Plasaj is where the ethnographer's sympathy runs out

Adelsia lived in a plasaj, a union recognised by the people around her and by neither church nor state, which might involve one partner or more than one. It was the ordinary arrangement in rural Haiti and it carried real obligations about land, children and support. Comhaire-Sylvain admired the way Adelsia handled her trade and raised her children, and said so in print. On the union she balked. The essay questions Adelsia's standing as a second wife to her husband, and at that point the register shifts from description to judgement. The same writer had spent four articles insisting that the way a market woman measures rice is a form of knowledge educated Haitians should learn to read. The way that woman organised her household received no such reading. Ethnographic generosity extended as far as work and stopped at the bedroom door.

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.

In February 1938 Jeanne Perez stepped down from the editorship of La Voix des Femmes, a year and a half after the paper had carried her open letter to the child Marie-Madeleine. She stayed inside the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and gave it her house. The building in Petionville became one of the league's schools, where girls brought up from the centre of Port-au-Prince were taught to read and write. She also had more time for the journal of poetry and creative writing she had started in 1937 and called La Semeuse, the woman who sows. The name matches the shape of the work. Perez was putting things in the ground in whatever medium came to hand, in a newspaper, in the theatre, in a poetry review and in the front rooms of her own house, with no assurance that any of it would come up.

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.