Istwa Nou

Fighting went on through the night across the lower city. When the army had the upper hand, trucks came to collect the bodies and the fire brigade hosed down the streets. The government counted fifty dead and two hundred and fifty injured. Maurepas Auguste put the figure above five hundred. Diederich and Burt later estimated a thousand. Kebreau imposed a state of siege that held without further trouble until election day, fixed at last for 22 September 1957. Six months of collapse had done the work of a campaign. Fignole was in Miami. Jumelle had been discredited whatever his qualifications. Dejoie was still moving and on the defensive. Duvalier had the commander of the army on his side, a growing cell of Duvalierist officers, and a quiet rumour in circulation that the Americans backed him. He went to the countryside with nationalism, mysticism, the racial argument he had inherited from Estime, and a plain division of the world into them and us, delivered in long sentences where Creole ran into French.

The refrain of Duvalier's most famous speech was that they had gone mad. They had decided to keep the most popular candidate in the country out in the dark, and to rule that the people of the Northwest, the North, the Artibonite, the Southwest and the Grand-Anse, along with the middle class, the professors, the teachers and the students of Port-au-Prince, had nothing to say. Then he began naming places. Derac, Phaeton, Maribaroux, Valliere, Monbin Crochu, Cap-Haitien, Fort-Liberte, Ouanaminthe, Limbe, Port-de-Paix, the Mole, Jean-Rabel, Belladere, Hinche, Mirebalais, Lascahobas, Marigot, Cayes-Jacmel, Cotes-de-Fer, Jeremie, Dame-Marie, Anse-d'Hainault, Cavaillon, Aquin, Coteaux. Every commune in the republic, each name carrying its own memory of revolt, and after each block of names the same accusation repeated like a summons at a Vodou service. It turned a candidacy into a cosmology. Voting against Duvalier became a betrayal of the map itself. He left out La Gonave, which had a few hundred inhabitants and produced eighteen thousand votes in September.