Floods drown two thousand, coffee falls forty percent, bananas go up

The first two years of liberation went badly. World depression had cut average annual coffee earnings by forty percent, the 1935 harvest was poor, and floods in October put eight feet of water through downtown Jacmel, carried away bridges and houses across the Grande Anse and drowned at least two thousand people. Logwood exports stopped. The Haitian Pineapple Company failed. Of the American farming ventures started ten years before, two were left standing: HASCO, and the sisal estate at Fort Liberté called Dauphin. Vincent's one success was a banana monopoly agreed with Standard Fruit in 1935; exports rose from 1,600 stems in 1927 to 1,363,176 ten years later. Shedding American fiscal control meant retiring the 1922 bonds, and there was no money. Constantin Mayard sounded out French bankers and the talks ended in scandal at the close of 1935. In 1936 emissaries bargained with Hjalmar Schacht over a blocked-mark loan that would have handed German firms Haiti's public works. In March 1936 France denounced the commercial convention and shut the Havre coffee market.

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.

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.

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.