In her 1934 novel Le joug, Haitian writer Annie Desroy depicts the bustle of a Port-au-Prince home being prepared for new residents. Before a US Marine officer and his family moved in, neighbors heard the “cries of prisoners dispatched in haste from the National Penitentiary, who arrived under a gendarme's guard … to clean the courtyard and rake the paths where the weeds had pierced the cobblestones.” The convicts’ voices mixed with the “noises of paid domestics whose melodic syllables reverberated in the vast room toward the high ceilings.”Footnote 1 This highlights aspects of domestic labor during the US occupation of Haiti (1915–34) that are corroborated in non-fictional sources but overlooked by scholars. First, the US Marines in Haiti depended on domestic laborers to perform the often invisible work of cleaning, preparing food, laundering, and providing emotional support that was a pre-condition for the military occupation to run. Second, domestic spaces contained the extremes of free and unfree labor arrangements as convicts and other coerced servants worked alongside wage laborers. The fact that this all occurred under the watchful eye of a gendarme points to the inseparability of domestics’ private labor, the lives of public officials, and the policies of the occupied state.
This article uses the experiences of Haitian domestic workers to explore how the abstract processes of US military occupation played out interpersonally and in private spaces. Domestic workers were indispensable to the functioning of marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the occupation itself; they served as a human infrastructure in a country with a limited physical one. Interactions within households were connected to larger struggles over race and labor in Haiti. Domestics’ proximity to marines engendered mutual processes of race-making and fueled Americans’ exoticist obsession with Vodou.
Domestic workers’ private interactions with marines were connected to various facets of antioccupation activism that took place outside of homes. For example, the occupation's use of convict labor for domestic service created links between Marines’ homes and the Caco rebellion that sought to end foreign rule. Additionally, domestics’ positions in the growing urban working class inserted them into struggles over space and antioccupation mobilizations. The latter began to take place on the capital's streets in the 1920s and have since become a staple of Haitian political protest.Footnote 2 Thus, domestics’ experiences unearth new dimensions of antioccupation activism and the roots of postoccupation protest.
Haitian Labor History, Domestic Service, and an Emerging Urban Working Class
Domestic laborers have worked in elite homes throughout Haitian history in arrangements ranging from a highly coercive form of unpaid child labor to voluntary types of wage labor. But these workers have been entirely absent from historiography. This erasure is symptomatic of the field of labor history, which traditionally focused on male, wage earners and union activism.Footnote 3 Disregarding domestic work also has roots in an assumption that urban Haiti was a place where people did not work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Haiti's urban bourgeoisie prospered by exporting peasant crops and thrived by controlling the state; real work only occurred in the countryside.Footnote 4 In 1920, National Geographic expressed the racial inflections of these spatial class divisions: “And while the peasants thus took to the bush, the middle and upper class Haitians gravitated to the seacoast towns, where they learned the art of living by the expert exploitation, political and commercial, of the unthinking black animals of the interior.”Footnote 5 In fact, since independence, Haitian leaders have attempted to tie peasants to the land to produce the export crops that sustained the national economy; these efforts continued under the occupation. To this end, Haitian and foreign ruling classes ratified labor codes and sought to halt rural-urban migration. Such measures continued during and after the occupation, when official plans to modernize Port-au-Prince included efforts to limit the visibility of the urban working class.Footnote 6
Haitian historiography has maintained the invisibility of urban labor by using an analytical shorthand that conceptualizes a society bifurcated between a black, Creole-speaking, Vodou-practicing peasantry that produced exports and a light-skinned, French-speaking, Catholic, urban bourgeoisie that thrived from marketing these goods. In effect, these analytical categories invest undue power in state efforts to control peasant labor and to enforce rural-urban segregation. Until recently, few have explored what Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as the “classes and class fractions within and outside the peasantry” or analyzed “the dialectics of social reproduction” among Haiti's classes.Footnote 7 Haitian labor history addresses urban workers most significantly only in the postoccupation period when their protests spurred the Revolution of 1946 and became impossible to ignore.Footnote 8 This article, thus, builds on a smaller body of emerging scholarship that explores rural-urban migration and urban labor during the occupation.Footnote 9
A number of studies from across disciplines provide useful points of departure for analyzing domestic and urban workers in occupied Haiti. Literary critics like Myriam Chancy highlight the previously-ignored works of women authors whose lives and writings provide insights into women's subjectivities and lived experiences during the occupation. Such analysis has opened new avenues for research about the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality influenced Haitians’ interactions with US soldiers in both private and public spaces during the occupation.Footnote 10 In the past two decades, historians have asked similar questions.
This article will build on newer historiographic approaches that demonstrate the reciprocal effects of individual actions and ideologies on the high politics and daily functioning of empire. Mary Renda's Taking Haiti emphasizes the way that individual notions of race and gender shaped the occupation. She argues that marine and civilian US voices sustained the occupation with a narrative of paternalism that conceptualized foreign rule in terms of a patriarchal household—an image that feminized and infantilized Haitians as it sought to normalize marines’ racial and gender superiority. She and others have demonstrated that ideas of gender shaped the way that Haitians experienced the occupation—raising new questions about the multiple ways that various sectors of Haitian society sought to navigate US rule, achieve citizenship, and challenge racism and imperialism.Footnote 11
This article also draws from scholarship on domestic workers in colonial projects in other geographic settings. These scholars argue, first, that domestic spaces were sites where hierarchies of race, gender, and power were forged, reinforced, and challenged. Second, domestic laborers performed all of the tasks that kept society running and allowed colonial officials to govern.Footnote 12 Third, domestic laborers represent a source of anxiety about cross-racial interactions and the vulnerability of colonizers’ control over the labor force. These anxieties include the fact that domestics regularly breached the boundaries between the private spaces of the home and the working class spaces outside of it. Most studies emphasize domestics’ actions both within and outside homes and their roles as liaisons between private and public spaces.Footnote 13 The connection between domestic workers and urban space is especially important during the US occupation of Haiti, a moment when the city of Port-au-Prince was transformed by urban planning projects and a new urban working class, which included domestics, expanded.Footnote 14
Domestic workers’ experiences are not extensively documented in archival sources. In occupied Haiti, like other places, their voices seldom appear in official records. This gap is partially due to state officials’ tendency to conceptualize work only in terms of formal wage labor, thus excluding domestic service from their gaze.Footnote 15 For example, an occupation report about Port-au-Prince listed forty-two types of urban work that included white collar professions, crafts and trades, and other types of formal wage labor. Although the list included “laundry,” there are no other references to the enormous amounts of domestic and service labor that Haitians performed to keep the country running.Footnote 16
There are some exceptions to the overall dearth of official state records on domestic work. Occasionally, the Haitian courts intervened in the affairs of servant and employer, which created useful paper trails for historians. Usually, these instances occurred when servants were accused of theft or complained of mistreatment from their employers. Even these official sources rarely supplied domestic workers’ last names, showing the limits to their citizenship and legal identities.Footnote 17 However, they do provide brief glimpses into daily life and labor conflicts. These sources also became part of the story because they demonstrate how employers tried to use the courts to enforce labor discipline. In some cases, they show that domestics used formal state institutions to lodge complaints against their employers, highlighting an underexplored formal strategy by the Haitian poor to improve their lot during the occupation.
Unfortunately, some of the most detailed accounts of domestic workers were created outside the temporal scope of the occupation. For example, detailed accounts of unpaid child servants, such as Jean-Pierre Cadet's Restavec, provide rich information only for the period after the occupation ended.Footnote 18 In addition, the novel that addresses domestic labor most directly is Justin Lhérisson's Zoune chez sa ninnaine [Zoune at her Godmother's], which was published nine years before the occupation.Footnote 19
The largest source of material comes from the travel writings of foreign observers who were there during the occupation. These are problematic because they are imbued with racism, apologies for the occupation, and exoticism.Footnote 20 However, they provide more details about domestic workers’ daily lives than any other sources. For Americans, having domestics was a novelty. In the United States, the practice of hiring domestic workers was diminishing as the occupation began, and having a servant was certainly out of reach for most marines back home. Their ability to hire domestics in Haiti—with all of the race and class status it implied—explains why Haitian domestics elicited so much comment. Even African-American travelers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston described servants with their own North American biases.Footnote 21 Many writers cited servants as the source of their knowledge about Haiti. In short, domestics’ proximity to marines places them within a body of writings that may otherwise seem counter-productive to recovering Haitians’ experiences of occupation. Reading these texts against the grain provides an unexpectedly rich source for approaching domestic labor during a foreign occupation.
Domestic Labor During a Foreign Occupation
The influx of US soldiers and civilian travelers during the occupation increased both the demand and the supply of servants. Upon his arrival to Haiti in 1925, US Marine John Houston Craige found that “every one had a Number One Boy.”Footnote 22 That same year, a civilian traveler named Blair Niles surrounded herself with servants as she traversed Haiti. On a trip to the famous Citadelle, she described her breakfast: “here was a fat Haitian woman—in an ample white cotton dress, coral necklace, red bandanna turban and gilt ear-rings—frying our bacon… . Here was Martel setting forth lunch…And there was Josef piling logs on the fire, while a horseboy was bringing in water.”Footnote 23 This was not unique to foreigners as Langston Hughes observed in 1931; members of the “upper classes—always had trailing behind in the street an adult servant, or a small black boy or girl, to bear their parcels, usually on the head.”Footnote 24
Rural dislocations ensured a large labor pool to fulfill this new demand by helping to usher in a wave of rural-urban migration. During the occupation, marines resuscitated a century-old corvée law requiring peasants to build roads with little food and no pay. Haitians in the rural areas around Hinche responded with a rebellion that was met with violent counter-repression, killing untold thousands of Haitians, and destroying entire communities. Even those regions unaffected by the corvée and the Caco rebellion were subject to more subtle forms of dislocation through the elimination of customary rights, the commodification of land, and new pressures on rural existence. It is no wonder that by the time of the 1950 census, almost half of the residents in Port-au-Prince were from the countryside. Under the occupation, the ranks of the urban poor swelled as newly-arriving peasants found limited economic opportunities in the cities beyond petty commerce and informal service labor. Footnote 25
Domestic workers largely came from among this rural-born, urban working class. While Langston Hughes’ observation that “The servants at the hotel were all former peasants” was technically true, it elides the fact that many such workers also spent time in the urban informal labor sector before, during, and after working in marine or elite Haitian homes.Footnote 26 The urban working class actually fed the ranks of domestic laborers and vice versa. For example, in a 1924 case, an unnamed “boy,” who may very well have been an adult, entered the house of Dr. Charmant in Port-au-Prince from the street “for the purpose of applying for a job as coachman,” a reminder that domestic staff came from the capital's informal sectors.Footnote 27 Members of the urban working class also came from within the ranks of domestic workers, since the streets were a place of refuge for child servants who fled harsh treatment. Just a few years after the occupation, Haitian social reformer Madeleine G. Sylvain explained this fact as she bemoaned the dangers of the streets for children who escaped their masters: “I have known some [unpaid child servants] who have never been found. Are they reduced to solitude, lost in a hostile city? Without doubt the prey of vice always ready to exploit their weakness.”Footnote 28
Haitian domestics, like those in other Latin American cities, participated in Port-au-Prince's informal urban economy outside of their employers’ homes.Footnote 29 For example, in the period immediately following the occupation, Haitian sociologist René Victor declared: “The vagabond of our streets…is ordinarily one of these small domestics in the service of our bourgeois families.”Footnote 30 The songs of urban street vendors illustrated his point. In the city of Les Cayes, a young woman sold bread while she sang about the woman in whose home she worked. “Grand moun'n [elder] told me/don't dally … if I dally/ She will beat me.”Footnote 31 In this case, the petty commerce or service tasks that were a hallmark of urban informal economies were coupled with domestic labor. The decently-clad domestic could be one and the same as the urban worker who scandalized elite sectors for “working in their trade in rags showing complaisantly their nudity.” When a writer for Le Temps asked a group of shoe shiners “about their rags, they answer that they have some clothes, good clothes and shoes, but that this is [sic] their working clothes.”Footnote 32
Even the street sellers who were not employed as servants interacted with domestics and had access to private homes, a further reminder that the lines between domestic workers and other urban laborers were often blurry. For example, participants in Port-au-Prince's informal economy had a fair amount of access to domestic spaces where they interacted with servants and their employers. In 1924, “a small boy” named Da Boute, whose actual age or youth is unknown, entered the house of Jean Babeau to sell fruit.Footnote 33 In a similar case, Edouard Charles entered the private yard of the Parsons family through the servants quarters. He was accused of stealing “150.00 [gourdes - 30 USD], 1 white suit, 5 khaki suits, 1 pr. of tan shoes.”Footnote 34 If true, the clothing and shoes would have allowed Charles to inhabit the city streets without being arrested for vagrancy, whose laws were enforced using the markers of shoes and clothing.Footnote 35 The fact that domestics’ duties included tasks in both public and private (to be discussed later) only contributed to this blurring.
Once in Port-au-Prince, servants and other urban workers maintained networks with their family in the countryside. One of Hurston's servants named Joseph worked in Port-au-Prince but maintained contacts with his family in Petit Goâve.Footnote 36 When a domestic worker named Pauline Benoit had a problem with her employers in the Bois Verna neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, she fled to the nearby rural district of Thomazeau, where family probably awaited her.Footnote 37
There are also scattered references to domestic servants who had left other impoverished parts of the Caribbean. On the eve of the occupation, Eugène Aubin had one servant each from Haiti, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe.Footnote 38 In Le joug, a marine's wife considers both Jamaican and Haitian servants to fill her domestic staff. The same family had actually brought a servant from their previous post in the Philippines to work in Haiti—a fictional intra-imperial migration that is beyond the scope of this essay to explore.Footnote 39
The occupation could not run without the work of these servants and other urban service workers. Foreign travelers’ accounts are replete with descriptions of domestic laborers who cooked meals, cleaned homes, did laundry, supervised children and maintained yards. The expectation that they would wake up before the rest of the household was so widely accepted that Haitian churches offered a 4:00 am mass. According to Hurston, “It is held mostly for the servants.” However, in a perfect example of erasing domestic labor, the church service was known as “the lazy people's mass” because the non-servants who went could “come back home and go to sleep again.”Footnote 40
Servants also performed all types of unquantifiable affective labor that is often invisible in archival sources.Footnote 41 Richard Loederer, a European artist who traveled through Haiti during the occupation, remembered his servant Yvonne who “often kept me company on those dreamy evenings … she sang unceasingly.”Footnote 42 Hurston went into even more detail about a servant named Lucille who would
do anything I wanted done because she loved to please. Already I was beginning to love her and to depend upon her. Later on I put her on the roster of my few earthly friends and gave her all my faith. Lucille with her great heart, her willingness to help, her sympathy under varying conditions and her great honesty…In addition she is extremely kind.Footnote 43
We don't how Yvonne and Lucille perceived these relationships.
Domestic laborers’ duties included work outside of the home, which was shaped by the occupation emphasis on urban planning. During and after US rule, Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities increased in geographic size through efforts that included widened streets, beautified plazas, public works, and the incorporation of new neighborhoods through expanded roads. James C. Scott's arguments about the link between urban transformations and domestic labor are highly relevant to Port-au-Prince during the occupation.
Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment of its official structures, given rise to another, far more ‘disorderly’ and complex city that makes the official city work—that is virtually a condition of its existence…The insistence on a rigid visual aesthetic at the core of the capital city tends to produce settlements and slums teeming with squatters who, as often as not, sweep the floors, cook the meals, and tend the children of the elites who work in the decorous, planned center.Footnote 44
In Haiti, domestic servants’ tasks extended beyond the private space of the household and into the larger city, which was equally dependent on their labor.
Domestic workers represented a human infrastructure of the expanding city. They completed tasks to keep Haiti running amid urban transformation, economic centralization, and rural dislocation. Outside homes, servants expended immense time and labor to make up for the country's limited physical infrastructure. They carried water, lit lanterns, delivered messages, and transported goods within and between houses and cities. Haiti could not function without them. In the absence of a frequent national mail service, Loederer relied on his domestic servant to carry a letter the few miles from Bizoton to nearby Port-au-Prince. “I wanted a letter posted, so I sent Faustin with it to Port-au-Prince. He did postman for me in typical Haitian fashion. He placed the letter on his wooly head and ‘fastened’ it there with half a brick; then he trotted off.” Others marveled at servants’ ability to spread information rapidly through what William Seabrook called “the grapevine telegraph of servants in Port-au-Prince.”Footnote 45
Domestics were only one part of the human infrastructure that sustained the occupation. From the earliest months of the occupation, US policies required marines to hire Haitians to carry goods through cities. Right after the first disembarkment of soldiers, an officer forbade able-bodied marines from performing the physical labor of unloading and transporting supplies. “I do not approve of Marines hauling push carts or carrying stores through the streets of the town. Such practice does not sustain that respect towards our forces from the natives which we must at all times maintain while on this duty.”Footnote 46 Even at the level of policy, servants and service labor were crucial to the occupation and the narratives of racial superiority that marines deployed to differentiate themselves from the occupied.Footnote 47
Wages for the domestic laborers who received them varied; but they tended to be lower than other manual jobs for the occupation government. Foreigners paid between three and six dollars per month for domestic servants of various specialties and tasks, plus up to three additional dollars for food.Footnote 48 After factoring in the extra money for food, only the highest end of the domestic wage scale was comparable to the nine dollar monthly minimum wage paid “for common labor on Government work” during the occupation. Meanwhile, rural wage labor fetched a comparable six dollars per month.Footnote 49
Not all servants received a wage, though, which was one of many unfree labor arrangements under the occupation. In Haiti, even before the occupation, systems of unpaid child labor flourished. The system that some today call the restavec or ti-moun system entailed an agreement whereby a rural family would send a young child to the house of an urban wealthy one. The child was obligated to perform chores around the house in exchange for room, board, and an education.Footnote 50 Lhérisson's novel Zoune chez sa ninnaine illustrates the unequal nature of such exchanges in the decade preceding US rule. Zoune's parents scraped their savings to send their daughter to her mistress in nice clothing, implying their high expectations for her future. When they dropped her off at Madame Boyote's house, they were cowed by racism and their fears of the state. Madame Boyote yelled at the parents in Creole “You are not Christians, my friends; you are animals, you live like animals!” Boyote then continued talking to herself, presumably in a French Zoune's parents could not fully understand, about the state's inattention “to the fate of the mass of peasants.” When Zoune's parents heard mention “of the authorities … they slipped away” in fear and “never returned.”Footnote 51 The system was rife with abuses, and most past and present observers regard it as a form of slavery.Footnote 52 For all of the occupation claims to improving the working and living conditions of ordinary Haitians, marines made no attempt to eliminate the practice of unpaid child labor; some even perpetuated it. In a soldier's house in rural Haiti, Blair Niles observed: “The table-boy… was a black child of about eleven, serving for his board and keep, for occasional garments, and with his afternoons free to go to school.”Footnote 53
Another form of unfree work that overlapped with domestic service was convict labor. Throughout the occupation, marines relied on convict labor in both rural and urban areas.Footnote 54 As the novel Le joug explained—and archival sources confirm—some of these prisoners were forced into unpaid domestic service. In 1920, the antioccupation newspaper Le Courrier Haitien complained that “Haitian prisoners, under the guard of gendarmes are employed to clean the private rooms of American officers.”Footnote 55 Marines never denied using prisoners for domestic labor. John Houston Craige employed “a total of six servants, including a general manager, steward and butler united in the person of Destiné, at a cost of nine dollars a month; a laundress costing six dollars more; and four bus boys, chambermaids, gardeners, kitchen-assistants, etc., costing nothing, at a total wage bill of fifteen dollars per month.” The four unpaid servants were convicts. “Their pay was the scraps from my table and such small change as I chose to give them.”Footnote 56
Marines’ use of unpaid child servants and convict laborers is a reminder that the notorious violence of forced corvée labor was only one form of unfree labor during the occupation. Marines never concealed their use of unpaid, forced labor. In fact, some made unapologetic comparisons to slavery when they mentioned their domestic workers. Craige described the acquisition of a servant as “my first venture in black ivory.”Footnote 57 Officer Smedley Butler referred to a servant named Antoine as his “children's faithful slave.”Footnote 58
For convict laborers, working in a marine's house for table scraps, with all the abuse and hardship it entailed, was probably more advantageous than even a short stay in prison or another type of forced labor. In 1919, a medical official complained that the penitentiary in Port-au-Prince had a “high death rate” from disease. He noted “the ill effect of imprisonment on an undernourished people,” which made them more susceptible to all kinds of illness. Prison rations did not assuage undernourishment but work was still expected of convicts. “Hard labor cannot be performed by people receiving the amount of food these people do” but “the great majority of prisoners perform light labor.”Footnote 59
The variety of labor arrangements in domestic spaces created hierarchies and ambivalent relationships among workers. A servant known as Ali Baba, who received a wage from Craige, supervised prisoners who worked in the marine's household without pay. His job included “bossing a crew of three prison-striped assistants who did odd jobs.”Footnote 60 These hierarchies could determine which type of labor servants would perform. For example, one unnamed domestic who had been “sent to carry a stepladder to the house across the street” stood at the entrance of the house for half an hour because he was “hoping to find a laborer whom he can hire to return the ladder, for such labor is beneath the dignity of the house servants.”Footnote 61 Race probably influenced this labor hierarchy as well. For example, Martel was a lighter-skinned, better dressed Haitian who was called a “general boy” by Niles. Although infantilized as a “boy” by his white employer, Martel did have authority over other servants. “Give him a direction, he would receive it amiably and at once relay it to Josef: looking on with bored and melancholy air while Josef executed it.”Footnote 62 At times, such hierarchies created conflicts among servants. Hurston watched “Arius and Lucille having one of those quarrels over jurisdiction that all Haitian servants seem to be having eternally, and during which Arius saying that she had better be careful how she insulted him.”Footnote 63 This is not to deny the camaraderie that emerged among domestic workers, especially those performing similar tasks. Niles described “the gay banter of those laundresses of Bizoton” who socialized and exchanged stories.Footnote 64
Domestic spaces were also sites of face-to-face, cross-class and interracial interactions that were tied to larger occupation processes of race-making.Footnote 65 Although minimally documented and filtered through employers’ gazes, sources suggest that Haitian servants probably developed ideas about foreigners through a combination of preconceived notions, domestic observations, and work experiences. These ranged from the comical to the dangerous. William Seabrook's servant Louis once told a companion that his employer “was not like a white man,” suggesting a store of racial knowledge.Footnote 66 In a moment of levity, an unpaid child servant admitted that Americans “were commonly known as ‘fool whites.’”Footnote 67 Other observations and generalizations came specifically from experiences in domestic spaces. Loederer's cook Yvonne asked “why the white ladies wore thick clothes all day and undressed at night.” Others demonstrated their knowledge of American violence and racism. A servant named Faustin told Loederer, a European, that he would never go “to the États Unis where they burn negroes!”Footnote 68
Rather than meaningful sites of exchange, soldiers and foreign travelers used domestic interactions to reinforce the pretensions of the occupation and to steel exoticist images of Haitians. Employers prided themselves on the education they believed they were bestowing on their servants and treated the interpersonal relationship as a microcosm of the occupation's racially-loaded goals of uplift and civilization. In contrast to well-off Haitians, whose command of French and Eurocentric affect befuddled marines, poor servants were more easily slotted into racist narratives about the primitivism and ignorance that foreigners liked to repeat about Haiti.Footnote 69 Loederer complained that his servant “could not understand why his Haitian ideas of what constituted cleanliness should offend me… With truly Christian patience I tried to teach him better.”Footnote 70 Likewise, Niles described a marine lieutenant who “loved the refinements of life” and believed that his unpaid child servant Gimon “must be trained into a proper table-boy.” “We all took a hand in the training … until suddenly the child comprehended.”Footnote 71
Employers also created knowledge about Haiti from their servants. Smedley Butler's children learned to “chatter French and Creole” as a result of their interactions with servants.Footnote 72 In the novel Le joug, a marine officer's wife expressed her anxiety about interacting with black heads of state at official dinners even though her husband's “future depends on it.” Her friend had a solution; private interactions with domestics would attenuate her fears of interracial social interactions. “To facilitate your first contact with the creoles,” the friend explained, “I chose a small Haitian chambermaid that you will train.”Footnote 73
In some cases, the effects of employer-servant relationships reached far beyond the household. Domestic servants’ importance to larger Haitian-US cultural interactions is most apparent in the realm of spirituality. Since the era of colonial slavery, Haitians have served spirits, built community, and interpreted the world through a host of African-descended religious practices that have since been lumped under the umbrella term Vodou. Racist US narratives about what they called “Voodoo” both piqued US interest in Haiti and provided a cultural justification for the occupation and its violence.Footnote 74 Vodou was a central part of what Raphael Dalleo described as the “international fascination with all things Haitian sparked by U.S.-disseminated narratives of Haiti” that influenced scholarly and literary currents, as well as hemispheric politics of (anti-)racism and (anti-)imperialism.Footnote 75
Since upper-class Haitians sought to insulate foreigners from Vodou to promote an image of civilization, American writers depended on servants to bring them into contact with the religion.Footnote 76 As Seabrook noted: “while the High Commissionare, his lady, and the colonel had called and taken tea in our parlor, the high gods had been entering by the back door and abiding in our servants’ lodge.”Footnote 77 His book, The Magic Island was arguably the most influential in the genre of sensationalist writings on Haiti. Although scholars have rightfully criticized Seabrook and others for their racist distortions of Vodou, it did not prevent him from citing servants as sources of information and inspiration. The early chapters’ most prominent Haitian is Louis, the servant who introduced Seabrook to Vodou.Footnote 78 “It was humble Louis and no other who set my feet in the path … which led finally through river, desert, and jungle, across hideous ravines and gorges, over the mountains and beyond the clouds, and at last to the Voodoo Holy of Holies.” Indeed, the book whose sensationalism would consolidate negative images of Haitian savagery for US audiences and give birth to the zombie film took an exchange between master and servant as its point of departure. “That trail began at my own back doorstep and led only across the garden to my yard boy Louis’ bare, humble quarters.”Footnote 79
For numerous military and civilian foreigners, glimpses of servants’ spirituality confronted them with practices about which they may have only previously read. The wife of a marine stationed in Mirebalais apparently “thought a good deal about Voodoo. Her laundress was a Hounga-woman [houngan]” or spiritual leader.Footnote 80 Niles was taken aback when she learned that a group of servants were practicing Vodou, a fact that confounded her belief that supposedly primitive cultural practices would disappear in the face of foreign tutelage, materialism, and civilization. “I found it impossible … to believe that Justin, the tall negro who brought in morning coffee … could ever shed his dignity and dance with abandon to the barbaric pulsing of drums. Or that the black giantess, Frasilia, who solemnly flourished the … broom, might by night lead a wild chorus.”Footnote 81 Niles refused to acknowledge that Vodou's power to heal and to solidify community made it more appealing for Haitians experiencing the disruptions and harsh labor exigencies to which she herself contributed. That she and others like Seabrook recounted these for US audiences in exoticist narratives demonstrates that domestic interactions were bound to international political debates and currents of race-making.
Domestic servants were just as important in the descriptive, less sensational works written during and immediately after the occupation. Hurston's popular account of Vodou in Haiti was peppered with information gleaned from her servants. When she heard “drums throbbing at a distance,” she “resolved to go and see … I began to dress and woke up Lucille, the maid. I told her what I planned to do and told her to get dressed.”Footnote 82 Anthropologist Harold Courlander admitted that servants were the first informants for his fieldwork into Haitian folk music. “I began to talk to the houseboys.” Among his listed informants was a twenty-five-year-old named Augustin who “worked garden in Pétionville” before working “two years in Port-au-Prince as domestic.”Footnote 83 In 1936, shortly after the occupation ended, American folklorist Alan Lomax depended on a servant named Polines: “I have hired a trustworthy boy to teach me Creole, to help me in the transcription of records, to help me carry the machine, [and] to do my haggling for me.” Polines also taught Lomax a number of Haitian folktales.Footnote 84
Practicing Vodou and sharing information with foreigners carried major risks for servants. Hurston scolded her servant Joseph when he burned animal fat for a ritual to protect his child, showing the limits to the anthropologist's interest in Haitian spirituality. The next day, Joseph was subject to insults and physical threats for having told Hurston about Vodou. An unnamed, “upper class” man “was speaking in Creole and calling Joseph every kind of a stupid miscreant. He ended his tirade by saying that since Joseph had been so foolish as to tell a foreigner, who might go off and say bad things about Haiti … he was going to see that the Garde d'Haiti gave him a good beating.”Footnote 85 This was not an unusual response. Before and during the occupation, practicing Vodou was outlawed in Haiti and elite Haitians often sought to prevent foreigners from seeing it.Footnote 86 Joseph faced the brunt of racism and state repression for performing a ritual in the presence of a foreign visitor who had already expressed interest in Vodou.
Conflict and Protest in the Household and Beyond
US Marines in Haiti considered their relationships with servants as a harmonious extension of a popular military occupation. However, judicial sources illustrate the labor struggles, physical violence, sexual assault, and legal oppression to which domestic workers were subject. Considerable contention in employer-domestic relationships involved property, theft, and unspoken privileges. Servants engaged in daily, undramatic acts of pilfering, probably to redress perceived wrongs or to make work bearable without openly confronting their employers, embodying what James Scott calls the “weapons of the weak.”Footnote 87 For example, Craige described a servant as someone who: “wouldn't steal. That is, he wouldn't steal anything but the legitimate percentage of the market-money and food, which all Haitian servants regard as being legally their own.”Footnote 88 Others may have employed subtle strategies to reduce their workload without creating major conflict with employers. Loederer scolded his servant Faustin for “drying the crockery with his loin cloth.” What Loederer interpreted as his servant's lack of hygiene, Faustin may have done as an act of protest or to lighten his workload. “Thenceforth,” Loederer confessed, “I did the washing-up myself.”Footnote 89 Others may have engaged in more brazen acts of theft upon definitively leaving an employer. In 1924, Pauline Benoit ran away from her employers’ Port-au-Prince home with “several pieces of glassware, napkins, [a] table cloth” and other items. Police eventually found her in possession of the goods in the countryside, her specific motivations or grievances are unknown.Footnote 90
Employers used formal charges of theft as a tool of oppression since they were virtually impossible to disprove and leveled the weight of the legal system against servants. On the morning of June 11, 1924, a woman named Marcel Chenet “reported the theft of a pair of ear rings” to the Port-au-Prince police. Immediately, an unnamed “servant girl was suspected; she was arrested and her house was searched.” When police could not find the earrings, they concluded that “Girl has, no doubt, sold them.” The ultimate outcome was not reported but it was clear that being someone's “servant girl” was not enough to have one's name appear on an official report, but it was sufficient circumstantial evidence to justify arrest.Footnote 91 The oppressive use of the justice system was conscious but not always effective. In 1927, prosecutors in Cap-Haitien insisted that Cyrus Severe and Luc Pierre, both minors, be punished for the theft of money even after they had returned most of it to their master. Prosecutors’ rationale was “that the jury must punish the guilty parties to set an example and assure peace of mind to the numerous persons who have ‘ptits mounes’ [unpaid child servants].” The jury acquitted the two children, illustrating the limits to employers’ efforts to use the courts as a direct instrument of labor discipline.Footnote 92
Other servants used the judicial and legal system themselves, highlighting an underexplored response by Haitian workers to the occupation.Footnote 93 In one case, a gendarme arrested every single servant who worked in a Port-au-Prince boardinghouse when some money was missing. In response, one servant girl, with the aid of an attorney, “brought suit for damages, claiming her reputation was injured.”Footnote 94 Like other Haitian women during the occupation, she used the courts to “clarify assumptions about [her] identity,” and turned the judicial instrument that oppressed her into a means of iterating her respectability.Footnote 95
The Haitians who lodged formal complaints represented a small number but the types of grievances they described were certainly more widespread during the occupation.Footnote 96 In 1931, a servant named Pelones Neptune reported his marine employer to the Police after a work conflict turned into a physical fight. Neptune was washing the shutters on the door of the Ford's residence when Mrs. Ford began “cursing me saying that I was lazy and that I could not do her work.” After repeated chidings, Neptune replied “that if she was not satisfied with my work that I would leave.” In the middle of the argument, Mrs. Ford called her husband home and the disagreement turned physical. According to Neptune, Lieutenant Ford quickly “grabbed hold of me by the shirt and hit me many times with his fist. He hit me on the mouth causing a loose front tooth there. I happened to break loose from him and ran out.”Footnote 97 Lieutenant Ford admitted that Neptune fell but denied hitting him in the face. The lieutenant and other witnesses also claimed that Neptune “picked up some rocks and threw them at Mr. Ford.”Footnote 98
Domestic workers were also vulnerable to sexual assaults that threatened Haitian women of all classes during the occupation, even within the private spaces that offer security to women of other social classes.Footnote 99 The experience of Antoinette Titus shows women's vulnerability to sexual assault from marines, as well as their use of official channels to seek redress. In April 1922, two Marines entered the home of a Haitian woman in order to have their clothes washed, illustrating that some labor was performed in workers’ and not soldiers’ homes. One of the men approached Titus, the daughter of the washerwoman and began to harass her. “He approached me and told me: ‘I arrest you, I better put you in prison … and you'll pay 150 gourdes [30 USD].” Titus tried to extricate herself from the situation and immediately started walking out of the house and toward the police station. The marine pushed her into another house. Still, she fought back until “he pointed his revolver at me and declared that if I continued to fight he would kill me … He first removed his pants, then began to lift my dress.” Titus continued to resist when “he again grabbed his revolver, menaced me another time and ordered me to lay down on the ground. I obeyed his caprice, I laid down and he continued his task.”Footnote 100 She and her mother then took the case directly to the Haitian police, providing a singular paper trail for a more widespread form of assault against domestic workers and other Haitian women.Footnote 101
Domestics’ use of formal state institutions against their employers represented only one way that private struggles connected to public occupation politics. The exploitation of domestic laborers, their urban-rural networks, the fact that many came from prisons, and their proximity to marines influenced servants’ participation in antioccupation movements. The most famous was the Caco rebellion, which was led by Charlemagne Péralte in the areas around Hinche, in response to forced labor for road-building projects. The two year guerilla movement depended on support from noncombatant Haitians and was met with violent repression by US Marines in rural zones.Footnote 102 Domestic servants likely comprised these networks of support, as they did in other Caribbean uprisings, representing what Aisha K. Finch calls “rebels in the cracks.”Footnote 103
The fact that marines forced prisoners to work in their homes, even in hotbed areas of rebellion like Hinche (where John Houston Craige employed convict labor), likely motivated domestic servants to join or aid the Cacos. One year before he led a military threat to the occupation, Péralte had been forced to clean the streets of Cap-Haitien as punishment for attacking a marine barracks.Footnote 104 Péralte's transition from convict laborer to anti-imperial fighter was certainly repeated by lesser-known participants, including the Cacos that he recruited from within the prison.Footnote 105 The experience of imprisonment and forced household labor at the time that an alternative vision for Haiti was being espoused by rebels created Cacos and sympathizers right inside marines’ homes. Butler, the marine who became notorious for his anti-Caco violence, used highly racist language to brag about bringing former insurgents into his household. For example, he discussed “Antoine, the Caco ape man who had remained with me ever since my first trip into the mountains in pursuit of the rebels …”Footnote 106 Butler described Antoine as “the worst Caco in Haiti.” “I picked him out because he was the ugliest brute I ever saw and I trusted him with my children, my wife, and everything. He was the most faithful man I have ever known.” Butler's unquestioned faith in the transformative power of the US occupation, his racial superiority, and his patriarchal authority within his household blinded him to the fact that his and other marines’ homes were probably nodes in the networks of Caco support that were never fully uncovered by occupation authorities.Footnote 107
Other marines recognized the important role that cooks, servants, and domestic spaces played in the rebellion. Soldiers loved to tell the story of Anna, a marine's cook in the town of Hinche who aided her employer during a skirmish with Cacos by repeatedly reloading one rifle as the soldier fired another.Footnote 108 Food and domestic space figured into marines’ efforts to suppress the rebellion as well. In November 1918, on the eve of a battle between US Marines and Cacos, Lieutenant Lang ordered the preventive arrest of a Haitian named Téca because Péralte was known to eat in his house. Lang then ordered the slaughter “of two donkeys in everyone's presence.” He also “wanted to bring his gendarmes there to eat the meat,” thus brazenly consuming the food upon which Cacos, and ordinary peasants, depended. Téca was later executed, illustrating marines’ recognition that cooks and servants were crucial to the insurgency.Footnote 109
Domestic laborers were also invoked in the antioccupation writings of the 1920s that were inspired by Caco nationalism and US Marine counter-insurgency. For example, the above story of Téca was published in the highly popular and staunchly antioccupation daily Le Courrier Haitien. Outside of Haiti, NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson penned criticisms of occupation violence and racism for the organization's periodical The Crisis, as well as the progressive magazine The Nation. These made reference to Haitian domestic servants, buttressing historians’ claims that domestic labor is inseparable from the high politics of empire.Footnote 110 For example, Johnson wryly noted that US officials “have taken their wives and families to Haiti… . Families that could not keep a hired girl in the United States have a half-dozen servants.”Footnote 111 Elite Haitians probably felt the same way about marines’ apparent class transgressions. In Senate hearings from 1920–21, one American admitted that for some Haitians, “it was galling … to see Americans who had never had a servant at home putting on airs.”Footnote 112 For these authors, what was at stake in domestic relationships were the very notions of race, class, gender, and civilization that both proponents and opponents of empire used to justify their position. Although such criticisms threatened the occupation's legitimacy, they did not challenge to the institution of domestic service itself.
The overlap between domestics and the urban informal sectors suggests that domestics probably also participated in the conflicts over public space that were a hallmark of the occupation.Footnote 113 Occupation archives are full of examples of conflicts among wealthy Haitians, marines, and members of the urban working class over access to the city streets. For example, in 1931, a Haitian named Clebert Antoine complained that he was standing on a street corner in Port-au-Prince when he was assaulted by a group of marines. As “the Marines were passing by him, one of them pushed another against him, and … he (Antoine) pushed the Marine back, then one of the Marines grabbed his hat, they threw rocks at him and ran away.” Others challenged Antoine's version of the story and blamed the entire incident on him and other members of Haiti's urban working class. “Two civilians working at the West Indies Trading Co., stated … that they saw a group of 3 to 4 Haitian vagabonds throwing rocks at the marines, … and that in their opinion the Haitians were the one causing the whole trouble.”Footnote 114 The specific details of this case are contested, but the terms of the debate regarding the rights of the Haitian urban poor—here coded as “vagabonds”—to inhabit urban spaces were clear for all involved. Police also harassed petty merchants and arrested so-called vagabonds for making noise in residential neighborhoods after dark.Footnote 115 To name but one example of the former, in 1923, Le Temps complained that Haitian gendarmes who received their orders from marine officers, were “seen kicking the poor street sellers and threatening peaceful people with revolvers.”Footnote 116
The connections between domestic and other urban workers explain why writers identified domestic workers in the more organized forms of street protests during and after the occupation.Footnote 117 As in the other types of protest, domestics’ proximity to Marines and their experiences of conflict in households probably influenced their participation. As Valerie Kaussen demonstrates, in the 1920s, Haitian writers who were part of the cultural nationalist movement known as Indigenisme “identified with the mauvais sang of the people of the urban streets.”Footnote 118 For some, this included a more positive reappraisal of the urban poor, as well as invocations of domestic workers. For example, in the poem “Vous [You],” Carl Brouard challenged standard discourses about the filth of the urban poor as a “vehicle of revolutionary consciousness,” while alluding to the presence of domestic laborers among the ranks of the urban working class. “Oh! Great Wave/Gather together!/Seethe/Howl/So that beneath your shroud of scum/There will be nothing left/Nothing/But what is nice and clean/Nice and washed/Nice and bleached to the bone.” Kaussen explains: “The poem's last lines ironically use the work of laundering and bleaching as a trope for the flood that will redeem. Laundering in bourgeois households was exactly the labor that awaited many of the migrating rural women that Brouard's poem depicts.”Footnote 119
There was growing urban noise alongside this poetic “howl.” During the 1920s, antioccupation protest increased in Haitian cities, and political activists attempted to mobilize the new class of urban workers. For example, on October 9, 1925, antioccupation activists Joseph Jolibois and Victor Cauvin held an outdoor meeting in the Bel Air district of Port-au-Prince that was reportedly “attended by vagabonds.” The two made speeches claiming that “revolting” could stop the occupation, “even if blood has to be shed.”Footnote 120 The urban poor were beginning to play a role in politics. In 1929, a general strike against the occupation started among students in rural schools before spreading to urban populations.Footnote 121 Jolibois continued invoking the urban poor to achieve his political ends.Footnote 122 In August 1930, he approached the office of the newspaper Le Nouvelliste and threatened to “descend into the streets” to protest a decision by interim Haitian President Eugene Roy. The newspaper's director calmly explained “If you descend onto the streets, the Americans will bash your face,” showing the fears of urban protests in the late occupation.Footnote 123
Despite the efforts by Jolibois, Cauvin and others, successful large-scale organizing would have to wait until after the occupation, when “laborers, domestics, and unemployed urbanites” organized under leaders like Daniel Fignolé to overthrow the Haitian president in 1946.Footnote 124 That year, revolutionary intellectual Roger Dorsinville claimed that the black who “turns his eyes to the four corners of the world” would see himself in the lowliest positions on the planet: “the poor, it's him, the yardboy, it's him, the domestic, it's him, the porter, it's him.”Footnote 125 It is clear that the events of 1946 had their roots in the urban ferment of the 1920s, which itself included the domestic workers who pushed back against foreign domination both within and outside of marine households.
Conclusion
During the US military occupation of Haiti, domestic workers performed the crucial labor that allowed marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the entire country to function. Men, women, and children hailing from rural Haiti and the urban working class filled the new demand for domestic labor that the occupation engendered. Their experiences show that the debates over race, labor, and sovereignty that defined the high politics of the occupation actually reached into private spaces where face-to-face interactions between occupier and occupied occurred. These interactions were crucial in processes of race-making, including foreigners’ exoticist writings about Haitian spirituality that were crucial to the creation of negative stereotypes of Haitians. Proximity influenced domestics’ participation in acts of anti-imperial activism, such as the Caco rebellion, and explains why servants were invoked by radical journalists and cultural nationalist writers, who sought to organize the urban poor against US rule. The fact that such urban protests became a staple of postoccupation politics suggests the need to pay more attention to their occupation-era origins.
