The countryside people were being sent back to was emptying out

Valcin, and most people in the Haitian cities, did not know what the deep countryside was living on in 1937. The interior held no reserve of green pasture waiting to absorb the women the capital found unsuitable. Holdings had been divided among heirs past the point of viability, prices for what farmers grew were low, and the state took more out of the peasantry in duties on coffee than it ever put back. So people left. Women and men were crossing the eastern border to live and work in the Dominican Republic for very little money, carrying the same expectation as the girls walking into Port-au-Prince, that somewhere else would pay better than here. The generous soul of the Haitian land, in the phrase Valcin used for where such women belonged, was a place they were leaving as fast as they could arrange it. Within months the ones who had gone east were being hunted with machetes.

The Carnival dances known in northern Haiti as ra-ra had come up from the west and the south only recently, and by 1937 they were being danced through Lent and above all on Good Friday. On that day in 1937 several bands arrived at a house in the commune of Plaisance and performed in the yard. One group had a man in a mask with horns who danced as a bull. Another was led by a cane thrower who went through his routine with the stick. Several boys stood on their heads and danced with their bodies in the air. These bands move along the road, which sets them apart from the dances held in a yard at a bal, and they were marked off from the quadrille, the polka, the waltz and the meringue that the same peasants danced at those bals. The meringue remained the favourite of the borrowed dances. Some older country dances, such as the mazinga, had already gone out of use.

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.

Peasants in northern Haiti in 1937 told a story about a spirit they called President Clermeil. He had been a French colonist in the time of slavery, and a cruel one. The people he held resolved to kill him. He prayed to Lucifer and offered his soul in exchange for never being taken, and the bargain held. Clermeil is counted now among the zanj served in the vodou temples, and he is held to father every light skinned child born in the district. Families whose wives or partners bore such a child considered themselves honoured by it. The colonist who owned people and escaped their judgement is still in the neighbourhood, still fathering children whose colour will place them above their neighbours, and his continued attention is received as a compliment. Colour in Haiti has carried economic weight since independence, and the story shows what that arrangement looked like from inside a mountain village more than a century later.