A president who jails critics reads a headline from Montreal

Stenio Vincent had organised against the American occupation before he became president, and by 1937 he was imprisoning Haitians who criticised him in public and threatening others with exile. The headline over Madeleine Sylvain's Montreal interview said that in Haiti women have no rights. It ran while he was under attack at home and abroad for his mild response to the killing of Haitians on the Dominican border that October. Sylvain understood herself to be doing diplomatic work. She talked up the revolution and the independence of 1804, and she talked up Haitian folklore, presenting a country coming out from under twenty years of United States rule. She was also continuing her parents' work, since her mother and father had built international support during the campaign against the occupation. The League's women had pledged that the reality and the voice of Haitian women would be heard. Sylvain kept that pledge in a foreign newspaper while her president preferred quiet.

Suzanne Sylvain was often ill as a girl and spent enough time near her own death to grow curious about everyone else's. Her caregiver, Amise, told her folktales while nursing her, and the stories held her. She began attending wakes, funerals and burials for people she did not know, in order to hear families narrate a life. The wake drew her most, the night of sitting with a body or dancing around it while relatives, friends and elders tell stories over the dead. Her family said these rituals settled her body and fed her curiosity. She grew up to become a linguist and ethnographer of Haitian Kreyol and Haitian folklore, the first Haitian woman to make a scholarly career of that work. Her father's funeral in August 1925 gave her no comfort. It opened eight years in which her eldest brother Normil and then her mother also died. Madeleine, just back from the Immaculate Conception Academy in Jamaica, took charge of the three younger children.

Some domestic workers in Port-au-Prince had no journey across the city. They lived in the house and went from downstairs to upstairs. That trip took a minute, appears in no record of anything, and left them available at any hour to whoever in the household wanted something. In the data these women were folded into the employer's household, counted as part of a family they may have felt nothing at all for. The consequence outlives them. A woman entered the record as a member of the household she served, while the household she actually belonged to left no trace, particularly where her own family fell outside what the Catholic parish registers would recognise: the wrong beliefs at home, a birth outside marriage, a partner the priest would not bless. So the archive reproduces the arrangement of the house. The people upstairs are documented as a family with dependants. The women downstairs are documented as one of the dependants. Their own kin are documented nowhere.

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.