Thirty tailors and ten bakers make up a village middle class

The middle class of Plaisance, a village of northern Haiti, could be listed item by item in 1937. Among artisans there were thirty tailors, ten bakers, six butchers, five dressmakers, four cabinet makers, four shoemakers, three barbers, one mattress maker, and two jewellers who worked gold and silver well enough to turn out wedding rings and chains. Two communal employees. One mail carrier for the road from Plaisance to Pilate. Two corporals, two sergeants and six privates. One nurse. One public crier. Seven rural school teachers. Fifteen small merchants and a number of small coffee buyers. One telephone operator. Within that group the noncommissioned officers and the rural teachers stood highest. The whole stratum was smaller than the elite above it. Officers of the American occupation had hoped that recruiting new men into the agricultural service and the Garde d'Haiti would build a buffer class, and by 1937 that had not worked.

Trujillo gave a reason for the October 1937 killings. The frontier had to be de-Africanised, and Dominican life, which he described as European, had to be protected from what lay on the other side of it. Thousands of Haitians in the borderlands died to serve that sentence. The reasoning repays a moment's attention, because it inverts the geography it claims to defend. Both halves of Hispaniola were built by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Santo Domingo was receiving captives from the Atlantic trade before the French colony on the western third existed. The population Trujillo was defending was substantially African in descent, and his own family was no exception, which is precisely why the killers on the ground needed a pronunciation test to tell one dark-skinned person from another. A state can declare itself white by decree. It then has to go hunting for the people the decree is aimed at, and it cannot see them.

In October 1937 Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered his army to kill the Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. Thousands died within days. They were farm workers, cane cutters and their families, many of them born on Dominican soil, some from households that had crossed the frontier generations earlier, when the line existed mostly on paper. Hispaniola holds two countries and one landmass, and movement between them had always been ordinary. Trujillo made that movement a capital matter and settled it with machetes. What the killing produced, past the dead themselves, was a permanent condition. Every question the two states have put to each other since 1937 is asked across that ground: labour migration, citizenship for children born to Haitian parents, deportation, the status of the border itself. The massacre did not close and become history. It became the terms.

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.