Two years after the border treaty, Haitians are massacred on the Dominican side

In 1937, two years after the border treaty was signed, Haitians living on the Dominican side of the frontier were killed in large numbers. Jean Price Mars called it an abominable drama, a sinister episode and a terrible butchery, and read it as a challenge and a provocation to war. The official Dominican account described painful incidents among Haitian marauders who had been looting settlers. What puzzled Price Mars most was how readily the Haitian government accepted a settlement with the Trujillo administration, and he reported a conversation with a Dominican public figure suggesting that eminent Haitians had connived in it. The killing became a fixed point in Haitian popular memory and, for many Dominicans as well, a symbol of barbarism. It also fitted a policy. Trujillo was planting agricultural colonies along the border to make the zone Dominican, while Dominican migration law went on permitting Haitian labour in the sugar industry.

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.

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.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into class zones for her research. Close to twenty thousand women lived at the seams between them. They were domestic workers, and their day was set by somebody else's breakfast. Coffee had to be on the table at seven, so they set out at five, and they came home after dark. Both ends of the journey happened when nobody was watching. Many of them had given up schooling for jobs paid at the legal minimum, and that trade runs one way only. The capital ran on these women. The households that employed them, the zones Comhaire-Sylvain mapped, and the professional and political life conducted inside them all rested on twenty thousand people walking through the dark twice a day. The map of the city did not show them. The census counted them in somebody else's house. The hours they spent in transit belonged to no one's accounts at all.