Hundreds of Haitian teachers, doctors, engineers and agronomists went to the newly independent Congo in the early 1960s to staff the United Nations civilian operation there, and by 1962 they formed the second largest national group among UN experts in the country. Jackson asks why so little of this survives in the record. She works through the Maurice Dartigue papers at the Schomburg Center, including his correspondence with Haitian presidents about recruiting professionals, alongside UN staff lists, the newsletter of retired World Health Organization staff, and interviews with the men who went and with the wives and children who grew up in Africa. The categories on offer, exile, brain drain, expatriate, all fail to hold what she finds, which is a group who chose Africa and developed a sense of solidarity there. Following Trouillot, she treats that failure as evidence about how histories get made and which stories they close off.