Intercepted letters become evidence for a strike never called

Correspondence between Roumain and communists in New York was intercepted by the Haitian authorities and treated as proof of an active movement. The government charged that Roumain and his associates were planning a general strike for the second week of January intended to hasten American withdrawal and bring down the regime, financed by the New York chapter of the American party and orchestrated by a Cuban communist resident in Haiti, Dr Omar Lind. At the same time the Haitian minister in Paris reported that Haitian radicals in the Latin Quarter were circulating news of cells organising at home. Similar letters were produced against Max Hudicourt, leader of La Reaction Democratique. On this basis the two leading figures of the Haitian left were arrested, tried and imprisoned for three months at the beginning of 1933.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

In 1932 Louis Diaquoi announced the formation of a group he called the Griots, after the West African keepers of oral history. Its purpose was to rehabilitate African values in Haitian national life and to work out what the group called the country's collective personality. Its most quoted instruction to Haitians was to stop trying to be ridiculous little whites and to accept the inheritance they actually had. Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier were among its members. The setting matters. The American occupation was in its seventeenth year and had governed Haiti on the premise that its people required supervision, and the Haitian elite had spent a century presenting itself to Europe as French in everything except address. The Griots answered both at once. Diaquoi made the argument as a cultural one. Within a generation Duvalier had converted it into a claim about who was entitled to hold power in Haiti, and he held that power for fourteen years.

Two Haitians living in Paris founded La Revue du Monde Noir in 1930 to argue for solidarity and self-respect among black people across the world. The setting matters. Paris in 1930 held students and writers from the French Caribbean, from West Africa, from Madagascar and from the United States, all of them educated in the same language and all of them discovering that the education had not made them French. A magazine in that city could reach the whole empire at once, which no journal published in Port-au-Prince or Dakar could do. The review is a direct ancestor of negritude, the movement that Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas would build over the following decade and that shaped black writing in French for fifty years. Haitians reached the argument early because they had been having a version of it at home since 1927. A country independent since 1804 had a longer run of experience with the gap between formal freedom and European contempt.