An agricultural school frightens the elite more than any gendarme did

The Service Technique de l'Agriculture et de l'Enseignement Professionnel was organised in April 1923 and became the most far reaching American programme in Haiti. Its declared functions were agricultural training, research, farm schools, advice to adult farmers, animal clinics, field experiments and vocational instruction. Russell's larger aim was to raise from the peasantry a class of Black smallholders with schooling, capital and access to markets. The record is real. Experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the agricultural school at Damien that one historian called a miniature Tuskegee, demonstration farms, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberte with the largest sisal acreage in the world, tobacco brought back as a money crop, national soil surveys, and veterinary clinics that treated more than a hundred thousand animals. The hostility it drew ran far beyond agronomy. Since 1804 the oligarchy's position had rested on the peasantry having no schooling, no capital and no market. A programme that undid any one of those undid the oligarchy, and its members understood this faster than the Americans did.

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 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.

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.