A house is built for Madame Toussaint on masonry with a tiled roof

Among the acts King recovered is an order for a substantial house for Toussaint's wife, built of hardwood on a masonry foundation and, the specification indicates, roofed in tile. He reads the materials as a class marker. Ordinary country people lived under thatch in houses of mud brick or wattle. Better-off families glazed their windows and rendered the brick in hard mortar so it survived the rains. Tile had to be shipped from France and was expensive enough that an aristocratic man of colour or a rich white planter would use it on a town house or an office. King notes that comparable properties let for between four hundred and a thousand livres a year, and that developing urban rental property in Cap Francais had become an important route to wealth for free people of colour by the 1780s. The Toussaint household was inside that pattern.

Nine slave ships sailed from Le Havre in 1783 for the Loango coast, all of them bound for Saint-Domingue. Their names were L'Homme Instruit, L'Apollon, Le Neree, Le Roi Maure, La Marthe, L'Agamemnon, Le Prince Noir, Le Jason and Le Jeune Frederic. The armament records give three figures for each vessel: how many people it bought in Africa, how many died at sea, how many were put ashore in the colony. Together the nine bought 3,722 people. 458 died on the crossing. 3,264 were landed in Saint-Domingue. Le Jeune Frederic, which left on 25 September, bought 328 and lost 115 of them, more than a third. Le Neree lost 17 out of 432. Le Havre was one port among several, since Nantes and Dunkirk were fitting out for the same African coast in the same years. Loango lies north of the Congo river, and its people were the largest single group in the colony that became Haiti.

The Portuguese missionary Rafael de Castello de Vide served in Kongo through the 1780s, witnessed and denounced the export of captives, and sought to persuade the king of Kongo to ban the sale of enslaved people outside the country. Thornton uses his eyewitness reports to connect two things usually kept apart. A long round of Kongo civil war began in 1779, first setting partisans of King Pedro V against those of José I, then breaking out again on the death of José's brother and successor Afonso V. French and English shippers were buying along what they called the coast of Angola, with the region around Loango as the main base, and Vili merchants brought captives from inland to Cabinda, Malemba and Loango. Thornton estimates some sixty-two thousand Kongolese exported in the decade after 1780, more than half the combined French and English Angola trade.

Perry notes that the insurgent army in Saint-Domingue was for a short time called the Army of the Inca. Geggus attributes the name to a mistaken belief that the Taino descended from the Inca. Sinclair Thomson offers an alternative that Perry prefers to leave open: the Tupac Amaru rebellion against the Spanish received extensive coverage in the Saint-Domingue press, so the name may register a sense of solidarity with aboriginal peoples that reaches beyond the Taino as local predecessors. She uses the ambiguity to develop her central distinction. The relationship the revolutionaries built with the Taino was not filiation, which would require biological descent, but affiliation, secured by an analogy between two historical situations involving two entirely different sets of actors, Taino against Spanish and African-descended against French.