1918, October 1: (The Corvée Becomes Slavery: The Kokomakak, the Roped Peasants, and the Teledjòl That the Blan Had Come to Restore Slavery): The weak link i…

1918, October 1: (The Corvée Becomes Slavery: The Kokomakak, the Roped Peasants, and the Teledjòl That the Blan Had Come to Restore Slavery): The weak link in the corvée system was that Haitian officials and Haitian gendarmes still imbued with old traditions of the press gang had a hand in it. Magistrats and gendarmes soon found they could fill their pockets by exempting those who could pay while impressing those who could not. When the blan gave each peasant an exemption card after his annual stint, the chef seksyon would tear it up under the bearer’s eyes and send him back to work with a thwack of the kokomakak. By late 1918 — significantly, after the departure of Butler, who whatever his faults ran a taut ship — it was not unusual to see peasants roped up for corvée in some distant place like conscripts for the old army. Nor was it only peasants who had to serve: even more unfair, or so it seemed, some city-dwelling man of education was occasionally caught in the net — in 1918, so recounted Bellegarde still outraged twenty-three years later, a gendarme knocked on the door of Jean Price-Mars in Pétionville and took him away for three days’ corvée. Thus the corvée, despite its benefits, however firm its legality, whatever its indisputably Haitian origin — matters in any case beyond the understanding of a roped peasant and the gendarme who clubbed him — became a source of widespread resentment, and worse still it formed the basis of teledjòl: the blan are come hither to restore slavery; the corvée is only the beginning. Butler’s successor as Gendarmerie commandant, Major A. S. Williams, put the matter concisely: the results of this exploitation of labor were twofold — first it created in the minds of the peasants a dislike for the American occupation and its two instruments, the Marines and the Gendarmerie, and second it imbued the native enlisted man with an entirely false conception of his relations with the civil population, as the corvée became more and more unpopular and gendarmes resorted to methods which were often brutal but quite consistent with their training under Haitian officials. On October 1, 1918, Williams acted on his misgivings and abolished the corvée — it was already too late. The teledjòl that the blan had come to restore slavery — a rumor that traveled from mouth to mouth through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite — performed a profound act of historical memory: the peasantry, whose grandparents and great-grandparents had been enslaved, recognized in the corvée not merely the inconvenience of forced labor but the structural form of the plantation itself returning under a new flag, and in this recognition lay the seed of an armed resistance that would shortly convulse the republic.