Istwa Nou

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.

Women who quit domestic service in Haitian towns were routinely accused of theft on their way out. Guilt and innocence in these cases were seldom established either way. What the women were doing was leaving, and leaving without notice was the only shape the departure could take. Carolle Charles records the terms in which poor, working-class and peasant women described the thing they were guarding. Kom se kawo tem: my body is a piece of land. Se lajam'm: it is money. Read that literally and it rearranges the sociology. A migrant with no property who sells her labour in a town belongs, by the standard categories, to the urban proletariat. A woman who holds a plot and works it decides for herself how hard to work it and how much of the yield to keep. These women were placing themselves in the second category. The body was the holding. Walking out of the house was how she set the rate.

The Foyer was the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale's attempt to work on the city directly. Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was crowded, expensive and hard on any woman who arrived alone, and the league's answer took the form of a room. The same people came back to it. A woman's absence would be remarked on. Care was expected there and could be asked for out loud. Recognition, care and accountability, built up slowly by repetition rather than declared. Grace Sanders Johnson describes what the room was for in one sentence. The Foyer was a place where somebody might see another woman looking out toward the sea for too long, and offer her other possibilities. Everything the league argued about wages, marriage, the law and citizenship sits behind that sentence. In front of it is a specific afternoon, a specific woman at a window, and the ordinary act of walking over and starting a conversation.

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.

Yvonne Sylvain was a physician, one of the Sylvain sisters, and a member of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. She did not begin her one day a week at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince until several months after the newborn was found at LaSaline. She was already working close by, at Le Service d'Hygiene au Centre de Sante, whose district covered LaSaline and Cite Vincent. The details of the rescue would have come to her there. Sanders Johnson puts the two facts beside each other to close a distance readers tend to assume was wide. The League is usually described as an organisation of lettered, French speaking women of the capital's elite, several removes from the settlements by the water. In this instance the removes amounted to a few city blocks. The doctor compiling public health figures on infant mortality and the mother who left a child near the shore were using the same clinic, the same road, the same town.