The anchor of the Santa Maria goes into a case in Port-au-Prince

Haiti established a national museum at Port-au-Prince in 1938 to hold objects from the entire span of the island's past, from the Taino period through the colony and the revolution into the twentieth century. The holding that drew visitors was an anchor. It came off the Santa Maria, the ship Christopher Columbus put onto a reef near what is now Cap-Haitien on the night of 24 December 1492. That wreck is the reason the first Spanish settlement on the island existed at all, since the men who could not sail home were left behind in a fort built out of the ship's timbers. Everything after it follows: the seizure of Taino land and labour, the collapse of the Taino population, the French colony, the sugar, the slave ships, the rising of 1791, the republic. A country that had spent nineteen years under American occupation being told it had no history of its own put the iron that started it all under glass in its capital.

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.