Jerome Conspiracy 1786

In 1786, authorities in the Marmelade district prosecuted a clandestine ritual network associated with Jerome Poteau and Telemaque, both fugitives from the same plantation, whose gatherings could draw up to two hundred participants. Witnesses described ritual meetings involving altars, candles, rum mixed with pepper and gunpowder, sacred packets, and mayombo sticks filled with charged materials; colonial testimony claimed Jerome and his associates preached independence and sold protective objects. Crystal Eddins reads the network as part of a larger pattern where ritual, marronnage, and collective action are inseparable — the 1786 prosecution is one of the clearest pre-1791 cases where colonial law, anti-assembly policing, Black sacred practice, and explicit liberation language converge in the same archive.