Price-Mars gives elite women the peasant woman as proof of authenticity

Price-Mars at the League's podium did two things at once. His presence showed the leaders were willing to have class, colour and cultural privilege attacked in their own hall. His argument gave them something else. In his account, rural women embodied a cultural authenticity that educated women had to respect and take in, which turned peasant women's bodies and customs into the ticket by which elite women entered the land of origins. Trouillot, Matthew Smith, Ramsey and others have shown how easily the celebration of African ancestry sat beside contempt for the people who practised it daily. Here the harm ran from women to women. Price-Mars also did the useful work of treating Haitian women as Black women inside a patriarchal order, with common ground across class, and he named schooling as the way out of domestic mistreatment and a shrunken civic life. He asked far less of men. He explained multiple partnerships as an inherited African trait and said nothing about the marriage contract that left a wife subject to her husband. That silence pushed the League toward family law.

The occupation had begun in 1915, ostensibly to collect loans and restore civil order after five presidents in four years were assassinated or driven out, and had revealed its imperial character through control of the customs houses, institutional racism and the revival of the corvee. The caco guerrilla movement under Charlemagne Peralte was crushed in 1919 and its leaders executed. At Cap Haitien the American flag was lowered and the blue and red Haitian flag hoisted. Eleven months after his New Year message Vincent validated his nationalist credentials by holding a state funeral in the same city for Peralte. The book treats both ceremonies as political theatre that could not conceal the splits inside the nationalist movement, and dates the beginning of the postoccupation conflict to this moment. Nineteen thirty-four therefore closes one struggle and opens another that runs to 1957.

The composer Clarence Cameron White and the librettist John Frederick Matheus travelled to Haiti for six weeks in search of musical materials for an opera. White completed the score in 1932 after a fellowship took him to Paris to study, and although it was performed in concert form in Chicago that year it was not staged until 1949. Jackson gathers the same year's other Haitian works to show how concentrated the moment was. Vandercook's life of Christophe appeared with drawings of the revolt that later fed Jacob Lawrence's paintings, and it moved Countee Cullen so deeply that he wrote the poem Black Majesty, published that May in the magazine of the National Urban League. The Haitian past had become working material for the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson treats the trip as the start of a sustained American musical engagement with Haiti.

For the September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez chose a map for the cover, and the direction it pointed was north. The issue took readers on the trip many Haitians make once: a hundred and twenty miles from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the old capital, then several miles south to the village of Milot, then up the Bonnet a l'Eveque, a mountain of three thousand feet, to the fortress called the Citadelle Laferriere. Henry Christophe built it after independence against a French return that never came, and it is among the largest fortresses in the Americas. A feminist monthly was turning itself into a route. The league had been arguing since 1935 that women belonged inside the revolutionary story of the country. Printing a map and walking the readership up to Christophe's walls was a way of saying that the inheritance was theirs to hand out, and that they had decided who was going.