Istwa Nou

Until the middle 1920s most gendarme units patrolled districts where they were already known. Women were on the streets daily, and officers watched their movements for security and for tax purposes, so the two sides grew familiar even where a gendarme had been posted to a strange town. Some women used that. They called on the gendarmerie against thieves and in domestic quarrels, a practical use of the occupation state that carried no political loyalty with it. Claire Saint-Lot's report to her son in law shows the same web working the other way, since the intelligence apparatus of the occupation ran through ordinary relationships rather than through a bureaucracy. In the case of the four young market women arrested at Petit Goâve, the gendarme Bernadel may well have known them and judged them no threat to the order of taxed peddling, or he may have wanted one of them as an informant. Constant presence gave Haitian women something to trade, and taught them where the authority of the occupation stopped.

The Cacos recruited and threatened the gendarmes; the Americans tried to control them. Both sides got most of what they knew from women who moved along the roads. Marie Louise's letters supplied the Cacos with warnings and money. Women who knew the tracks were equally useful to marine intelligence, and the Cacos said so in the same statement in which they dismissed the gendarme as worthless: any Haitian guide who showed American officers the roads would be killed. The guides understood that the threat was real. Claire Saint-Lot, a vendor from Bellanger in the commune of Arcahaie, reported in December 1921 that she had overheard Silenciaux, Charles Boco, Charleaus Glaude, Augustin and Malette planning a rising and saying they would not let whites stay more than two months. Having heard it, she was watched so closely she could not visit her own plantations without fearing assassination. She passed what she knew to the Americans through a gendarme who was her son in law, Merveus Denna. Occupation intelligence travelled along kinship and market ties.