Adelsia keeps what she earns and gives her father none of it

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, the first Haitian woman to train as an anthropologist, recorded the working lives of Haitian women in the decades around the First World War. One of them was Adelsia, who entered plasaj, a recognised conjugal union outside civil marriage, as her husband's second wife during the war. Adelsia kept every gourde she earned for herself and her daughters and passed none of it to her father. Marriage in this world moved property as well as people. Through a husband a woman could gain the use of land belonging to her own family and to his, in places where she would never hold the title. It also carried the exchanges that held a rural community together, the feasts, the labour swaps and the obligations between households. Adelsia's refusal to hand over her earnings marks the edge of a second economy, one that women ran inside the household on terms the Haitian civil code had never written down and could not reach.

By 1909 France and Germany carried more commercial weight in Haiti than in any other Caribbean country. The clergy were French, French importers at Le Havre took two-thirds of the coffee crop, and every Haitian loan from 1825 to 1896 had come from France. German firms moved two-thirds of Haiti's trade on the Hamburg America Line, controlled the railway, the Port-au-Prince wharf, the ice plant and the electric company, and married into Haitian families to get around the ban on foreigners owning land. German money financed the revolutions as well, buying rebel bonds at ten cents on the dollar and redeeming them in full when the rebellion won. In 1910 a Franco German group offered a new bank and a loan of 65 million francs secured on the customs. The National City Bank of New York and Speyer and Company offered 12.5 million dollars against American control of the same customs. Washington objected furiously to the European plan, and in January 1911 American interests took half of the new Banque Nationale de la Republique d'Haiti.

In January 1906 L'Etoile Africaine ran articles on the Pan-African movement then taking shape. The movement was six years old, dating from the London conference of 1900, and it had almost no institutional existence yet: a handful of meetings, a few journals, letters passing between men in the West Indies, the United States, west Africa and Europe. A paper in Port-au-Prince publishing its arguments was one of the connections that made it a movement at all. Haiti's place in this was peculiar. It was the reference point everyone in the network cited, the proof that black self government existed, and it was at the same time a poor country under mounting American pressure whose own newspapers were reading about the black world elsewhere. The journal's name states the position it took. The link ran both ways, and Haitian intellectuals were consumers of Pan-African thought as well as its favourite example.

The last months of Nord Alexis went badly. On 5 and 6 July 1908 fire took twelve hundred houses in Port-au-Prince, and four days later the Grand'Rue nearly went with them. Jamaica offered relief supplies and was told that cash would suit better, since government salaries were four months in arrears. In October the president's wife died. He was nearly blind by then and could no longer get onto a horse. On 15 November he watched the Sunday parade from the palace balcony, lectured his officers on loyalty, and then dismissed General Antoine Simon, who had governed the South from Les Cayes for eighteen years. Simon was past seventy. He marched on the capital with peasant troops carrying spears and machetes and reached Leogane on 30 November. On the night of 1 December the last regiments in Port-au-Prince changed sides and the cabinet fled to the French legation. Nord Alexis was still washing when they came to tell him to go. He was walked to the wharf through a howling crowd that cut his coat open and took thirty thousand dollars in gold from his baggage.