Istwa Nou

The party that went from Port-au-Prince to Saint-Marc in September 1935 was made up of Cleante Valcin, Jeanne Perez, Madeleine Sylvain, Jeanne Sylvain, Fernande Bellegarde, Lyla Poitevien and two women recorded only as Madame Price-Czaikoski and Madame A. Laroche. The local leadership met them on arrival. Between them the visitors were the league's novelist, the editor of its newspaper, its executive secretary, two of the four Sylvain sisters and several organisers, which is to say that most of the founding layer of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale left the capital on the same day for a town none of them lived in. The American occupation had ended a year earlier. The women who had assembled the organisation in its last years were now spending a day on bad roads in order to sit down with members they had never met. What they found waiting was a branch already staffed with officers.

The Saint-Marc branch of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was run by Carmen Marcelin as vice president, Myrta Lanier as secretary general and Marie Aline Ade as her assistant, with Dina Jumelle holding the money and Vida D'Meza assisting her. Marie Coliman, Marie Nahoum, Beatrice Verna and D. Alexis completed the committee. The detail is worth recording for what it rules out. A national organisation can put its name on a provincial town by writing a letter. This one had officers, a treasury and members on the ground, which meant decisions could be taken at Saint-Marc without waiting on Port-au-Prince, and money could be raised and spent there. Haitian political life ran through the capital and always had. The league was assembling a second layer underneath it, in towns where women had no vote, no seat in the chamber and no prospect of either, and it was giving the members of that layer titles and duties in writing.

The Saint-Marc gathering ran through the day and drew close to a hundred people, women and men together. Several members of the league spoke. Madeleine Sylvain is the one the record dwells on, and Cleante Valcin described her manner as warm, sympathetic and persuasive, which was the point, since a good part of the room had come in cautious about what women's politics meant and what it might cost them. Valcin wrote that Sylvain won a lot of hearts before she left the room. The league had no leverage in 1935. It could not offer jobs, votes or protection, it held no seat in the chamber and no post in a ministry, and it commanded nothing that anyone in power had to answer. What it could do was arrive, sit with people for a day and keep talking until the objections ran out. Every chapter the organisation opened outside the capital was won that way, one room at a time.

The hosts at Saint-Marc were Beatrice Verna, her husband Clement Verna and Madame D. Alexis, and what they put in front of their guests was an argument. Every course carried a name. There was a Helena Woodham course and a Mary Winsor cucumber, both named for American suffragists who had been arrested for protesting. There was Claire Heureuse fish and an Adelina salad, for the empress married to Dessalines and the empress married to Faustin Soulouque, and there was Marie-Jeanne coffee, for the warrior. Anyone who had sat through the speeches unconvinced now had the same case made on a card at their place setting. Haitian women who had carried arms and worn crowns were being served at one table with women who had been jailed in the United States for demanding the vote. The arrangement said that these belonged to a single line of descent, and that the guests were eating inside it.

Critics asked whether the league's members were serious or whether the whole thing was a pastime for educated women in the capital. Madeleine Sylvain answered by pointing at movement. A doubter might not follow the politics, she suggested, but he could count the miles, and the miles showed that women wanted to be near one another badly enough to pay for it. A second reading sits inside the same figure. The delegates had come by road, over bad surfaces, and had arrived tired. Haitian market women covered comparable distances on foot or by donkey every day of their working lives, carrying the produce that fed the towns and the trade that kept the economy upright, and nobody had ever treated their travel as a political fact. The league's journeys were an echo of theirs. The women who moved the country's food had no organisation, no newspaper and no delegates.