A Secret among the Blacks

A riveting read and a transformative contribution to our understanding of resistance and revolution in the Caribbean and the Atlantic World. Garrigus vividly brings us into a world shaped by the work of divining, healing, and resistance, showing us how this world nurtured the alternative visions for the future that ultimately made the Haitian Revolution imaginable-and therefore possible. -- Laurent Dubois, author of <i>Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution</i> The clearest, most sophisticated account I have read of the cultures of resistance that would help fuel the Haitian Revolution. Garrigus shows that enslaved men and women developed a range of complex, long-term political visions and pursued them by organizing across plantations, a powerful response to the argument that plantation slavery, especially in the Caribbean, was so harsh that it blocked political development among the enslaved. This important book is essential reading for historians of the Atlantic world and African diaspora, and should be read widely outside the academy. -- James Sidbury, author of <i>Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, 1760-1830</i> Concise, creative, and deeply researched. Combining ethnohistory with archival sleuthing, Garrigus uncovers communities of slave resistance in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the decades prior to the Haitian Revolution. African healing and ritual practices were not only used as a means of self-preservation in an atmosphere of chronic hunger, overwork, physical abuse, and disease; they also created communities among the enslaved that envisioned, and worked toward, a better world beyond the degradation of slavery. -- Paul Cheney, author of <i>Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue</i>