Istwa Nou

Many Haitian couples treated plasaj as an interim arrangement, guaranteed by a contract their families oversaw, to be converted into legal marriage when they were ready for it. The marriage tax law assumed that fees stood in the way. Fees rarely did. Even in the countryside a wedding celebration cost more than the taxes attached to it. What couples were waiting for was the capacity to house a family. Women in plasaj commonly lived with parents or other relatives while a partner built up enough security, or built the house itself. That waiting is visible in the city. The hundreds of self built houses in the poorer zones of Port au Prince were the physical record of partnering contracts, put up block by block across years by men and women who had already agreed to marry and were assembling the conditions for it. In Haiti a marriage produced a house, and the house was the thing that made the marriage official.

In 1937 Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain interviewed a woman and her husband who had lost seven children to miscarriage and infant death. They had brought a second wife into their plasaj union so that there would be children. Infant mortality in rural Haiti was barely documented at the time, and this is what the absence of records looks like from inside one household. Her fieldwork showed that decisions about partnering ran on grief and on care as much as on money or desire, and that plasaj households were often held together by women supporting one another. The count matters too. In Kenscoff in 1938 multiple partnering occurred in about nine of every hundred plasaj unions. Lescot and the reformers who wanted the state to stamp out rural polygamy were legislating against a practice that nine households in a hundred used, generally to survive a loss the state had done nothing to prevent.

The December 1944 amendment opened paternity research and equalised inheritance for children born outside marriage. It kept one restriction in place. A legally married Haitian man could not legally recognise a child conceived outside that marriage. An unmarried man could recognise his children socially and in law without difficulty. A married man could recognise only the children of his marriage. Children of a second or third partnership therefore had no claim on land, and children born to a woman in an arrangement with a married man were cut off economically and socially at once. The Haitian women's rights activist Suzie Boisrond sets out the result: alienation for those children and their mothers, and a legal ranking of sexual relationships, each rank carrying its own schedule of entitlements. One statute sorted Haitian children into three groups. The children who inherited. The children who stood in a legal grey zone. And the children the state declined to enter in its books at all.

Between the wage law of January 1944 and the repeal of the marriage tax in January 1945 the Haitian legislature amended the civil code. The December 1944 amendment authorised legal research into a child's paternity and gave children born outside marriage the same rights as children born inside it, including the right to inherit land. Before that, a birth registered as illegitimate shut the child out of the estate for good. In a country where most partnerships were plasaj rather than civil marriage, the old rule disqualified a very large share of the population from inheriting the ground their own families farmed. Elie Lescot's interest in plasaj ran to legitimacy and what legitimacy did to property, which is why the amendment sits where it does in the sequence. The word illegitimate had been doing the work of a restriction on a deed, attached to a person instead of to a parcel of land, and after December 1944 it no longer did.