Fire covers the northern plain before the masters can blink

The article quotes Trouillot's account of the rising spreading across the plain of the north and the call to fight for freedom spreading through the whole country. What distinguishes his treatment is the chronology he attaches to it. Over thirteen New Year's days of fire the cry grew, was subdued and changed shape, and malevolent actors seized it for private interest. He then names the years in which people died for it: 1795, 1802, 1843 and 1918. The article reads this as a deliberate splice of the revolutionary period onto later peasant risings and onto the resistance to the United States occupation, which converts the revolution from a closed event into an unfinished process. Trouillot's closing image, of laying rock on rock until a Vodou temple of freedom stands, marks a shift from Marxist analysis into an epic register.

Boukman Dutty had been a driver and a coachman on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, which meant he knew a great many work gangs across the northern plain, and he was a priest as well. Accounts left by planters and parish priests indicate careful planning in deep secrecy. A first meeting between the maroon camps led to a second, held on 14 August 1791 and framed as a religious ceremony over which Boukman presided. The gathering has come down as Bois-Caiman. Fact and legend are thoroughly mixed in what survives of it. The participants are said to have shared the blood of a sacrificed black pig and sworn a pact to die rather than live under the masters, while Boukman spoke in Creole and called for vengeance in the name of the ancestors. A young priestess remembered as Cecile Fatiman cut the animal's throat. The rising began eight days later.

Mocombe dates the rising itself to the twenty-second, writing that the black population of the north entered into rebellion, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's plantations alight. The eight day gap between the ceremony and the rising is deliberate in his account, since it makes the oath an act of organisation with named leaders rather than a spontaneous outburst. He lists the men the priestess had designated as commanders, including Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois and Macaya. The rising took place while the whites and the free people of colour were still fighting each other over participation in colonial government and over equality of opportunity, which for Mocombe is the point: the two struggles were different in kind, and the maroons entered a war that the others had already begun for different reasons.

Geggus tracks the speed of the news rather than its influence. By September 1791 enslaved people in Jamaica were singing songs about the events in the neighbouring French colony, and blacks in Havana were believed to be sacrificing pigs in honour of the insurgents. When Louverture occupied Spanish Santo Domingo in early 1801 the enslaved in the hills above Coro in western Venezuela were praising him in song within weeks. A year after independence, alleged conspirators in Trinidad were reported to be parodying the mass with words about eating white men's flesh and remembering Saint-Domingue. He also corrects a widely repeated quotation about black power dissolving white authority, which has been dated to a visit to Rio in 1792 but actually comes from 1806 and refers to the whole hemisphere.