Istwa Nou

Georges Sylvain's death marked a change in how Haitians organised against the occupation, and his posthumous collection Dix annees de lutte set out what the first decade had held: caco fighting in the hills, Union Patriotique work in the towns, and daily refusal everywhere else. The American side changed too. After the Senate commissions of 1920 and 1921 came to Haiti and looked, Washington told the occupying forces to moderate their conduct and to write more of it down. Two results followed. Fuller records produced a wider account of ordinary life, which is why traces of individual Haitian women survive in that archive at all. Wider surveillance also let the marines penetrate the caco networks, kill their leaders and reduce combat deaths. Haitians kept dying anyway, in traffic and in custody and in ordinary encounters with occupation officials, and the frustration built until the riots of 1929. On the day of Sylvain's funeral an American car struck two Haitians, one of them a child taken to hospital.

When Georges Sylvain's body passed the upper market on 3 August 1925, the peasants filling the space went to their knees. Le Nouvelliste reported it as spontaneous. La Poste wrote that when the coffin appeared in front of the market by the cathedral, every market woman there, buyer and seller alike, knelt as though commanded, and that nothing could be heard except sobbing. In 1925 few Haitians imagined the occupation had another decade to run. What the crowd shared was a conviction that Sylvain had shortened it, or at the least had never let the Americans rest. His writing and his organising were spoken of as weapons, and his death was spoken of as a casualty of war, though he died at home in bed. Not every death under the occupation could be entered in a combat ledger. The women who knelt were the same women who carried news along the roads and refused to be counted, and they were mourning more losses than the one in front of them.