Haitian women's politics is rebuilt out of funerals

In Haiti the death space covers more than the passage from this world to the next, which is to say to Ginen. It takes in the procession, the possessions, the wake, the placing of bodies in the cemetery and the long practice of mourning. Under military occupation those observances gained new weight, because the authority that should have counted the dead was foreign and counted selectively. Suzanne Sylvain built a scholarly life on that ground and her sister Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau built a political one. Women's organising in the years after the marines left drew on both. It was shaped by exclusion from the Haitian state, since women could neither vote nor hold office, and it was driven by shared loss and by mourning work Haitians already knew how to do together. The Sylvain sisters carried their parents' politics and their grief into the same effort. When the movement began after 1934, its method was to study women's lives across class, beginning with the women who had knelt in the market.

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.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel appeared in the crown of a royal palm at Ville Bonheur, and the miracles that followed made the place a national pilgrimage. It grew after the Dominican Republic closed its frontier to the Haitians who used to cross every year to the grotto of Higuey. Because the waterfall of Saut d'Eau stood nearby, the spirits of vodou claimed the site as well. Candles and food offerings were laid at the foot of the palms beside the candles of Christian penitence, and possession trances ran through the crowd alongside the liturgical singing. The church first doubted the apparitions, then denied them, then acted. One priest set fire to the trunks of several palms and was cursed by the crowd; he is said to have lost his reason soon after. His successor called in the secular arm and had every palm cut down, and was later struck with stiffness in both legs. The pilgrims read both events as vengeance.

On 16 July 1926 the crowd at Ville Bonheur came for the Virgin of Saut d'Eau, for the great feast of the springs of Saint John, and above all for the waterfall. The street to the chapel was solid with people: pilgrims, onlookers, sellers of amusements, peasants in their Sunday clothes, superstitious townspeople, professional beggars in rags, sick people wasted by syphilis and tuberculosis, prostitutes past working age, countrywomen in votive dresses of blue, white or grey cotton with cords across the shoulder, young men down from the dance halls of Port au Prince, small children carried on their mothers' shoulders in thanks for having been born at all. The movement sorted itself into two streams, one climbing to the fall and the chapel, one coming back. In the afternoon the heat broke. Cloud ran in from the lake country over the mountains and the storm burst on the town. The women called the downpour a rain of blessings.