Labelle's fieldwork, carried out in Port-au-Prince and the Leogane countryside in 1971 and 1972, treats Haiti's question of colour as an ideology carried by particular classes rather than a culture shared by everyone. She collected colour terminology, ran picture tests on beauty, wealth, honesty, sexuality and kinds of work, and interviewed adults and children, comparing an old light-skinned bourgeoisie, a black petite bourgeoisie, and prosperous, middling and poor peasants around Carrefour-Dufort. What emerges is a set of parallel vocabularies whose content shifts with class position. Mulatrisme survives intact among the bourgeoisie, sharpened by what the first Duvalier years cost them. Within the petite bourgeoisie the two doctrines fight openly, and its noirisme defends its own members against the peasants and workers it treats with contempt. Peasant noirisme carries genuine resistance, folded into vodou and into a nationalism drawn from oral memory. Colour, on this reading, is a sign that class hierarchy uses and hides behind.