Moreau de Saint Mery writes down the word vaudou

Moreau de Saint Mery appears to have been the first writer to put the word vaudou on paper, around 1789, and his account is the only detailed description of the colonial ceremony. He set the scene at night in a closed place safe from prying. Each initiate wore sandals and a number of red kerchiefs. The king wore the finest and the most of them, with an all red one bound round his forehead as a diadem and a blue cord to mark his rank. A box holding the snake stood on a kind of altar where every member could see it through bars. After the oath of secrecy the queen stepped onto the box, was entered by the god and spoke as an oracle. A candidate was then placed in a traced circle, given a packet of herbs, hair and horn, tapped on the head with a wooden paddle and sung over. The war cry in that song was later set to rhythm by the men of letters at King Henry Christophe's court.

Dubois separates the planning meeting from the religious ceremony, and gives the meeting the organisational weight. On Sunday 14 August 1791, just over a week before the insurrection began, two hundred enslaved people gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in the parish of Morne-Rouge. They were delegates from estates across the central northern plain, including Limbe, Petite-Anse where the Gallifet plantations lay, Port Margot, Limonade, Plaine du Nord and Quartier Morin. Gatherings of this kind had happened before and were common enough that several planters had given permission for what they were told was a dinner. This one was different: final plans for a mass uprising were made. Most delegates were privileged people, many of them drivers. Dubois reads the choice of delegates as the reason the plan held across dozens of estates without leaking.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

Audubon was born on 26 April 1785 at Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugar planter and a French servant woman. He was taken to France as a child as the colony destabilized and later sent to the United States to avoid Napoleon's conscription. He became the defining ornithological artist in American history, and almost nobody who owns a print knows the man was born in Haiti. I keep him here for one reason. The diaspora is usually narrated as something that starts in 1915, or 1957, or 1991, and it starts before the country does. Saint-Domingue exported people to Louisiana, to Cuba, to Philadelphia, to Charleston and to France for decades before independence, and the cultural residue of that scattering is sitting in American museums under captions that mention no island at all.