Marie Magdeleine Garette was a free woman of color who worked as ménagère (domestic manager) for Vincent Ogé, earning 600 livres per year — a salary reflecting Ogé's considerable wealth as a quarteron négociant, and higher than the 400 livres paid to ménagères in more modest households.
King's Blue Coat or Powdered Wig documents her position and uses her case to correct C. L. R. James's claim that most free colored women were 'prostitutes or kept mistresses,' showing instead that wealthy gens de couleur employed formal household staff with contracts and set salaries. As Ogé's ménagère in the period leading up to his 1790 uprising, she would have been present in his household during the planning; what she witnessed or knew is unrecorded, and her fate after his execution in February 1791 is unknown.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Garrigus's Before Haiti provides the social history context for understanding figures like Marie-Magdeleine Garette — free women of color in colonial Saint-Domingue whose economic and social positions were defined by the legal frameworks that the affranchis community navigated. Garrigus's extensive archival work on the South Province's free-colored community recovers the women who appear in notarial records, inheritance cases, and commercial transactions as property owners, businesswomen, and social actors whose lives resist reduction to the categories that later historiography imposed. Garette's position as a free-colored woman in colonial service illuminates the complex gendered dimensions of the affranchis community's class formation — how women accumulated property, managed households, and transmitted social capital across generations.
Garette represents the free women of color whose economic and social lives Garrigus recovers from the notarial records — property owners and businesswomen whose class formation was inseparable from the gendered structures of colonial Saint-Domingue.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
Ménagère to Vincent Ogé
Employed as domestic manager (ménagère) in Vincent Ogé's household at a salary of 600 livres per year.