Haitian speech carries gestures that no grammar had recorded

Haitian speech has a physical component. Meaning rides on the tap of two fingers against the mouth, on a lifted eyebrow, on the way a body is held while a sentence is finished. Grammars written in 1938 recorded none of that, because a language was understood as words on paper with rules for joining them. Comhaire-Sylvain wrote the physical part down. Her notes and articles are the earliest archive of Haitian Kreyol as something performed, assembled at a time when the language itself was still treated in the capital as a defect to be corrected. The women of the feminist league took the point. So did readers well outside that circle. Anthropologists and sociologists began citing a method that had been developed for a column in a women's paper, having recognised in it the material their own disciplines had been walking past for decades.

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.

Peasants in northern Haiti in 1937 told a story about a spirit they called President Clermeil. He had been a French colonist in the time of slavery, and a cruel one. The people he held resolved to kill him. He prayed to Lucifer and offered his soul in exchange for never being taken, and the bargain held. Clermeil is counted now among the zanj served in the vodou temples, and he is held to father every light skinned child born in the district. Families whose wives or partners bore such a child considered themselves honoured by it. The colonist who owned people and escaped their judgement is still in the neighbourhood, still fathering children whose colour will place them above their neighbours, and his continued attention is received as a compliment. Colour in Haiti has carried economic weight since independence, and the story shows what that arrangement looked like from inside a mountain village more than a century later.