Istwa Nou

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, the first Haitian woman to train as an anthropologist, recorded the working lives of Haitian women in the decades around the First World War. One of them was Adelsia, who entered plasaj, a recognised conjugal union outside civil marriage, as her husband's second wife during the war. Adelsia kept every gourde she earned for herself and her daughters and passed none of it to her father. Marriage in this world moved property as well as people. Through a husband a woman could gain the use of land belonging to her own family and to his, in places where she would never hold the title. It also carried the exchanges that held a rural community together, the feasts, the labour swaps and the obligations between households. Adelsia's refusal to hand over her earnings marks the edge of a second economy, one that women ran inside the household on terms the Haitian civil code had never written down and could not reach.

A Haitian peasant wedding was a financial event as much as a celebration, and it was a point where women did the negotiating. At many plasaj weddings the groom's side presented a peye bôné, the payment of happiness, to the parents of the bride. It consisted of money, and sometimes a cow or a large quantity of food. The father received it. He handed it straight to the mother, who divided it between the new couple and herself. If the mother and the bride's godmother judged the amount too low, they were the ones who reopened the price. The ceremony gave the transaction to the men and the decisions to the women. Two women assessed what the marriage was worth, and having a second woman standing beside the mother made the assessment harder to wave away. Weddings also carried ritual and food that families saved for over months, so the money moving through the ceremony was rarely money anyone had to spare.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain recorded that everyone eats well at a Haitian wedding, and that the rites around it included a water ceremony in which the parents asked the lwa, the spirits of Vodou, to protect the couple. Practices of that kind crossed the lines observers liked to draw. People who served the lwa and people who did not both used them, and they were found in the towns as well as the countryside. Comhaire-Sylvain also settled a question her informants raised. Women in Port au Prince spoke of a wave of marriages at the end of 1943 and the start of 1944 as though it were a contagion. It was the calendar. Across the twentieth century marriage rates in Haiti rose with the first coffee harvest in November and stayed high through February, and rose again during the corn harvest between August and October. Weddings happened when there was money and food, which is to say when the land had just paid out.

Coffee could not legally be sold in Haiti's small markets. The trade was tightly regulated by the government and the national processing companies, and growers sold into that system or not at all. The crop still set the rhythm of money for everyone. When the harvest was good, the rural markets had cash to spend on the goods they did not grow themselves, and that cash moved between the countryside and the towns on the calendar the agricultural seasons dictated. One of the things the surplus bought was weddings. Long unions were an ordinary part of women's lives in rural Haiti, and the moment at which one could be formalised, with the food, the clothes and the ceremony a wedding required, depended on how the coffee had done. So a marriage in a Haitian village carried a date and a price set by the world coffee market. The women who walked between the countryside and the towns carried the surplus in their bundles.