One word turns a woman leaving a bad job into a bad character

Valcin called the woman who changed employers rogue. The word does specific work. It moves the account from what happened, a worker left a job, to what she is, a person of defective character, and it licenses whatever comes next. Once she is rogue she can be kept out of the training school, sent back to the countryside, and struck off the movement's list of Haitian women worth organising. None of this was peculiar to Haiti. Elite and middle-class Black women across the diaspora in these decades were preoccupied with the migration of Black girls into cities and with how women conducted themselves in public, and they built respectability programmes on that worry. The vocabulary travelled with the programmes. Naming autonomy as delinquency let women who described themselves as advocates take up the work of supervision, and it converted a labour decision into a moral flaw.

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.

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.