A priest at Petite Riviere writes down where a freedom paper came from

For most of the eighteenth century a person of colour in Saint-Domingue was free if the neighbours treated her as free. By the 1770s officials wanted a document instead, and an arret of 1758 required priests to see proof of liberty and to stop accepting what everyone locally knew. The parish of Petite Riviere was ahead of that order by ten years. In 1748 a woman recorded as Angelique brought her freedom papers to a baptism and the priest wrote down exactly where they came from, an act of liberty granted by two named men on 29 August 1746. Her daughter had no acknowledged father and therefore no white protector, so the entry in the register was the child’s whole defence. In the same year and the same parish, Marie Victoire Morisseau was baptised with her brothers by a mother who called herself free in front of priests and enslavers and produced nothing. Years later that absence decided a lawsuit against her.