A market woman steps out from behind a water cart in Port-au-Prince

On Tuesday 5 September 1917 Adirenng Senatus of Jacmel tried to cross the street by the open market in Port-au-Prince with a basket of fruit and a parcel in her hands. She stepped out from behind a sprinkler wagon and was hit by a Quartermasters mortar truck driven by Private Sterling R. Hold of the United States Marine Corps. She remembered nothing until she woke in hospital. The record lists a laceration six inches long above her left knee, a deep one twelve inches long in her lower left leg, and bruising across her left foot and under her right eye. In evidence Hold said he had not seen her, and that he had been driving slowly. Senatus told the court she had no reason to think he hit her on purpose. The court ruled the collision unavoidable and cleared him of carelessness. She died later of what the truck did to her. Her case sits in a file of road accidents that Grace Sanders Johnson reads for what American officials believed about Haitians and their bodies, and for what Haitian women said back.

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

Charlemagne Masséna Péralte of Hinche was a graduate of Saint Louis de Gonzague, a former commandant de la place at Port-de-Paix and at Léogâne, and a brother in law of Oreste Zamor, which made him an enemy of Dartiguenave. In early 1918 he was convicted of taking part in a night raid on Gendarmerie headquarters at Hinche, where a payroll of twelve thousand dollars had just arrived. Caught at Ouanaminthe before he could reach the border, he was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the civil prison at the Cap and set to sweeping the gutters under guard. On 3 September 1918 he persuaded his guard to run with him into the mountains behind the Plaine du Nord. He gathered Bobo's old Cacos and Zamorist bands from Hinche and declared war to drive the invaders into the sea. On the night of 17 October a hundred Cacos wearing the scarlet badge of Ogoun attacked Hinche and lost thirty five dead to a garrison that had been warned. On 10 November sixty of them took Maïssade.

Around forty thousand Haitian peasants took up arms against the American occupation in 1918. Nothing on that scale had happened on Haitian soil since the war of independence. The grievance was the corvée, the unpaid road labour the occupation had revived from an 1863 statute, which the peasantry read as the return of the forced work their great grandparents had fought a revolution to destroy. The fighters were called Cacos, after a bird of prey, and they marked themselves with patches of red cloth. They had been a factor in Haitian politics for decades, hired and paid by presidential candidates from the North to march on the capital. In 1918 they turned on the Americans instead. Their leader was Charlemagne Péralte, born at Hinche on 10 October 1885, who had commanded the garrison at Léogâne when the marines landed in 1915. Sentenced to five years of hard labour for destroying United States property, he escaped and built the insurgency. The same year a constitution drafted under American supervision was promulgated over a population that had no part in writing it.