Before the balloon rises in Washington Black, there is heat: the furnace glow of a Barbados boiling house, the clang of cast-iron “trains,” the relentless logic of sugar. In 1661, Barbados became Britain’s first slave society, writing a slave code that turned people into property and exported its methods across the Atlantic. Our new hybrid podcast and trailer set the fiction against this reality—not to diminish the story, but to deepen it.

In the film world, Wash takes to the skies. In the historical world, law and labour held him to earth. The Barbados Slave Code normalised punishment, protected planters’ property, and laid down a racial order that structured daily life. Those statutes travelled with planters and merchants; so did the sugar they milled and the rum they shipped. Here, the Halifax, Nova Scotia, connection comes into view—part of a wider Atlantic economy where Caribbean production met northern ports, and ideas, people, and power moved with the cargo.

This is a trailer to the full podcast- Other Trailers Include the Barbados Halifax-Connection, illustrated in Wash’s story
– see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL9QordXDuc

 

What we’re doing in this series is simple and, we hope, humane: pairing imagination (flight) with non-fiction (ground). We follow the arc of the balloon, but we also listen for the voices in the yard—market women, artisans, sailors, and the everyday “rogues” whose wit and resilience complicate any single narrative. Their humour isn’t an escape from history; it’s proof of life within it.

The result is a cinematic-audio weave: filmic pacing, archival textures, and plainspoken context you can walk into—windmill towers, boiling-house walls, chattel houses that once moved from estate to estate. It’s a story about law and empire, yes, but also about the stubborn humanity that outlasted both.

Watch the 56-second explainer, hear the full hybrid episode, and explore the script, sources, and maps here:

👉 https://roguesinparadise.com/washington-black-meets-the-real-barbados/

 

The Podcast is a project of Rogues in Paradise- Expected to be published shortly- Grab your Free Sampler Chapters here…

 

Previous Trailer – Halifax Barbados Historic Connection:

 

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