A sister writes to warn Péralte that the new bridge is a trap

On 15 July 1919 Marie Louise wrote to Charlemagne Péralte. She told him his tactics were wearing down the morale of the American soldiers in Port-au-Prince and that his name was carrying further, at home and abroad. Then she gave him the reason she was writing. The occupation had built a bridge at Arcahaie, and there was a trap set there with a car. Warn your men. She signed herself his affectionate sister. Hers was one of many letters carried by women who worked for the Cacos or for the Americans, and the intelligence in it turns on the same infrastructure the occupation listed in its annual reports as achievement. A bridge counted as progress in Washington and as a killing ground in her letter, and both descriptions were accurate. Marie Louise took real risks for what she believed. She later mortgaged the value of her house to cover the travel costs of an Englishman who was going to carry news of the revolution through Europe.

Franklin Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy and the Democratic candidate for vice president, told an audience that he had had something to do with running a couple of small republics and that he had written Haiti's constitution himself. Pamphile places the remark in a sequence. On 9 August a NAACP delegation including Johnson had met Harding at Marion, Ohio, putting to him an agenda of anti-lynching legislation, federal aid, voting rights and an end to the occupation; Harding took little interest in any of it except Haiti, which Johnson said he treated as a gift off the Christmas tree. Roosevelt's boast gave him his opening. On 17 September Harding promised he would not authorise an assistant navy secretary to draft a constitution for helpless West Indian neighbours and force it on them at marine bayonet point, and in his Constitution Day speech he called the admission a confession of the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

The women knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. The first day brought in one hundred American dollars. Between October 1920 and February 1921 Haitian women financed the Union Patriotique's delegation to the United States, and the campaign reached all sixty-one committees the organisation had in the country, with women serving as the main fundraisers and the administrators in each of them. They were instructed to give two or three days a week to soliciting from families in their own neighbourhoods, and they spent weeks inside other people's houses. That is where the second thing happened. Sitting in those rooms, the collectors heard what the occupation had done to the women who lived in them, wrote it down, and carried the accounts back to the membership and outward across the region. The material became the centre of the delegation's report in 1921, reached American newspapers, and was printed years later in the book Occupied Haiti. A fundraising round had produced the first archive of the occupation's violence against women.

Malbranche-Sylvain and Alice Garoute catalogued what the collectors brought back. The Senate hearings in Washington had concluded that no Haitian girl or woman was touched, harmed or killed by the occupation. The list of grievances the women assembled recorded girls and women burned alive, buried alive, hanged and shot. Some appear by name: Mme. Rosier, Hergenee, Madame Garnier, Athelia and Cloraine Etienne, Madame Eucharice Cadichon, Dorlean Joseph, Madam Prevoit, Mme. Bregarde, Madame Lumenesse. Others enter the record through a relationship, as somebody's mother or sister or daughter, or as the woman who had been caring for a pregnant neighbour. Much of the harm was done at the line between the street and the house, in doorways and yards, where occupied public space pushed into private life. A committee in Washington had declared this category of victim empty. Haitian women filled it in longhand, name after name and wound after wound, and produced a record the occupation could neither correct nor destroy.