A newborn found at Cite-Vincent belongs to a long lineage

When women in the Haiti of the 1940s were stripped of standing, income and legal protection, some of them answered in ways with a long and specific history behind them. Enslaved women in the Caribbean had refused their conditions by killing themselves, by killing their newborns, and by rerouting kinship and sexual relationships toward meanings of freedom the plantation had never authorised. The newborn found near the shore at Cite-Vincent sits inside that lineage. The mother's act was legible to anyone who knew what women had done for three centuries when the alternative was handing another child to the same system. Grace Sanders Johnson uses this archive to press against a comfortable habit of reading. The Haitian revolution of 1946 is usually treated as something that had to arrive exactly as it did. The record women left shows the moment standing open. Other outcomes for women were within reach at several points along the way.

On 30 December 1935 Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily, began running a series of articles setting out the racial and biological theories of the Griots. The Griots were young intellectuals who had taken the cultural nationalism of Jean Price-Mars, which asked Haitians to recognise the African content of their own culture, and pushed it into biology. In their hands African descent stopped being a heritage to be studied and became a set of inherited traits determining temperament, aptitude and the proper distribution of political power. Printing the argument in Le Nouvelliste moved it out of small literary reviews and into the reading of every educated household in Port-au-Prince. This was the intellectual equipment of noirisme, the doctrine that the Black majority had a right to the state and that the mulatto elite had held it by fraud since 1804. François Duvalier was one of the Griots. Twenty-two years later he was president.

Negotiations over the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had run on and off since the 1870s, interrupted for years at a stretch, with each side suspecting the other of stalling to gain ground. In 1935 President Rafael Trujillo and President Stenio Vincent signed a treaty that was supposed to settle the question. Jean Price Mars, who served as a Haitian diplomat in Santo Domingo and wrote the history of the two states, recorded that the hopes placed in it came to nothing. What the treaty did not touch was the movement of poor Haitians into Dominican territory to look for work, driven by population and by the sugar economy, and living once across the border in a disguised form of bonded service and under open racial prejudice. Price Mars called that the exposed nerve in all future relations between the two countries.

On 11 September 1936 Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published an essay on what they called the Haitian ethnie in Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily paper. Their claim was that biology determined the psychological and social behaviour of the different colour groups in Haiti. The country had been divided since independence between a largely light skinned elite and a Black majority, and that quarrel had always been fought in the language of politics, property and class. Denis and Duvalier moved it onto race as a physical fact, borrowing the vocabulary of European racial science and turning it against the elite that had used the same vocabulary to justify its own standing. The essay is the founding document of noirisme. It supplied the reasoning Duvalier used as president after 1957 to argue that power in Haiti belonged to Black Haitians by nature, and that opposition to him was opposition to the majority itself.