Hall describes an exchange of knowledge in colonial Louisiana. Africans showed Native people how to fight against Spanish and French methods of warfare; Native people in turn guided Africans into the forests and swamps, where communities of the escaped took hold.

That mixing left descendants. White families with long roots in Louisiana frequently have African and Native American ancestors, though after a few generations the connection was seldom acknowledged, least of all on the African side.

On the question of Haitian influence Hall is careful. Enslaved people in Louisiana who organized against slavery during the Age of Revolutions drew some inspiration from Haiti's success and from the instability of the period, but no evidence ties Haitians directly to any Louisiana conspiracy or revolt. What Haiti did send was people: refugees whose arrival doubled the free population of color in New Orleans.

Fifty linked adventures of Bouqui, the gullible one, and Malice, who outwits him, taken down word for word from Haitian country storytellers and presented as a single cycle rather than scattered tales.

Comhaire-Sylvain then asks where they came from. Roughly twenty-five have African relatives, mostly in the hare cycle of West Africa and the Bantu world; five are widespread in Europe; two look Amerindian; seventeen she could place nowhere. Names carry their own evidence: Bouqui is the Wolof word for hyena, kept in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Louisiana and the Bahamas, while the hare became Lapin in the north and Malice in the south and west.

Foreign origins, she argues, do not make the corpus foreign. Nothing travels whole; a people takes only what answers to its own taste, and then reshapes it. Motives change, characters vanish, a bawdy Eastern farce turns into a mild moral story. What results belongs to Haiti.