Istwa Nou

Nobody can reconstruct what Haitian women and their families felt in the first weeks of the invasion, though fear, confusion and anger were certainly part of it. The most revealing accounts of daily change come from people who were children in 1915, of the age of Eleanor Charles or of Alice Garoute's older grandchildren. They folded the occupation into everything else about growing up, treating it as one more thing that required caution and rewarded careful curiosity. The literary scholar Nadève Ménard reads the novels written in Haiti during those years for what they show about the mind of a person raised under foreign rule. Oral histories, novels and archival records agree that young Haitians absorbed the occupation into ordinary life, by conscription, by necessity or by self preservation. Some remembered a before and an after. Ghislaine Charlier, born in 1918, had never known another Haiti, and described the Marines as deeply familiar and vividly out of place at once.

The march did its work. Alice Garoute was in the crowd with her granddaughter Ghislaine, then twelve years old. By the time the Forbes Commission finished, an American military withdrawal was clearly coming. President Louis Borno was replaced by Eugène Roy, whose interim presidency ran six months until the legislature could vote. On 18 November 1930 it chose Sténio Vincent, a nationalist who had campaigned for years against the occupation. Ten years earlier Haitian women had walked Port au Prince collecting money to pay for Vincent's journey to the United States to plead the country's case. They expected the debt to be recognised, and a president who would treat their organising as an asset. Vincent was occupied with holding power and with suppressing any programme that threatened his own moderate one, so the support never arrived. Haitian women entered the years after the occupation without a friend in the palace, learning to move between shifting alliances and methods because nothing steadier was on offer.