A budget worthy of Switzerland and five hundred schools nobody could find

Guilbaud kept pushing on education under Tancrède Auguste and got very little in the towns and nothing in the countryside. Sir Harry Johnston, the British explorer and colonial analyst, had visited Haiti in 1910 and set out why. The Budget général, handsomely printed, carried a section for the Department of Public Instruction laid out in a detail he compared to Switzerland or Germany. Most of that structure existed on paper. The money voted for it reached the pockets of officials or never left the treasury at all. Johnston doubted that any rural school existed, though five hundred were provided for, and thought that where one did it functioned as a small income for someone unfit to teach. About two and a half million of Haiti's three million people could neither read nor write. This is the shape the postcolonial state kept taking: European architecture on the page, and underneath it an arrangement for moving public money among the governing few.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.

Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice exposed to prosecution, a congregation with a spiritualist name was legally safe, and the churches carried Vodou, Pentecostalism, spiritualism and Catholicism together: elaborate altars to ancestors, saints and spirit guides, women serving as priests and as mothers, prophecy and healing performed in ecstatic trance. Catholic Creoles of colour used a second cover, the seance, in which a medium delivered detailed messages in French from the dead. Rene Grandjean, born in France and resident in Haiti for several years, kept written records of those Creole seances. Zora Neale Hurston, working in the city in this period, put the arrangement plainly: the practice was in disrepute and parts of it were illegal, so a spiritualist name protected the congregation and worked as camouflage.

In 1917 the United States bought the Danish West Indies, the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix, and renamed them the Virgin Islands. The purchase was strategic. The Panama Canal had opened in 1914, and Washington wanted no European power holding a harbour on the approaches to it, least of all with a war running in Europe and German submarines at sea. Nicholls files the transaction alongside the occupation of Haiti and the occupation of Nicaragua, because all three belong to one policy. The Caribbean was being converted into an American lake, and the instrument varied with the case: a cheque to a small European state, a treaty extracted from a government the marines had installed, a landing party. Haiti's place in this was geographic. It sat on the sea lane that mattered to the United States at the moment the United States decided that sea lane would answer to nobody else. Anything Haitians did or failed to do in those years was read in Washington through that single consideration.