Do giants beget dwarves, Perez asks a four year old

Perez told her niece that one visit would not be enough. A butterfly in love with light goes back to the flame and burns its wing, and the girl would go back to the Citadelle again and again to put her soul into the living spring of what the ancestors believed. Then the letter turned. The work up on that mountain is titanic, Perez wrote. What have we done since? Do giants beget dwarves? The questions are addressed to a four year old and aimed at everyone else. Haiti in 1936 had just come through nineteen years of American occupation and was sliding into the personal rule of Stenio Vincent, and a generation was being asked to measure itself against a fortress raised by people who had been slaves and had then beaten Napoleon's army. Perez did not answer her own question. She left it in print, where the readers of a women's newspaper would have to.

James recalled fifty years later that one night in Manchester Robeson proposed that the play tour with James himself in the part of Dessalines. It opened at the Westminster Theatre in London. Jackson places it inside a decade of work that turned the revolution into material for black artists across several forms, including Arna Bontemps's novel of Gabriel's Virginia revolt in 1936, Guy Endore's book of 1934 based on the insurrections of 1791, Jacob Lawrence's series of prints on Toussaint begun in 1938, and Ralph Ellison's story in New Masses in 1941, in which the Haitian leader enters African American folklore alongside Stagolee and John Henry. Robeson himself returned to the figure in 1954, writing that Ho Chi Minh was the Toussaint Louverture of Indochina. Jackson uses the production to show how far the revolution had travelled as artistic material.

Rafael Trujillo ordered a mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937. After the Second World War he took an interest in sugar production and found that he needed workers. In 1952 his government signed a treaty with the Haitian government covering the seasonal movement of cane cutters across the border. Two renewals followed, one in 1959 and one in 1966. From 1971 the arrangement ran instead through contracts between the Dominican state sugar council and the government in Port-au-Prince, and these lasted until Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in 1986. They became a way for successive Haitian governments to make money. The Haitian side was paid a sum for setting up recruitment centres, and part of the migrants' wages was held back, officially to be handed over at the end of the season, in practice sent home and pocketed by the ruling circle. Conditions in the cane were documented from 1979 onward as slavery in all but name.

The mountains that became the commune of Kenscoff were thin country under the French. The large sugar planters held the plains, and the estates up here belonged to men like Robin de Kenscoff and Lefebure de Fourcy, with few installations and few slaves. Most of those slaves came from the Lower Congo. Some had come from further up the river and been sold on the lower stretch, which is why a small settlement near Furcy was still called Nan Congo in 1937, and why a distinctive type of hut was found there. Many of them had arrived recently and were proud of having been born in Africa. In the lineage cemeteries of the region the inscriptions read like this: the person's name, the word African, a date of birth and a date of death. After the revolution some of their descendants obtained state grants of sixty to ninety acres and farmed them as owners.