Istwa Nou

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.

From her hospital bed after the collision, Estrea Jean Gilles gave a statement to the inquiry. She explained that she had a toothache and had been rinsing her mouth with tafia, the local cane spirit, and she finished with the sentence her whole testimony was built around. She did not drink. Little of the statement went on assigning blame for a broken leg that surgeons later amputated. Most of it went on establishing that she had not been drunk and was not the kind of woman who got drunk. She would have known that witnesses at the scene had smelled alcohol, and she would have known what the occupation's officers did with that detail when the injured party was a Haitian market woman. At nineteen, with one leg, she was protecting the only asset the accident had left her, a reputation solid enough to keep her trusted by customers on the same streets where the car hit her. Carolle Charles argues that poor Haitian women have always set the terms of their own respectability.