Price-Mars asked for the uncle and she went to find the aunt

In 1928 Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'Oncle and told the educated class of Haiti to stop despising the culture of the peasantry and to bring popular Haitian thought inside the discipline of ethnography. The book set the terms for a generation. Comhaire-Sylvain took the instruction and turned it. Her submission to La Voix des Femmes recorded what women thought and how they said it, and it laid out the method she would work by for the next thirty years. The uncle of Price-Mars's title is a figure of authority, the elder whose speech a nation was told to respect. Comhaire-Sylvain went after the aunt, the grandmother and the woman selling artichokes in the market, on the ground that they held the same thing he had sent his readers to look for. The programme had been announced as a national one. She made it a programme about women.

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.

A journal called Les Griots began publishing at Port-au-Prince in 1938. Its editors held that the biology of a people governs its collective mind, so that the psychology of Haitians followed from African descent as a matter of physical inheritance. From that premise they demanded a wholesale change in the mentality of the country. Among the men writing in its pages was a young physician named Francois Duvalier. The doctrine took the vocabulary of European race science and turned it around, claiming the black majority as the authentic nation and treating the light skinned elite as an imposture. It was built to flatter and it was built to exclude, and it offered a ready made explanation for every political quarrel in Haitian history. Nineteen years later the physician was president of Haiti, and the ideas rehearsed in a small review became the working theory of the Haitian state.

A coumbite is a work party. A farmer in northern Haiti asks relatives and neighbours to come and clear, plant, weed, harvest, make cassava or build a house, and in return he feeds them, hands round tafia, the cheap cane spirit, and owes them the same labour when they call on him. The parties ran from four or five people to more than a hundred. In better years the host served food at noon and again at five or six in the evening. Through the summer of 1937 most hosts managed one meal, in mid afternoon. The dances went the same way. Anyone giving a bal owed a tax of one dollar and charged three to five cents a dance, or twenty cents for the whole evening. Twenty cents was a day's wage in Haiti. In the Bassin section of the commune of Plaisance there were almost no weekday bals that year, and the people there said plainly that they were too poor to hold them.