Three men in Plaisance and Cap-Haitien give up their stories

A field trip through northern Haiti in 1937, paid for by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, collected stories from three men. Arsene Pierre Jean-Baptiste was a day labourer, storyteller and dancer of twenty eight, born in the Artibonite and living in the commune of Plaisance. Termrus Joseph was a farmer of thirty three, born in Plaisance and still there. Bertrand Velbrun was a cook of forty two, born in the Artibonite and resident for years at Cap-Haitien. J. B. Cineas helped gather the material. A good raconteur in the countryside was invited to every wake, wedding, derniere priere and Vodou ceremony, and was handed the best food, drink and tobacco available. The custom was already thinning. Families that had once sat children and grandchildren in the yard for a night of stories now shut their doors after dark.

Haitian newspapers told readers almost nothing about President Stenio Vincent's difficulties. The country had been under a state of siege since not long after the American marines withdrew in 1934, and the controlled press printed praise. Vincent's programme was a move from representative government to personal rule, carried out behind the proper legal forms. The elections of September 1936, the first general elections since the occupation ended, offered voters one government candidate for every seat in the Chamber of Deputies, on printed slates they were forbidden to change. Vincent later gave Colonel Calixte of the Garde the theory behind it: the government makes the constitution, the laws, the regulations and the agreements, and cannot let any of them get in its way when it decides a measure is needed to keep itself in place. By the end of 1936 the state was Vincent. The mass of Haitians had no vote worth casting, class, region and colour were sorting the country again, and the Garde itself was reported to be coming apart.

On 11 September 1936 Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published an essay on what they called the Haitian ethnie in Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily paper. Their claim was that biology determined the psychological and social behaviour of the different colour groups in Haiti. The country had been divided since independence between a largely light skinned elite and a Black majority, and that quarrel had always been fought in the language of politics, property and class. Denis and Duvalier moved it onto race as a physical fact, borrowing the vocabulary of European racial science and turning it against the elite that had used the same vocabulary to justify its own standing. The essay is the founding document of noirisme. It supplied the reasoning Duvalier used as president after 1957 to argue that power in Haiti belonged to Black Haitians by nature, and that opposition to him was opposition to the majority itself.

Valcin's essay telling servants they belonged back on the land appeared weeks before Rafael Trujillo cleared Haitians out of the Dominican Republic. His campaign of anti-Haitianism laid the country's financial crisis on the people working the western estates, who were poor, foreign in law, and in no position to answer. Across roughly two weeks in October 1937 he ordered deportations and executions, and Grace Sanders Johnson puts the estimate at 20,000 dead. Among them were women whose migration Valcin had described as a failure of judgement. They had not stayed on the plot with the promising vegetables. They had gone east, because east was where the wage was, and the border they crossed to earn it was where they were killed. The essay and the massacre sit a few weeks apart in the same year, in the run of the same paper.