A list of gestures is offered as a grammar for crossing class

The documentation Woodson singled out was a record of gestures. Two fingers struck against the mouth, an eyebrow raised, a posture taken up in the middle of speaking: Haitians of every station used these, and they carried the same meaning for a market woman in Kenscoff and for a lawyer's wife in Petionville. Those were exactly the meeting points the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was hunting for, since the league's standing problem was that its members and the women it claimed to speak for shared almost nothing. Comhaire-Sylvain's work later became the ground on which a written standard for Kreyol was built, and the state adopted an official spelling in 1979. In 1938 the ambition was smaller and stranger than that. A dictionary and a grammar were being handed to women of one class so that they could talk to women of another.

Three young men calling themselves Les Trois D had met since 1929 in a rented house in downtown Port-au-Prince to discuss what Price-Mars and the ethnological movement meant for the emerging black middle class. They were Lorimer Denis, a lawyer from Cap Haitien, Louis Diaquoi, a journalist from Gonaives who suggested the group's name before his death in 1932, and Francois Duvalier, then a medical student. After a failed attempt at a daily paper, the quarterly appeared with Duvalier, Denis and the poets Clement Magloire fils and Carl Brouard as directors, aiming to continue the work of La Revue Indigene. Duvalier and Denis wrote most of the articles, adopting the racial theories of Gobineau and Arthur Holly to argue that psychological and cultural characteristics differ sharply between European and African peoples and that Haitians are unconsciously governed by African heredity.

The headline story of the March 1939 issue reported the Lima declaration in favour of women's rights, written after the Eighth International American Conference, and identified Peru as a leader in the field. Sylvain-Bouchereau then turned the comparison on her own government, recalling the solidarity of Pétion and Bolívar and the two countries' independence struggles, arguing that Haiti had been a pioneer in abolition and independence and that Peru had followed its example, and asking whether Haiti would now stay behind. She demanded to know whether the government would honour its signature in the Pan-American Union or persist in the politics of an ostrich recommending to others reforms it would not undertake. Sanders Johnson reads this as the League's core tactic: leverage the revolutionary past against the present government, and make regional embarrassment do domestic work.

Sitting in a bar near the Massacre River with Greene, Diederich recounts the killings of October 1937 from interviews he did with survivors for a feature. Dominican soldiers hacked and clubbed Haitians to death by the thousands, many on the banks of that river, and were only permitted to use their old rifles on those trying to swim across once their arms grew too tired to keep swinging. Black corpses choked the water and the ravines. The screening method was a literacy and pronunciation test in which every black person was asked to say the Spanish word for parsley, and anyone who failed to produce the Dominican pronunciation was killed on the spot. He puts the toll at some twenty thousand Haitians across the Dominican Republic on Trujillo's orders, and notes that the killing reached far inland, as far east as San Pedro de Macoris.