Thirty dollars a head, then two cents, for fifteen thousand dead

The river dividing Ouanaminthe from Dajabon has been called the Massacre since 1728, when Spanish colonists cut down a party of French buccaneers on it. Beginning on 2 October 1937 the Dominican army and national police spent three days and nights killing Haitians along that river and as far off as Samana Bay, Barahona and San Pedro de Macoris. Heinl puts the dead at fifteen to twenty thousand. Orders specified clubs and machetes over rifles, so that nothing recovered from a body would point at the state, and at Santiago the killing squads worked in shifts as their arms tired. Men were marched down the customs wharf at Montecristi and clubbed into deep water. Others were told they were boarding ships for Haiti. There were no ships. President Vincent said nothing until 9 October. Trujillo settled in January 1938 for 750,000 dollars, thirty a head, then talked it down to 525,000 in cash. Survivors received about two cents each. A good pig sold for thirty dollars that year.

American troops had been in Haiti since 1915, and Jackson traces the black American response through the whole period, from Du Bois writing that the country was more civilised than Texas, through the protest of 1920 against the occupation, to the Pan-African Congress that Du Bois presided over in Paris in 1919. The withdrawal did not end the literary consequences. Langston Hughes had described the country for New Masses in 1931 as a small tropical place of mountains and sea, marines, mulatto politicians and a world of black people without shoes, while calling the Citadel a splendid monument to the genius of a black king, and his poem of 1932 argued that conditions would be the same for black people everywhere until black workers united. The occupation also produced a wave of sensationalist American fiction and travel writing.

Madeleine Sylvain's father had campaigned for Haitian sovereignty and the country had followed him. Her own campaign for women's rights drew almost no attention, and where it was noticed people treated feminism as something shipped in from Europe or North America. One critic wrote that equality between the sexes was a chimera and would never become real. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale answered in print. In October 1935 it issued the first number of La Voix des Femmes, the first newspaper in Haiti run by women with a declared purpose of covering women's political and intellectual lives. By February 1936 the editors had found their footing. The paper carried political editorials, foreign affairs, and above all historical and sociological essays about women. Its ethnographic reporting was the unusual part. Roumain and Price-Mars had written about peasant life, but nobody had yet put the daily existence of peasant women in front of a national readership. Printing those lives beside the lives of city women made the shared parts visible.

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.