Trouillot records that the snake has left the clay jar

D. Trouillot published an ethnographic sketch of vodou at Port au Prince in 1885 and noted that the reptile had long since slipped away from its canari, the small clay vessel that stands for the altar. Everyone who looked found the same thing. Moreau de Saint Mery had made the snake the centre of the colonial ceremony, yet Haitian and foreign writers who described ceremonies afterwards either say it is gone or never mention it. Among them are Hannibal Price, whose book on the rehabilitation of the black race appeared at Port au Prince in 1900, the physician Leon Audain, whose study of Haiti's affliction was printed there in 1908, and the traveller Eugene Aubin, whose account of Haitian planters and peasants came out in Paris in 1910. What survives of the older worship is narrower: country people will not kill a water boa. The dance, the trance and the sacrifice carried on without it.

In 1888 the New York Times told its readers that a revolution would be welcomed with fierce joy by what it called the black savages of the interior, who stood ready at the first signal to come down on the towns and, maddened by rum, to commit every outrage imaginable. The same paper later described a highly emotional population with little beyond tribal rule and superstition to guide it, and therefore open to demagogues. Bellegarde-Smith sets those sentences beside the New York Times of 2010, whose columnists explained the country through cultural inferiority and the influence of Vodou, and beside a Wall Street Journal piece of the same year resting on the claim that culture matters and race does not. He treats the vocabulary as the visible surface of a colonial discourse running since the late eighteenth century, and notes that the paper had kept a resident correspondent in Haiti from the late nineteenth century into the late 1950s.

In 1885 the Haitian writer and diplomat Antenor Firmin published On the Equality of the Human Races, written against the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau. Firmin argued that the Haitian people stood as a lighthouse for black people across the Americas and in Africa, because of the revolution that had ended slavery there. Vodou had no place in what he was defending. His purpose was to demonstrate that Haitians were a civilised people, and the argument left the opposition between barbarism and civilisation standing exactly where the anthropology of his century had put it. Hurbon treats the omission as the shape of a much longer problem. The educated minority spoke for Haiti abroad while the religion of the rural majority was kept at the edge of national life, and after a century the marginalising felt normal to the people doing it.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.