Istwa Nou

The incidents happened in the open, on the street. They were written down inside the miscellaneous notes attached to reports on construction work called necessary. The Caribbean scholar Donette Francis describes postcolonial Caribbean space as capable of working as a clandestine site, a place hidden in plain view where a woman who tells what was done to her meets disbelief because nothing can be verified. Haitian women under the occupation were accounted for and erased in one motion. Their injuries were set down in enough detail to be treated medically and processed legally, then filed under headings that emptied the detail of meaning: careless women, disobedient women, drunk women, girls recorded as women and women recorded as girls. The street was public and the file was private. Everyone saw the violence and none of it could be admitted. Grace Sanders Johnson treats this as harm aimed at the archive itself, so that the record of what happened became the means of losing it.

On 15 May 1920 the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper in the United States, ran the headline US Troops Attack Haitian Girls. Its source was the Reverend S. E. Churchstone-Lord, an African American pastor serving in Port-au-Prince for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He described white soldiers of the American army spreading terror through the republic and trying to beat Haitians into submission. His heaviest charge was that nine Haitian girls between the ages of eight and twelve had died in a single night after being assaulted. He said further that white officers required members of the Haitian gendarmerie to procure Haitian women as concubines for them. Girls who survived were in some cases pushed into sexual servitude arranged by their own countrymen on American instruction. Elizabeth Saint-Bernard, Claircia Delva, Estrea, Marilia Lindor, Adirenng, Claircilia Telisma, Louise Ismael and Eleanor Charles appear in the military record distorted or not at all. Antioccupation families in Port-au-Prince, the Garoutes and the Sylvains among them, moved these accounts across the region and into the American press.

Churchstone-Lord told the Chicago Defender that if the United States meant to keep its protectorate over Haiti, Haitians would rather have Black American troops. White troops, he said, were arrogant and known for their contempt toward Haitians, women and girls in particular. The request measured what people expected to survive. Under a foreign army that was going to stay, the only choice on offer was which soldiers were least likely to read Haitian skin as permission. His report put a structure of rape, assault and murder in front of an American public with no other way of learning about it. Few of the incidents were ever investigated by the marines or by the gendarmerie. Haitians moved the information themselves, by word of mouth, in newspapers and journals, in open letters, and where it was possible through courts martial. Churchstone-Lord learned about the dead girls through those channels and sent the story north. The Black press in the United States did the work of a court of inquiry because there was no court of inquiry.