Istwa Nou

The occupation censored the Haitian press, so Haitian opponents of it published in foreign periodicals. African Americans living in Haiti as clergy and as settlers reported conditions back to Black newspapers in the United States. Inside the country, Auguste Garoute and intellectuals including Jean Price-Mars, Perçeval Thoby and Georges Sylvain argued for Haitian sovereignty and for Haitian capacity to govern, working through the Union Patriotique and the Union Nationaliste, in public meetings and in the Courrier Haïtien, Le Nouvelliste, Haïti Intégrale, La Patrie and Le Matin. The Union Patriotique and the Cacos never formed an alliance. They shared a contempt for the occupation, and both invoked the same grievance. One Caco general spoke of the ladies and young girls who had been condemned and left to die of wounded pride. Armed resistance and written resistance each claimed the suffering of Haitian women as a justification, and each kept women out of its own leadership.

Women appear rarely in the archive of the occupation, and the gap says something about how they lived through it. Whatever protection the Cacos or the Union Patriotique believed they were extending, most Haitian women were working out their own safety, their own trade and their own allegiances by calculations no political organisation could see. Part of that work concerned how their stories came to be written down. Many women appear as witnesses in occupation records because injury reports, court hearings and military investigations required a statement from them, which is testimony compelled by a state rather than offered to it. Others told what had happened to them to other women, building an unofficial record of violence that circulated outside American paperwork and outside Haitian nationalist publications alike. Grace Sanders Johnson treats the difference between the two kinds of telling as the distance between being subjected and acting for oneself. The two archives have very different silences in them.

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.

Late in 1920, after the attack on Eleanor Charles and the killing of the nine girls that summer, the Union Patriotique decided to send a delegation to Washington to put the conduct of the marines before the American government and to propose terms for ending the occupation. A delegation costs money. Raising it fell to the women of the organisation, and the division of labour was plain: men would make the case in Washington, women would pay for the passage. Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain took charge. She was the wife of Georges Sylvain, who had founded the Union, and she knew the politics as well as he did. Counted formally among the wives, daughters and sisters of the membership, she treated the work as her own contribution to national liberation. In Port-au-Prince she brought in her friends Alice Garoute and Therese Hudicourt, pooled what the three of them had, and built an urban women's committee that worked the streets of the capital for donations.