Kenscoff milk walks ten to twelve hours to town every day

Kenscoff sits at twelve hundred metres in a hollow of the mountains southeast of Port au Prince, on land kept damp by daily fog and watered by a clear stream. Holdings there are small; each family owns its plot and one or more cows. The milk goes to town on foot. In every household it is the girl, sometimes the young man, who carries five to ten litres from Kenscoff down to Petionville and Port au Prince, a daily journey of ten to twelve hours on paths that are often rocky and slippery. Beside the dairy the families grow vegetables and fruit that belong to temperate countries, peaches, strawberries and apples among them. A young man of twenty one with a good harvest behind him is ready to marry, and marrying means paying the bride's parents an agreed sum, fifty gourdes or a hundred or more, counted out in public on the wedding day. A gourde was worth twenty American cents.

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

Sudre Dartiguenave's term ran out in May 1922 and he wanted another. His support had gone. The press, the Union Patriotique and nearly every organisation in Port-au-Prince turned on him when he declared in early April, and a mass was said in the cathedral asking for deliverance from his government. He had exhausted the Americans as well, and they declined to endorse him. High Commissioner Russell announced strict neutrality so long as the law was followed, which left the Conseil d'Etat to choose. Stephen Archer led the field until Louis Borno moved ahead on money supplied by the wealthy Jamaican German merchant O. J. Brandt. On the evening of 10 April, Dartiguenave collected four votes out of twenty one from a council he had appointed himself, and withdrew. Borno was elected. On 15 May 1922 he was inaugurated and Dartiguenave walked out of the palace alive and free. This was the second constitutional transfer of power in Haitian history, the first since Nissage Saget.

Borno and Russell never mastered the Haitian press. Papers edited in the French polemical tradition attacked the occupation with a freedom the courts protected by refusing to convict editors. One journal spent part of 1925 running a daily notice counting down the days until the sanitary service would move Borno's remains to the city dump. Another advised readers to poison him. A preventive detention law of 1922 put Jolibois fils in and out of prison so often that the American diplomat Dana Munro thought he preferred it there, and Ernest Chauvet of Le Nouvelliste was locked up periodically and by one account enjoyed himself, devouring whole roast turkeys and drinking champagne. The courts went unreformed. Murder cases ended in acquittal on the plea that the victim had been a lougawou, since the penal code itself named sorcery a crime and treated zombification as real. The Garde was then turned on Vodou, arresting Haitians for preparing manje pou lesen. No senior American ever grasped that they were prosecuting the national religion.