Istwa Nou

Jeanne Sylvain wrote to her brothers and sisters about the illness going through Port-au-Prince in November 1943. Almost every family had a few days of fever with aches and the heavy depression that came with this particular sickness. The doctors could not agree. Some said dengue, some said an ordinary cold, some said a flu that was not the Spanish one and might well be Dominican. The schools had been running mornings only for a month and would stay that way until January, so the children wandered about in the afternoons and their parents were furious. The line about a Dominican flu carried a load. Six years earlier the soldiers of Rafael Trujillo had killed thousands of Haitians along that border in a matter of days. A disease that crossed it freely, at a moment when Haitians could not, was worth a bitter aside in a family letter.

The influenza that closed out 1943 did what outbreaks do. It produced rumour, fear, hints of national and international blame, shut businesses and schools, and wore out the people doing the nursing. The Sylvain sisters wrote to each other about the older members of their community, who were the ones at risk. Then the virus went through their own house. In the confusion and lethargy that followed, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau could not remember whether she had told her sister Suzanne, who was away doing research in the Belgian Congo, that the grandmother of Madeleine's husband Max Bouchereau had died during the epidemic. That lapse is the most exact record of the household's condition anybody left behind. A family of formidable letter writers who held themselves together by post lost track of a death, because every one of them was too ill to write it down.