The songs, sermons and other materials collected in this anthology thoroughly characterize and demonstrate the distinctive language and culture that developed when African and European exiles came together on the plantations of Jamaica. Accounts of planters, slave-trading captains, and other testimonies from both the colonial and indigenous population effectively illustrate the unfolding of this unique culture.

Jean D'Costa retired as Leavenworth Professor Emeritus from Hamilton College in 1998, and lives in Florida with her husband, David D'Costa. Her children's fiction includes Sprat Morrison (1972; 1990), Escape to Last Man Peak (1976), Voice in the Wind (1978) for ages ten to twelve. For children aged seven to ten, she has published Duppy Tales (1997), Caesar and the Three Robbers (1996), along with Jenny and the General (2006) and, with Velma Pollard, co-edited and co-authored an anthology of short stories, Over Our Way (1981; 1993). With Professor Barbara Lalla, she has produced Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole (1990), and also Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries (1989).

Barbara Lalla is Professor of Language and Literature in the Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. Her doctorate is in Medieval Studies, and teaching includes Language History, Literary Linguistics, and Medieval and Postcolonial Literature. Publications include Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole (1990) and Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1989), companion volumes both co-authored/co-edited with Professor Jean D'Costa; Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival (1996), and articles on Caribbean literature, discourse and language history. Her historical novel, Arch of Fire, appeared in 1998, and has since been translated into German (Flammedes Land, 2000).