The man who massacred Haitians in 1937 later signs to import them

Rafael Trujillo ordered a mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937. After the Second World War he took an interest in sugar production and found that he needed workers. In 1952 his government signed a treaty with the Haitian government covering the seasonal movement of cane cutters across the border. Two renewals followed, one in 1959 and one in 1966. From 1971 the arrangement ran instead through contracts between the Dominican state sugar council and the government in Port-au-Prince, and these lasted until Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in 1986. They became a way for successive Haitian governments to make money. The Haitian side was paid a sum for setting up recruitment centres, and part of the migrants' wages was held back, officially to be handed over at the end of the season, in practice sent home and pocketed by the ruling circle. Conditions in the cane were documented from 1979 onward as slavery in all but name.

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into class zones for her research. Close to twenty thousand women lived at the seams between them. They were domestic workers, and their day was set by somebody else's breakfast. Coffee had to be on the table at seven, so they set out at five, and they came home after dark. Both ends of the journey happened when nobody was watching. Many of them had given up schooling for jobs paid at the legal minimum, and that trade runs one way only. The capital ran on these women. The households that employed them, the zones Comhaire-Sylvain mapped, and the professional and political life conducted inside them all rested on twenty thousand people walking through the dark twice a day. The map of the city did not show them. The census counted them in somebody else's house. The hours they spent in transit belonged to no one's accounts at all.

The Carnival dances known in northern Haiti as ra-ra had come up from the west and the south only recently, and by 1937 they were being danced through Lent and above all on Good Friday. On that day in 1937 several bands arrived at a house in the commune of Plaisance and performed in the yard. One group had a man in a mask with horns who danced as a bull. Another was led by a cane thrower who went through his routine with the stick. Several boys stood on their heads and danced with their bodies in the air. These bands move along the road, which sets them apart from the dances held in a yard at a bal, and they were marked off from the quadrille, the polka, the waltz and the meringue that the same peasants danced at those bals. The meringue remained the favourite of the borrowed dances. Some older country dances, such as the mazinga, had already gone out of use.