Three men in Plaisance describe what changes shape at night

In 1937 an American researcher settled in the commune of Plaisance, in the mountains inland from Cap-Haitien, and wrote down what people there said about loups garous and lwa. The lawyer and novelist J. B. Cineas, then living in Cap-Haitien, helped him gather the tales. Three men supplied most of them. Termeus Joseph was a farmer of about thirty five, born in Plaisance and never resident anywhere else. Ulysse Marius was a labourer of forty seven, also born there. Bertrand Velbrun was a cook of forty two, born in the Artibonite and long settled at Cap-Haitien. A loup garou in their accounts is a person who slips out of human shape and travels at night as a dog, a pig, a great mapou tree lit on every branch, or a saddled white horse that keeps appearing ahead of you on the road to Pilate. The households whispered about, never accused to their faces, were usually the most prosperous in the district.

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.

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.

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.