Four essays in a feminist monthly serve as a funeral song

During the years of her grand deuil, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain published four pieces in a row in La Voix des Femmes, the journal of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. The first was about running into a young woman from Kenscoff she had known as a child, who used to sell food near her house. The second traced continuities between Kreyol and African languages, the subject her father had spent his life on. The third was a list of jokes about women and their families. The fourth retold a folktale about mothers and daughters and what women want from one another and do not get. Read in sequence they amount to a wake conducted in print, a libera for her father, her mother and her elder brother. The Sylvain sisters lost their parents as the American occupation was ending, and they carried the grief into the same journals where they were building a women's movement. The scholarship was the mourning.

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.

On 4 December 1937, two months after the massacre, about a hundred Haitians and Dominicans crossed into Haiti and took Thomonde, twenty miles inside the country, chasing off the corporal and three soldiers posted there before pulling back across the line. Ten days later the same band, now two hundred strong, hit Hinche, where the Garde had the strength to fight and to chase them to the border. Their leader called himself General Excellent Desrosiers, one of several Haitian exiles Trujillo was sheltering. The revealing part happened in Port-au-Prince. Colonel Calixte, who commanded the Garde, ordered a mobile company north, and Major Armand refused to release ammunition from the palace basement, stalling the column for forty-eight hours until Calixte went to the president in person. Armand was a relative of President Vincent. He had built the Presidential Guard into a private force of 550 picked men and held the heavy weapons and the ammunition reserve. The army had two commanders and one of them had the keys.

Major Armand was conspiring against the president he served. With the interior minister Frederic Duvigneaud and a Captain Merceron, he planned to have Vincent and Colonel Calixte killed, after which Duvigneaud would take the presidency and Armand the Garde. In late November 1937 Calixte learned he was to be shot on the Petionville road going home, and arrested the men waiting for him. Vincent dropped Duvigneaud from the cabinet and told Armand not to be foolish. On the evening of 12 December, while Armand and Merceron were drinking rum outside the Cafe Rex at the top of the Champ de Mars, a taxi slowed alongside them, someone fired, and both officers went down wounded. The car, plate P-3031, was found abandoned. Its passengers were five junior officers of the Garde led by Lieutenant Bonicias Perard, who was Calixte's nephew. Port-au-Prince had a kouri the next day, shutters going up along the Grand'Rue. On 9 January 1938 Vincent shipped Calixte to Nice as Inspector of Consulates.