Perez sends the sons up the stairs that carried Christophe's body down

Perez wanted the boys to make the journey too. Let our sons go up on a pilgrimage of love for the country, she wrote, to the enormous present a bronze skinned king left them. Let them climb where the weeping queen climbed, and the princes and the counts, up the great ruined staircase that watched the body of Henry Christophe pass down it for the last time. Those stairs had known the king's working life, his torments and every one of his victories, and he took to the grave a plan for a Haiti that would be grand and magnificent. Let the sons greet the ancestors in what remains of yesterday's glory, and let them come away wanting to be large and decent Haitians. Christophe shot himself in 1820 when his own troops turned on him. Perez put his widow at the head of the procession, ahead of the titled men, which set a woman's grief in the middle of the inheritance she was handing on.

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 river dividing Ouanaminthe from Dajabon has been called the Massacre since 1728, when Spanish colonists cut down a party of French buccaneers on it. Beginning on 2 October 1937 the Dominican army and national police spent three days and nights killing Haitians along that river and as far off as Samana Bay, Barahona and San Pedro de Macoris. Heinl puts the dead at fifteen to twenty thousand. Orders specified clubs and machetes over rifles, so that nothing recovered from a body would point at the state, and at Santiago the killing squads worked in shifts as their arms tired. Men were marched down the customs wharf at Montecristi and clubbed into deep water. Others were told they were boarding ships for Haiti. There were no ships. President Vincent said nothing until 9 October. Trujillo settled in January 1938 for 750,000 dollars, thirty a head, then talked it down to 525,000 in cash. Survivors received about two cents each. A good pig sold for thirty dollars that year.