Woodson puts a Port-au-Prince linguist into the Black scholarly line

Woodson wrote that in the very field Herskovits had chosen to work there had lately appeared Madame Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, and he counted her among the most intellectual people of Haiti. What impressed him was not her conclusions. It was what she had decided to record: how folktales and Kreyol are actually recited by the people who own them, how far a story travels and how widely it is known inside the country, and by what routes it has reached other places. Woodson had founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and had invented Negro History Week, and in Black America he was the man who decided what counted as scholarship. His notice placed a Haitian woman working outside Port-au-Prince in the same line as the historians of the United States, at a moment when almost everything Americans read about Haiti had been written by visitors passing through.

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.