Istwa Nou

American officials recorded the deaths of Haitian women struck by occupation vehicles and machinery as unavoidable, or as the consequence of the women being careless. The classification did the work of a verdict. Adirenng and Estrea, among others, were injured and then written into the file as the cause of their own destruction, and their broken bodies became curiosities in the record. What made them liable was the way they used the occupied street: walking in it, or being in it at all. Nineteen years of foreign rule ran alongside a settled American belief that Haitians were prone to injury and answerable for it, and together the two turned everyday violence into paperwork. Both women gave statements in hospital days before they died. They understood how badly they were hurt, and what they dictated carries the pressure of a final accounting. Their words also show how much these women knew about the roads, the machines and the changing shape of the country they moved through.

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.