Women's injuries are recorded in the margins of American road reports

The American occupation built more than 500 miles of road, bridge and railway in Haiti, and its engineers filed routine construction reports as the work went on. Those reports are also the fullest surviving record of what happened to Haitian women in the same years. In side notes and passing description the paperwork registers women's skin raised, punctured, cut open and dismembered by occupation personnel, through malice and through carelessness. Grace Sanders Johnson borrows Marisa Fuentes's term mutilated historicity for the result. Haitian women enter the written record of these nineteen years overwhelmingly as injured bodies, so that a historian who wants their lives has to build them out of wounds. Sanders Johnson reads Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau's statement that the Haitian woman was literally transformed by the occupation as a claim about flesh and material conditions rather than a figure of speech. The Haitian geographer Georges Anglade argued that the occupation cannot be understood without treating the reordering of physical space as a political and historical fact.

Back from Haiti, Addie Hunton reported that important people were paying attention and that her quiet propaganda on Haiti's behalf might come to something. Quiet is the wrong word for what she then did. Inside the same year she spoke about Haiti to the California state convention of the National Association of Colored Women, to the National Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, to the NAACP convention in Chicago, and to the National Association of Colored Women again at Oakland. The following year she carried the subject to the Pan-African Conference in New York. Malbranche-Sylvain and Hudicourt were working the same circuit from the other end, through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, so that what happened to a woman in Port-au-Prince could be described in a hall in California within months. The speed of the reporting did nothing to slow the occupation. While Hunton toured, Haitian girls went on being harmed by the men garrisoned in their towns, and the list of their names went on getting longer.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.

Nobody settled how many were killed in the Port-au-Prince prison. The American chargé Davis said nearly two hundred, the French minister Girard reported 160, the British minister Kohan said 168, and H. P. Davis gave 167. Charles Oscar Etienne and his men fired a last volley into the yard, pretending to be rescuers so that the wounded would move, and then left for the Dominican legation. When the crowd marched to the jail to free the prisoners, which was a normal stage of a Haitian revolution, it found the yard full of bodies. Almost no family in the elite was untouched. Survivors walked the town behind pairs of men carrying a corpse on a plank. Edmond Polynice went to see what had been done to his three sons, then put on a morning coat and gloves, called at the Dominican legation, sent in his card to Etienne, and shot him three times when he appeared at the door. The crowd took the body apart and burned what was left of it in the gutter the next morning.