Sabine Lamour reads plasaj back to the plantation

Plasaj is the Haitian conjugal arrangement that stands outside church and civil marriage, and it is often described as a form that left women room to move. The Haitian feminist Sabine Lamour argues for a harder reading. She traces it to the colonial period, when Africans held in captivity formed unions with no institutional standing, and she puts the weight on what the arrangement produced. Several women's labour went onto a single garden plot, and that labour is what allowed a man to hold his land against wealthy proprietors who wanted it. The habit outlived the colony by a century and a half. Plasaj normalised a work ethic in which a woman becomes valuable by sacrificing herself, and the weight of that model fell hardest and longest on Black women who were poor and working class. Lamour's reading turns the romance of the arrangement inside out. What looks like a woman's autonomous choice began as a method for turning her labour into a man's title.

James recalled fifty years later that one night in Manchester Robeson proposed that the play tour with James himself in the part of Dessalines. It opened at the Westminster Theatre in London. Jackson places it inside a decade of work that turned the revolution into material for black artists across several forms, including Arna Bontemps's novel of Gabriel's Virginia revolt in 1936, Guy Endore's book of 1934 based on the insurrections of 1791, Jacob Lawrence's series of prints on Toussaint begun in 1938, and Ralph Ellison's story in New Masses in 1941, in which the Haitian leader enters African American folklore alongside Stagolee and John Henry. Robeson himself returned to the figure in 1954, writing that Ho Chi Minh was the Toussaint Louverture of Indochina. Jackson uses the production to show how far the revolution had travelled as artistic material.

Kenscoff is a commune of about a hundred square miles in the mountains south west of Port-au-Prince, with roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the 1950s. Its main settlement is the bourg, called the buk in peasant speech, a word traced to mbuka, meaning village in the Kikongo of the Lower Congo, where a large part of the ancestors of the settlers came from. A motor road from Port-au-Prince opened in 1932, putting the bourg forty five minutes from the capital by car. In 1934 it was made the administrative centre of a commune. Because the summer temperature there sits between fifty two and seventy nine degrees, families from the capital began taking houses. Visitors saw crowded hotels, cars, villas and gardens and called it a small town. The peasant owners had sold only the strips along the road. From the first rains in the middle of September the holidaymakers left, and for the next nine months they were gone.

A man in the Kenscoff mountains who was already legally married could not easily register as his own the children he had by a plase wife. If he was well known in his own commune he might travel to another one to do it. Where he did nothing, the mother's father would commonly declare the child as his own by an invented woman. If the grandfather was dead, or the mother was over thirty and had been settled with a man for some years, she could register the birth herself, and the child was entered as born of an unknown father. In the bourg of Kenscoff between 1934 and 1956 there were forty eight such registrations, made by forty mothers. Twenty three of them concerned a woman who had been living with the child's father for between five and twenty four years. Ten of the children had no siblings. Three were made legitimate later when their parents married.