The Girl Explorers by Jayne Zanglein

Author:Jayne Zanglein [Zanglein, Jayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

What is mine too: a small cell in the Jura,

The snow lines it with white bars

The snow is a white gaoler who mounts guard in front of a prison

What is mine

a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness

a man alone who defies the white screams of a white death15

Blair wrote of the dignity and pride of Black Haitians. Even though Black Haitians had been torn from their native country for generations, they still “gloried in the traditions of the ancestors who won the country for him. It is the memory of their magnificently brave struggle, it is the sense of a subject race having gained for themselves their independence, that expresses itself in their dignity.”16

The book catapulted her to a new level of fame. Portions of her book were translated into French by the Haitian poet Dominique Hippolyte. The New York Times book review was favorable, and over the next few years, the Times would publish two of Blair’s page-and-a-half articles about Haiti.

Helen Fitzgerald, of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, lavishly praised Black Haiti: “Blair Niles has not shirked the truth. Fearlessly she has tackled the ugly as well as the lyric and dramatic. No writer would tell the whole story of an insular Black group evolving a startling patchwork of brutality and heroism. One admires the courage with which Blair Niles deals with this ghastly subject; her judicial fairness in presenting the truth as she sees it.” Fitzgerald reported that Blair had recently received a letter from “a member of the black intelligentsia asking for her picture in order that the writer may show it to the incredulous to prove that the author of Black Haiti is a white person!”17 Mary White Ovington, chair of the NAACP, praised the book as an accurate depiction of Haiti under the American occupation.18 But Blair must have felt the most pride when she discovered, nearly twenty-five years after the publication of the book, that it was among African American poet Langston Hughes’s favorite books on Haiti.19

Like Blair, Zonia Baber, who recently joined the Society of Woman Geographers, had a strong interest in Haiti. In 1926, she traveled to Haiti with an interracial delegation to investigate and report on conditions in Haiti under the American occupation. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a nonprofit organization organized after World War I to unite women in their fight for peace, sponsored the delegation.20 The commission had six members, four white and two Black. Five were women. Zonia made sure that all committee members were treated equally.

The committee spent three weeks in Haiti, interviewing a wide range of people, including businessmen, educators, physicians, and government workers. In the United States, they met with Haitians and Americans who held differing perspectives on the role of Americans in Haiti. They authored a report that addressed the influence of the American occupation on health, education, government, race relations, and the criminal justice system. The committee recommended that the U.S. military withdraw and stop violating Haiti’s right to self-determination. During

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