1915 · Haitianyear only
A girl in Jeremie called the Marines boiled lobsters
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Ghislaine Charlier was eight years old when she first took notice of the men she and her sister called boiled lobsters. They had come ashore at Jérémie in 1915, pink and raw, and the Caribbean sun had baked them a burnt red by the time she registered them. The girls laughed at them in the street. Eighty two years later she still laughed telling it. The lobsters were American Marines, officials, businessmen and their families. Her aunt Claira ran a small import and export business on the port at Jérémie, where Haitians were barred from the docks after five in the afternoon. Claira never married. She kept company with men and refused all of them access to her money, because losing the money meant losing her freedom and her niece's too, since Claira's income supplemented her brother's. It was from ports like that one that Woodrow Wilson ordered officers off ships already lying at Port-au-Prince to take the capital on 28 July 1915. Washington called it the Caribbean front of a European war.
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