Istwa Nou

A few months after Adirenng Senatus was run down, a pedestrian named Joseph Jean was struck a glancing blow by Captain Mayer's horse in Port-au-Prince. The officer leading the inquiry asked witnesses whether the natives of the city seemed careless of their persons compared with people in the States. The witnesses agreed the man had been careless. The inquiry concluded that residents of Port-au-Prince were prone to endangering themselves and showed negligible concern for their own bodies. In the Senatus case the court had gone further and produced medical records to suggest she was mentally unwell. Between 1917 and 1922 a run of automobile and horse accidents produced the same finding again and again: Haitians did not know how to move through their own streets. Those streets had been cut and surfaced by Haitian labour under a revived corvée and were now full of American vehicles, and when the two met the record explained the collision by the character of the person who was hit. Every ruling of unavoidable was also a ruling about whose road it was.

On the night of 9 May 1922 a car driven by United States First Lieutenant John Tebbs struck Estrea Jean Gilles as she walked along L Street in Cap-Haitien. She was nineteen years old and sold in the market. The medical record lists torn ligaments in the left ankle, the tibia driven out through the skin, a fractured fibula, both knees abraded and bruising down her right side. She later lost the leg. At the inquiry Colonel George Van Ordan gave evidence that the lieutenant had surely kept to a reasonable speed, reasoning that reckless driving would have brought an immediate outcry from bystanders. The argument concedes something without meaning to. It treats a Haitian street as a place where people pass judgement out loud on what Americans do. Van Ordan then explained that he had several times nearly hit pedestrians himself because Haitians moved erratically. Silence in the street was read as consent by men who had spent seven years teaching Haitians what speaking cost.