Of what happened that night there are many accounts, but of this we can be fairly certain: in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, today Haiti, late one night in August 1791, hundreds of men and women held as slaves gathered together at a clearing in a forest called Bois Caïman, or Bwa Kayiman in Kreyòl. It was probably August 21, a Sunday, so some may have arrived at the meeting on their way back from the Cap Français market. If not exactly a day of rest, it was, at least, a day away from the grueling work of sugar, the principal crop of the region. The labor done on one day, by any one of the individuals gathered that night, had been compounding exponentially for years to make Saint-Domingue Europe’s most profitable colony and the world’s largest producer of sugar, king long before cotton. By the time of the Bois Caïman assembly, the colony had half a million slaves and nearly 800 sugar plantations, producing almost as much as all the islands of the British West Indies combined. French Saint-Domingue was the envy of all Europe, the jewel of the Antilles, the Eden of the Western world.

It was in part the very foundation of that wealth – the brutality of the work and the violence of the coercion imposed on captive Africans and their descendants – that drew so many to the meeting at Bois Caïman that night. They were there to prepare for a radically different future. A leader named Dutty Boukman, himself enslaved, addressed the assembly. In some accounts his words were inspired: he spoke of God and vengeance, closing with a call to “listen to liberty that speaks to all our hearts.” At the center of the gathering, a woman lifted a knife and killed a black pig in ritual sacrifice; then the congregants swore an oath to obey their leader Boukman, who was organizing them in rebellion against their masters, and to maintain utmost secrecy so as to ensure the success of their bold endeavor. For additional protection, some took hair from the pig to put in amulets.