1900, April 21 – 1946: (The Education of Dumarsais Estimé: Verrettes, the Christian Brothers, Borno’s Bow, and the Self-Made Noir Intellectual): Dumarsais Es…

1900, April 21 – 1946: (The Education of Dumarsais Estimé: Verrettes, the Christian Brothers, Borno’s Bow, and the Self-Made Noir Intellectual): Dumarsais Estimé was an ulcer-afflicted Artibonite noir from Verrettes, born on April 21, 1900, schooled by the Christian Brothers at St. Marc and then at the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince. He taught mathematics until, inopportunely crossing Borno’s bow, he lost both job and platform. Vindication came in the 1930 elections, when he was elected deputy, rising to the presidency of that Chamber and then to successive cabinet portfolios under Vincent. Remembered by Milo Rigaud as Vincent’s disciple, depicted by Minister Mayer in 1937 as the silent, somewhat surly President of the Chamber of Deputies, Estimé was viewed from other perspectives by Katherine Dunham, the legendary American dancer and choreographer who came to know him intimately — she would write that she had thought of Estimé when looking at bronzes of Benin, at Bambara and Baulé masks, the head large for the body because there in the head the ancient artists placed the spirit, soul, and intelligence of a man, and that at times brusqueness and rude manners seemed to govern his actions, hiding behind defense an intense timidity and hypersensitivity. Senator Alphonse Henriquez, marveling at Estimé’s ceaseless energy, murmured that he was a motor in a pair of pants — yet he was also a snappy dresser, and the tan presidential Oldsmobile was known about Port-au-Prince by a nickname suggesting it was the last stop for virginity. As Robert Rotberg observed, Estimé’s victory represented the triumph of the folklorique movement of black intellectuals who had long sought political power, while Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite — the self-made doctrinaire intellectual from Verrettes, whose education ran from the Christian Brothers through the Lycée Pétion to the rough school of Vincennist politics, embodied the Griot generation’s claim that authentic Haitian identity resided not in the Francophile salons of Pétionville but in the noir masses of the Artibonite, and that the men who understood those masses were entitled to govern them.