Simpson describes a country split into two strata that barely mix and cannot do without each other. The elite is perhaps three percent of the population, entered by birth rather than achievement, and actual government rests with a few hundred men.

The gap is as much cultural as economic. The elite speaks French and the countryside speaks Creole, which the elite understands and the peasantry cannot answer in kind. Physicians and pharmacies serve one side, bocors the other. Law, medicine, politics and the army are the honorable careers, and commerce is disdained. Within the elite, wealth, party and clique cut across one another, party loyalty attaching to particular men rather than programs, and color is weighed constantly while being publicly denied.

Movement upward is narrow. Money alone does not admit a peasant, marriage across the line scarcely occurs, and the usual route has been a successful revolt. Inherited habits of deference hold the arrangement together.