Istwa Nou

Valcin called the woman who changed employers rogue. The word does specific work. It moves the account from what happened, a worker left a job, to what she is, a person of defective character, and it licenses whatever comes next. Once she is rogue she can be kept out of the training school, sent back to the countryside, and struck off the movement's list of Haitian women worth organising. None of this was peculiar to Haiti. Elite and middle-class Black women across the diaspora in these decades were preoccupied with the migration of Black girls into cities and with how women conducted themselves in public, and they built respectability programmes on that worry. The vocabulary travelled with the programmes. Naming autonomy as delinquency let women who described themselves as advocates take up the work of supervision, and it converted a labour decision into a moral flaw.

Valcin, and most people in the Haitian cities, did not know what the deep countryside was living on in 1937. The interior held no reserve of green pasture waiting to absorb the women the capital found unsuitable. Holdings had been divided among heirs past the point of viability, prices for what farmers grew were low, and the state took more out of the peasantry in duties on coffee than it ever put back. So people left. Women and men were crossing the eastern border to live and work in the Dominican Republic for very little money, carrying the same expectation as the girls walking into Port-au-Prince, that somewhere else would pay better than here. The generous soul of the Haitian land, in the phrase Valcin used for where such women belonged, was a place they were leaving as fast as they could arrange it. Within months the ones who had gone east were being hunted with machetes.

Valcin's essay telling servants they belonged back on the land appeared weeks before Rafael Trujillo cleared Haitians out of the Dominican Republic. His campaign of anti-Haitianism laid the country's financial crisis on the people working the western estates, who were poor, foreign in law, and in no position to answer. Across roughly two weeks in October 1937 he ordered deportations and executions, and Grace Sanders Johnson puts the estimate at 20,000 dead. Among them were women whose migration Valcin had described as a failure of judgement. They had not stayed on the plot with the promising vegetables. They had gone east, because east was where the wage was, and the border they crossed to earn it was where they were killed. The essay and the massacre sit a few weeks apart in the same year, in the run of the same paper.

A full catalogue of La Voix des Femmes, assembled from several archives, has a hole in it. The issues between September 1937 and early 1938 are absent, which is precisely the span of the border massacre and its aftermath. The League's president, Madeleine Sylvain, was in Philadelphia at the time. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain was in Haiti, and her personal collection of other newspapers from October and November is unusually full, so the women were following the killings closely. What they printed about it, if they printed anything, is not in hand. President Vincent's conduct is easier to document. He was neither transparent nor publicly responsive about what he knew, and his opponents read the silence as further proof of where his loyalties lay. The gap in the run is evidence of something. Shock, seizure, self-censorship and simple loss all leave the same shape on a shelf of bound periodicals.