Istwa Nou

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.

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.

On the first day of the collection in November 1920 a reported two hundred Haitian women went out into the streets of Port-au-Prince. The number survives. The names do not, which is the ordinary arithmetic of this archive. Regina Carrie Thoby, an outspoken opponent of the occupation, was very likely among them. So were Madeleine and Jeanne Sylvain, the teenage daughters of Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain. Madeleine would later found the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and write Haiti et ses femmes. Jeanne would coedit La Voix des Femmes. Both learned mass organising at an age when they were still walking beside their mother carrying a collection bucket, and no school in Haiti was offering that lesson. These were the same streets where Eleanor Charles had been killed and Adirenng Senatus's bones broken, and where four market women at Petit Goave had refused to stop trading. The street took Haitian women and the street was where Haitian women organised. Both things were true on the same afternoon.