Haiti's population figures come from the baptism registers

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain attached a warning to her own numbers. Statistics, she wrote, have to be used with caution. The problem was the source. Haitian population growth was calculated from Catholic baptismal records, so a birth entered the count only when the church wrote it down. Births that happened outside a hospital were missing. Births to parents who had not married in church were missing. In a country where most women gave birth at home and most unions were never solemnised by a priest, that is a large hole rather than a rounding error. The official Haiti of the 1940s was a partial Haiti, and the part left out was the poorest and the most rural. The gap points directly at what the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale took up in 1944 and 1945. Children the parish had never recorded were the same children the law on illegitimacy penalised. The silence and the statute were describing one set of women.

The Griot writers had built a politics out of racial authenticity, arguing that the assimilation of French values had impaired Haitian development, that African polities were communitarian while Haitian individualism was an import, and that only culturally authentic black Haitians could meet the needs of a black country. At the base of this lay a strong anti-liberal component, including an authoritarian and exclusive state, on the argument that liberal democracy in a country full of colour prejudice would divide black Haitians of different classes to the benefit of the mixed race elite. When Italy invaded Ethiopia the noiristes, like most other black intellectuals in the region, backed Haile Selassie and attacked Mussolini. The book uses this to mark the point at which the group's framework was fully outlined, before the war, and available for political use in the following decade.

Radio arrived with the marines in 1926, as jazz had, and the first commercial station followed in the middle of the decade. By 1948 seven stations operated in Port-au-Prince. In its early phase radio spread ideas through music and discussion, with Dantes Bellegarde and Felix Magloire debating weekly on the air. Wartime import shortages cut the supply of French and American records just as demand rose, so entertainment stations expanded in-studio concerts by groups such as Jazz des Jeunes, which were very popular because the country had no developed recording industry. The book argues that this infrastructure is what carried black consciousness out of the drawing rooms of the black intelligentsia to the popular classes, and that in the following decade radio would bring Haitians closer to international events and give political figures a route to the illiterate majority.

For the September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez chose a map for the cover, and the direction it pointed was north. The issue took readers on the trip many Haitians make once: a hundred and twenty miles from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the old capital, then several miles south to the village of Milot, then up the Bonnet a l'Eveque, a mountain of three thousand feet, to the fortress called the Citadelle Laferriere. Henry Christophe built it after independence against a French return that never came, and it is among the largest fortresses in the Americas. A feminist monthly was turning itself into a route. The league had been arguing since 1935 that women belonged inside the revolutionary story of the country. Printing a map and walking the readership up to Christophe's walls was a way of saying that the inheritance was theirs to hand out, and that they had decided who was going.