Romaine-la-Prophétesse

Romaine-la-Prophétesse ("Romaine the Prophetess") was born around 1750 in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, assigned male at birth, and originally named either Romaine or Romain Rivière or possibly Román Rivera. 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 his wife Marie-Roze Adam gathered supporters at their Trou Coffy plantation to defend it from armed whites, and led an uprising there of thousands of slaves, who took weapons and supplies from and sometimes burned plantations and businesses across southern Haiti, and freed 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 to refer to himself in letters he dictated. Romaine has therefore been interpreted as perhaps genderfluid or transgender, or might have been bigender.

For a time, Romaine controlled much of the countryside and two of the main cities of southern Haiti, Léogâne and Jacmel. In 1792, however, a coalition of whites and conservative free blacks and French forces defeated this uprising, although Romaine escaped capture and disappeared from history. Romaine-la-Prophétesse appears in Victor Hugo's novel Bug-Jargal, and Mayra Montero's fiction In the Palm of Darkness.