An official count makes Haiti smaller and more urban than it is

An official publication of 1925 gave Haiti a population of 1,500,000, with 207,000 people living in the eight largest towns and fewer than 250,000 in all the others together, which would put the urban share at about fifteen to seventeen per cent. The figure rested on no serious statistical work. A more likely reading of the same country gives a total near 2,500,000, of whom some 2,200,000 are peasants. Either way the arithmetic makes one point. The towns lie on the coast, because the western half of the island is a net of mountains running north to south and east to west, with few plains and almost no inland cities, and the educated class lives in those coastal towns. That class had spent a century speaking as though it were the whole nation. The counting shows it to be a small fraction of a rural country, and any account of Haitian belief that begins in Port au Prince begins in the wrong place.

As chancellor of the exchequer in 1925 Winston Churchill returned Britain to the gold standard at the prewar rate of four dollars and eighty six cents to the pound. The rate was too high. It made British exports dear and imports cheap and threatened to drain the Bank of England of gold. Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reasoned that cheaper money in America would stop the flow of gold from London to New York and steady an international financial system still recovering from the war, so the Federal Reserve flooded the American banks with liquidity in 1927. His reasoning was sound and the side effect was enormous. The same cheap money financed the speculative borrowing that carried the New York stock market into the sky. Hoover called Strong a mental annex to Europe, which is also a statement about where he thought the blame belonged.

Legba is the youngest son of the Dahomean sky gods, the messenger who carries decisions from Mawu to the powers that execute them, and the one who can refuse to deliver a message or bend it in favour of a man who has fed him well. Every household, every village, every cult house and every individual keeps a Legba shrine, always near the entrance and always outside. A small mound of earth goes up as soon as a child is born and is enlarged when the child reaches adolescence. Missionary writing described Legba as the counterpart of the Christian Devil and explained his position outside the walls by the harm he does. Herskovits reported in 1931 that Dahomeans did not fear him and probably loved him more than any of the other great gods. Where he did hear the identification with the Devil from a Dahomean, the speaker had learned it in contact with missionaries.

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.