The second chapter of Ti difé boulé explores the history of the infamous French colonial Code Noir, or Black Code, of 1685 and how it operated on slave society. With Grinn Prominnin arriving to discuss colonial times in Saint-Domingue, the book presents an outline of the hierarchies of power within the former French colony. The Black Code buttressed white plantation owners, the French commissioners, businessmen and foreign investors at the expense of the enslaved people who were permanently trapped in apocalyptic conditions. Trouillot conveys a Marxist analysis of the contradictions in the colonial system—ones that foreshadow the predatory reflexes of the Haitian state in the society that arose following the revolution (post-1804). Providing a broad panorama, the chapter argues that the enslaved population resiliently forged the Haitian Creole language and Vodou religion, forming, for Trouillot, the two great coherencies that form the bedrock of subsequent Haitian resistance. While Creole and Vodou represent the surging enslaved proletariat, Trouillot describes the forced conversion of enslaved people to Catholicism as a means of “easing” the consciences of colonists. The final sections explore the Black Code’s carefully calibrated delineations between enslaved people, black and mulatto freedman, and whites. Trouillot riffs on the interplay between the term kòd, which means both “code” and “cord”, to capture the dynamics of legal strangulation that the Black Code put into place. Like a kite in a hurricane, the enslaved people were finally able to slit the Code/cord that kept them in bondage in 1791, the year that sparked the revolution.
