Istwa Nou

On Tuesday 5 September 1917 Adirenng Senatus of Jacmel tried to cross the street by the open market in Port-au-Prince with a basket of fruit and a parcel in her hands. She stepped out from behind a sprinkler wagon and was hit by a Quartermasters mortar truck driven by Private Sterling R. Hold of the United States Marine Corps. She remembered nothing until she woke in hospital. The record lists a laceration six inches long above her left knee, a deep one twelve inches long in her lower left leg, and bruising across her left foot and under her right eye. In evidence Hold said he had not seen her, and that he had been driving slowly. Senatus told the court she had no reason to think he hit her on purpose. The court ruled the collision unavoidable and cleared him of carelessness. She died later of what the truck did to her. Her case sits in a file of road accidents that Grace Sanders Johnson reads for what American officials believed about Haitians and their bodies, and for what Haitian women said back.