The great Haitian bonanza turns out to be coffee and a little bauxite

In 1922 the National City Bank floated sixteen million dollars of Haitian bonds at 96.50. The French loans, worth 21.4 million dollars in 1915 francs, were refunded for 6.04 million, which left the government ten million in working capital and unwound seven years of financial deadlock. The national railway came off the state's back. Its absentee president and later receiver, Roger Farnham, went on drawing twenty five thousand dollars a year from a company earning eighty five thousand, while the New York firm of Sullivan and Cromwell held a twenty thousand dollar retainer. The economist Paul Douglas concluded that Haitian peasants were paying for an expensive luxury. The larger finding was emptiness. United States geological surveys turned up bauxite at Miragoane, marginal copper and little else. Agriculture was the only resource, and plantation agriculture needed land titles that did not exist. Peasants resisted the cadastral survey, and in 1926, after Marine aviators had photographed the country from the air, the building holding the negatives burned down.

Zora Neale Hurston took a degree in anthropology from Barnard in 1928 and went to New Orleans that August for six months of fieldwork. She studied with nine Vodou doctors and went through six initiations. The longest, under a priest called Samuel Thompson in one of her books and Luke Turner in the other, required nine nights of preparation and then three days lying face down and naked on a couch spread with a moccasin hide, silent, a pitcher of water set at her head so that her spirit would not go wandering after any. She reported five psychic experiences inside those sixty nine hours. At eleven on the morning of 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, she was raised, led through running water, painted with a lightning mark from her right shoulder to her left hip, given eyes on her cheeks and a sun on her forehead, and crowned. At midnight a black sheep was killed and buried under her written petition.

On 10 March 1922 the old battleship North Dakota carried General John Russell down the Gulf of La Gonave toward Port-au-Prince. He had smelled the city once before, as a midshipman in 1893, and had written in his journal that it was the filthiest place he had ever set eyes on and that he hoped never to return. He went ashore the next morning as American high commissioner, met by the magistrat communal, an honour guard of gendarmes, the palace band and a crowd well practised at cheering new rulers of Haiti. His first directive settled the shape of the next eight years. All correspondence between treaty officials and the Haitian government, Washington or each other would pass through his office, and no statement of policy, draft law or budget line could issue without his approval. The Haitian president, his ministers and the Conseil d'Etat kept the ceremony. Russell kept the valve. He compared the arrangement openly to Lord Cromer's Egypt, one foreign race governing a second in order to rule a third.

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.