A women's centre opens across from the stadium in a swelling capital

Between 1921 and 1943 Port-au-Prince added eight thousand houses, reaching fifteen thousand recorded dwellings. Between 1931 and 1949 its population climbed from 125,000 to more than 142,208 people inside 6.7 square miles. Into that thickening city the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale placed its Foyer, a house for women sited across from the National Stadium, just south of the Champs de Mars. The address was the argument. Any woman could walk in from anywhere in the capital, through the old commercial streets and past the legislative plaza, and find other working women waiting. The stadium opposite was where the nation staged its idea of itself as male. The Foyer was a room where women did that work on their own account. Ordinary geography decides who can join a movement. A meeting house too far from the markets excludes the women who most need it, and the Ligue chose ground the whole city could reach on foot.

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.

In December 1921 a United States Senate commission was in Haiti investigating reports of atrocities committed during the occupation. Senator Medill McCormick questioned Jean Marie Jan, the French Catholic bishop of Cap Haitien. Jan called the occupation an act of kindness, then explained the war against the Americans by saying the people had been driven to desperation by arbitrariness, injustice and mistreatment and had proclaimed their right to defend themselves. Asked whether Vodou had diminished since the landing, he answered that it had increased, and that the greatest cause was that the boko had been the soul of the insurrection. He also asked whether Washington intended to impose Protestantism by force. He had grounds. Edwin Denby, the American under secretary of the navy, was writing to E. O. Watson of the Council of Churches that Haiti lay within the sphere of the United States and that the Navy Department would be happy to facilitate the work of the missionary societies.

Louis Borno was elected president of Haiti in 1922 and became the chief Haitian instrument of the American administration. He did not treat the role as a humiliation. He described the occupation as paternalism in the honourable sense, a beneficent application of the duty a Christian people owed the weak, and he governed on that understanding for eight years. The practical content of the theory was plain. Borno prosecuted and jailed his political opponents, harried the press when it suited him, and stayed in office on American arms before a public that had no way of removing him, since no legislative elections were held. Nicholls records that the regime was unpopular at the start and unpopular at the end. Borno matters because he supplies the model of the collaborating executive that Haitian politics returned to repeatedly: a cultivated man of the capital, fluent in the language of duty and improvement, whose authority came from a foreign garrison and evaporated the moment that garrison lost interest.