Denis and Duvalier say Haitian politics is settled by biology

Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published their findings on racial determinism in Les Griots in 1939. Their argument was that the political history of Haiti could be understood only through a scientific analysis of racial characteristics, which meant that the country's coups, constitutions and civil wars were expressions of biology. Two groups were held to be at work: the black majority carrying the African inheritance, and the light skinned elite descended in part from Europeans. Everything since 1804 was read as friction between them. The word scientific is doing heavy lifting there. Denis and Duvalier were borrowing the apparatus of European racial anthropology, the same apparatus that had been used for a century to explain why Haiti should never have existed, and turning it to the advantage of the majority. It handed a small circle of writers a complete theory of the nation and a rule for deciding who belonged inside it.

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.

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.

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.