The word for parsley decides who lives on the Dominican side

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.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

Kenscoff is a commune of about a hundred square miles in the mountains south west of Port-au-Prince, with roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the 1950s. Its main settlement is the bourg, called the buk in peasant speech, a word traced to mbuka, meaning village in the Kikongo of the Lower Congo, where a large part of the ancestors of the settlers came from. A motor road from Port-au-Prince opened in 1932, putting the bourg forty five minutes from the capital by car. In 1934 it was made the administrative centre of a commune. Because the summer temperature there sits between fifty two and seventy nine degrees, families from the capital began taking houses. Visitors saw crowded hotels, cars, villas and gardens and called it a small town. The peasant owners had sold only the strips along the road. From the first rains in the middle of September the holidaymakers left, and for the next nine months they were gone.

A man in the Kenscoff mountains who was already legally married could not easily register as his own the children he had by a plase wife. If he was well known in his own commune he might travel to another one to do it. Where he did nothing, the mother's father would commonly declare the child as his own by an invented woman. If the grandfather was dead, or the mother was over thirty and had been settled with a man for some years, she could register the birth herself, and the child was entered as born of an unknown father. In the bourg of Kenscoff between 1934 and 1956 there were forty eight such registrations, made by forty mothers. Twenty three of them concerned a woman who had been living with the child's father for between five and twenty four years. Ten of the children had no siblings. Three were made legitimate later when their parents married.