Invoking 1804 pulls the readership together and shows where it splits

The essayists of La Voix des Femmes reached constantly for the revolution. Names, dates and the language of 1804 gave a Haitian readership immediate common ground, since any woman who could read the paper had been taught that history as the founding fact of the country. The device worked. It also exposed something the writers had not set out to display. The women producing the essays were lawyers, teachers, doctors and journalists in Port-au-Prince. The women they wrote about were market traders, cultivators and domestic workers who in most cases could not read the sentences describing them. When an educated writer claimed descent from the revolutionary generation on behalf of all Haitian women, the claim reached across a gap she had just made visible. Rhetoric meant to close a distance kept measuring it instead. The tension ran through the paper from its first years, and the League never resolved it in print.

Sitting in a bar near the Massacre River with Greene, Diederich recounts the killings of October 1937 from interviews he did with survivors for a feature. Dominican soldiers hacked and clubbed Haitians to death by the thousands, many on the banks of that river, and were only permitted to use their old rifles on those trying to swim across once their arms grew too tired to keep swinging. Black corpses choked the water and the ravines. The screening method was a literacy and pronunciation test in which every black person was asked to say the Spanish word for parsley, and anyone who failed to produce the Dominican pronunciation was killed on the spot. He puts the toll at some twenty thousand Haitians across the Dominican Republic on Trujillo's orders, and notes that the killing reached far inland, as far east as San Pedro de Macoris.

A coumbite is a work party. A farmer in northern Haiti asks relatives and neighbours to come and clear, plant, weed, harvest, make cassava or build a house, and in return he feeds them, hands round tafia, the cheap cane spirit, and owes them the same labour when they call on him. The parties ran from four or five people to more than a hundred. In better years the host served food at noon and again at five or six in the evening. Through the summer of 1937 most hosts managed one meal, in mid afternoon. The dances went the same way. Anyone giving a bal owed a tax of one dollar and charged three to five cents a dance, or twenty cents for the whole evening. Twenty cents was a day's wage in Haiti. In the Bassin section of the commune of Plaisance there were almost no weekday bals that year, and the people there said plainly that they were too poor to hold them.

The Carnival dances known in northern Haiti as ra-ra had come up from the west and the south only recently, and by 1937 they were being danced through Lent and above all on Good Friday. On that day in 1937 several bands arrived at a house in the commune of Plaisance and performed in the yard. One group had a man in a mask with horns who danced as a bull. Another was led by a cane thrower who went through his routine with the stick. Several boys stood on their heads and danced with their bodies in the air. These bands move along the road, which sets them apart from the dances held in a yard at a bal, and they were marked off from the quadrille, the polka, the waltz and the meringue that the same peasants danced at those bals. The meringue remained the favourite of the borrowed dances. Some older country dances, such as the mazinga, had already gone out of use.