Istwa Nou

Marguerite was the Sylvain family's young cook. She survives in the record because of half a sentence in a letter reporting that the whole house had caught the flu in 1943. She and the Sylvain sisters would have met for the first time in the foyer of that house, the entryway, which is the same word the League chose for the centre it built for women like her. She most likely cooked for the leadership meetings of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale at the family home on Rue Christophe. Her origins go unrecorded; nearby Poste Marchand or Bolosse are likely, or Bel Air or La Saline further north. The women of the League debated the condition of Haiti's working women over meals a working woman had prepared, and she entered the archive only because a virus drew no distinction between the women who owned the house and the woman who fed them.

The Foyer was an evening school for working women in Port-au-Prince, run by the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. Its teachers, Madeleine and Jeanne among them and probably Marguerite as well, intended to lock the doors before seven in the evening. Enrolment made that impossible. The women who came wanted instruction in anything on offer, and the teachers kept the rooms open past the hour. What followed each night was several hundred students leaving at once and walking home through a capital with poor lighting and real danger for a woman on her own. They moved as one body toward the districts they lived in and peeled off in twos and threes near their own doors. Sanders Johnson counts the walk as part of the school. The lesson in the classroom was literacy and a trade. The lesson on the road was that safety for a woman in Port-au-Prince after dark was something these women manufactured for each other, nightly, with no institution and no police force behind them.

In the first days of 1944 a newborn girl was found alive by the water at LaSaline, the settlement on unsecured ground at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Sanders Johnson makes no claim about who left her or who found her. She sets out what the geography permits. Darkness covered a parent who could see no future for a child on that land, and covered her from neighbours who would have read the act as sickness rather than as arithmetic. The road running beside the sea past the old ports was the same road the women took when they walked home from their evening classes at the Foyer. One of those groups may have heard the child. A single person walking home may have heard her. Someone carried her across town to the maternity ward at the general hospital. The account is left open on purpose. The women who walked home together at night may also have been the women who carried a baby back from the sea.