Perez shared her niece with Rosa Clara Perez and Jean Price-Mars

Long before anyone needed words like blended, extended or multigenerational to describe a family, Theodora Holly had set out the Haitian version, in which parents and godparents hold a child in common. Jeanne Perez lived inside that arrangement. The niece she wrote to belonged to her sister Rosa Clara Perez and to Rosa Clara's husband Jean Price-Mars, the ethnologist whose work on the religion of the Haitian peasantry had changed how the educated class talked about the African inheritance. The three adults shared the guardianship and the friendship that came with it. What Perez did next was widen the circle past the family. Publishing the letter in La Voix des Femmes handed Marie-Madeleine and every girl her age to Haitian women in general. A note between an aunt and a child became a public undertaking, and the readers of the paper were enrolled as co-parents responsible for the political education of the generation coming up.

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.

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.

Sténio Vincent visited Washington in the spring of 1934 and was received at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt returned the call on 5 July, coming ashore from the USS Houston at Cap Haïtien in heat near a hundred degrees and walking the wharf on legs that polio had taken most of the use of. The two presidents drove through crowds to the Union Club and agreed a memorandum whose main effect was that the marines would be gone by the middle of August. On 1 August, in front of Vincent, the cabinet and ten thousand people on the Champ de Mars, Colonel Démosthènes Calixte took command of the Garde d'Haïti from Colonel Vogel. On 14 August the American flag came down at brigade headquarters, twenty one guns sounded from Fort National, then twenty one more while the Dessalinienne played and the Haitian flag went up. The Americans left their weapons and equipment behind. Next morning the marines marched to the transports.