A professional charm maker sells his recipes to an anthropologist

Herskovits found a Dahomean who made charms for a living and who came back to him repeatedly through 1931 with new ones. For each he explained how it had been made, what had gone into it and why, the taboos attached to it, who could use it, under what conditions and to what end. Charms meant to harm were included alongside charms meant to protect. The collection reached just under forty gbo with the details recorded for every one. A gbo could be worn at the waist, neck, wrist or ankle, kept inside a house, set at the edge of a field, buried in ground a man owned, worked into cuts in his skin, or swallowed. Once a specialist had sold a client the method, the right to make that charm belonged to the buyer as much as to the seller. A Dahomean proverb says the charm holds nothing for long, while the powers of the Vodu are eternal.

Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus, a Marine serving in the occupation, published The White King of La Gonave in 1931. It sold ten million copies in the United States, then in Europe, and as far as Japan. In it he gave an account of the damage he had inflicted in order to save Haitians from cannibalism and black magic, and he set down the operating assumption that the cacos, the armed opponents of the occupation, were practitioners of the religion. Wirkus quoted his own orders, which required a report leading to criminal action against every priest and every diviner, described in the wording of the instruction as voodoo artists. Other books followed with titles like Cannibal Cousins, and between them they established Haiti in the English-speaking imagination as the country of the living dead. A military occupation had produced a literary genre, and the genre outlasted the occupation by decades.

Hoover's social scientists reported that infant mortality among black Americans in 1930 was nearly double the white rate, ten per cent against six, and that black life expectancy was fifteen years shorter, forty five years against sixty. Fewer than five per cent of eligible African Americans in the eleven states of the former Confederacy were registered to vote as late as 1940. Separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, separate churches and deliberately inferior schools were the ordinary furniture of life, and the few industrial jobs in the South were closed to black workers. C. Vann Woodward called the arrangement an anthropological museum of southern folkways and dated its perfection to the 1930s. The historian Ulrich Phillips wrote in 1928 that white southerners shared one settled resolve, that the region should remain a white man's country. This is the United States that occupied Haiti until 1934.

Vodou was forbidden in Haiti from independence in 1804 and persecuted by the state and by the Catholic Church for more than a century, even though the religion had helped organise the war that ended slavery. Around 1930 the educated minority in Port-au-Prince began to accept it as part of the national culture, in the years when Jean Price-Mars and the indigenist writers were arguing that Haitian culture was African in origin and worth taking seriously. Hurbon treats the recognition as the opening of a second problem. From 1957 to 1986 the Duvalier dictatorship put Vodou to systematic use, more rigorous and more effective than anything earlier presidents had managed through private consultations with priests. Nearly every Haitian political leader had kept such contacts. What changed under the Duvaliers was the scale and the openness, and Hurbon calls the result manipulation.