A president's hat falls from his head on the road to Jacmel in 1896, he dies before reaching his enemy, and Haitians still sing about it. Largey uses that song, together with band scores, interviews with Haitian musicians conducted between 1988 and 1996, and the writings of elite journalists, to show how stories about the dead accumulate. Florvil Hyppolite borrowed the rhetoric of Dessalines and was pulled into the legend himself, a legend that had already fused the emperor with the warrior spirit Ogou into a figure at once protector and dismembered corpse. Largey names this borrowing recombinant mythology, and calls the writers who deploy Vodou imagery while disowning the religion alchemists of memory. Occide Jeanty, Hyppolite's bandmaster, entered the same chain through his funeral marches and above all through "1804", whose performances on the Champs de Mars let audiences rehearse the war of independence under the eyes of the marines.