The women who founded the LFAS were the country's first professionals

The leadership of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale included the first Haitian woman to qualify as a lettered attorney, the first woman anthropologist, the first woman gynecologist and the first woman social worker. They carried the methods of those disciplines into their politics. In the 1930s and 1940s their work took its direction from indigénisme, the cultural nationalism Jean Price-Mars built around the claim that Haiti should treat its African ancestry as its centre. In 1917 Price-Mars had told an audience of elite women that poor and elite women were bound together by that shared ancestry whatever else divided them, and LFAS members took the class gap between Haitian women up as their own problem. When indigénisme was professionalised through the Institut d'Ethnologie in the 1940s it shaped the research of members like Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, whose subject was consistently women and girls among the peasantry and the urban poor. The Institut, founded by Price-Mars and Jacques Roumain, supplied the contacts and the tours, often arranged by women, that let Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Lavinia Williams, Melville Herskovits and Alfred Métraux do their work.

Michel makes the coincidence of dates the hinge of his narrative. The tenth of October 1917 was Peralte's thirty-second birthday, and that evening, he writes, brought a particular gift, because during the night the cacos made their first attack on the town of Hinche. He treats the raid as the opening of a duel to the death between Haiti's heroes and the occupying army rather than as an isolated act of banditry. The attack was repulsed, partly for want of preparation, but the occupiers and their local auxiliaries felt the heat of the engagement and set about finding who was responsible. Michel notes the setting that made the central plateau suitable ground: the population there had not been disarmed as coastal regions had been, and the forced labour system was applied with particular severity.

In 1917 American authorities arrested Charlemagne Péralte for his alleged part in an attack on the home of a United States officer. He was tried and sentenced to five years of hard labour. He escaped, went into the mountains, and organised the largest peasant rising Haiti had seen since the war of independence. Nicholls records the arrest in a single line, which is roughly how the occupation's own paperwork treated it at the time. Péralte was a district commander from Hinche, educated at one of the best schools in the country, well connected, and hostile to Dartiguenave long before he was hostile to the marines. Putting such a man in prison clothes and setting him to sweep streets under guard was a decision whose consequences no court weighed. The occupation produced its most dangerous opponent through the ordinary operation of its own justice, and then spent two years, a marine brigade, an air detachment and a covert operation undoing the result.

Michel says the American authorities arrested the Peralte brothers with little concern for guilt or innocence, taking Saul, Saint Remy and Charlemagne along with the cousins Sevigne and Jules Peralte and other notable citizens of Hinche, all held from that date. After questioning in the Marines' jails, four of the accused were kept and marched on foot to Ouanaminthe under heavy guard, roped together like animals, to face a military court. Charlemagne's house was burned and Saul's was plundered by the Marines and their followers. The brothers spent Christmas in the jail at Ouanaminthe. Michel treats the collective punishment of a family and a town as the standard method of the occupation rather than an excess, and later lists cousins Philoxene, Emmanuel and Leosthenes among relatives killed under one pretext or another.