1959 · Haitianyear only
The servant is the bridge between the zones that the map never draws
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Women made up most of the population of Port-au-Prince, and because of how they moved through the city they were the people who carried messages, goods and knowledge between the class zones. Comhaire-Sylvain never set out those connections as a separate finding. She left them folded into the descriptions. Of Zone IV she wrote that the rest live in other quarters in some menial capacity, often as servants. Of Zone II she wrote that households were larger, averaging four adults and five children, and that the fifth child was usually a servant. Put the two sentences side by side and the bridge appears. The Zone IV woman sleeping in a Zone II house is counted twice, once as a resident of the poorest crescent of the city and once as a member of a household that considered itself respectable. She is the link between the two, and she carries one world's labour into the other world's comfort every morning.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.