Train the servants and send the rest back to the land

Valcin proposed that the League open training schools for house servants. Women who came out of them unfit for service, whether through lack of schooling or through what she called roguery, would stay in the countryside to nurture the generous soul of the Haitian land and multiply its produce. There is a sorting mechanism inside that proposal. Working-class women divide into those useful enough to enter an elite household and those to be returned to the provinces, and the sorting is done by the women whose own comfort rests on the labour being sorted. It is worth naming what the plan assumes. The countryside can absorb whoever the city rejects. Agricultural work is available and pays. A woman who left the land in the first place made an error of judgement. Haitians were at that moment crossing into the Dominican Republic to find wages, which is the answer to what the generous soul of the land was providing.

Suzanne Sylvain was often ill as a girl and spent enough time near her own death to grow curious about everyone else's. Her caregiver, Amise, told her folktales while nursing her, and the stories held her. She began attending wakes, funerals and burials for people she did not know, in order to hear families narrate a life. The wake drew her most, the night of sitting with a body or dancing around it while relatives, friends and elders tell stories over the dead. Her family said these rituals settled her body and fed her curiosity. She grew up to become a linguist and ethnographer of Haitian Kreyol and Haitian folklore, the first Haitian woman to make a scholarly career of that work. Her father's funeral in August 1925 gave her no comfort. It opened eight years in which her eldest brother Normil and then her mother also died. Madeleine, just back from the Immaculate Conception Academy in Jamaica, took charge of the three younger children.

Major Armand was conspiring against the president he served. With the interior minister Frederic Duvigneaud and a Captain Merceron, he planned to have Vincent and Colonel Calixte killed, after which Duvigneaud would take the presidency and Armand the Garde. In late November 1937 Calixte learned he was to be shot on the Petionville road going home, and arrested the men waiting for him. Vincent dropped Duvigneaud from the cabinet and told Armand not to be foolish. On the evening of 12 December, while Armand and Merceron were drinking rum outside the Cafe Rex at the top of the Champ de Mars, a taxi slowed alongside them, someone fired, and both officers went down wounded. The car, plate P-3031, was found abandoned. Its passengers were five junior officers of the Garde led by Lieutenant Bonicias Perard, who was Calixte's nephew. Port-au-Prince had a kouri the next day, shutters going up along the Grand'Rue. On 9 January 1938 Vincent shipped Calixte to Nice as Inspector of Consulates.

Some domestic workers in Port-au-Prince had no journey across the city. They lived in the house and went from downstairs to upstairs. That trip took a minute, appears in no record of anything, and left them available at any hour to whoever in the household wanted something. In the data these women were folded into the employer's household, counted as part of a family they may have felt nothing at all for. The consequence outlives them. A woman entered the record as a member of the household she served, while the household she actually belonged to left no trace, particularly where her own family fell outside what the Catholic parish registers would recognise: the wrong beliefs at home, a birth outside marriage, a partner the priest would not bless. So the archive reproduces the arrangement of the house. The people upstairs are documented as a family with dependants. The women downstairs are documented as one of the dependants. Their own kin are documented nowhere.