Weddings every week, and Jeanne Sylvain calls it an epidemic

Between November 1943 and May 1945, through wartime shortages, unstable markets, the influenza and the funerals, Jeanne Sylvain was invited to a wedding almost every week and attended a great many of them. She reported the run of them to her brothers and sisters as though tracking an outbreak, and she borrowed a friend's phrase for it: the marriages were an epidemic. The comparison does real work. Something was moving through her social class with the momentum of a contagion, spreading by contact at the ceremonies themselves, and nobody could explain the timing except by saying that everyone was doing it. A war that made the future uncertain sent a whole generation of the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie to the altar. Jeanne counted the cases from the pews, which is where a guest sits and where a woman of her age was not expected to remain.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.

The Société Haïtienne-Américaine de Développement Agricole was set up to grow rubber for a wartime market, and its method was to take farmland out of food. Crews cleared standing crops and cut down trees that bore fruit so that rubber could be planted in their place. Peasant families were moved off the plots they worked. The returns came in slowly and small. What the project delivered instead was displacement on a mass scale and the loss of the fruit-bearing stock that households had eaten from for generations. Fruit trees take years to bear. A family that loses one loses a decade of food, not a season of it. The rubber that replaced them failed to take hold, so the cleared ground gave nothing back to anybody. The ecological damage and the human damage were the same damage counted twice, and both were charged to people who had not asked for the scheme and could not refuse it.

In 1938 the anthropologist Jose Imbelloni proposed that the native people of the West Indies formed a distinct race, which he called Amazonid, and traced their biological descent from the Amazon basin, north through the Orinoco valley, and out along the island chain. The route is roughly right. Archaeology has since confirmed that direction of settlement, with pottery, languages and crops moving up the Antilles from the South American mainland. The racial classification is the part that has gone. Imbelloni belonged to a school that sorted humanity into fixed biological types with measurable skulls and firm edges, and running that machinery over the Caribbean produced a category nobody uses now. I keep it on a Haitian timeline for what it shows about the period. In 1938 a sound migration history and a false science of race arrived in the same sentence, and a reader had no easy way to take the one without the other.