Louis XIV's edict builds a class of free people of colour into slavery

Daut reads the sixty articles issued under Louis XIV as the legal machinery of white supremacy, a set of rules that let enslavers practise some of the cruellest punishments anywhere in the Atlantic world and that expelled Jews from the colonies. Her interest is in an unintended consequence. One article encouraged white men to marry the African women they had children with and to convert them, which freed those women. The result was a large intermediary population of free people of colour that grew nearly as numerous as the white colonists. Julien Raimond pressed exactly this point in his own writing, noting that the provision predated the French colony itself, and that later articles granted freedmen the same rights and privileges as those born free. The nineteenth-century writer Daguin called the code the source of the trade and the stain on the legislators who wrote it.

Thornton uses the movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita to show how far Kongolese ideologues could rework Christian material. Claiming to be permanently possessed by Saint Anthony, she set out to end the civil wars and restore the kingdom, and in defining her position she retold Christian history so that the nativity happened at Nsundi, the province traditionally tied to Afonso, which she named as Bethlehem, while the capital São Salvador became Jerusalem and the place of the baptism. Thornton's point is that Macaya's later description of the kings of Kongo, France and Spain as descendants of the Magi was not eccentric improvisation but an established Kongolese habit of mind. Kongolese, he argues, viewed kings much as northern European thinkers did, as necessary but potentially limited.

The raiders drove every person of African descent and every Spanish man out to Isla de Sacrificios, an islet off Veracruz where more than four thousand people were crowded with almost no drinking water. On the afternoon of 26 May the buccaneers formed two lines, drew their cutlasses and ordered the captives to strip. The Franciscan Juan de Avila, who watched, wrote that the black and mixed race women were left almost naked and weeping. The raiders then divided the black and mixed race men and women from the Spanish men. Interracial families were broken at that moment, which the friar did not mention. On 29 May a final choice was made and only the young and healthy were put aboard. About five hundred people described as old and sick were abandoned on the islet. On 30 May those left behind watched 1,463 relatives and friends sail away.

A denunciation made to the inquisitorial commissioner in Salvador in March 1686 described slaveholders buying an enslaved couple precisely because they were known for curing afflictions caused by poison and charms, and hoping to profit from their practice. It sits inside a cluster. Across the two full trials and twenty one investigations from 1686 to 1707, ten cases involved fifteen medical practitioners, and all but one of the fifteen were of African descent. Some stood accused of causing afflictions and some of curing them, and the same people often did both. The knowledge that an illness came from sorcery, and frequently the accusation itself, came from the enslaved, and owners gradually adopted it. Church law had nothing yet to say about any of this, and the Inquisition did not much want the cases. The link between poison, sorcery and African healers was made on plantations and in city streets long before a statute described it.