Cotton falls from thirty five cents to sixteen and stays down for twenty years

American farmers had ploughed marginal land and bought tractors to feed the world during the war. The number of motor vehicles on farms multiplied fivefold in the war years to about eighty five thousand, and by the end of the 1920s nearly a million farmers were driving them. Nine million work animals were slaughtered as machines replaced them, releasing thirty million acres of pasture for wheat, cotton and dairying. When world production returned to its normal channels after the armistice of November 1918, the surplus had nowhere to go. Cotton fell from a wartime high of thirty five cents a pound to sixteen cents in 1920. Corn fell from a dollar and a half a bushel to fifty two cents, wool from nearly sixty cents a pound to under twenty. Prices improved a little after 1921 and did not recover fully until war returned in 1939. Foreclosures rose and owners became tenants.

American marines had held Haiti since July 1915, and the armed answer to them came from the cacos, the peasant fighters of the northern and central hills. Benoit Batraville led them after Charlemagne Peralte was killed in 1919. In May 1920 he was shot dead in a fight with marine and gendarmerie patrols, and organised guerrilla resistance to the occupation ended with him. Nicholls draws attention to what was found among his personal papers. Batraville understood the peasant struggle in religious terms and sought spiritual protection for the men who followed him, which is to say the campaign was fought with the resources the countryside actually had. The occupation would last another fourteen years. It was ended by lawyers, newspapers, fundraising committees and a general strike, and no peasant army took the field against the marines again. Those papers record the last moment when the war was still being waged the old way, by men in the hills asking the spirits for cover.

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.

Yvonne Sylvain was a physician, one of the Sylvain sisters, and a member of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. She did not begin her one day a week at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince until several months after the newborn was found at LaSaline. She was already working close by, at Le Service d'Hygiene au Centre de Sante, whose district covered LaSaline and Cite Vincent. The details of the rescue would have come to her there. Sanders Johnson puts the two facts beside each other to close a distance readers tend to assume was wide. The League is usually described as an organisation of lettered, French speaking women of the capital's elite, several removes from the settlements by the water. In this instance the removes amounted to a few city blocks. The doctor compiling public health figures on infant mortality and the mother who left a child near the shore were using the same clinic, the same road, the same town.