The city grew past its walls and women had no room in it

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.

The Axis powers had cut American access to rubber coming out of the Philippines, and in 1941 Elie Lescot agreed to make Haiti the answer. The instrument was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, known as SHADA, a joint agricultural programme with the United States. Hevea rubber trees were to be brought from the Philippines and grown in Haiti. Alongside them the scheme planted cryptostegia vines, a second source of rubber, and took lumber out of the southeast of the country. All of that required land and it required labour. Both came from the Haitian peasantry, who held the ground the trees were to occupy and who would do the clearing and the planting. The structure should be recognisable. American capital directing Haitian land and Haitian work toward an American requirement is exactly the arrangement of the occupation that had ended six years earlier. The difference in 1941 was that the instructions came through a Haitian president rather than a Marine general.

In 1941 the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Haiti launched what it called an anti-superstition campaign, with the open support of the newly elected president Elie Lescot. The method was direct. Voodoo objects were sought out and destroyed in quantity: drums, altars, and the vessels in which the spirits are housed, everything that makes a temple a temple. Thousands of Haitians were made to stand up and formally renounce African religious practice. This was an attack on the religion of most of the population, carried out by a church established in the country by treaty with Rome and backed by the state. It was also an attack on a material record. The objects in a temple are not interchangeable. They carry the lineage of the people who served with them, and destroying the contents of a temple cuts a line that ran back through generations. Lescot's endorsement bought him the clergy and cost him the countryside.

Stenio Vincent was opposed to Vodou throughout his presidency, and in his last year in office he put the state behind the antisuperstitious campaigns the Haitian Catholic Church was running. The effect was to make the practice criminal. What followed was a new wave of violent repression aimed at ceremonies, at temples and at the objects used inside them. It is worth being exact about what was being suppressed. Vodou is the religion the majority of Haitians serve, assembled in the colony out of West and Central African traditions by people who had been shipped across the Atlantic against their will, and the revolution that made Haiti a country drew on it for its organisation and its oaths. The Haitian state and the Roman Catholic Church, working together, were suppressing the spiritual life of the population that state governed. Lescot inherited the campaign in 1941 and carried it further. While it ran, holding a ceremony in the open was an act of defiance.