One candidate a seat, and ballots the voters may not alter

Haitian newspapers told readers almost nothing about President Stenio Vincent's difficulties. The country had been under a state of siege since not long after the American marines withdrew in 1934, and the controlled press printed praise. Vincent's programme was a move from representative government to personal rule, carried out behind the proper legal forms. The elections of September 1936, the first general elections since the occupation ended, offered voters one government candidate for every seat in the Chamber of Deputies, on printed slates they were forbidden to change. Vincent later gave Colonel Calixte of the Garde the theory behind it: the government makes the constitution, the laws, the regulations and the agreements, and cannot let any of them get in its way when it decides a measure is needed to keep itself in place. By the end of 1936 the state was Vincent. The mass of Haitians had no vote worth casting, class, region and colour were sorting the country again, and the Garde itself was reported to be coming apart.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

Trujillo gave a reason for the October 1937 killings. The frontier had to be de-Africanised, and Dominican life, which he described as European, had to be protected from what lay on the other side of it. Thousands of Haitians in the borderlands died to serve that sentence. The reasoning repays a moment's attention, because it inverts the geography it claims to defend. Both halves of Hispaniola were built by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Santo Domingo was receiving captives from the Atlantic trade before the French colony on the western third existed. The population Trujillo was defending was substantially African in descent, and his own family was no exception, which is precisely why the killers on the ground needed a pronunciation test to tell one dark-skinned person from another. A state can declare itself white by decree. It then has to go hunting for the people the decree is aimed at, and it cannot see them.

In October 1937 Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered his army to kill the Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. Thousands died within days. They were farm workers, cane cutters and their families, many of them born on Dominican soil, some from households that had crossed the frontier generations earlier, when the line existed mostly on paper. Hispaniola holds two countries and one landmass, and movement between them had always been ordinary. Trujillo made that movement a capital matter and settled it with machetes. What the killing produced, past the dead themselves, was a permanent condition. Every question the two states have put to each other since 1937 is asked across that ground: labour migration, citizenship for children born to Haitian parents, deportation, the status of the border itself. The massacre did not close and become history. It became the terms.