Duvalier falls and a slogan about two founders enters the streets

Mocombe dates the modern protest cry to the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, which ended nearly thirty years of family rule. From that point the standard framing of Haitian street opposition to dictatorship and to American economic policy became the children of Dessalines standing against the children of Petion. He traces its later career through former senator Jean-Charles Moise and Assad Volcy of Platfom Pitit Desalin, who deployed it against Michel Martelly's government of 2011 to 2016 and his party. His conclusion is that the slogan misdescribes the conflict: both camps want position inside the same world economy, one an Arab and mulatto commercial bourgeoisie, the other an educated Black landowning and professional class. The peasant majority, whom he calls the children of Sans Souci, is represented by neither and is used by both. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues the slogan represents neither Dessalines's programme nor the African majority, and should properly name Toussaint rather than Dessalines.

Michel records, on information from the Marine Corps, that Brigadier General Hermann Hanneken died aged ninety-three in California, where he had long been retired, and notes pointedly that he had for years absolutely refused to let the historian Roger Gaillard interview him. Michel places the death in the year of the hundredth anniversary of Peralte's birth and collects other coincidences of dates in history to frame it, including two American presidents dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration they had both signed. He allows himself one question and no answer, wondering whether Hanneken saw his victim as he passed out of life. The dating carries a small internal problem, since Michel's own chronology of birthdays and the book's subtitle both point to 1885 rather than 1886. Michel gathers further coincidences, including a Swedish count killed on the anniversary of a royal flight and a Russian prince who died soon after helping film the killing he had committed. Where this account departs from the standard one: Michel dates Peralte's centenary to 1986 here, while his own birthday arithmetic and the book's subtitle place the birth in 1885.

The Haitian writer Sanba Gregory Sanon, known as Azouke, was among the worshippers attacked during a crusade against the religion in 1986, in which a number of people were killed. He wrote about the building afterwards. Spirits had come to that small run down house from the four corners of the country, and inside it the members wrote poetry, composed songs, learned to dance and argued politics. They lost one of their brothers, a man Sanon calls very dear to the struggle, and from that day they decided to move the house elsewhere. The spirits, he says, visited them wherever they went. Anti-Vodou crusades ran from the colonial period into contemporary times without a long enough break for anyone to grow up without seeing one. Abandoned temples stand in the Artibonite valley, and they are as much a record of Haitian religious history as the ones still in use.

In 1986 hundreds of Vodou worshippers were killed at Soukri, near Gonaives. Desir places the killing in a long line of attempts to stamp out the religion, and records the answer given by a practitioner named Herard Simon, who improvised a response inside a ceremony that was part prayer, part protest and part warning. Simon told the gathering that a revolution was under way and that every religion would have to take a position in it. The Catholics, he said, had shown they were not interested in Vodou, that they wanted to break it and to kill, and that more than a thousand of its priests had died across the country. He named Catholics, Protestants, Baptists and Adventists together as holding a single plan, to destroy a work that was giving them trouble, and answered that the religion had come out of Africa and would be left where it stood. The song was recorded by the scholar Marie-Jose Alcide Saint-Lot.