Péralte writes to a British chargé from the hills above the capital

The surviving letters show how high Péralte was riding in 1919. He wrote to Brigadier General Catlin attacking the Dartiguenave ministers by name, dismissing the Gendarmerie as ex-convicts and houseboys led by marines dubbed officers for the occasion, declaring that slavery had already been re-established, and offering to support the better sort of American in exchange for Bobo's return. Catlin filed it. Letters came the other way from his brother Saint-Rémy and his sister Marie Louise in Port-au-Prince, addressed to the code name Maïs Goilte, carrying money, rumour, and news of contacts with the British legation and an unnamed Englishman who was to buy ammunition, see King George V, then travel on to Japan, France and Russia. Marie Louise mortgaged a house to give him two thousand dollars. The manbo Mme de Thèbes offered, for five hundred, a neuvaine to paralyse the gendarmes, provided Péralte sent earth from every commune in the North and Upper Artibonite. He sent it. On 6 October he warned the British chargé that he stood at the gates of the capital.

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.