A day of recovered liberty that lasts less than twenty-four hours

Michel treats the day as simultaneously one of mourning and of liberty, liberty regained and then immediately lost again, because the euphoria lasted less than a day before a period of travail that ran nineteen years. His dedication names the defenders: the officers and soldiers of the Haitian army who that night defended national territory from their position at the Port-au-Prince Arsenal against the United States Marines, and specifically the First Artillery Regiment under Captain-Adjutant-Major Chery Germain, a rank the Americans afterwards abolished. Michel puts the stand of that regiment forward as the direct precedent for what Peralte would attempt some years later. He also dates the loss precisely against the founding, noting that one hundred and eleven years after winning their liberty at such cost the Haitian people were put back in chains.

The fighting stopped on 11 November 1918. The war had lasted 1,563 days, killed some ten million soldiers, wounded twenty million more and consumed over three hundred billion dollars. It destroyed the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Romanovs in Russia, and in its final hours new governments were forming in Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Dublin while crowds filled the streets of Berlin and Petersburg. Kennedy opens his history of the American 1930s at this date because Herbert Hoover opened his memoirs the same way. The first sentence of those memoirs states that the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914 to 1918. Everything that followed for the United States, the debt, the tariffs, the closed door to immigrants and the refusal to join the League of Nations, was a reaction to those fifty two months.

A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.