1934, August 18–21: (The Second Independence: The Bamboche, the Te Deum, the Gourde Notes from Vincent’s Limousine, and the Oath to 1804): Sténio Vincent set…

1934, August 18–21: (The Second Independence: The Bamboche, the Te Deum, the Gourde Notes from Vincent’s Limousine, and the Oath to 1804): Sténio Vincent set Tuesday, August 21, 1934, as the day of the second independence, when désoccupation would be celebrated, but it was expecting too much to ask people to wait — parties began on the 18th with a grand ball at the Cercle Bellevue, next night another at the Port-au-Princien, and of course the whole country in delirious bamboche. The evening of the 20th, Vincent gave a diplomatic dinner at the white palace ashine with festive illumination, his first toast to Franklin D. Roosevelt, to which Norman Armour replied in polished French. At the stroke of midnight, while guests sipped champagne on the balconies of the Palais, a gun boomed from Fort National, cheers and tumult echoed from Bel Air to Morne l’Hôpital, and the great fête began. By daybreak the city was throbbing with tens of thousands of humble Haitians who had been told they were free again — free of exactly what may not have been very clear to some, but libre is the most intoxicating word in the Haitian vocabulary. At 8:30, Msgrs. Conan and Le Gouaze celebrated a glorious Te Deum at which the clergy were white and the altar boys noirs, then followed a presidential progress with fistfuls of newly printed gourde notes fluttering from Vincent’s limousine into the rejoicing crowd. The president stopped to lay wreaths at the statues of Toussaint and Dessalines, the latter’s bronze saber ever aloft in warning to blan who might come to re-enslave the noirs, then proceeded to the Place de l’Indépendance and the common tomb of Dessalines and Pétion. Doubling back to the casernes, Vincent himself ran up the colors. At 11:15 came a vin d’honneur at the palace, then in the forecourt a review of the Garde including a new unit constituted the day the Marines left — a new Garde Présidentielle of four strapping rifle platoons and one of heavy machine guns, commanded by Major Durcé Armand, intimate and kinsman of the president. Colonel Calixte, the new commandant, led the assembled officer corps in a moving oath of personal fealty to Vincent — an innovation, for the old oath prescribed by the blan had been only to the constitution and the Haitian people — gave the president an iridescent gold-hilted sword of honor, and led the smart battalion past the gleaming white portico to the crash of 1804. When dusk fell there were such fireworks as Port-au-Prince had never seen and bamboche that continued until dawn.