The occupation starts keeping records, and women appear inside them

Georges Sylvain's death marked a change in how Haitians organised against the occupation, and his posthumous collection Dix annees de lutte set out what the first decade had held: caco fighting in the hills, Union Patriotique work in the towns, and daily refusal everywhere else. The American side changed too. After the Senate commissions of 1920 and 1921 came to Haiti and looked, Washington told the occupying forces to moderate their conduct and to write more of it down. Two results followed. Fuller records produced a wider account of ordinary life, which is why traces of individual Haitian women survive in that archive at all. Wider surveillance also let the marines penetrate the caco networks, kill their leaders and reduce combat deaths. Haitians kept dying anyway, in traffic and in custody and in ordinary encounters with occupation officials, and the frustration built until the riots of 1929. On the day of Sylvain's funeral an American car struck two Haitians, one of them a child taken to hospital.

The New York Stock Exchange estimated in 1929 that twenty million Americans owned stock, and Frederick Lewis Allen used that figure in the popular history he published in 1931. It was wildly wrong. The chief actuary of the Treasury calculated that about three million Americans, under two and a half per cent of the population, held securities in 1928, and brokerage firms reported 1,548,707 customers in 1929. Pension funds did not yet exist to give workers an indirect stake. So the crash by itself did almost nothing to the finances of the ordinary American, who owned nothing to lose. Stock prices recovered about a fifth of their losses by April 1930 and no major bank or company had failed. Kennedy's point is that the crash and the depression are two different events, and that the most careful students of 1929 have never demonstrated a causal link running from one to the other.

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.

Ainsi parla l'Oncle, essais d'ethnologie, was printed at Compiegne in France in 1928, four preliminary pages and 243 pages of text. Its preface is dated Petionville, 15 December 1927, and states the aim: to raise the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the Haitian people. Haiti had then been occupied by the United States for thirteen years, and educated Haitians had spent a century trying to be coloured Frenchmen, in a country where the word African was the most humiliating thing one could say to a compatriot. The book took the beliefs, songs, tales, dances and ceremonies of the peasantry, traced them to Dahomey and the Kongo, and handled them with the apparatus of ethnography. It gave a generation of Haitian writers a defensible reason to look at their own country. A second edition appeared in New York in 1951, a Spanish translation in Havana in 1968, a third edition in Montreal in 1973, and an English translation in Washington in 1984.