1969–1970: (Ambassador Knox and the Baseballs: The First Black Ambassador Since Dr.

1969–1970: (Ambassador Knox and the Baseballs: The First Black Ambassador Since Dr. Furniss, the Honorary Tonton Macoute, Light Industry Arrives, and the King Herod Haircut Roundup): The Rockefeller visit and its sequelae proved a tonic. A new American ambassador — this one Black, the first since Dr. Furniss, and a voluble and convivial supporter of the regime — publicly called for new American loans and told reporters they would be symbolic of a new official attitude toward Dr. Duvalier, adding that Washington’s feeling was quite favorable. Within months Port-au-Prince was styling the pliant ambassador an honorary Tonton Macoute; de Catalogne put it more positively, purring to foreign reporters that Ambassador Knox was a man who understood this country. Now there were more tourists, even some light industry — all the baseballs in the United States were being sewn by Haitians. In summer 1970, as young people trooped back from school abroad, Duvalier noted disquieting changes in their appearance. Suddenly one morning, in the manner of King Herod, the president had macoutes sweep up every male teenage returnee. After interminable hours in the police station, barbers appeared and every shaggy head, beard, or high-style Afro was shorn. Next morning, herded into the Grande Salle of the palace by submachine-gun-carrying TTMs, the chastened youths and fearful parents found themselves facing Duvalier. In the manner of Toussaint delivering a discourse, the white-haired president spoke like a bishop on public morality, concluding that he would hold the youths and their parents fully responsible for acceptable future dress and behavior in all respects — then, after a long pause, murmured softly: as you know, I do not like to have to say the same thing twice. The Afro roundup — a dying dictator spending his diminishing energies policing the hairstyles of teenagers returning from abroad — measured the regime’s terminal absurdity: a state apparatus capable of midnight executions and naval bombardments now deployed against the cultural contagion of student fashion, the final enemy not communism or invasion but the specter of a generation whose very hair announced that the world outside Haiti had moved on.