Two hundred priests serve thirty thousand people at Plaisance

Plaisance is a commune in the north of Haiti. In 1937 it held about thirty thousand people, and roughly two hundred of them were houngans, the priests of Vodou. Beneath the priests came perhaps fifteen hundred to two thousand badjicans, who assist them, and about three thousand serviteurs, the people through whom the spirits speak during a ceremony. Fifteen to twenty thousand more were fideles, the ordinary congregation, believing in varying degrees and not necessarily entering possession. Measured against the beliefs of the religion as a standard, somewhere between a fifth and a third of the peasants of Plaisance were nonconformists. Position in the cult tracked closely with standing in the district, so the men who ran ceremonies were also the men whose word carried weight. The figures came from what peasant informants in the district said rather than from any census, which makes them an estimate. They are still one of the few numbers anyone put on rural Vodou before the state and the Church set out to break it.

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.

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.