Knapp allows that three thousand Haitian men may have been killed

By the early 1920s the American military declared the caco wars won. The proof it offered was Charlemagne Peralte, the caco leader and intellectual, captured and killed in 1919, his naked body arranged to resemble a crucifixion and photographed, the photograph then circulated through a country that knew exactly what image was being used against it. Reports of continued killing kept reaching Washington and the Senate opened investigations. In 1920 Admiral H. S. Knapp, who had served in Haiti and said he had studied conditions there thoroughly, was asked whether some three thousand Haitian men, women and children had been shot since 1915 by troops under American command. He answered that it was very possible three thousand Haitian men in all had been killed, and that the operations were necessary to restore order and a respect for human life and property. The life and property in danger, on his account, were endangered by Haitians. The killing of people in their own country went into the record as the price of governing them.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.

In November 1919 American forces reached Charlemagne Péralte in his camp and killed him during a raid. Nicholls records that he was betrayed by a member of his own family. His body was then tied to a door and displayed publicly in the town square to discourage anyone from carrying on the fight. The occupation had spent more than a year unable to find him in country that was almost entirely on his side, and took him in the end through information supplied by someone close to him. That is worth saying plainly, because the display of the body was meant to communicate something else, that American arms had beaten Haitian resistance in a fair contest. What ended the rebellion in the North was money and access, applied to the network of kinship and obligation that had kept Péralte alive for fourteen months. The display then handed his movement the one thing his living command had lacked, which was an image every Haitian would recognise on sight.

Haitian men avoided the main roads to escape the labour draft. Women could not, because they were the market sellers, the caregivers, the landowners, the shopkeepers and the domestic servants whose work required travel. American records and Marine photograph albums are full of pictures captioned as the typical country woman on a burro. Some men used that familiarity for cover. The Caco general Theophil toured the north recruiting while dressed as a market woman, travelling with a burro. General Petit Severe, wanted by the authorities in Cap-Haïtien, came and went from the town as he pleased in the same disguise, moving seven burro loads of rifles across the Dominican border. The performance made attacks on American officers possible. Visibility cut the other way as well, and girls and women travelled in groups for safety. Madame Benoît, wife of the Caco leader, went regularly to Mirebalais, Lascahobas and Port-au-Prince for supplies in the company of other market women, riding a bay mule and carrying a revolver under her dress.