By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haiti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophetesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed thatthe Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Leogane. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbe Ouiviere, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil ofthe revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the 18th Century Caribbean. This crucial book, based on extensive archival research, offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and West African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulences andtriumphs of revolutionary France, Haiti, and early republican America. | The Priest and the Prophetess by Terry Rey, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters