A work party in the north gets one meal and nobody can afford a dance

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.

A regional census in 1935 recorded more than fifty thousand Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The count was low. Many more had crossed the border without papers and were never entered in any register, which is the ordinary condition of migrant cane labour anywhere. They were there because Dominican sugar needed cutters and Haitian land could no longer feed the people standing on it. The estates paid badly, the work was seasonal, and the population settled into the sugar towns near the mills and along the frontier. Dominican nationalists had by this point identified those workers as the country's central problem. The rhetoric coming out of Santo Domingo through the middle of the decade described the presence of Haitians as an invasion of the national body. The country's own sugar industry had arranged for them to be there. Two years after this census, Trujillo's soldiers began killing Haitians along the border in numbers no census taker ever established.

Dominican soldiers moving through the northwest of their country in October 1937 could not tell by looking which of the people in front of them were Haitian. So they used language. A person was made to say perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians whose first tongues were Kreyol and French handled the sounds differently, and the ones who failed were killed. Around fifteen thousand died. Trujillo's stated grievance was cattle theft. His actual programme was a culturally uniform Dominican nation, reached by removing the people who complicated it. Parsley carries weight in Vodou ceremony, in baths and cleansings, so the plant chosen to identify Haitians for slaughter was already sacred to many of them. Trujillo later agreed to pay 500,000 dollars to the families of the dead, and officials of President Vincent's government took most of it. Vincent tried to keep the massacre out of the Haitian press. Noirisme gained a generation of recruits from his silence.

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.