Rehabilitating the people puts a distance between them and the writers

From 1928 a literature of indigenism and negritude in Haiti took up the rehabilitation of popular culture as its task. The writers came from a fraction of the black intellectual middle class, and the move had a use for them beyond the literary one. Popular culture became a favoured object of study and a theme, and treating it that way set a comfortable distance between the writers and the people whose culture it was. It could be declared beautiful once its disappearance was assumed. The clearest emblem of that logic stands in the centre of Port-au-Prince facing the National Palace: the statue of the unknown maroon, raised by the regime that talked about popular culture more than any other in Haitian history. Marronnage had meant slaves withdrawing to ground the masters could not reach and rebuilding a language of their own there.

Half a million black Americans had already left the rural South for northern factories during the First World War. When Congress choked off European immigration in 1924, northern industry needed new hands, and by the end of the decade another million African Americans had left the old slave states for the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with about half a million Mexicans, who were exempt from the new quotas. They found work in metal shops, car plants and packing houses. Only about a hundred thousand black Americans lived west of the Rockies. The political effect showed in 1928, when the Chicago alderman Oscar De Priest became the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction and the first ever from a northern district. The same quota law and the same factory demand shaped where Caribbean migrants could go in these years.

From January to September 1931 Melville Herskovits and Frances Herskovits travelled in Dahomey, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, working mainly in Dahomey, the kingdom on the Bight of Benin whose people the colonists of Saint Domingue had called Arada. An initial grant from Elsie Clews Parsons paid for the trip and Columbia and Northwestern universities carried it afterwards. Their chief interpreter was Prince Rene Aho Glele, a member of the family that had ruled the kingdom, and the French Residents of the districts of Abomey and Allada opened doors for them. The journey matters on a Haitian timeline because the deities, the ceremonies and most of the African vocabulary of Haitian Vodou come out of this region, and because Herskovits built the study of African survivals in the Americas from material gathered here. He arrived already carrying a knowledge of the Maroon communities of Surinam.

Two groups of Haitian intellectuals reorganised the country's politics between 1926 and 1937, along the fault lines of class and colour. Jolibois fils wrote to Moscow in 1926 and the Comintern ignored him. In 1930, under French party sponsorship, Jacques Roumain founded the Haitian Communist Party with Max Hudicourt. President Vincent jailed Roumain in 1934, released him two years later, and outlawed the party by decree in November 1936. Its members, with the notable exception of Jacques Alexis, were mulatto men of the literary elite: Jean Brierre, Jules Blanchet, Roumain himself. French Marxism did not reach the second group. Black professionals and bureaucrats produced by the occupation, and by Russell's effort to build a Black middle class, were looking for Haiti's roots in Africa, and in 1937 they took the name Les Griots. Jean Price-Mars, Lorimer Denis and Doctor J. C. Dorsainvil led them, and a young ultranationalist physician named Francois Duvalier was among them. The Griots had the constituency the communists could never reach, and they used it.