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.

Bernadel's commanding officer was less troubled by the market women's unlicensed trading than by their evident calculation. They had judged that they could escape punishment, they had judged the limits of a gendarme's authority, and they had tested both. Going back to the same street after release showed how loosely the American military actually held Haitian towns. Both sides of the war used the same resource. Gendarmes and Cacos alike depended on women's knowledge of the roads, and women decided in each case what to say and to whom. Claire Saint-Lot used hers to damage the antioccupation movement. The four peddlers used theirs to keep trading. In both cases the answer was a threat of public violence, and the officer's insistence on making an example confirmed what Haitian women already understood, that they were the first targets and the principal witnesses of the ordinary physical punishment of those years. The occupation could not function without what women knew, and could not tolerate their knowing it.

Under the American occupation the market women of Haiti went back to the roads and the market squares, and by going they refused the control the occupation claimed over their labour, their movement and their choices. Their claim on the nation ran through their knowledge of its ground and its prices, and that knowledge could not be requisitioned. Their traffic unsettled every layer of occupation bureaucracy and upset the arrangements Haitian officials and American officers were trying to hold together. The historian Yveline Alexis has shown women meeting interrogation with silence and pretended ignorance while officers threatened to kill them. The answer was more paperwork and more watching, with radio and aircraft turned on ordinary conversation between Haitians. The occupation had been built on the assumption that Haitian compliance came free. Women priced it. The drag they created slowed the machine as effectively as the caco columns in the hills, and it fed the campaigns at home and abroad that eventually made nineteen years of occupation impossible to continue.