Marie-Cessette Dumas

Marie-Cessette Dumas was an enslaved woman 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". 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 near Jérémie of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, until Antoine's departure in 1775.