3 August 1925 · Haitian
Four sisters walk beside their father's body through an occupied city
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Georges Sylvain died on the morning of 2 August 1925 at his house on Rue Christophe in Port-au-Prince, with his family around him. By sunrise the next day more than a thousand people had lined the streets to mourn the man they called the apostle of liberty. On 3 August his daughters Jeanne, Yvonne, Madeleine and Suzanne rode in an open caravan beside the body, flanked by their brothers and their mother. Sylvain had been born at Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic in 1866 and came to Haiti as a boy. He collected and published Cric? Crac!, among the earliest and best known books of Haitian Kreyol folktales, a work that took the language and the storytelling form of the country seriously as art. He was also a poet, a lawyer and the founder of the Union Patriotique, the organisation that carried the case against the American occupation abroad. His daughters founded the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale a decade later. They learned the trade at his funeral.
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