In eighteenth-century France and its Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, this biography follows Alex Dumas—born to an enslaved mother and a fugitive French nobleman—as he rises from bondage to command Revolutionary armies, becoming the real-life model behind his son Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling heroes.
An outsider can reject an inherited advantage to claim his own identity and earn his place. The son of an enslaved woman, he dropped his white father's noble name, took his mother's slave name, and joined the army at the lowest rank. His father had once sold him into bondage to pay for a passage home.
A sudden revolutionary break can let an outsider rise in a way the old order never allowed. One man climbed from corporal to four-star general in about a year and a half, at the height of slavery. The author says he could never have risen so far without that moment of upheaval, which was ahead of its own century.
Some of fiction's most familiar heroes are built from a real person's life, retold by someone who loved him. A son turned his father's exploits and unjust imprisonment into stories of fearless heroes and of the wronged man seeking justice. That pattern still shapes action heroes and thrillers today.
A society can go a long way toward equality and then reverse it, and the reversal can erase the memory of how far it got. The author set out to learn how close one country came to a society blind to race before it destroyed that progress. That a black general this prominent could vanish from history is part of the evidence.