1915, July 28: (The Peasant and the President’s Head: Guillaume Sam’s Burial and the Legend of the Petit Soldat): That night after the dismemberment, Girard …

1915, July 28: (The Peasant and the President’s Head: Guillaume Sam’s Burial and the Legend of the Petit Soldat): That night after the dismemberment, Girard recounted, a peasant brought an object swathed in burlap to the legation gate — it was the ex-president’s head. “It’s for Mme Vilbrun Guillaume,” he said in Creole. What could be reassembled — one main chunk of Guillaume Sam had been run the length of the Grand’Rue, the other chivvied through Turgeau and Bois-Verna — was buried unshriven in a shallow grave outside the east gate of the Cimetière, which Girard later described as a place of desolation the most horrible he had ever seen. Meanwhile, it has become firm in the apocrypha of Haitian history that a single soldier — sometimes named Joseph Pierre, sometimes Pierre Sully — resisted the Marine takeover of Fort National and was killed by the Americans. Although no confirmation of this can be found in U.S. reports of the landing, this man — if he ever existed — has subsequently been canonized in anti-American literature, notably Jean Brierre’s Le Petit Soldat. The legend of the petit soldat — a lone Haitian defender standing against the Marine invasion at the gateway of the republic’s chief fortress — performed the same function in the national imagination that Vertières had performed a century earlier: the transmutation of military defeat into moral victory, the assertion that even in the moment of occupation, Haitian sovereignty had not been surrendered but merely overpowered, and that the spirit of resistance — whether embodied in a real man or a necessary fiction — survived the fall of the state.