Istwa Nou

Malbranche-Sylvain and Alice Garoute catalogued what the collectors brought back. The Senate hearings in Washington had concluded that no Haitian girl or woman was touched, harmed or killed by the occupation. The list of grievances the women assembled recorded girls and women burned alive, buried alive, hanged and shot. Some appear by name: Mme. Rosier, Hergenee, Madame Garnier, Athelia and Cloraine Etienne, Madame Eucharice Cadichon, Dorlean Joseph, Madam Prevoit, Mme. Bregarde, Madame Lumenesse. Others enter the record through a relationship, as somebody's mother or sister or daughter, or as the woman who had been caring for a pregnant neighbour. Much of the harm was done at the line between the street and the house, in doorways and yards, where occupied public space pushed into private life. A committee in Washington had declared this category of victim empty. Haitian women filled it in longhand, name after name and wound after wound, and produced a record the occupation could neither correct nor destroy.

In February 1921 a delegation from the Union Patriotique sailed from Haiti for Washington carrying testimony that Haitian women had gathered door to door. Sixty one committees had done the collecting. The accounts described women burned alive, hanged and shot during the American occupation. The delegation included Stenio Vincent, later president of Haiti, and Perceval Thoby, the organisation's representative in the American capital. Their timing was ruinous. Through the 1920 presidential campaign, Senator Warren Harding had used Haiti as a stick to beat Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, repeating rumours of naval misconduct and charging the administration with the rape of Haiti. That served him until election day. By the time the Union Patriotique had raised the fare and put its men aboard a ship, Harding was president elect and Haitian suffering had stopped being useful to him. The testimony arrived intact and found no audience. A grievance loud enough to move a national election became, within four months, an embarrassment to the man it had helped elect.