We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.
Four sisters walk beside their father's body through an occupied city
Georges Sylvain died at home on Rue Christophe and a thousand people lined the streets by dawn.
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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.
Georges SylvainSuzanne SylvainMadeleine Sylvain-BouchereauUnion PatriotiquePort-au-PrincePuerto Plata
Where this comes fromJohnson, G. S. (2023). White gloves, Black nation. University of North Carolina Press.HT-WGBN-000111HT-WGBN-000112
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.
Shopkeepers close the capital for a funeral and the classes mix on the street
Black flags on Rue des Fronts-Forts, and condolences from across the Caribbean and the Americas.
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On the day Georges Sylvain was buried, the shopkeepers of Port-au-Prince agreed among themselves to close so that they and their employees could attend. Black flags hung from almost every house on Rue des Fronts-Forts, Rue Bonne Foi and the Grand Rue. Condolences arrived from across the Caribbean and the Americas. One newspaper wrote that this was no mourning of a few thousand people and that the whole nation was in mourning. The procession drew the wealthy onto their balconies and the poor out of their yards, and set, as one account had it, the most dazzling luxury beside the most sordid rags. Charlemagne Peralte's death six years earlier had been made a spectacle by the Americans, who photographed his corpse tied to a door. Estrea Jean Gilles's ruined leg produced an inquiry and then silence. Sylvain died in his own bed at fifty nine. Haitian newspapers and American surveillance reports agreed on one thing about the day. It was among the largest displays of national unity the country had ever seen.
Georges SylvainCharlemagne PeralteEstrea Jean GillesPort-au-Prince
Where this comes fromJohnson, G. S. (2023). White gloves, Black nation. University of North Carolina Press.HT-WGBN-000112
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.