A folklorist counts a hundred graves at the entrance to Kenscoff

Kenscoff sits fifteen miles above Port-au-Prince among pine and eucalyptus, and in 1937 it held about 7,500 people and roughly a hundred gravestones at the entrance to the town. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, who had left Haiti to study in Europe after her parents died, came home and went up there to work. She knelt on the ground, put her hands on earth and stone, and drew the graves of women. What she recorded was a system in two parts. Petit deuil starts on the day of the funeral and runs six months for the immediate family. Ten years after a parent dies the children open grand deuil, which runs a further two years for a mother and eighteen months for a father. At its close the family holds a mass and sings a libera over the tomb, a song of release. Comhaire-Sylvain reached Kenscoff twelve years after her own parents were buried. Ten years and two. She arrived inside her own grand deuil.

The Carnival dances known in northern Haiti as ra-ra had come up from the west and the south only recently, and by 1937 they were being danced through Lent and above all on Good Friday. On that day in 1937 several bands arrived at a house in the commune of Plaisance and performed in the yard. One group had a man in a mask with horns who danced as a bull. Another was led by a cane thrower who went through his routine with the stick. Several boys stood on their heads and danced with their bodies in the air. These bands move along the road, which sets them apart from the dances held in a yard at a bal, and they were marked off from the quadrille, the polka, the waltz and the meringue that the same peasants danced at those bals. The meringue remained the favourite of the borrowed dances. Some older country dances, such as the mazinga, had already gone out of use.

A coumbite is a work party. A farmer in northern Haiti asks relatives and neighbours to come and clear, plant, weed, harvest, make cassava or build a house, and in return he feeds them, hands round tafia, the cheap cane spirit, and owes them the same labour when they call on him. The parties ran from four or five people to more than a hundred. In better years the host served food at noon and again at five or six in the evening. Through the summer of 1937 most hosts managed one meal, in mid afternoon. The dances went the same way. Anyone giving a bal owed a tax of one dollar and charged three to five cents a dance, or twenty cents for the whole evening. Twenty cents was a day's wage in Haiti. In the Bassin section of the commune of Plaisance there were almost no weekday bals that year, and the people there said plainly that they were too poor to hold them.

Peasants in northern Haiti in 1937 told a story about a spirit they called President Clermeil. He had been a French colonist in the time of slavery, and a cruel one. The people he held resolved to kill him. He prayed to Lucifer and offered his soul in exchange for never being taken, and the bargain held. Clermeil is counted now among the zanj served in the vodou temples, and he is held to father every light skinned child born in the district. Families whose wives or partners bore such a child considered themselves honoured by it. The colonist who owned people and escaped their judgement is still in the neighbourhood, still fathering children whose colour will place them above their neighbours, and his continued attention is received as a compliment. Colour in Haiti has carried economic weight since independence, and the story shows what that arrangement looked like from inside a mountain village more than a century later.