Rypson went to Haiti in 2001 to look into Vodou and music and came away with a different subject: the Poloné-Ayisyen, communities at Cazale and elsewhere who trace descent from the Polish legionnaires Napoleon sent to Saint-Domingue. The book is about how that story has been told as much as about what happened.

He works through its layers. There was the furious argument in the press at the time over whether Poles were going over to Dessalines, which the French pressed and the Poles rejected; the memoirs of the few officers who got home; a nineteenth-century Polish historiography preoccupied with foreign betrayal while Poland itself was partitioned; archive-driven studies of the 1910s and 1920s; and the journalists and historians who made the trip to Cazale from the 1950s on. Rypson is careful about which of these can be checked. A set piece is the 1983 papal visit, when the palest villagers were trucked to the airport with Polish flags.