The American occupation of Haiti ends after nineteen years

American troops had been in Haiti since 1915, and Jackson traces the black American response through the whole period, from Du Bois writing that the country was more civilised than Texas, through the protest of 1920 against the occupation, to the Pan-African Congress that Du Bois presided over in Paris in 1919. The withdrawal did not end the literary consequences. Langston Hughes had described the country for New Masses in 1931 as a small tropical place of mountains and sea, marines, mulatto politicians and a world of black people without shoes, while calling the Citadel a splendid monument to the genius of a black king, and his poem of 1932 argued that conditions would be the same for black people everywhere until black workers united. The occupation also produced a wave of sensationalist American fiction and travel writing.

Sténio Vincent named Tuesday 21 August 1934 the day of the second independence. Nobody waited for it. The balls started on the 18th at the Cercle Bellevue, carried on the next night at the Port-au-Princien, and the country went into days of bamboche. At midnight on the 20th a gun sounded from Fort National and the cheering ran from Bel Air to Morne l'Hôpital. In the morning monsignors Conan and Le Gouaze sang a Te Deum where the clergy stood white and the altar boys Black. Then the president drove through the city scattering freshly printed gourde notes into the crowd, laid wreaths at the statues of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, and ran up the colours himself at the barracks. At the review that followed, a new Garde Présidentielle appeared under Major Durcé Armand, a relative of the president. Colonel Calixte led the officers in an oath of personal loyalty to Vincent. The oath the Americans wrote had bound them to the constitution.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

Comhaire-Sylvain did not raise Adelsia's arithmetic as a compliment to one woman. She raised it as a question about how women count, in both senses of the phrase. Vendors and market women measured with pots of graded sizes, by the weight of a handful, by touch and by smell, and they did it accurately enough to run a trade on it for a lifetime. That is a system of measurement. It has units, it can be taught to a daughter, and a buyer can check it. It had never been written down because the people who wrote things down did not think of it as knowledge. In La Voix des Femmes she argued that these systems mattered and that the women using them counted as members of the nation. The pot a woman used to measure rice was an instrument, and no laboratory recognising it changed nothing about what it could do.