The wait for a legal marriage was a wait for a house

Many Haitian couples treated plasaj as an interim arrangement, guaranteed by a contract their families oversaw, to be converted into legal marriage when they were ready for it. The marriage tax law assumed that fees stood in the way. Fees rarely did. Even in the countryside a wedding celebration cost more than the taxes attached to it. What couples were waiting for was the capacity to house a family. Women in plasaj commonly lived with parents or other relatives while a partner built up enough security, or built the house itself. That waiting is visible in the city. The hundreds of self built houses in the poorer zones of Port au Prince were the physical record of partnering contracts, put up block by block across years by men and women who had already agreed to marry and were assembling the conditions for it. In Haiti a marriage produced a house, and the house was the thing that made the marriage official.

Seabrook's travel narrative The Magic Island, built around the marine sergeant Faustin Wirkus and Seabrook's own fanciful account of Haitian religion, was chosen by the Literary Guild as its featured book for January 1929 and became a national bestseller. Renda uses its reception to show how empire was absorbed at home. Seabrook printed Wirkus's address, and schoolboys in Pennsylvania wrote to the man they understood to be a king, identifying with him as a Pennsylvanian, a working class boy and a Boy Scout, and asking about wild animals and chief exports. The Guild editor Carl Van Doren praised the book as a work in the literature of American empire and told readers they were citizens of an empire reaching far beyond their own continent. Renda notes that in 1929 empire was no longer debated in the United States, it was a point of pride.

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.

The Nation gave the killings at Cayes the name that stuck, and self-defence stopped being an available explanation. On 7 December, with the strike already breaking under the marine brigade and the cruiser Galveston up from Guantanamo showing the flag, President Hoover asked Congress to set up a body that would work out when the United States could leave Haiti and how it should behave until then. He had wanted out since his inauguration in March. Within ten days the curfew ended, the papers reappeared, the Damien quarrel was settled and Dr Freeman was finished. On 7 February 1930 Hoover named five men under W. Cameron Forbes, a Boston lawyer who had governed the Philippines and who noted privately that his instructions had been made very clear to him. The commission landed at Port-au-Prince on 28 February to a nineteen-gun salute and to banners from the Union Patriotique demanding the occupation end. General Russell's reception the next day was boycotted. Roumain published his refusal, saying the negro Jacques Roumain did not condescend to mix with whites.