For those Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage, arrival in Saint-Domingue was followed by another torture: branding. Masters marked their ownership by burning their initials into the flesh of their human property. For some, this was a second branding, as slave traders sometimes branded the captives loaded onto their ships. And each time a slave was sold, the process was repeated. According to one seventeenth-century priest, one man “who had been sold and resold several times was in the end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.”

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 74