The bank holds the government's own money and names its price

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.

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.

In 1914 the American State Department received reports that German merchants controlled roughly eighty percent of all commerce in Haiti. The community numbered only a few hundred people and had made itself indispensable in the one way the law allowed. Foreigners could not own Haitian land, so German traders married Haitian women, held the import business, financed governments at high interest and lent to whichever faction looked likely to win. By 1914 they were the working bank of Haitian politics. Washington read this as a strategic problem rather than a commercial one. Europe went to war that August, the Panama Canal opened in the same month, and the prospect of a German-leaning republic sitting on the Windward Passage was the argument that carried in the American cabinet. The occupation that began in July 1915 is usually explained by Haitian disorder. The disorder was real enough. The eighty percent is what made it urgent.

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.