Jérôme Poteau was a mixed-race fugitive at the center of the 1786 Marmelade ritual-conspiracy prosecution.
The surviving testimony portrays him as a seller of sacred objects — packets containing stones, rum, gunpowder, iron, and papers — organizer of clandestine nocturnal meetings across multiple plantations, and preacher of liberation. In November 1786 the Conseil Supérieur of Le Cap convicted three men for holding 'superstitious and tumultuous nocturnal meetings of slaves' in the Marmelade district, and Eddins places Poteau at the center of this network alongside Telemaque, who had escaped from the same plantation. He fled capture and was condemned in effigy — his mixed-race status and movement between plantations as a seller of sacred objects made him a figure the colonial state could not reduce to a single category.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Ramsey's The Spirits and the Law recovers Poteau through the colonial legal record of the 1786 Conseil Supérieur prosecution — the judgment that criminalized the Marmelade nocturnal meetings as 'superstitious and tumultuous.' Ramsey's legal-history approach situates this prosecution within the colony's long effort to regulate and suppress African religious practice through anti-poison and anti-assembly laws. Where Eddins emphasizes the network's internal organization and ritual logic, Ramsey emphasizes the colonial state's response: how the prosecution named, categorized, and sought to eliminate a form of collective action that the law could only partially understand.
The 1786 prosecution of the Marmelade assemblies placed Poteau within the colonial legal framework that sought to suppress African religious practice as a mechanism of plantation control — the prosecution is itself evidence of the network's organizational effectiveness.
Eddins's Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution places Jérôme Poteau at the center of the 1786 Marmelade ritual-conspiracy prosecution — documenting his role as seller of sacred objects (packets containing stones, rum, gunpowder, iron, and papers), organizer of clandestine nocturnal meetings across multiple plantations, and co-leader with Telemaque of a network the colonial state could not categorize cleanly. Eddins's analysis of Poteau makes the ritual dimensions of pre-revolutionary resistance visible as political infrastructure: the sacred objects were organizing tools, the assemblies were spaces of collective deliberation, and the liberation preaching was ideological work.
Poteau's sale of sacred objects and organization of clandestine assemblies across multiple plantations constituted a political infrastructure for collective resistance — ritual practice as organizing technology.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1786
Jerome Conspiracy 1786
The central figure in the 1786 Marmelade ritual-conspiracy prosecution; condemned in effigy after escaping capture.
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- Allied withTelemaque
Close associate in the Marmelade ritual network; both had escaped from the same plantation near Marmelade and jointly organized clandestine assemblies.