A woman inherits her mother's spirits and later hires a priestess

Mariline, a Haitian woman interviewed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, said she had taken on her mother's spirits in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Her mother had served those spirits at home, on the family land, without paying anyone to help. Mariline did the same for years. She said she could hold the feeding of the spirits herself because it was a simple one, and because her nation of spirits was not used to being served in a priestess's house. Then illness sent her to a manbo. She stayed, went through initiation, and by the time she was interviewed she held the rank of hunsi kanzo inside a temple and depended on the manbo to help feed her spirits. Hers is one of the few first hand accounts of Haitian Vodou moving from the homestead to the temple, and of the point at which a paid priesthood became necessary for work families had done for themselves.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

Frederick Douglass, appointed by President Florvil Hyppolite as Haiti's commissioner to the World's Columbian Exposition, spoke at the dedication of the Haitian pavilion on the anniversary of independence. He told his audience he would speak of the country's character, history and importance, of its struggle from slavery to freedom and statehood, of its relations with the United States and its probable destiny, and of what its example might mean for people of African descent elsewhere. He praised the modest size of the building, saying the government had wisely chosen not to strain its resources. St. Hubert notes that the pavilion was the first foreign building completed at the fair, and that its central hall carried the arms of the republic with three dates, the discovery in 1492, independence in 1804 and the present anniversary.

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.