“She ordered one of her slaves to cut off the head of the [beautiful negro girl], which was instantly done. At dinner her husband said he felt no disposition to eat, to which his wife, with the air of a demon, replied, perhaps I can give you something that will excite your appetite; it has at least had that effect before. She rose and drew from a closet the head of Coomba.”
Secret History or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, Leonora Sansay, p. 70
This anecdote from a Creole woman in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History is one of the many horrors illustrated in the novel. But these horrors, read through a white American woman, frequently place sympathies with the white elite as opposed to enslaved Blacks in the midst of what would become the Haitian Revolution.
Coomba is the only Black woman named in Sansay’s epistolary novel, and in an attempt to give attention to her mode of dress (a likely source of the Creole woman’s jealousy), I have created drawings of her head with adornments – in effect re-contextualizing her head from the grotesque dinner table setting. To do this I explored the history of the name Coomba, using the African Names database, Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade among other archives to trace her possible identities, while attending to the fuzziness and inconclusiveness of the historical record. Each ‘version’ of Coomba is a creative imagining, informed by both her presence and absence in the archive.
The new context of the head is the postage stamp, nodding to the epistolary nature of Sansay’s Secret History and communicating the necessity of “rebellious” Black women to share the history of Haiti. That is, without a stamp, a letter goes nowhere.
Secret Histories of Coomba 
