Istwa Nou

The Second World War was good business for a narrow layer of Haiti. Factory owners and the big import and export houses had guaranteed buyers in the United States, fixed contracts and rising prices. Very little of that money moved downward. The local markets went on extracting labour from a working class that was growing as people came off the land, and from the peasant majority that still fed the country. Haitian women carried the heaviest part of the arrangement. They walked the produce to market, they did the domestic work in other people's houses, they took the factory shifts, and they kept households running on whatever was left over. Sanders Johnson uses one word for what this did to them, which is depleted. It is the right word. A person can be impoverished and still recover. Depletion means the stock is drawn down faster than it is replaced, and nobody in the arrangement intended to replace it.

Jeanne Sylvain was thirty seven years old and single while the weddings went on around her. In the class she came from that counted as a condition requiring urgent attention, which is why she could hear a run of marriages as an emergency when other people heard only good news. Every invitation that reached the Sylvain house and every reception she attended brought the question about her own status, put to her by relatives, by friends and by people who hardly knew her. Her sister Yvonne, single at thirty six, said plainly that Jeanne's situation was a choice, since there had been no shortage of men wanting to court her. Two educated sisters in one house had each declined the arrangement their society treated as the only completed form of a woman's life. Their money and their family name made the refusal survivable. Neither made it comfortable, and the questions did not stop.

Jeanne Sylvain treated her own marriage as a subject for sarcasm. The wave of weddings around her was a pattern she studied, in the way she had been trained to study populations. Her plainest reason for staying out of it was financial. She had just taken her first paid job, and earning her own money was a step up in her life. Under the law then in force a married woman's wages legally stopped being her own. Marriage therefore meant handing back the single thing the job had given her. Seen from her desk it looked like a loss of freedom and of movement, something hanging over her like a sickness she was watching spread through her friends. A woman who had spent that winter cataloguing an influenza outbreak found the same shape in the marriage contract, and she gave it the same name.

Between November 1943 and May 1945, through wartime shortages, unstable markets, the influenza and the funerals, Jeanne Sylvain was invited to a wedding almost every week and attended a great many of them. She reported the run of them to her brothers and sisters as though tracking an outbreak, and she borrowed a friend's phrase for it: the marriages were an epidemic. The comparison does real work. Something was moving through her social class with the momentum of a contagion, spreading by contact at the ceremonies themselves, and nobody could explain the timing except by saying that everyone was doing it. A war that made the future uncertain sent a whole generation of the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie to the altar. Jeanne counted the cases from the pews, which is where a guest sits and where a woman of her age was not expected to remain.