Book Notes

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• Book Notes
• Dionne T. Babineaux, Andrew W. Sanders, Bohan Zhang, and William Gillispie

A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance in the Haitian Revolution. By John D. Garrigus. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2023. Pp. [x], 236. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-27282-8.) John D. Garrigus uses archival research and knowledge of Caribbean plantation societies to discuss enslaved life in the eighteenth-century French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). He explores the colony’s conditions, their effects on slavery, and the rising tensions, which led to the secret of resistance among Black people that circulated in the years before the Haitian Revolution.

Garrigus opens with the story of Médor, whose elevated status in slavery allowed him to move freely around his town, Cap Français. Médor could visit the local market, where, as Garrigus shows, free and unfree Black inhabitants connected through common language, origin, and circumstance. Knowledge, plans, and supplies were often shared and purchased through these local connections. Like other Black residents, Médor purchased “powders” and “herbs” to treat illness among the enslaved and the livestock (p. 37). After the deaths of people he treated on the plantation, Médor was accused of poisoning and subjected to intense interrogation. Garrigus speculates that Médor’s guilt over the supposed poisonings caused him to divulge that enslaved people also used powders to influence their masters’ temperament and will. Médor’s alarming revelation of this secret created fear and panic among the whites and led to the belief in a Black conspiracy to overthrow the colony. Fear and uneasiness were not limited to whites; local Black people were also confused amid the rising unrest because medicines were traditionally intended to influence, not kill.

Garrigus explores the records of Médor, Assam, and Makandal to expose their connected acts of slave resistance and survival through the use of medicines. The unexplained deaths of people and animals caused many healers to be accused, tortured, and forced to identify others as co-conspirators in a widespread slave poisoning plot. High death rates among whites and a significantly higher number of deaths among enslaved Blacks indicate another cause. Garrigus reveals that a strain of anthrax, not poisoning, was responsible for the decades of suspicious deaths. The disease was spread by eating contaminated meat, through contact with livestock, and due to conditions of drought and starvation common among the enslaved.

Garrigus has examined three decades of conspiracy and persecution that engulfed plantations in Saint-Domingue. A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance in the Haitian Revolution is invaluable for understanding local plantation conditions, the views of the enslaved, and their continuous struggle to create power from a powerless circumstance. [Dionne T. Babineaux, Rice University]

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. By Frederick Douglass. Introduction by Scott C. Williamson. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2021. Pp. xlviii, 128. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-792-5.) While Frederick Douglass’s classic Narrative is a key text for any historian of slavery and abolition, this new edition comes with an [End Page 467] introduction by Scott C. Williamson, the Robert H. Walkup Professor of Theological Ethics at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Author of The Narrative Life: The Moral and Religious Thought of Frederick Douglass (Macon, Ga., 2002), Williamson begins by drawing parallels between Douglass and Henry David Thoreau, as well as speaking to the vast distance between them. While Douglass was writing his narrative, Williamson points out, Thoreau was living by Walden Pond, seeking an escape of a different kind. Williamson argues that both Douglass and Thoreau “challenged various forms of conformity to social convention, championed self-determination, and called for a new America” (p. ix). Williamson continues by placing Douglass’s work in the context of the broader genre of narratives written by formerly enslaved people, pointing out the literary and political difficulties of writing such a text, and reflecting on how the color line has shaped the literary canon. As he introduces the Narrative itself, Williamson sees parallels between the plantation world that Douglass describes and the present day. In one such example, he mentions Douglass’s observation of...