Marie-Cessette Dumas

Marie-Cessette Dumas was a female slave in the French colony of Saint Domingue. She was the mother of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the grandmother of novelist Alexandre Dumas, and the great-grandmother of playwright Alexandre Dumas, fils, and has been called a "great matriarch to a saga of distinguished men".^[1] She was a slave of African descent kept by the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de La Pailleterie. They lived at a plantation called La Guinaudée^[2] (or Guinodée^[3]) near Jérémie of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), until Antoine's departure in 1775.