Alice Garoute is born, and her mother is carrying a revolver

Alice Thézan was born in Cap-Haïtien in 1874 into a milat petite bourgeoise family. Her mother was rumored to keep a revolver in her corsage, having taken part in the Boyer-Bazelais operations against the Salomon government, and the family spent years exiled in Jamaica for it. Garoute grew up to be older than most of the women she later recruited into the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, sharp tongued, and by every account extremely persuasive. What I want on the record is the inheritance. Haitian feminism in the 1930s did not arrive from Paris or from American suffragists. It came down through households where the women had already been in political conflict with the state for two generations, and where exile was a family experience rather than a headline. Movements have genealogies, and this one runs through a corsage.

Between 1868 and 1877 descendants of the refugees who had left Saint Domingue held elected office across the American South. F. H. Fyall sat in the Georgia House in 1868. George L. Fayerman sat in the Virginia House from 1869 to 1871. Robert C. DeLarge and Alonzo J. Ransier both sat in the South Carolina House from 1868 to 1870 and then went to the United States House of Representatives, DeLarge from 1871 to 1873 and Ransier from 1873 to 1875. Felix C. Antoine sat in the Louisiana House and Cesar C. Antoine in the Louisiana Senate, both from 1868 to 1872. Cesar Antoine then served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 1872 to 1876 and Richard H. Gleaves as lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1872 to 1877. The generation that lost these seats is the one that organised the challenge to segregation in New Orleans.

MacLeod credits the treaty concluded between Haiti and the Dominican Republic with completing the policy the deposed emperor had pursued in the eighteen fifties. Its central undertaking is that neither power will permit foreign intrusion on its soil without invoking the help of the other, which is precisely the guarantee Soulouque had sought when he offered the Dominicans a nominal confederation in exchange for closing the island to European and American power. The article uses this to argue that his eastern policy has been misread as adventurism. The dilemma he faced was real and is stated plainly in the scholarship the article cites. Leaving the east alone invited a white power to take it, which Haitians read as the return of slavery next door, while trying to reassert Haitian sovereignty there provoked exactly the foreign intervention he feared.

In 1876 the British authorities tried to fine Dahomey over the treatment of their honorary vice consul at the port of Whydah. King Glele protested that in all the books written about Dahomey by the French, the Portuguese or the English, from the founding of the kingdom down to his own reign and his father's, no such fine had ever been paid, and that they should look into those books and find such a case if they could. Dahomey kept its history by mouth, but the court had some access to the European written record, whether by reading it or through the reports of visitors. Twenty six years earlier Forbes had watched a woman soldier at a public festival hold up a piece of paper and say that the heir apparent had given it to her for the king, to keep the records of the country on. Law allows that European books may have fed back into Dahomian tradition before colonial rule began.