge, and a pseudoscientific vocabulary of graded terms supplies the scaffolding. People of mixed descent do double duty, as agents blamed for the violence and as figures for the anxiety that colour, class and kinship no longer predicted allegiance.

The title names that doubling, the Caribbean as a region and the figures of speech by which colonial writing produced what it claimed only to report.