Romaine-la-Prophétesse

Romaine-la-Prophétesse ("Romaine the Prophetess") was born around 1750 in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo and assigned male at birth. Romaine moved to the French colony of Saint-Domingue and became a free Black coffee plantation owner and an influential figure there. In 1791, as the Haitian Revolution began, Romaine and wife Marie-Roze Adam gathered supporters at their plantation (Trou Coffy) to defend it from armed whites who had massed nearby, and led an uprising of thousands of slaves, who took weapons and supplies from and sometimes burned plantations and businesses across southern Haiti and freed other slaves there.

At the same time, Romaine began to identify as a prophetess, dressed like a woman, and spoke of being possessed by a female spirit, but also reportedly identified as a godson of the Virgin Mary, intended (according to one critic) to become "king of Saint-Domingue", and reportedly used masculine pronouns in self-references in dictated letters. Romaine has therefore been interpreted as perhaps genderfluid or transgender, or might have been bigender.

For a time, Romaine controlled much of the countryside of southern Haiti, and two of its main cities, Léogâne and Jacmel. In 1792, however, a coalition of white and conservative free Black residents and French forces defeated the Trou Coffy uprising and arrested Marie-Roze, although Romaine escaped capture and disappeared from history. Romaine-la-Prophétesse appears in Victor Hugo's novel Bug-Jargal (as a man), and Mayra Montero's fiction In the Palm of Darkness (as a woman).