A thousand maroons become more than three thousand in fifty years

A memoir on maroon negroes held among the Saint Domingue papers in the Bibliotheque Nationale gives running totals for people who had escaped the plantations. Around 1700 there were roughly a thousand of them. By 1751 there were more than three thousand. The counts matter because the colonial world took no notice of the religious life of the enslaved until it began to look like the signature of revolt, and that shift falls in the years around 1740 to 1750. In the same period marronage was intense and night meetings were frequent, called by a drum nobody could locate. The figures are estimates made by administrators with reasons to play the danger up or down, so the exact numbers are soft. The direction is not. Within half a century the number of people living outside the plantation regime had tripled, in a colony whose entire wealth depended on holding them inside it.

Some time after Easter in 1704 a young woman named Kimpa Vita, baptised Beatrice, joined the old prophetess in burning charms and crosses in the villages around Mount Kimbangu. She was said to die every Friday and return to life every Sunday. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo questioned her and she told him she was St Anthony, come from heaven. He asked, crudely, if there were Kongolese blacks up there and whether they still had their colour. She answered that there were Kongolese adults and children who had kept God's law, and that nobody there was black or white, because heaven has no colour. Pressed on why she burned crosses as well as charms, she said the crosses had superstition mixed into them too. She had given away everything she owned, as the friars did, and she was preaching that the people must go back to Sao Salvador. About that she was right.

In May 1712 Governor Arnoul de Vaucresson opened his report to the ministry in Paris with a long run of losses among enslaved people and livestock in Martinique, from illnesses so unusual that the owners could not explain them. Several owners had arrested their slaves, held them in irons on the plantations, extracted confessions and then sent them on to the king's prison. One case in that report concerns an enslaved man named Francois, who claimed particular skill in detecting poisons, spells and the people who used them. His owner, a Mr David, hired him out during the crisis and collected money from the neighbours for it. The court dropped the case against the accused for want of proof, rebuked the owners who had abused them, and made David return the money for tricking the public. Slaveholders were learning who to suspect, and how to look, from the enslaved themselves.

Ambrose Madison finished building the plantation Montpelier in Spotsylvania County, Virginia in 1732, and shortly afterwards three enslaved Africans were accused of poisoning him. He suffered a long wasting illness and died. Their conviction was the first in Virginia of enslaved people for murdering an owner and the first conviction for poisoning. The documentation is thin, but one detail carries weight. The three had help from a man on another property who was said to know about poisons, which points to a relationship between a client and a practitioner. The case set the shape of Virginian poison talk for the rest of the century, in which an enslaved poisoner kills the owner slowly. Elsewhere in the Atlantic the accusations more often concerned other enslaved people. Virginia stood apart in this respect, and of the cases from Brunswick and Cumberland counties between 1740 and 1799, 44 per cent had white targets.