The League asks the government for a licence and Vincent turns suspicious

By the end of March 1934 the new League had officers and a written programme and lacked only government authorisation. Its leaders filed the petition expecting approval within days. They had reason to. Many members moved in the same circles as Sténio Vincent, and the Garoute family had entertained the Vincents at their home in Jérémie. Vincent had been elected four years before the occupation ended, a founding member of the Union Patriotique with real nationalist credentials and, as the historian Matthew Smith has shown, wide popular appeal early on. The pressure of the American marines was part of what held that appeal together. As it lifted, Vincent grew afraid of losing his standing as the man who had delivered the country from the United States, and the American military backing that had propped up his authority went home with the troops. Old friendships stopped protecting anyone. He used executive power to watch and break up organisations, unions and gatherings, religious ones included. What worried him most was the younger nationalists turning toward Marxism.

Speaking in Nelson on the subject of the Negro, James condemned the British Empire for the racism it fostered not only in the colonies but in the metropolis itself, stressed the achievements of African civilisation, and was reported as saying that there would one day be a tremendous revolt in Africa. Hogsbjerg places the lecture at the point where two commitments converge. James had returned to Britain earlier that year having concluded that European civilisation was doomed, had made an independent study of Marxism and decided to become an organised revolutionary, and his new militant Pan-Africanism developed alongside that. The editor treats the combination as the political engine of the play, which he says is panoramic in its treatment of the revolution and spreads eleven scenes across three acts. Hogsbjerg adds that the same year saw the first play written and directed by a Jamaican woman staged in London, changing what a British theatre audience might expect.

The last United States marines sailed from Haiti on 14 August 1934, closing nineteen years of military occupation. The Americans had built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, piped clean water into Port-au-Prince and strung telegraph line between the main towns. They had also killed more than two thousand Haitians putting down the Caco rebellion, revived forced labour through the corvée, shut the Black majority out of political life, and left the mulatto elite holding the economy more securely than they had found it. The institution that mattered most was the national guard, trained and armed by the United States. Every strongman of the next half century reached for it first. No part of the political system had been reformed, and the poverty produced by the French indemnity and a century of bad government was untouched. Two organisations founded that same year, the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale and the Haitian Communist Party, are the better measure of what came out of 1934.

Suzanne Sylvain was often ill as a girl and spent enough time near her own death to grow curious about everyone else's. Her caregiver, Amise, told her folktales while nursing her, and the stories held her. She began attending wakes, funerals and burials for people she did not know, in order to hear families narrate a life. The wake drew her most, the night of sitting with a body or dancing around it while relatives, friends and elders tell stories over the dead. Her family said these rituals settled her body and fed her curiosity. She grew up to become a linguist and ethnographer of Haitian Kreyol and Haitian folklore, the first Haitian woman to make a scholarly career of that work. Her father's funeral in August 1925 gave her no comfort. It opened eight years in which her eldest brother Normil and then her mother also died. Madeleine, just back from the Immaculate Conception Academy in Jamaica, took charge of the three younger children.