Caiman does seem reasonable, especially as it's a term for the alligators of Central and South America.
Palmera (An African Resettlement AH)
Perhaps find a way to incorporate both terms into the lexicon;"kaiman" for instance might be an earlier Chatta word derived from native sources,while "gaddey" is introduced later by immigrating Dusties (this could even serve as a regional distinction among Palmeys)
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"If into the political threads you go, only Warnings will you find."
Owing to some excessive zeal on a political thread, I've been on a bit of a vackey* for the past week, but I've been cooking up some more content in that time which I'll be posting today. As Rachel Maddow would say, watch this space.
-- (a rather freely paraphrased) Yoda
Owing to some excessive zeal on a political thread, I've been on a bit of a vackey* for the past week, but I've been cooking up some more content in that time which I'll be posting today. As Rachel Maddow would say, watch this space.
* Chatta for vacation, or for one on vacation. Also a term for those who served at home during the Great War. 
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A Dinner in Daltonville
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
To come in the timeline:
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
Cocktails With a Kingmaker (from Ayo Perline!). Rum sours & a side of exposition on the Haiti Question.
Of the many issues that roiled the nation in 1928 – a minor financial crisis stemming from bad debt in Tequesta County, where a second even worse hurricane in the fall of this year would set back development schemes severely; strain on the minimal and increasingly outdated Dalton-era social safety net; labour unrest; controversy over troops and spending in Haiti – none loomed larger than the question of corporate corruption and power, which came into sharp relief in the illegal liquor trade.
There had been widespread suspicion for years that an intersection of interests among the Juckers, the Nemoists, the Union Mercantile Company and various criminal gangs and other partners was smuggling contraband liquor into America from across the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, Cuba, the Windward Islands and Haiti. The nation had stern penalties for such flouting of Prohibition and was under much pressure from Washington to enforce them, but the Secret Service's Anti-Contraband Branch remained under-manned and under-funded and though it produced an endless string of showy busts—dismantling the infamous Klein Gang late in 1927—these did so little to stem the greater tide that it was hard not to suspect they were simply eliminating competitors for some far larger interest.
Those suspicions were shared by the Secret Service's Director, Bristol Prophet, who created a clandestine task force called “Directorate J” to monitor the ACB for potential corruption in 1927. It would not be long before they hit paydirt, in a way that would rock Palmera's political landscape.
The “Daltonville Dinner” was a famous early use of wiretapping by the Secret Service's “Directorate J,” though such tactics had been previously used by the ACB against other gangs and Palmera was indeed a pioneer of this kind of surveillance. The Dinner took place at a restaurant called Colonel Tandon's India Experience in Tismore and the transcript, leaked to the Daltonville Bolder a couple of weeks after it was recorded, featured key figures of the liquor-smuggling cartel that came to be known as the “Osceola Merry,” all of whom refer to each other by nicknames.
The nicknames seen in the transcript line up with historical personages thusly:
[At the point where the leaked transcript begins, Jim, Smalley and Doc are seated at a table in the restaurant--in the private dining room which Bushey uses to conduct business deals -- and have just ordered. Bushey comes to the table having apparently just received a message from one of his men.]
Bushey: Alright. So I’ve got [unintelligible], Frem’s bringing this guy down here. We’re gonna straighten this thing out. Say, Jim, ki pra-feh fi yuh grez[1]?
Jim: Don’t really know from Asian food, if I’m being honest. Our jenny[2] here told me I should try the Sol Kadhi, so I’m going with that.
Smalley: I told him real men eat the tambada, but he--
Jim: Right, I kind of--
Smalley: He didn’t believe me--
Jim: Not sure you’ve got the most, uh, most unbiased take on that one.
Smalley: See? Still in denial. Total denial.
[laughter]
Bushey: He’s got you there, Jim. Think I’ll have the tambada myself. And a manto a klairin, make it a double. Doc, what’s your nurrey there?[3]
Doc: Same as Jim. Ah, I never been adventurous about this kind of deal.
Bushey: Your loss. Dackoe den, I think we’re all set, yeli. Tak-tak.[4] [The waitress leaves.] So this thing with this kid, we’re all on the same page with this?
Smalley: I trust you to do what needs doing, Bushey.
Jim: Second that. The important thing is to keep efficiency.
Smalley: Exactly. Exactly the thing.
Jim: Besides, I don’t much care for this sort anyway.
Bushey: [laughs] Tru-tru.
Jim: I was actually thinking while we wait on him that maybe we could talk about product flow. Boston and New York have some, uh, concerns after that hurricane last month.
Doc: Joss almighty, that’s a hell of a thing. Like Noah’s flood.
Smalley: Eeh. Perline took a worse hit in August[5]. Our supply chain there’s still up and running. Production’s right where it needs to be in every region we’re covering.
Bushey: But maybe they’re worried about our boys in Tequesta? [‘Jim’ evidently nods.] They don’t need to be. Just ask Waltz and he’ll tell you. ‘Sah-yoh daal dem a run booney ban-dan all dem a cuss, tuzhu-tuzhu’[6]. [He says this like he’s doing an impression; the others laugh.] It’ll take more than a hurricane to slow them down. They may lose a few caches here and there but you know, they’ll-- they’ll keep up their end. Price of a spare dose stays constant.[7]
Jim: Well alright then. Okay. They’ll be relieved to hear that.
Smalley: Damned shame about your Tequesta County project, though.
Jim: Joss’ balls, I don’t even wanna talk about it. People walk so careful around the Big Man these days you’d swear he was Ol’ Hickrey. [laughter] You know what that one clever son of a bitch, what’s his name, that MP from St. Lucia.
Doc: You’re thinking about Iverley.
Jim: Iverley, right?
Bushey: Snakey little fucker if it’s who I’m thinking of.
Jim: Well exactly, and he’s supposed to be one of our own boys and all, right? And you know what he gets up and says right in the fucking Commons the other day? He actually says: “Tequesta is the County of the Future, and always will be.”[8] Used our own damn slogan to mock us, you couldn’t make it up.
Bushey: Bad discipline, that’s what that is. Ah-Wah ought to rein a kid like that in. Must make it awkward at the lodge hall.
Jim: I mean Ah-Wah made him walk it back, ah sake ah what a fucking insult to the people of the county, the idiot. But the damage is done, eeh nah? It’s that he’s one of this new lot, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, that this a profession he’s in. Not even a Brother -- like, that’s not supposed to matter, I’m told, but I tell you what, it matters. It matters. I [unintelligible] just, just don’t trust this new lot.[9]
Bushey: I’m not a Brother.
Jim: Aw hell, you know what I mean. Anyway you’re baba to a whole clan, nobody could say you don’t know what the shot is.[10]
[Drinks arrive during all this and the men cheer Bushey’s family values with a collective sah yeh.]
Bushey: Joss a dam, that’s a bit of alright. You just keep things up and running over there in the Dogs, Smalley. Now that Lady Klairin’s in my life I don’t think I want to give her up.[11] [laughter]
Smalley: No worries about that. Malleys may not like the work that much but they don’t mind the money we bring in, I can tell you. And Ah-Baz are with us, nuff fi a dem anyway that the ones who aren’t know better than to come in the open against us. If we could just keep ah dam duggey dem from stirring things up[12], well…
Doc: Same story everywhere, that one.
Jim: No doubt. Got to say I was a little worried the other day, heard you had, like --
Smalley: Eeh, it was nothing.
Jim: Close call with a caco, wasn’t it? Some kid got dog-mouth and came at you with a --
Smalley: Nah, it was nothing. Can’t run a relley e'ry time someone flash a sam in this game.
Bushey: Coo deh, Jim. Now that’s ah mawga right there.[13]
Doc: Looks like your man’s here, Bushey.
[There’s a brief pause as someone enters. Some low inaudible muttering and then someone else enters.]
Bushey: Food’s here, too. Alright there, Oh-So, you don’t mind we see to our nurrey here before we talk business, do you? You okay to wait a while?
Oh-So: [barely audible] Um. Aw leh.
Bushey: Good man. Frem, yuh wan fi keh eh ginney? Grab a menu there, our jenny here, she’ll fix you right up.[14]
[There is a half hour of small talk as the men finish their meal; the only remarkable thing about it being that ‘Oh-So,’ pointedly not invited to join the repast, is watching them and sweating. Eventually, the waitress clears away the meals and either receives a visual signal or has an understanding to stay gone.]
Bushey: Okay. Oh-So… you don’t mind I call you that? I know we ain’t met but--
Oh-So: It’s… uh, it’s--
Bushey: Got to feel like I know you, ah yeh?
Oh-So: I’m not fussed about it.
Bushey: I’m assuming you’ve figured out who I am, then. [‘Oh-So’ presumably nods or makes some gesture.] Good. My friends with me here yuh nuh fi a kon, it’s okay. Only one you need to know is Doc over there, ah sake ah he’s the reason you’re here.
Oh-So: I’m--due respect to you, I’m not sure I quite get what that reason is. [long silence] Uh, I mean, what I mean is I get… well, I thought they had it all worked out with you, like, our uh, our thing and your thing, I thought it was all cleared.
Bushey: Yeah, well that’s just it. You know a kid named Zack up Georgia way?
Oh-So: Uh…
Bushey: How about I don’t put it as a question. You know a kid named Zack up Georgia way. I know you do ah sake ah Doc over there has pictures of you and your partner tailing him to a meet. He has pictures of you two goofs outside the barn where he got found minus a few, uh, organs and extremities. He has pictures of you coming out cleaning a buck knife. So you can cut the ka-ka.
Oh-So: Um. Well. I uh, I can’t talk about certain kinds of uh, activities without-- uh, I’ve got to clear with my Lochagos--
Bushey: Who you think help us find you, you fucking doik?[15] How you think I know the Society didn’t clear a hit on Zack? And you want to know why they wouldn’t? [silence] Aside from you’re not supposed to be [inaudible] doing your crazy hoodoo act in the Marches, it’s ah sake ah Zack was a Merry Man. He was under our protection. In theory he was supposed to be under your protection, too, ah yeh?
Oh-So: Huh? Some peck? But I--
[Sound of a fist, presumably Bushey’s, hitting the table.]
Bushey: Shut. Up.
Oh-So: It’s just… well, we defend… I mean, we stand for something --
Bushey: What I just say. You stand for what the committee tell you that you fucking stand for. This the big boys talking now and your own Archey one a dem. I sweh Joss you make me raise my voice right now --
Doc: I’d listen to him, kid, you plan on leaving here with those good looks.
Smalley: Hah. What good looks?
Bushey: ’S'all relative. I can sure make em worse if this kid want it. All he gotta do's open his fucking yawp again while I’m talking. Hm?
[Silence. Oh-So seems to have gotten the message.]
That’s better. Now look, Oh-So. The way this work we can either profit each other or turn on each other. Everyone in this operation got a role to play, praan? Even the ones hate each other, since believe it or not we sometime need some peck to sell our product north-the-border. Sky-larking hoodoo man fi mek dem peckah dem a peh-peh is one thing, but you gone off-reservation and kill one our assets doing it and that’s bad for business. Bad fi yuh santey to be bad for business, ah yeh?[16]
Oh-So: I get you, yeah.
Bushey: Now I’m letting you go for right now, but wi fi a mek a fucking ruling on you, so you best keep your nose clean. And if this ever happens again, you’ll find out my people can sky-lark the hoodoo man, too, and they won’t wait til you dead to start cutting the pieces off you. You hear me?
[Oh-So apparently nods or makes some other gesture.]
Boh. Then get out of my sight. And you can find your own dam way home.
[Silence as Oh-So clears out and for some minutes afterwards.]
Frem. Bin a yah. [Brief inaudible murmuring, and then silence again as ‘Frem’ leaves.]
Poor dumb bastard. What a waste. Eeh sa. Anyone up for dessert? [17]
The notorious Nemoist militia-man Sason Paul, a loose cannon of the Society long known to law enforcement, was found executed in an alleyway on the northern edge of Tismore a day later. It couldn’t be conclusively proved that the Osceola Merry had compassed his death, but the later-leaked surveillance tape was suggestive to say the least. What nobody could doubt was that there was a criminal conspiracy on that recording of shocking dimensions, reach and ruthlessness.
Particularly vexing was the guessing game the dinner encouraged about the mysterious politician -- who could only be someone highly placed in the United Freedom Congress -- referred to as ‘Ah-Wah’ and whether that figure was directly party to the Osceola Merry’s crimes, as seemed to be implied. Whether outright complicity was true or not (and as it happened, ‘Ah-Wah’ was never conclusively identified), the shadow of impropriety alone caused a scandal and a vote of no-confidence the Bolton government only barely survived.
The earthquake set off by the leaking of the “Daltonville Dinner” recording led to a massive overhaul of the Palmeran Secret Service, forced resignations of several high-profile figures from the UITC and St.-Cyr Import/Export, a united push for anti-trust reform in the Commons--two eventual results of which would be the break-up of the Union Mercantile empire and the institution of public broadcasting in Palmera--and open gang warfare in the streets of Daltonville and other cities in Palmera. “Bushey” Bill Tarrant would eventually be caught trying to flee to Jamaica.
Among the most disturbing things on the recording was the frighteningly cynical way “Smalley” St.-Cyr had spoken about the state of play in Haiti. That the rising chorus of dissent about the island and what was happening there would become impossible to ignore was another outcome of the Daltonville affair… perhaps one of the most momentous.
NOTES:
[1] ki pra-feh fi yuh grez--”What are you having to eat?”
[2] “jenny”--Young lady, young girl.
[3] tambada--Tambda Rassa, an Indian dish popular in Palmera. manto a klairin--a mint cocktail made with clairin, a white rum from Haiti. nurrey--”Feed / meal / eats”
[4] Dackoe den . . . yeli. Tak-tak.--”Very well then . . . honey / sweetie. Thanks very much.”
[5] “Perline” is an affectionate nickname for Haiti, derived from the old phrase “Pearl of the Antilles.” A hurricane in August did significant damage and killed upwards of two hundred people in Haiti in this year.
[6] ‘Sah-yoh daal dem a run booney ban-dan all dem a cuss, tuzhu-tuzhu’--“Our boys have run liquor through every kind of curse since forever.”
[7] “Price of a spare dose stays constant.”--Part of the Osceola Merry’s business model was apparently based on shipping medicinal liquor, which was a legal loophole under Prohibition. The smuggling part of the business applied to hooch in far larger quantities that supplied speakeasies across America, referred to with wry humour as “spare doses” in the Merry’s parlance. Apparently the Tequesta “Operation” we met earlier in The Deal played a large role in stockpiling reserve caches of liquor destined for the illegal market at remote rural sites, presumably in order that shocks from law enforcement activity or natural disaster could be quickly compensated for.
[8] “Tequesta is the County of the Future, and always will be.”--This of course parallels the cruel old “country of the future” joke routinely made about Brazil, which has been apocryphally attributed to Stefan Zweig and Charles de Gaulle. Here maybe the Palmey joke will inspire the later version.
”The County of the Future” was how the UITC was promoting settlement and urban development in Tequesta County from 1926. The company survived being caught colluding with criminal interests (Southern James or “Jim” was successfully hung out to dry as a rogue actor) and emerged still strong in its sector of the market after anti-trust action split up Union Mercantile. The development project would still go ahead, though more slowly than initially hoped for and delayed by years, and this wouldn’t be the last time UITC agents were caught colluding with criminals.
[9] “just don’t trust this new lot.”--Freemasonry’s near-monopoly of the top rungs of political and economic power in Palmera was in a much more advanced stage of decay than anyone had yet admitted to themselves in 1928. Some of the signals were unmistakable, such as the appearance of MP’s who were proudly defiant of the tacit rules of etiquette that had once prevailed.
[10] “Anyway you’re baba to a whole clan . . .”--The Palmey underworld naturally had its own secret societies, quite apart from Masonry or the Nemoists. This alludes to Bushey heading up such a society.
[11] “Joss a dam…”--”God-damn!”
“. . . over there in the Dogs”--”The Dogs” is a not-so-affectionate nickname for Haiti and for the island of Hispaniola generally. It probably derives from an old folk legend about a birth vision--of a dog springing from her womb with a torch in its mouth--seen by the mother of St. Dominic, for whom the island was originally named. (The legend in turn derived from an old Latin pun on the name of the Dominican Order which the saint founded.)
[12] “Malleys may not like the work that much. . .”--Malley is from malé in Kriyol, meaning “wretch,” a reference to the Haitian peasantry. Smalley being involved in rum production, part of his business would have included reintroducing sugar plantations to Haiti, which would be seen as everything from distasteful to abhorrent by many Haitians. His allusion to “the money we bring in” is about having to entice workers with (relatively) high rates of pay.
“And Ah-Baz are with us, nuff fi a dem anyway that the ones who aren’t know better . . .”--Ah-Baz means “the base,” a reference to two of the most potent pillars of political legitimacy in Haiti: approval from local military officials and vodoun priests. Nuff fi a dem means he thinks enough of them are on side to keep the opposition intimidated.
“ah dam duggey dem”--”The damn do-gooders.” Aside from business and the military, Haiti has also drawn the activities of a wide range of charities, missionary organizations and journalists from Palmera, and they keep stepping on the toes of men like Smalley.
[13] “Close call with a caco, wasn’t it? Some kid got dog-mouth and . . .”--A caco is a Haitian bandit or outlaw. “Dog-mouth” is an English form of the Chatta expression dug-mout, meaning “drugged up.” There is a persistent Palmey belief, based on fascination with zombie legends, that vodoun priests drug potential hit men to make them immune to mercy, pain and fear. The total lack of evidence for this legend--which is probably a transferred trope from legends of the “hashish-eating” assassin sect of the Crusades--does not slow it down in the slightest.
“Can’t run a relley every time someone flash a sam”--”Can’t run screaming every time someone flashes a gun”
“ah mawga”--”The skinny,” meaning the true word, the true doctrine, the right way to behave.
[14] yuh wan fi keh eh ginney--”You want to get some food?”
[15] doik--lit. “ape,” meaning moron. Oh-So’s preceding reference to a “Lochagos” alludes to a whole system of faux-Hellenic ranks and titles in the Nemoist hierarchy, as does Bushey's later reference to an "Archey," meaning "Archon."
[16] “Sky-larking hoodoo man fi mek dem peckah dem a peh-peh is one thing. . .”--”Play-acting like voodoo priests to make all the pecks piss themselves is one thing. . .” A succinct summary of Nemoist terror tactics. Part of what has landed “Oh-So” in hot water is that he was caught doing this in the Marches at all; quite obviously nothing could fuel Marcher paranoia like actual Palmeran terrorists doing actual ritual killings in their backyard. That it turned out the Osceola Merry was also employing the likes of the Respecters as bootleggers was one of the more shocking revelations on the tape, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been, and clearly it was need-to-know information even within the cartel.
“Bad fi yuh santey to be bad for business. . .”--”Bad for your health to be bad for business,” as Oh-So would shortly discover.
[17] Bin a yah.--”Over here.” Eeh sa.--”Oh well / That’s life / So it goes”
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
To come in the timeline:
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
Cocktails With a Kingmaker (from Ayo Perline!). Rum sours & a side of exposition on the Haiti Question.
A Dinner in Daltonville
(Borough of Tismore in Daltonville, St. Peter Parish in Osceola County, November 12th, 1928)
(Borough of Tismore in Daltonville, St. Peter Parish in Osceola County, November 12th, 1928)
Of the many issues that roiled the nation in 1928 – a minor financial crisis stemming from bad debt in Tequesta County, where a second even worse hurricane in the fall of this year would set back development schemes severely; strain on the minimal and increasingly outdated Dalton-era social safety net; labour unrest; controversy over troops and spending in Haiti – none loomed larger than the question of corporate corruption and power, which came into sharp relief in the illegal liquor trade.
There had been widespread suspicion for years that an intersection of interests among the Juckers, the Nemoists, the Union Mercantile Company and various criminal gangs and other partners was smuggling contraband liquor into America from across the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, Cuba, the Windward Islands and Haiti. The nation had stern penalties for such flouting of Prohibition and was under much pressure from Washington to enforce them, but the Secret Service's Anti-Contraband Branch remained under-manned and under-funded and though it produced an endless string of showy busts—dismantling the infamous Klein Gang late in 1927—these did so little to stem the greater tide that it was hard not to suspect they were simply eliminating competitors for some far larger interest.
Those suspicions were shared by the Secret Service's Director, Bristol Prophet, who created a clandestine task force called “Directorate J” to monitor the ACB for potential corruption in 1927. It would not be long before they hit paydirt, in a way that would rock Palmera's political landscape.
* * *
The “Daltonville Dinner” was a famous early use of wiretapping by the Secret Service's “Directorate J,” though such tactics had been previously used by the ACB against other gangs and Palmera was indeed a pioneer of this kind of surveillance. The Dinner took place at a restaurant called Colonel Tandon's India Experience in Tismore and the transcript, leaked to the Daltonville Bolder a couple of weeks after it was recorded, featured key figures of the liquor-smuggling cartel that came to be known as the “Osceola Merry,” all of whom refer to each other by nicknames.
The nicknames seen in the transcript line up with historical personages thusly:
- “Bushey” is Bill “The Bushwhacker” Tarrant, head of the Tarrant Gang in Daltonville and the senior figure of the Osceola Merry.
- “Oh-So” is Sason Paul, a member of the Nono Nemo Society.
- “Jim” is Southern James of the Union International Transportation Company.
- “Smalley” is Etienne St. Cyr, descendant of the exiled Boyer family of Haiti – resident since the early 1840s – and CEO of the St. Cyr Import/Export Trading Company.
- “Doc” is Martin Duley, an ACB agent supposedly tasked with investigating the Tarrant Gang.
- “Frem,” Efraim Stone, one of Bushey’s men.
- “Ah-Wah” or The King, an unspecified politician.
- “Waltz,” Walter Northup, a boss of the Tequesta Operation seen in a prior chapter.
- “Zack,” Zack Hazzard, a now-deceased member of the Mutual Respect Society.
* * *
[At the point where the leaked transcript begins, Jim, Smalley and Doc are seated at a table in the restaurant--in the private dining room which Bushey uses to conduct business deals -- and have just ordered. Bushey comes to the table having apparently just received a message from one of his men.]
Bushey: Alright. So I’ve got [unintelligible], Frem’s bringing this guy down here. We’re gonna straighten this thing out. Say, Jim, ki pra-feh fi yuh grez[1]?
Jim: Don’t really know from Asian food, if I’m being honest. Our jenny[2] here told me I should try the Sol Kadhi, so I’m going with that.
Smalley: I told him real men eat the tambada, but he--
Jim: Right, I kind of--
Smalley: He didn’t believe me--
Jim: Not sure you’ve got the most, uh, most unbiased take on that one.
Smalley: See? Still in denial. Total denial.
[laughter]
Bushey: He’s got you there, Jim. Think I’ll have the tambada myself. And a manto a klairin, make it a double. Doc, what’s your nurrey there?[3]
Doc: Same as Jim. Ah, I never been adventurous about this kind of deal.
Bushey: Your loss. Dackoe den, I think we’re all set, yeli. Tak-tak.[4] [The waitress leaves.] So this thing with this kid, we’re all on the same page with this?
Smalley: I trust you to do what needs doing, Bushey.
Jim: Second that. The important thing is to keep efficiency.
Smalley: Exactly. Exactly the thing.
Jim: Besides, I don’t much care for this sort anyway.
Bushey: [laughs] Tru-tru.
Jim: I was actually thinking while we wait on him that maybe we could talk about product flow. Boston and New York have some, uh, concerns after that hurricane last month.
Doc: Joss almighty, that’s a hell of a thing. Like Noah’s flood.
Smalley: Eeh. Perline took a worse hit in August[5]. Our supply chain there’s still up and running. Production’s right where it needs to be in every region we’re covering.
Bushey: But maybe they’re worried about our boys in Tequesta? [‘Jim’ evidently nods.] They don’t need to be. Just ask Waltz and he’ll tell you. ‘Sah-yoh daal dem a run booney ban-dan all dem a cuss, tuzhu-tuzhu’[6]. [He says this like he’s doing an impression; the others laugh.] It’ll take more than a hurricane to slow them down. They may lose a few caches here and there but you know, they’ll-- they’ll keep up their end. Price of a spare dose stays constant.[7]
Jim: Well alright then. Okay. They’ll be relieved to hear that.
Smalley: Damned shame about your Tequesta County project, though.
Jim: Joss’ balls, I don’t even wanna talk about it. People walk so careful around the Big Man these days you’d swear he was Ol’ Hickrey. [laughter] You know what that one clever son of a bitch, what’s his name, that MP from St. Lucia.
Doc: You’re thinking about Iverley.
Jim: Iverley, right?
Bushey: Snakey little fucker if it’s who I’m thinking of.
Jim: Well exactly, and he’s supposed to be one of our own boys and all, right? And you know what he gets up and says right in the fucking Commons the other day? He actually says: “Tequesta is the County of the Future, and always will be.”[8] Used our own damn slogan to mock us, you couldn’t make it up.
Bushey: Bad discipline, that’s what that is. Ah-Wah ought to rein a kid like that in. Must make it awkward at the lodge hall.
Jim: I mean Ah-Wah made him walk it back, ah sake ah what a fucking insult to the people of the county, the idiot. But the damage is done, eeh nah? It’s that he’s one of this new lot, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, that this a profession he’s in. Not even a Brother -- like, that’s not supposed to matter, I’m told, but I tell you what, it matters. It matters. I [unintelligible] just, just don’t trust this new lot.[9]
Bushey: I’m not a Brother.
Jim: Aw hell, you know what I mean. Anyway you’re baba to a whole clan, nobody could say you don’t know what the shot is.[10]
[Drinks arrive during all this and the men cheer Bushey’s family values with a collective sah yeh.]
Bushey: Joss a dam, that’s a bit of alright. You just keep things up and running over there in the Dogs, Smalley. Now that Lady Klairin’s in my life I don’t think I want to give her up.[11] [laughter]
Smalley: No worries about that. Malleys may not like the work that much but they don’t mind the money we bring in, I can tell you. And Ah-Baz are with us, nuff fi a dem anyway that the ones who aren’t know better than to come in the open against us. If we could just keep ah dam duggey dem from stirring things up[12], well…
Doc: Same story everywhere, that one.
Jim: No doubt. Got to say I was a little worried the other day, heard you had, like --
Smalley: Eeh, it was nothing.
Jim: Close call with a caco, wasn’t it? Some kid got dog-mouth and came at you with a --
Smalley: Nah, it was nothing. Can’t run a relley e'ry time someone flash a sam in this game.
Bushey: Coo deh, Jim. Now that’s ah mawga right there.[13]
Doc: Looks like your man’s here, Bushey.
[There’s a brief pause as someone enters. Some low inaudible muttering and then someone else enters.]
Bushey: Food’s here, too. Alright there, Oh-So, you don’t mind we see to our nurrey here before we talk business, do you? You okay to wait a while?
Oh-So: [barely audible] Um. Aw leh.
Bushey: Good man. Frem, yuh wan fi keh eh ginney? Grab a menu there, our jenny here, she’ll fix you right up.[14]
* * *
[There is a half hour of small talk as the men finish their meal; the only remarkable thing about it being that ‘Oh-So,’ pointedly not invited to join the repast, is watching them and sweating. Eventually, the waitress clears away the meals and either receives a visual signal or has an understanding to stay gone.]
Bushey: Okay. Oh-So… you don’t mind I call you that? I know we ain’t met but--
Oh-So: It’s… uh, it’s--
Bushey: Got to feel like I know you, ah yeh?
Oh-So: I’m not fussed about it.
Bushey: I’m assuming you’ve figured out who I am, then. [‘Oh-So’ presumably nods or makes some gesture.] Good. My friends with me here yuh nuh fi a kon, it’s okay. Only one you need to know is Doc over there, ah sake ah he’s the reason you’re here.
Oh-So: I’m--due respect to you, I’m not sure I quite get what that reason is. [long silence] Uh, I mean, what I mean is I get… well, I thought they had it all worked out with you, like, our uh, our thing and your thing, I thought it was all cleared.
Bushey: Yeah, well that’s just it. You know a kid named Zack up Georgia way?
Oh-So: Uh…
Bushey: How about I don’t put it as a question. You know a kid named Zack up Georgia way. I know you do ah sake ah Doc over there has pictures of you and your partner tailing him to a meet. He has pictures of you two goofs outside the barn where he got found minus a few, uh, organs and extremities. He has pictures of you coming out cleaning a buck knife. So you can cut the ka-ka.
Oh-So: Um. Well. I uh, I can’t talk about certain kinds of uh, activities without-- uh, I’ve got to clear with my Lochagos--
Bushey: Who you think help us find you, you fucking doik?[15] How you think I know the Society didn’t clear a hit on Zack? And you want to know why they wouldn’t? [silence] Aside from you’re not supposed to be [inaudible] doing your crazy hoodoo act in the Marches, it’s ah sake ah Zack was a Merry Man. He was under our protection. In theory he was supposed to be under your protection, too, ah yeh?
Oh-So: Huh? Some peck? But I--
[Sound of a fist, presumably Bushey’s, hitting the table.]
Bushey: Shut. Up.
Oh-So: It’s just… well, we defend… I mean, we stand for something --
Bushey: What I just say. You stand for what the committee tell you that you fucking stand for. This the big boys talking now and your own Archey one a dem. I sweh Joss you make me raise my voice right now --
Doc: I’d listen to him, kid, you plan on leaving here with those good looks.
Smalley: Hah. What good looks?
Bushey: ’S'all relative. I can sure make em worse if this kid want it. All he gotta do's open his fucking yawp again while I’m talking. Hm?
[Silence. Oh-So seems to have gotten the message.]
That’s better. Now look, Oh-So. The way this work we can either profit each other or turn on each other. Everyone in this operation got a role to play, praan? Even the ones hate each other, since believe it or not we sometime need some peck to sell our product north-the-border. Sky-larking hoodoo man fi mek dem peckah dem a peh-peh is one thing, but you gone off-reservation and kill one our assets doing it and that’s bad for business. Bad fi yuh santey to be bad for business, ah yeh?[16]
Oh-So: I get you, yeah.
Bushey: Now I’m letting you go for right now, but wi fi a mek a fucking ruling on you, so you best keep your nose clean. And if this ever happens again, you’ll find out my people can sky-lark the hoodoo man, too, and they won’t wait til you dead to start cutting the pieces off you. You hear me?
[Oh-So apparently nods or makes some other gesture.]
Boh. Then get out of my sight. And you can find your own dam way home.
[Silence as Oh-So clears out and for some minutes afterwards.]
Frem. Bin a yah. [Brief inaudible murmuring, and then silence again as ‘Frem’ leaves.]
Poor dumb bastard. What a waste. Eeh sa. Anyone up for dessert? [17]
* * *
The notorious Nemoist militia-man Sason Paul, a loose cannon of the Society long known to law enforcement, was found executed in an alleyway on the northern edge of Tismore a day later. It couldn’t be conclusively proved that the Osceola Merry had compassed his death, but the later-leaked surveillance tape was suggestive to say the least. What nobody could doubt was that there was a criminal conspiracy on that recording of shocking dimensions, reach and ruthlessness.
Particularly vexing was the guessing game the dinner encouraged about the mysterious politician -- who could only be someone highly placed in the United Freedom Congress -- referred to as ‘Ah-Wah’ and whether that figure was directly party to the Osceola Merry’s crimes, as seemed to be implied. Whether outright complicity was true or not (and as it happened, ‘Ah-Wah’ was never conclusively identified), the shadow of impropriety alone caused a scandal and a vote of no-confidence the Bolton government only barely survived.
The earthquake set off by the leaking of the “Daltonville Dinner” recording led to a massive overhaul of the Palmeran Secret Service, forced resignations of several high-profile figures from the UITC and St.-Cyr Import/Export, a united push for anti-trust reform in the Commons--two eventual results of which would be the break-up of the Union Mercantile empire and the institution of public broadcasting in Palmera--and open gang warfare in the streets of Daltonville and other cities in Palmera. “Bushey” Bill Tarrant would eventually be caught trying to flee to Jamaica.
Among the most disturbing things on the recording was the frighteningly cynical way “Smalley” St.-Cyr had spoken about the state of play in Haiti. That the rising chorus of dissent about the island and what was happening there would become impossible to ignore was another outcome of the Daltonville affair… perhaps one of the most momentous.
* * *
NOTES:
[1] ki pra-feh fi yuh grez--”What are you having to eat?”
[2] “jenny”--Young lady, young girl.
[3] tambada--Tambda Rassa, an Indian dish popular in Palmera. manto a klairin--a mint cocktail made with clairin, a white rum from Haiti. nurrey--”Feed / meal / eats”
[4] Dackoe den . . . yeli. Tak-tak.--”Very well then . . . honey / sweetie. Thanks very much.”
[5] “Perline” is an affectionate nickname for Haiti, derived from the old phrase “Pearl of the Antilles.” A hurricane in August did significant damage and killed upwards of two hundred people in Haiti in this year.
[6] ‘Sah-yoh daal dem a run booney ban-dan all dem a cuss, tuzhu-tuzhu’--“Our boys have run liquor through every kind of curse since forever.”
[7] “Price of a spare dose stays constant.”--Part of the Osceola Merry’s business model was apparently based on shipping medicinal liquor, which was a legal loophole under Prohibition. The smuggling part of the business applied to hooch in far larger quantities that supplied speakeasies across America, referred to with wry humour as “spare doses” in the Merry’s parlance. Apparently the Tequesta “Operation” we met earlier in The Deal played a large role in stockpiling reserve caches of liquor destined for the illegal market at remote rural sites, presumably in order that shocks from law enforcement activity or natural disaster could be quickly compensated for.
[8] “Tequesta is the County of the Future, and always will be.”--This of course parallels the cruel old “country of the future” joke routinely made about Brazil, which has been apocryphally attributed to Stefan Zweig and Charles de Gaulle. Here maybe the Palmey joke will inspire the later version.
”The County of the Future” was how the UITC was promoting settlement and urban development in Tequesta County from 1926. The company survived being caught colluding with criminal interests (Southern James or “Jim” was successfully hung out to dry as a rogue actor) and emerged still strong in its sector of the market after anti-trust action split up Union Mercantile. The development project would still go ahead, though more slowly than initially hoped for and delayed by years, and this wouldn’t be the last time UITC agents were caught colluding with criminals.
[9] “just don’t trust this new lot.”--Freemasonry’s near-monopoly of the top rungs of political and economic power in Palmera was in a much more advanced stage of decay than anyone had yet admitted to themselves in 1928. Some of the signals were unmistakable, such as the appearance of MP’s who were proudly defiant of the tacit rules of etiquette that had once prevailed.
[10] “Anyway you’re baba to a whole clan . . .”--The Palmey underworld naturally had its own secret societies, quite apart from Masonry or the Nemoists. This alludes to Bushey heading up such a society.
[11] “Joss a dam…”--”God-damn!”
“. . . over there in the Dogs”--”The Dogs” is a not-so-affectionate nickname for Haiti and for the island of Hispaniola generally. It probably derives from an old folk legend about a birth vision--of a dog springing from her womb with a torch in its mouth--seen by the mother of St. Dominic, for whom the island was originally named. (The legend in turn derived from an old Latin pun on the name of the Dominican Order which the saint founded.)
[12] “Malleys may not like the work that much. . .”--Malley is from malé in Kriyol, meaning “wretch,” a reference to the Haitian peasantry. Smalley being involved in rum production, part of his business would have included reintroducing sugar plantations to Haiti, which would be seen as everything from distasteful to abhorrent by many Haitians. His allusion to “the money we bring in” is about having to entice workers with (relatively) high rates of pay.
“And Ah-Baz are with us, nuff fi a dem anyway that the ones who aren’t know better . . .”--Ah-Baz means “the base,” a reference to two of the most potent pillars of political legitimacy in Haiti: approval from local military officials and vodoun priests. Nuff fi a dem means he thinks enough of them are on side to keep the opposition intimidated.
“ah dam duggey dem”--”The damn do-gooders.” Aside from business and the military, Haiti has also drawn the activities of a wide range of charities, missionary organizations and journalists from Palmera, and they keep stepping on the toes of men like Smalley.
[13] “Close call with a caco, wasn’t it? Some kid got dog-mouth and . . .”--A caco is a Haitian bandit or outlaw. “Dog-mouth” is an English form of the Chatta expression dug-mout, meaning “drugged up.” There is a persistent Palmey belief, based on fascination with zombie legends, that vodoun priests drug potential hit men to make them immune to mercy, pain and fear. The total lack of evidence for this legend--which is probably a transferred trope from legends of the “hashish-eating” assassin sect of the Crusades--does not slow it down in the slightest.
“Can’t run a relley every time someone flash a sam”--”Can’t run screaming every time someone flashes a gun”
“ah mawga”--”The skinny,” meaning the true word, the true doctrine, the right way to behave.
[14] yuh wan fi keh eh ginney--”You want to get some food?”
[15] doik--lit. “ape,” meaning moron. Oh-So’s preceding reference to a “Lochagos” alludes to a whole system of faux-Hellenic ranks and titles in the Nemoist hierarchy, as does Bushey's later reference to an "Archey," meaning "Archon."
[16] “Sky-larking hoodoo man fi mek dem peckah dem a peh-peh is one thing. . .”--”Play-acting like voodoo priests to make all the pecks piss themselves is one thing. . .” A succinct summary of Nemoist terror tactics. Part of what has landed “Oh-So” in hot water is that he was caught doing this in the Marches at all; quite obviously nothing could fuel Marcher paranoia like actual Palmeran terrorists doing actual ritual killings in their backyard. That it turned out the Osceola Merry was also employing the likes of the Respecters as bootleggers was one of the more shocking revelations on the tape, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been, and clearly it was need-to-know information even within the cartel.
“Bad fi yuh santey to be bad for business. . .”--”Bad for your health to be bad for business,” as Oh-So would shortly discover.
[17] Bin a yah.--”Over here.” Eeh sa.--”Oh well / That’s life / So it goes”
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Correct-o-mundo.
I'm comfortably distant from hurricanes (not so much wildfires) and am sending out prayers to anyone who isn't.
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So this is their Apalachin meeting - the event that puts organized crime firmly on law enforcement radar?
“Ayo Perline!” [‘Nonwar’ & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails With a Kingmaker (from Ayo Perline!). Rum sours & a side of exposition on the Haiti Question.
“Ayo Perline!” [‘Nonwar’ & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction: Long before the Haiti Mission began in 1915, Palmera had official and unofficial contacts with the Republic. There were of course the entrepreneurs and political family ties of the late-19th century. Prior to that, owing to Haiti’s long 19th-century isolation, it was Palmeran officialdom that was most frequently reminded of events there during the brief storms of rebellion, coup and counter-coup that tended to terminate Presidencies and serve as interregnums between long periods of dictatorship*. From 1843 to 1915, no less than seven former Haitian Presidents and Presidents-for-Life and one former Haitian Emperor were fortunate enough to escape the politics of their country alive and go into exile in Palmera.
* Of course there were some private actors with interests in Hispaniola before the Dalton years, too. One was Jeremiah Hamilton, the so-called ‘Prince of Darkness,’ who ran a counterfeiting operation using Haitian gourdes during the early 1860s.
Few of these distinguished refugees were accorded the kind of pride of place given to deposed African or European royalty; though Haiti could claim title of the first Black republic and only successful slave rebellion, this potential symbolic potency was dimmed by the fact that she was mostly seen in Palmera as a broken country, the Land of Jack Freedom’s lesser cousin, doomed from the outset by the bloody manner of her birth and the combined isolation, poverty and superstition that had since seized her. Still, the Haitian expatriates did attain celebrity status in many cases, using it in part to popularize a more complicated picture of their homeland than most other countries got; Palmey students read in their history books about at least a few of Haiti’s modernizers, artists and intellectuals along with her dictatorships and dysfunctions as a result. Some of them expounded until their dying days, to whomever would listen, upon the best ways to “fix” Haiti.
At least four of these famous exiles left descendants--the various branches and offshoots of the Boyer, Soulouque, Geffrard and Salomon families--who remained in Palmera and seeded clans that prospered in business and eventually broke into politics. These prominent Haitian families helped in many cases to keep the Republic’s history alive, at least as they saw it, and to propagate the idea of Palmera as a potential “saviour of Haiti” across decades, an idea which grew in tandem with Palmera’s economic interests in Haiti, and that finally bore fruit with Big Ike’s subtle confrontations with America over the Haiti Question.
Palmera’s Second Expeditionary Force, her Secret Service and substantial fractions of her entrepreneurial class and civil society all became involved with Haiti during the years of the mission in support of Ovince Danastor’s regime--and eventually that of his successor, Mauleart Roy--from 1915 to 1934. Owing to their resources of Kriyol-speaking personnel familiar to some degree with the island’s religion and culture, the Palmerans eventually assumed most of the “front-line” duties of the mission--the Americans were most interested in the country as a port and naval base and were just as happy leaving someone else to do most of the dealing with the locals as long as stability remained intact--and were active even in isolated areas of the country that American counterparts seldom reached or even thought about.
The Union and the Republic grew more entangled than ever before. Palmey missionaries, doctors, merchants, engineers, scientists and soldiers worked in Haiti in their thousands. Some settled, intermarried with the locals (or each other), raised families that would become the Moun-Déyo,** the “outsiders,” their own subcaste of the Haitian elite. In some cases young men and women who went out with the intention of conquering the “superstition” of vodoun found far more to it--and to Haitian life--than they’d anticipated.
** In Haitian terms, the Moun-Déyo coded as part of the country’s mulatto minority. Haiti’s “elite” was divided as in OTL between the mulattoes, who were mostly urban administrators and functionaries, and the Black-dominated military, though there was some overlap between the two.
By 1928 Palmera had just shy of a quarter share of both Haiti’s import and export markets. From the Union’s point of view it was a necessary investment because a brief American occupation in the Dominican Republic next door (ending in 1921***) had managed to almost completely reorient that country’s economy toward the States; it was believed that Haiti had hidden gold reserves that might yet be tapped and compensate the loss of access to the great mine in the Dominican highlands.
*** This parallels a similar occupation of the Dominican Republic IOTL. Having expended so much political capital on the Haitian Incident, this was an American action in which Palmera could not intervene despite severe misgivings as to the outcome. Palmera did remain a presence in the east of Hispaniola thereafter, especially after the American occupiers departed, but at nothing like the levels of activity seen in Haiti.
However, the Palmeran presence and actions were far from universally welcome in Haiti or free of controversy at home. Substantial parts of the mission were marred by outbreaks of civil unrest, guerrilla activity or opportunistic bandit attacks and assassination attempts that came collectively to be called “The Nonwar****” by the National Militia Service. Some found this absurd bureaucratese, but to many who served in Haiti the term had much to commend it as an attempt to capture the unusual and unfocused nature of a conflict in which there was rarely a fixed enemy on whom you could focus and defeat.
**** “Nonwar” more often refers to a state of being than to a specific event, but it fits the pattern of small-scale disturbance and opportunistic ambushes seen in Haiti of this timeline, which nobody in an official capacity on the Palmey side will want to call actual warfare.
The Nonwar could be roughly divided into three phases: the first immediately followed the Haitian Incident and the establishment of the Danastor regime, lasting from around 1915 through to 1920, and consisted of periodic protests and outbreaks of hostility to the regime that occasionally (but rarely) focused around potential political rivals. The second lasted from 1922 through until about 1926, emerging from suspicions about the legitimacy of Danastor’s reelection and coinciding with the most vigorous period of Palmey-led school and infastructure building.
The third and worst phase began with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929--which terminated ambitious Palmeran investment and infrastructure projects for some time--and gradually intensified until President Danastor resigned and triggered fresh elections in 1933. Mauleart Roy’s reasonably peaceful accession to the presidency led to the drawing-down and termination of the mission (save for those civilians and a small force of “advisors and trainers” who remained) in 1934.
Witness to this final phase of the mission, and a leading authority on Haiti, was a Palmeran Major by the name of Jack Heyland, who’d first set eyes on Hispaniola as a green recruit during the Sixty-Minute War. His book on the subject, considered perhaps the essential early work, was not a military treatise, but a semi-scholarly account of the social and historical context of the mission combined with vivid travelogue-style remembrances of the various places, personalities and events--from the charming to the sinister, inspirational to tragic, idyllic to surreal--he encountered there.
The book was called Ayo Perline! (or “Farewell Perline!”) and will be excerpted in what follows. After leaving the Service, Jack Heyland himself would go on to found the publishing company Belair House, which printed a wide range of Palmey and Caribbean literature but focussed specifically on bringing “Antillanities,” works from the former French West Indies and especially from Haiti, to a wider audience.*****
***** “Perline” was the most flattering of the range of nicknames that Haiti hands from Palmera gave the country, in reference to her former reputation as the Pearl of the Antilles. Heyland’s publishing company was named in honour of Sanité Bélair, a heroine of the Haitian Revolution. It would publish many works of early Haitian literature that would be partly or wholly lost IOTL, including Massillon Coicou’s famous play The Emperor Dessalines.
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails With a Kingmaker (from Ayo Perline!). Rum sours & a side of exposition on the Haiti Question.
“Ayo Perline!” [‘Nonwar’ & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction: Long before the Haiti Mission began in 1915, Palmera had official and unofficial contacts with the Republic. There were of course the entrepreneurs and political family ties of the late-19th century. Prior to that, owing to Haiti’s long 19th-century isolation, it was Palmeran officialdom that was most frequently reminded of events there during the brief storms of rebellion, coup and counter-coup that tended to terminate Presidencies and serve as interregnums between long periods of dictatorship*. From 1843 to 1915, no less than seven former Haitian Presidents and Presidents-for-Life and one former Haitian Emperor were fortunate enough to escape the politics of their country alive and go into exile in Palmera.
* Of course there were some private actors with interests in Hispaniola before the Dalton years, too. One was Jeremiah Hamilton, the so-called ‘Prince of Darkness,’ who ran a counterfeiting operation using Haitian gourdes during the early 1860s.
Few of these distinguished refugees were accorded the kind of pride of place given to deposed African or European royalty; though Haiti could claim title of the first Black republic and only successful slave rebellion, this potential symbolic potency was dimmed by the fact that she was mostly seen in Palmera as a broken country, the Land of Jack Freedom’s lesser cousin, doomed from the outset by the bloody manner of her birth and the combined isolation, poverty and superstition that had since seized her. Still, the Haitian expatriates did attain celebrity status in many cases, using it in part to popularize a more complicated picture of their homeland than most other countries got; Palmey students read in their history books about at least a few of Haiti’s modernizers, artists and intellectuals along with her dictatorships and dysfunctions as a result. Some of them expounded until their dying days, to whomever would listen, upon the best ways to “fix” Haiti.
At least four of these famous exiles left descendants--the various branches and offshoots of the Boyer, Soulouque, Geffrard and Salomon families--who remained in Palmera and seeded clans that prospered in business and eventually broke into politics. These prominent Haitian families helped in many cases to keep the Republic’s history alive, at least as they saw it, and to propagate the idea of Palmera as a potential “saviour of Haiti” across decades, an idea which grew in tandem with Palmera’s economic interests in Haiti, and that finally bore fruit with Big Ike’s subtle confrontations with America over the Haiti Question.
Palmera’s Second Expeditionary Force, her Secret Service and substantial fractions of her entrepreneurial class and civil society all became involved with Haiti during the years of the mission in support of Ovince Danastor’s regime--and eventually that of his successor, Mauleart Roy--from 1915 to 1934. Owing to their resources of Kriyol-speaking personnel familiar to some degree with the island’s religion and culture, the Palmerans eventually assumed most of the “front-line” duties of the mission--the Americans were most interested in the country as a port and naval base and were just as happy leaving someone else to do most of the dealing with the locals as long as stability remained intact--and were active even in isolated areas of the country that American counterparts seldom reached or even thought about.
The Union and the Republic grew more entangled than ever before. Palmey missionaries, doctors, merchants, engineers, scientists and soldiers worked in Haiti in their thousands. Some settled, intermarried with the locals (or each other), raised families that would become the Moun-Déyo,** the “outsiders,” their own subcaste of the Haitian elite. In some cases young men and women who went out with the intention of conquering the “superstition” of vodoun found far more to it--and to Haitian life--than they’d anticipated.
** In Haitian terms, the Moun-Déyo coded as part of the country’s mulatto minority. Haiti’s “elite” was divided as in OTL between the mulattoes, who were mostly urban administrators and functionaries, and the Black-dominated military, though there was some overlap between the two.
By 1928 Palmera had just shy of a quarter share of both Haiti’s import and export markets. From the Union’s point of view it was a necessary investment because a brief American occupation in the Dominican Republic next door (ending in 1921***) had managed to almost completely reorient that country’s economy toward the States; it was believed that Haiti had hidden gold reserves that might yet be tapped and compensate the loss of access to the great mine in the Dominican highlands.
*** This parallels a similar occupation of the Dominican Republic IOTL. Having expended so much political capital on the Haitian Incident, this was an American action in which Palmera could not intervene despite severe misgivings as to the outcome. Palmera did remain a presence in the east of Hispaniola thereafter, especially after the American occupiers departed, but at nothing like the levels of activity seen in Haiti.
However, the Palmeran presence and actions were far from universally welcome in Haiti or free of controversy at home. Substantial parts of the mission were marred by outbreaks of civil unrest, guerrilla activity or opportunistic bandit attacks and assassination attempts that came collectively to be called “The Nonwar****” by the National Militia Service. Some found this absurd bureaucratese, but to many who served in Haiti the term had much to commend it as an attempt to capture the unusual and unfocused nature of a conflict in which there was rarely a fixed enemy on whom you could focus and defeat.
**** “Nonwar” more often refers to a state of being than to a specific event, but it fits the pattern of small-scale disturbance and opportunistic ambushes seen in Haiti of this timeline, which nobody in an official capacity on the Palmey side will want to call actual warfare.
The Nonwar could be roughly divided into three phases: the first immediately followed the Haitian Incident and the establishment of the Danastor regime, lasting from around 1915 through to 1920, and consisted of periodic protests and outbreaks of hostility to the regime that occasionally (but rarely) focused around potential political rivals. The second lasted from 1922 through until about 1926, emerging from suspicions about the legitimacy of Danastor’s reelection and coinciding with the most vigorous period of Palmey-led school and infastructure building.
The third and worst phase began with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929--which terminated ambitious Palmeran investment and infrastructure projects for some time--and gradually intensified until President Danastor resigned and triggered fresh elections in 1933. Mauleart Roy’s reasonably peaceful accession to the presidency led to the drawing-down and termination of the mission (save for those civilians and a small force of “advisors and trainers” who remained) in 1934.
Witness to this final phase of the mission, and a leading authority on Haiti, was a Palmeran Major by the name of Jack Heyland, who’d first set eyes on Hispaniola as a green recruit during the Sixty-Minute War. His book on the subject, considered perhaps the essential early work, was not a military treatise, but a semi-scholarly account of the social and historical context of the mission combined with vivid travelogue-style remembrances of the various places, personalities and events--from the charming to the sinister, inspirational to tragic, idyllic to surreal--he encountered there.
The book was called Ayo Perline! (or “Farewell Perline!”) and will be excerpted in what follows. After leaving the Service, Jack Heyland himself would go on to found the publishing company Belair House, which printed a wide range of Palmey and Caribbean literature but focussed specifically on bringing “Antillanities,” works from the former French West Indies and especially from Haiti, to a wider audience.*****
***** “Perline” was the most flattering of the range of nicknames that Haiti hands from Palmera gave the country, in reference to her former reputation as the Pearl of the Antilles. Heyland’s publishing company was named in honour of Sanité Bélair, a heroine of the Haitian Revolution. It would publish many works of early Haitian literature that would be partly or wholly lost IOTL, including Massillon Coicou’s famous play The Emperor Dessalines.
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Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
"Good morning, Austin! This is Basil Exposition with Palmey Intelligence."
Cocktails with a King-Maker
(from Ayo Perline! by Maj. Jack Heyland, OP, OBE, CMG)
(from Ayo Perline! by Maj. Jack Heyland, OP, OBE, CMG)
On the second evening of my return to Port-au-Prince, I was invited to dinner by a man who at first I thought was simply a local businessman, whose calling card at any rate proclaimed him a member of the advertising firm W.M. Morel & Son. He was the son, Edwin Morel, a well turned-out Lanney gentleman of dark complexion who encountered me in the foyer of my hotel--for I’d travelled a week early on my own initiative, out of a long habit, to get acclimated before I formally reported to my command--and was so blithely charming as to put me entirely at ease.
It was a short while after we had sat down to a “dinner” at a little sidewalk brasserie on Avenue Nord -- a dinner which I quickly worked out was to consist in the main of lively conversation and rum sours -- when I sensed something more purposeful in Edwin Morel than casual passing of the time. And when our conversation turned to politics, as conversations among Palmey expatriates were wont to do, and he began to talk about what “we” were doing with His Excellency the President, I came to the sudden realisation that I was in essence being briefed by an intelligence officer.
Many Palmeys are familiar these days with the exploits of our storied Secret Service via the lurid Dirty Hands novels and their perpetually randy, violent and ruthless “hero” Phineas Plumb. The reality is both more prosaic and occasionally more disconcerting. What many do not understand is that the intelligence profession in our Land of Freedom employs very nearly one man or woman for every thousand citizens: simple analysts, most of them, who apart from the fact of dealing with the clandestine are otherwise just like the rest of us. It’s an extraordinary figure that one must admit could give a man to sleepless nights if he believed the Communist line that they’re some Satanic apparatus of repression; but that’s rather a rich sort of accusation coming from people who so often seem to idolise the Cheka, with which our Secret Service boys have mercifully little in common.[1]
For all that, there’s no denying that it’s a striking thing to be “seen” and singled out while abroad by the all-seeing eye of Special Branch. It can also be reassuring, though, and even diverting when one’s local representative of the all-seeing eye is debonair, drily humorous and liberal about buying the drinks.
Edwin had been in country more-or-less continuously since the turn of the century, so that his French and his Kriyol both sounded flawless -- at least to an ear amateur in either -- and his English owed more to the Haitian accent than to Kingsland County, where his family apparently hailed from the township of Wycombe just a parish over from my own. We reminisced about home for a little while, but it was a distant place for Edwin and I could sense him far more eager to discuss the present and the Mission (like many a Haiti hand he spoke of it with an audible capital “M”). Rather oddly he launched himself on this subject, brandishing his rum sour to illustrate this point or that, by talking about Pears Soap.
“I wonder if you’re quite aware, my friend,” he said expansively: “To which figure our glorious Union most owes its successes on the world stage? I mean among other things the fact that you and I are here, now, with the Mission of helping a sister-country find its feet. How does this come to pass? Who would you say is most directly responsible?” I dutifully assayed all the usual answers: Prime Ministers, diplomats, military heroes. I even half-humorously tried “Phineas Plumb” out on him, which he declined with a glint of laughter in his eye and a knowing shake of his head, though appraising me anew: that guess perhaps revealed that I had already sussed him out. Eventually he said: “What if I told you it was Thomas Barrett?”[2]
I must have looked singularly blank, for now he laughed out loud. “An Englishman?” I hazarded, and when he nodded I guessed: “A… minister or Lord, perhaps? A missionary? A diplomat?” I had never heard the name.
“No,” Edwin said. “He invented Pears Soap.” He added, responding to my expression of confusion: “Not the soap itself, of course. No, he invented my profession in its modern form. The management of image. That’s what everything here hinges on, you see, though damned few of us consciously know it.”
“You don’t think that’s perhaps a touch facile?” Edwin’s observation irritated me, though I tried to disguise it. I’d long been accustomed to men of every profession thinking the fate of worlds hinged first upon their actions and none other, and I was habituated to seeing this attitude as gross folly. “I mean, surely our success here depends upon concrete achievement. On results such as--”
“General security? The building of roads? Standard schools? Sanitation systems? Working democracy and efficient, trustworthy government? Promotion of the Christian faith? Modern finance and reliable business contracts?” He saw that he’d stolen the words out of my mouth, and my irritation at his doing so, and laughed again. “Oh, I’m no mind reader, Jack. We’re children of the British Empire when it’s all said and done, aren’t we? And every one of us comes here with a head full of such pieties. I certainly know I did.”
Edwin drank again, heedlessly; at this point he was already outpacing me two portions to one. He had little need, it was plain, of the caution with regard to rum sours that my constitution enjoined on me. He went on.
“They’re worthy pieties all, of course. The touchstones of many a state that can be called successful, and we’re lucky enough to count our blessed Union among them. But a first step has to happen before such pieties become practical. Legitimacy, my friend. It’s the fount from which all else flows.”
I found myself without a pat answer to this and ill-equipped to see where he might be taking the point, so I resorted to sipping at my drink and stalling for time. “Go on.”
“You think I’m crazy, ah yeh? But you see, that was Barrett’s genius. His great success. He saw that Pears Soap could be more than just a product. That to achieve the dreams of profit dancing in his head, he must first make his product legitimate. A part of Britishness, of identity. And he was skilled at this as no other.” He took a long pull of his drink, his eyes faraway, clearly seized with his subject now. “Our product of course is His Excellency, the President Danastor. Our work here happens under his auspices, and our project is to establish him as the symbol of L’Haitianité just as Pears Soap is a symbol of Britishness. It’s from Mister Barrett I take my lessons.”
“You don’t say.”
“Indeed I do. Now let me ask you this: how many Haitian heads of state do you suppose have served out their full terms of office? How many have died peacefully in their beds, without being overthrown or assassinated or put to flight?”
“I… I must confess I don’t entirely know.” There was a certain shame in admitting it, and I felt my ears grow hot. “Not many, though, I’d wager.”
“And you’d win that wager. Now, what if I told you the number could be literally counted on one hand since independence?” I knew for certain that I looked shocked, now, and his answering smile was rather sad and bleak. “Scarcely believable, you might think, but it’s true. The norm for Haitian Presidents and a handful of Presidents-turned-Emperors has been violent death or exile in the face of rebellion, going right back to Dessalines. What does such instability hint at, to you?”[3]
I felt like a boy in a schoolroom, a feeling I’d always hated. But I had never been shy of applying myself to a problem. I always tried to measure up to this sort of challenge the way my brother had used to do, and had always challenged me to do. I thought carefully now and said: “Lack of legitimacy.” But no, I could feel that wasn’t quite right, and quickly revised this to: “Or conflicting ideas about legitimacy.”
Edwin beamed at me like a teacher at a prize pupil. “You have it exact. I would say conflicting systems of legitimacy. But between whom?” Here I simply motioned him to continue, which he did willingly: “It’s the same conflict that inheres in most every Caribbean state, and even in Palmera, too. It’s just at its most primal, its most basic, here in Haiti. Every such question boils down to: who served slavery, and who was the slave?”
“But that’s not true in Palmera.” I felt like my answer was missing something, but it came instinctively. “Everyone in the Union started out as free men. It’s what defines us.”
“A luxury we owe the freedom fighters of Haiti,” said Edwin, with the tone of someone who had had this argument many times. “It’s thanks to their success that abolition became an obsession for Britain. But even so, not all among us were at equal risk from slavery in the wider world. There were even slave-owners in Calusa in the early days, Lanneys almost to a man. And among us the divide between Black and Lanney and White persists even now, doesn’t it?” He raised an eyebrow and I was forced to nod. “And it goes back to the same old question. We were simply given the luxury of complication. Black men in Palmera still had the most to lose from the reinstatement of slavery, Lanneys next, and then Whites… excepting that fraction of them that chose the route of constant rebellion and were finally cast down along with the Asians and the Gitcheys. But all of them, have and have-not, had the luxury of developing together in society with hope of reward from supporting the law, and courting good government. With the belief that these things would improve their lives.”
“I see,” I said uncertainly, although I was not really sure I saw. But now Edwin barely took note of my interjection, as he was in full flight.
“Ah yeh?” he said. “Thanks to the rise of abolition that Haiti made possible, they all had at least the hope of equitable treatment, however flawed or distant it might be. It’s a kind of… scaffolding in a society, that makes trust in government and democracy and brotherhood in Christ possible no matter what adversity a country faces. Even where our interests were opposed, we could all hope to fight for relief from the Crown or the Touladi and sometimes even have our faith rewarded. We still can, and do. It softens that ancient divide between, if you’ll excuse my putting it this way, the house and the field.”
“And you are saying Haiti does not have this.”
“I am not saying it,” Edwin corrected me, draining the last of his drink and gesturing at the waiter for another. The fellow grinned at him broadly, clearly used to the sight of a Morel holding forth in his establishment. “History says it. Palmera faced endless assault from the time of her establishment, every schoolboy knows it. And knows too, or should know, the price that Gitcheys paid for serving in the Great War as opposed to the rest of us. The world is a hostile place.”
I didn’t hesitate to agree. I thought of good old Frank’s lonely casket, minus his remains, going into the ground, felt a powerful regret as I always did that I never had the chance to tell him how I truly felt before he met his Maker.[4]
So I nodded, and Edwin said: “But we also had the British Crown on our side, ah yeh? The greatest power in the world, determined to build what Haiti could not, above all determined to show up the French. It was a unique advantage, unlovely though their motives were. No other country in the Caribbean had it. No other Black country -- and have no illusions, to them, that’s exactly what we are -- ever had it. We’re the ultimate salve to the conscience of the White world, their 'Get Out of Jail Free' card.[5] Whereas Haiti, from the first day of her independence? She was utterly alone.”
“I understand, but… but surely that should have shored up common purpose?” I prompted him as this last observation sent him into something of a reverie. Clearly this was something on which Edwin either had strong and genuine feelings or was adept at imitating them. “Given everyone a common cause to work for?”
“In some ways, it did.” He grinned at the waiter and tipped him as the next round of drinks arrived. Took another sip and then said: “The common purpose was security. Haiti from her early days lived in a world full of deadly enemies with every reason to wipe her out. We even contributed to that, you know. Palmera was a release valve, or to put it more bluntly a dumping ground. Surety that there would always be a place to send recalcitrant or rebellious slaves. Haiti for her part was every single day at risk of invasion and re-enslavement, year upon year. Her army of liberation could never demobilise, they simply couldn’t afford to for decades even after they agreed to that ruinous indemnity they’re still paying. That we’re paying by proxy, now, in a very real way. And no, I haven’t been reading The Socialist Worker, it’s just a fact.” He grinned as he forestalled what was clearly a common objection on this point. “As to the order that preceded it… well, you know why we call her ‘Perline’?”
“For the profits France extracted from her.” This one I knew.
“Indeed. And that was because Saint-Domingue was the plantation economy at its basest, its most immoral. There was no scaffolding, not even a gesture at it. The law, such as it was, protected the master and to some minimal extent his servants while it scourged the slave. When the slave finally could endure no more and rose up, the only structure left was the very army they’d raised to free themselves. It eventually became the government, because even the Church was mostly absent. Vodoun is so strong here because the slaves were left to their own devices to cobble together a faith to sustain them. In most of Haiti, this is all still true.”
Understanding started to dawn on me. It was a depressing, disconcerting sort of enlightenment. “But the house and the field are still here, ah yeh? They didn’t go away when the French did.”
“Just so, Jack.” Edwin beamed at me again, but it was a bit sickly, now. “Both of them needed the army. They needed its omnipresence. Even when governments finally began to reduce its numbers it was only in order to built their own loyal militias, sometimes even more terrible. In that terror and the promise of a single indispensable man controlling it lay the nation’s life. The hope that no White man would ever set foot on this shore again and call himself a master without paying a steep price in blood, especially if he was fool enough to venture into the mountains. The sufferings of slavery made that contract absolute. But beyond that…”
“Beyond that, the house and the field didn’t have the same goals. They don’t have the same ideas of legitimacy. I take your meaning.” And I did. It was like a window was opening in my head, but it was a window onto something terrible and hopeless, through which I suddenly found all my fine former certainties about “concrete results” begin to leach. I remembered a disturbing proverb from my time in service in the Arab countries, after I’d first left Haiti to fight for what I’d foolishly thought was a promotion to honour in the Great War. I quoted it: “‘I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.’”[6]
“Yes, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Edwin affirmed. “A society without scaffolding. Except here, brothers and cousins are divided by faith, too, Catholic against Vodoun. Forced to live together and pay lip service to one another, but with no basis of true respect. But just as in an Arab country, the brothers and the cousins can have very different expectations of government and law. Our natural allies are the cousins: the Lanneys, or mulattoes as they’re called here.” He counted off fingers, enumerating goals: “They want parliamentary government -- not necessarily democracy but procedural, controllable government -- that at least presents as civilian for appearance’s sake. They want Catholicism and centralism and anti-Vodunisme. They want involvement in the wider world, international respect, wealth, exports, pro-business policy, education and public works. They want what the house naturally wants, which is most of what we want.”
“And as for the brothers of the field?” I almost dreaded the answer, but I was also truly fascinated.
“Perhaps you can guess.”
“I think maybe I can?”
I paused, furrowed my brow. Saw in my mind’s eye a village in the Haitian forests. Tried to think of what I might want if I lived in such a place, remote but poor and vulnerable, if the law had only ever been a club for others to beat me with or a scourge for my back. It was a terrible thought, an alien thought, but I held onto it, and felt realisation come as I followed where it led.
Finally, I assayed: “The field would want a monarch. ‘Ah Jaan-Wo Kankah’ with temporal power.[7] Remote, grand, uninvolved with day-to-day life, wily but un-intrusive. The government would be best that governed least, they’d become a threat themselves if they grew too competent, too… too efficient. I’d rely on my neighbours to help me in times of need.” I traced the line of thinking home, with a rising sense of disquiet. “But the monarch would also have to be awesome, supernatural even, dreadful in vengeance, a violent enemy to aliens and the educated heirs of the house, capable of smiting whoever threatened me. And he would have to be a friend of my faith, of the Vodoun faith. Munificent with land for the free smallholder but hostile to capital and… I guess they would probably come to seem busybody enterprises like education, missionaries, public works. Ways for the Law to get at me.”
“You’re a damned quick study, Jack.” Edwin looked at me with surprise and what seemed genuine admiration. “I’ve had to drag some men through the briar patches for weeks before they worked that out. Yes. Haitian history is the story of a battle between those views of the world, united in one basic need but otherwise hating each other to the marrow. And it’s also the story of occasional attempts at rapprochement between those views that mostly failed for obvious reasons. So you can see the real challenge we’ve set ourselves here.”
“I’m not sure if I would have rather stayed blissfully ignorant.” I didn’t really mean it, but my dismay was genuine. “My God. What are we doing here, then? How the Hell does one bridge a gulf like that?”
“Why, with leverage,” Edwin said. “And with image, whose potency you should never underestimate. Which brings us back to Mister Barrett and Pears Soap.” He broke off for a moment and then candidly admitted: “I’d best have something to eat if I’m to do justice to that part of things. What do you say to a little rice and beans?”
* * *
As we finished our repast, Edwin Morel’s eyes stayed sharp. It wasn’t clear that he’d been anything else at any point, and it was clear that he was watching my reactions and my state of mind carefully as we ate. But I knew this game, now, and (I flatter myself) gave nothing away as we ate our rice, beans and salt fish and prepared to resume our discussion.
He seemed tremendously pleased with himself as he emerged from his feed and gestured at the broadsheet pasted on the well. “Have a look at that on the wall there,” he said. “What do you see?”
Dutifully, I attended. It was, in truth, a picture of Danastor that I’d already seen a thousand times over before I had even arrived at my hotel, plastered on the walls of buildings everywhere. The man in a white suit, wearing a crimson sash, on a wicker throne with something that looked like a machete clasped in his hands as a sceptre of authority. The phrase Il Règne au Pouvoir featured in large red print on all of them, including this one. It was, to my eyes, an absurdity, and I said so even as I reported frankly the rude power of what I saw.
Edwin got a crafty glint in his eye. “Now,” he said, “Think on what we discussed a little while ago, and look at it again.”
I had no idea what his intention was. I saw in the image a primitive African potentate and said so. Edwin looked surprisingly and inordinately pleased, grinning delightedly.
“Thank you, friend,” he said. “That means I’ve done my job. Now let me take you through the method.”
I nodded, the intrigue seizing me once again as he talked.
“Think of the two worlds Ovince Danastor has to bridge. It’s all in the image you see there.”[8] He pointed at it, recounting its virtues. “For our Lanney cousins he wears a white tuxedo. For the Black friends of liberty he wears a military officer’s red sash. The cross at his neck is a symbol of Christ, the red sash a symbol of Ogoun, and the white suit a symbol of Damballah Wedo, eldest of the lwa.” He pointed out a silver scallop pin on His Excellency’s lapel. “He draws on Catholic and Vodoun imagery alike. That scallop is Damballah and St. James, too. He is a man educated about both the Catholic and Vodoun worlds. He holds a machete but it’s sheathed, a last resort: the potential of terrible vengeance, the actuality of restraint. See the wedge cap he wears, vaguely military but not a suggestion of any actual military service, as if he fights for the angels or in some mythic plane.”
As he unpacked the image for me, I found myself looking at it with new eyes. Seeing in it a bridging of two hostile worlds. Yet it disturbed me deeply. “You… you’re actually using hoodoo symbolism to sell our primary ally to his people.”
“Of course we are.” Edwin shrugged. “Listen, I’m a Baptist myself, I truly wish our missionaries well. And they’ve made some converts here, I think the Tribulationists in particular have surprised a few people. But it’s all surface. Danastor forbids, we actually forbid, any of them to run around tearing down Vodoun altars in the process, and there’s a reason for that.”
It seemed wrong to me. “Isn’t Vodoun just a symptom of stagnation, though? I understand not ripping down altars, but surely some more enticing way could be found without reinforcing it? You’d think we would want to end superstition here if the goal really is to build something lasting.”
“Vodoun is Haiti. Make no mistake about it. It isn’t going anywhere no matter how many missionaries come here..” Edwin wasn’t touching his drink now. He was more intense than before. “That die was cast long ago. The principle we work from is pragmatism, you simply can’t be an ally to the Black Haitians and an enemy of Vodoun, any more than you can despise Catholicism and hope for the mulattoes to embrace you. But there is more to Vodoun than primitive impulses and superstition. Like any faith it has dimensions that can be exploited by the worst among men and the best of them. Danastor’s neither, but he’s the certainly the best that’ll work with us.”
“And if we abandon that ground, something worse could claim it.” I nodded reluctantly, looking back at the image again. “And so, L’Haitianité. Terrible and hopeful. Violent and constructive.” I looked at the wicker chair he sat on and added: “He sits in a chieftain’s chair that could as easily be an ordinary chair. A throne that isn’t a throne.”
“Yes, excellent. You see it.” Edwin grinned. “Exquisite balance. A man who can deliver progress without threat. A man who can respect Vodoun without abandoning Christianity, who can really embrace syncretism not as a dodge, but as a positive value. There he is. L’Haitianité.”
“But,” I added, frowning: “That isn’t enough. Is it?”
“No,” Edwin agreed. “It’s the fount. It’s the root. On the radio, too, he sounds like you’d imagine Damballah would sound. Deep, rich, reassuring. One of our priorities has been getting radios to as many places outside the cities as we can, and Danastor is on them three or four times a day. It’s the beginning, but it needs Yemoja to water it if you will, if it's to flower. In particular there must be something to give the military chiefs and houngans a stake. Can you guess what that something is?”
It was as if I was entranced. I said it automatically. “Money.”
Edwin laughed aloud. “Yes!” he said. “There it is. The most malleable part of the equation, the point of articulation between the two worlds. Money. Avarice. It’s irresistible. If the regional chieftains believe they can profit from roads and law, if the houngans believe they can gain from education and political involvement, that it isn’t their enemy, they can transform Vodoun on their own. Make it work for us instead of against us. Remake the peasant identity so that it desires things it never thought it could desire. It’s been happening for fifteen years already. It’s how we are where we are.”
He finally indulged in a drink, now, then slammed his tumbler down on the table almost triumphantly. I emerged from my reverie and looked at him. “So you’ve made the country’s flaws work for us. Found a way to bind them together, it’s very clever. Brilliant, even. But still… I find I’m not reassured.”
“Yes, well. Nor should you be.” Edwin’s triumphant expression soured. “We broke a path between the solitudes of L’Haitianité with greed, with money-lust, and let the religions and the journalists and the duggey volunteers pour through the gap. So long as the local military chieftains and the houngans saw profit in it, Danastor was relatively safe. But the whole project has involved hauling Haiti out of isolation. The dream of the house, sold to the field on the promise of equity in the result, under the wing of a protector.”
“And so Haiti came back into the international market.” I nodded. “And now…”
“The market has collapsed[9]. Like nothing we’ve ever seen. It will affect Palmera, too, it already is. All the money for public works, the stream of donations for volunteers and missionaries, much of the export revenue, it’s all going away very soon. Probably for long enough to do us in.” Edwin grimaced. “Danastor is the image. Money is the leverage. Without the second, the first must fall… or turn against us.”
The logical outcome. “Yes, I see. He would have to turn hard to Vodoun, try to prove to the field that he’s more field than any of them.”
“Like I said, Jack. You’re a quick study.”
My companion’s face was studiously blank. I asked him: “Can Danastor hold power even so?”
“Not likely, no.” Edwin shook his head. “He’s a mulatto at the end of the day. No amount of image management can make him truly one of them, he knows it and they know it. By now, our condition of victory is simply that Ovince lives to old age and doesn’t have to flee the country. As for Haiti… well, she may yet produce someone else who can make the balancing act work, but that kind of man doesn’t exactly grow on trees. We just have to hope we can find him before we pack our bags.”
“So that’s your job, now?”
“Nope.” Edwin raised his tumbler and toasted me. “That’s our job, Jack.”
I clinked glasses with him and drank, numbly, trying to absorb it all. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should have returned to Perline. There’s no turning back now, I thought, trying to shake my unease at the enormity of what faced me as we turned to more innocuous topics and Edwin started to flirt with a beautiful woman at a table near ours. Like he said… the die was cast long ago.
* * *
NOTES:
[1] Actually, the ratio of citizens to Secret Service members in Palmera at the time was 980:1, which is roughly comparable to the dimensions attained by the Stasi in East Germany IOTL. (This put intelligence workers high in the ranking of the country’s largest specialized professions: there were at that time just over 1,250 Palmeran citizens for every lawyer, 460 for each police constable, 420 for every doctor, 200 for every registered member of the “oldest profession,” 170 for every full-time religious worker.) Heyland is right to point out that this large number of spies and analysts isn’t necessarily as forbidding as it sounds, and that the Palmeran Secret Service had a much more restricted scope of activities than something like the Russian Cheka. He’s perhaps a bit too blithe in dismissing the leftist charge that it could be used as a tool of repression, though… especially off Palmeran soil.
[2] Basically the same figure as OTL’s pioneering British advertiser Thomas J. Barratt.
[3] Much of the analysis Jack and Edwin are about to gin up between them is owed to this interesting paper on the subject of the legitimacy of Emperor Faustin Soulouque: http://davidgsweet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Soulouque1.pdf I’m simplifying its insights and canting the topic toward the characters’ prejudices, but it is definitely a recommended read on the topic of political legitimacy in Haitian history for anyone who's interested.
[4] Jack is in fact the brother of the same Frank Heyland who was cut down at Gallipoli in “The Hinge of History, Pt. 2.”
[5] Of course there’s rather more to it than this. Edwin is a bit of a cynic.
[6] Supposedly a Bedouin proverb, though I have no idea how authentic that attribution is and neither does Jack.
[7] ‘Ah Jaan-Wo Kankah’ is the Chatta version of “High John the Conqueror,” a figure of African-American folklore known for his humour, guile and magical powers. A central legend in folk and hoodoo magic, he’s a trickster who constantly evades and confounds the slave masters. Jack is envisaging a different version of him here with the power dynamic reversed.
[8] The manipulation of Vodoun imagery here is a more benign version of what ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier did in OTL, tapping a very different part of the Vodoun ethos. Edwin has studied Vodoun but it’s improbable that he came up with this imagery all on his own, glad though he is to take credit for it; more likely the source of this ‘balancing act’ is Ovince Danastor himself.
[9] As previously mentioned, the great stock market crash of ‘29 has materialized more or less as in OTL; this conversation is happening just a few weeks afterward.
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I was thinking "Papa Doc with restraint" throughout Edwin's description - Damballa rather than Baron Samedi - and from this I see that the similarity isn't accidental. I suspect most of the inspiration did come from Danastor, who grew up with Voudun and who knows in his gut how to use its symbolism.
If future presidents see him as successful - and if indeed he comes to embody Haitianness as Edwin wishes - then I suspect he'll become a model, and that all the twentieth-century Haitian leaders will play the part of loa.
The Parisiana
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
Finishing up in Haiti for a while so I can switch the focus back to Palmera proper.
Jack Heyland commanded a detachment of scouts in Artibonite, supposedly protecting a roads and sanitation project which--as Edwin Morel had predicted--quickly ground to a halt as the Great Depression set in. He also guarded several missionary operations in the Department, many of which continued stubbornly to operate as best they could money or no money, and several of which came down with the mysterious cases of vandalism or random attacks so characteristic of the Nonwar.
Of particular interest to Heyland was the Temple de Saint-Salomon mission in La Chappelle. This was one of the Tribulationist missions that Edwin Morel referred to as having “surprised” people, and it was run in part by a particularly beautiful and virtuous prêtresse named Lucine Saroyan[a], who came to occupy a significant place in the memoir. While on leave to Port-au-Prince in 1931 he persuaded Lucine to accompany him, and eventually to join him at one of the city’s great centres of culture and nightlife, the Cinema Parisiana.
The excursion was a hard sell: Lucine’s faith frowned on modern indulgences like the cinema. That she finally agreed laid the stage for an evening that would change Jack Heyland’s life in more ways than one.
When I first laid eyes on Prêtresse Lucine Saroyan, she was dressed in the simple habit of her sect in a white robe and turban and was leading a group of Haitian children in the Israelite Hymn to Unity[1]. I remember seeing her dark eyes shine with the kind of fervour that my beloved Statie had used to have when we first met[2]. Her voice soared with theirs, strong and clear, making me painfully conscious of my uniform and weapons and the days’ worth of sweat on my body and unkempt stubble on my chin.
I remember being struck by seeing the real acceptance and love the community seemed to have for someone with what I at first took to be a Lanney face and complexion[3].I was struck, too, not just by the extraordinary beauty of her features--though make no mistake, it wasn’t lost on me that she was a living work of art--but also by the force of her conviction. Something in me has always been attracted to religious women full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, and it certainly doesn’t have much to do with being very holy in my own right. I suppose old Dr. Fuller would tell me this was about my subconscious’ imprinting on my mother, and I’d have to say he was right, and that there’s certainly nothing to be done about it now.[4] But I remember thinking, when I first saw her then: She will never look more beautiful than at this moment. My first sight of her on our evening at the Parisiana disproved that belief conclusively.
As I went to retrieve her from her billet in Pétion-Ville, a far cry from my quarters at the Beau Rivage, it was only my second time seeing Lucine without her religious garb[5]. She wore a dainty white evening dress of lace and georgette and had her flowing locks bound up in a more casual style of headdress--she even allowed herself some colour here, for this turban was in Haitian colours of red and blue--and she sported a pair of earrings and the silver necklace I’d once gifted her. It was the extent of her concessions to fashion; Lucine inveighed often against the industry of cosmetics and refused to wear them, but then she of all women had no need to.
I remember the shyness of the smile she gave me, as if she felt naked without the garb of her faith, and I tried to reward the trust she was showing me by being at my most attentive, protective and solicitous as we climbed in our rented Hayer and I chaperoned my sweetheart, with the some misgivings, into the rowdier streets of greater Port-au-Prince.
It was the weekend after Defile Kanaval and there were rara processions in the streets even now, the sound of drums and trumpets and the hollow drones of vaksins a constant[6]. By this time of the evening the lyrics had gotten ruder and we caught snatches of song through the windows that made Lucine blush a little, for all that she was familiar enough with the earthy side of Haiti not to shock easily. Some of them shocked me, too, for somewhat different reasons:
Normal though it was for rara to get more and more irreverent as a day went on, there was something different in the tone of that one that made my hair stand on end.
I tried not to let my disturbance show, and Lucine reassured me for her part, simply grinning and saying: “Ah, what scamps. You see why I love my rude little mission so much.”
“I do,” I laughed, perhaps a bit forced. “I love it, too, you know that. But when I learned you hadn’t been to the cinema yet, well… trust me when I tell you this is worth it.”
Lucine, not in the least given to displays of affection in public, actually gave me a peck on the cheek and a smile, then, and let out a tinkle of gay laughter as she saw my look of wonderment. “Of course I trust you, Jack. That’s why I’m here.”
In truth I should’ve preferred to visit with Lucine in the more rarified precincts where her billet lived, except that I was keen to show her the wonders of modernity we’d played a role in bringing here, and its central showcase was the Parisiana, where many of our compatriots convened of an evening. I’ll admit it could be that I was keen to have her associate me with the bustling excitement of the city’s downtown, too.
That one overheard rara aside, actually the city was showing a friendly face that night. It was a perfect night for an outing, a cool breeze wafting in from the sea to keep some of the city’s more pungent smells at bay. The talking film was all the rage and the films at the Parisiana gave us all a nostalgic taste of home: you could go there to see Gad Pendarvis in The Fox or The Sword and the Bow, or watch Blango and Copes poke fun at life’s absurdities in Nuts for Coconuts, or weep along with Myrtilla van Alsten as she fell extravagantly in love with one handsome beau or another. It also served as a propaganda vehicle for His Excellency the President, who always purchased half the theatre outright as seating for the city’s poor. Palmey sponsorship for the Haitian National Cinema Foundation was one of the few support projects still fully funded outside of the military, and tonight there was great buzz about the double screening of a new Pendarvis swashbuckler, Our Man Israel, and L’Empereur Dessalines, the latest of the full-length Haitian historical epics Danastor was so fond of[8].
The Parisiana crowd was, as my friend Edwin once put it, “a who’s who of whoever is who” in the city at any given time. As Lucine and I stepped into the front hallway[9], I wouldn’t say I was exactly showing her off, it would have been beneath either of us, but I must confess I did notice the way some of the men’s eyes followed us with envy, and it did put an extra puff of pride in my chest.
Lucine held tight to my hand as we bought our tickets and stood in line for a concessions which mainly served tea or Kremas (I yearned for the latter but bought the former). But she was personable and outwardly unflappable as we encountered a rotating cast of Palmey officers and their Haitian mistresses.
I was disagreeably surprised to see that one of these was Chester Tredwell, who run an outfit in Marmelade and who I’d thought was still in country. He was a boor’s boor and dark rumours swirled around his boys, but he had somehow over the past couple of years conceived the idea that he and I were bosom friends, and he quickly homed in on me.
“Jack!” He thumped me on the back. “Quite an age[10]! How’s it now?”
“Chester.” I tried to tread the line between politeness and reserve as I introduced Lucine, who gave him one of her radiant, open-hearted smiles as I politely inquired after his health and the welfare of his lads.
“Can’t none of us complain,” said Chester expansively. “The lads are having a fine time of it, all dem ah feh fi boh-yoh kapa, ah yeh[11]?”
“Glad to hear it.” I tried for prudent restraint, but I couldn’t stop myself from adding: “Ah sake ah I heard about some troubles, pettey?[12]”
“Bah.” He made a dismissive gesture and grinned. “Ti gason yon praal ti gason, you know how it is. I don’t take notice of it. The job is the job, you’ve got to let them blow off some steam.”
“Boys will be boys. Tru deh, Chester. We’d say the same in our country, ah yeh?”
Chester’s smile faltered into a quizzical frown. I had plainly failed to keep the bitterness out of my reply, neutrally as I tried to phrase it, for a moment later Lucine was adroitly steering us clear of him before either of us could say anything more. I fumed and had to clench my jaw to suppress my rage as she counselled me, sotto voce: “Easy now, my love. Try not to get us in a tappey.”
I breathed deep and heeded her words. She was right. Getting in a fistfight with a colleague was not the best way to set the tone for a night out. But my anger simmered. Chester’s boys has become infamous for what could most charitably be described as inappropriate liaisons with the locals, in some cases girls younger than twelve, and they’d occasioned great fury from the people as a result. His was the kind of attitude that made the Mission far more difficult for the rest of us.
Luckily our next encounter en route to our seats was more pleasant. It was with Samfeyo Calixte and his wife Timize, both intimates of His Excellency the President. Samfeyo was a Lieutenant Colonel, one of those rare individuals in the Haitian Army who was well regarded by mulattoes, Palmeys and Blacks alike; he himself was as Black as Haitians came, as was his wife, an actress from a poor and obscure background whose beauty no man of any race could dispute, one of those women -- much like Lucine -- who seemed simply to glow from the inside out. The pair of them were like a palate-cleanser after the brief and unpleasant encounter with Chester Tredwell, and Lucine warmed to them immediately.
We fell in and I chatted with them for some time about the relative virtues of various Pendarvis[13] films, on which the Calixtes were something of an authority. (They were thorough partisans of The Fox, though they reluctantly admitted the virtues of The Sword and the Bow.) Timize was the most excited of all the company for L’Empereur Dessalines, having many times seen the play on which it was based and expressing mixed emotions of anticipation and guardedness about its adaptation to the cinema. We took our seats together and gabbled at each other until the master of ceremonies took the stage and the house quieted. Not long after his brief speech, the magic commenced.
As Our Man Israel began in earnest, I caught the glance of a gentleman in the foreward rows. He nodded and winked at me. I could scarcely refuse to acknowledge him, though I can’t say his presence was entirely welcome on this of all occasions. It was none other than my old friend Edwin Morel.
As was the custom, the whole house rose in applause to His Excellency--who was in personal attendance, as was not uncommon--at the end of the show. Lucine by this time was altogether a convert to the idea of the cinema, on account of having been moved to cheers by the first feature and reduced to tears by the dreadful tragedy of the second. The excursion was a palpable hit, which delighted me -- along with certain looks of wholly welcome passion shorn of shyness in my lady’s eyes -- but I had a hurdle to overcome before the end of the night. For as we made our way for the exit, basking in our mutual affection, Teddy Morel caught up with me.
He caught me by the elbow. By the left elbow in particular; it’s curious how vivid that little detail is in retrospect. Grinning and leaning in as if to tell me a joke, he immediately put paid to my joie de vivre with a single utterance.
He told me: “One of ours is turned.”
I felt frozen as I heard him say it. Managed back, sotto voce: “Are you sure?”
“There are patterns,” he elaborated. “Emanating from a point in your Department. It can only be a Palmey, he knows too much about how our patrols move. He’s a Vodoun enthusiast, or thinks of himself as one, and he has designs on other ‘foreigners.’ You’ll need to deal with him. I’ll be in touch.”
I have to confess that the intrusion of matters of blood and death on this golden evening wasn’t welcome. I must have seemed dreadfully distracted for the last part of the night, but Lucine was gracious about it, generous as her nature always was.
I daresay I came back fully to myself when I was dropping her home and her lips touched mine, fully and sweetly, for the first time. In normal circumstances, whatever those might be, I would have thought of little else but the dissolve into that honeyed kiss on my way back to the hotel.
But Morel’s voice nagged at me. The thought of one of our very own conducting the accursed Nonwar against us chilled me to the bone. Could it possibly be true?
To my eternal regret, it was. And the hunt for that grotesque malcontent, one of the most malign individuals it was ever my misfortune to encounter, would be one of the most harrowing episodes of my entire venture in Perline.
Jack Heyland was at this time three years away from departing Haiti, returning to Palmera in 1934. As he and other occupying forces left -- Lucine Saroyan left with him and became his second wife -- a mulatto lawyer named Mauleart Roy, aide to Danastor and arguably the second-most-powerful figure in the Haitian government behind His Excellency, was sworn in as President.
The Second Expeditionary Force did indeed achieve its minimal condition of victory: Ovince Danastor left office peacefully and had no need to flee the country. Roy himself was a staunch Catholic who did not remotely understand the essence of Danastorisme, however, and did not follow through on its promises to both the “house” and the “field.” It would seem at first as though this part of the Palmeran mission was a failure.
However, Danastor remained an eminence grise in Haitian politics, and was in fact suspected of being the motive force behind a conspiracy to unseat Roy, who did not last long. Come 1937 he was deposed by the Calixtes, who did understand Danastorisme and used it to the full, effectively becoming houngan and mambo, Mother and Father to the nation. Though they would nominally hold elections, theirs would effectively be a dictatorship, the longest-lived government in Haitian history after Danastor himself, lasting until the mid-Fifties. In Palmera, the Calixtes had a whole network of friends and associates cultivated--like Jack and Lucine Heyland--during the Nonwar years, which translated into political influence and a generous source of support and credit. Among these men and women the basic fiction of their being democratically elected leaders and more importantly of their being a force for the long-term stabilization of Perline became something of an article of faith.
Heyland’s book was not an action yarn and would be curiously reticent on the details and identity of the Nemoist traitor Morel alerts him to here, whom he eventually tracked and killed over the ensuing few months in Artibonite; the man proved lethal, wily and elusive, and even writing the story years later, Heyland would seem baffled and frustrated by how his target, a non-native, seemed to have so much support from malleys in the countryside. What he did not understand--what very few Palmeys ever understood--was that Vodoun’s most important feats of syncretism were not between African faiths and Christianity, but among the African faiths themselves. There were twenty-one different Nanchons or “nations,” of which (to put it a bit over-simplistically) Danastorisme chiefly represented the Radha tradition; it was the Petro Nanchon, fiery and revolutionary and sometimes violent, that had captured the heart of Heyland’s adversary, and the story of the Hunt in Artibonite (which actually became a later subject of films and books by people other than Heyland) was testament to its unrecognised power.
The Petro Nanchon would grow seemingly quiet to outside eyes during the Calixte regime. But its return to the stage of politics was coming.
[1] A version of “Out of the Depths, I Cry to Thee, O Lord” by Martin Luther. The most profound differences begin to appear in the second verse: “Tribulation is Thy Will, O Lord / And heart alone avail us / Prayer on prayer could ne’er our guilt remove / Faith at Last Hour would fail us. / We know that none may seek escape from Thee / But own in troth Thy Will shall always be / Union among the Righteous.” And it proceeds in that vein.
[2] A reference to Statira King-Heyland, Jack’s first wife from whom he was at this point separated and would soon be divorced. “Statie” was already cutting a figure among religious evangelists of this era in Palmera herself; she and Jack never had children.
[3] Lucine was Armenian, and looked somewhat Mediterranean to most eyes and “Lanney” from a Palmey perspective, save the straightness of her hair.
[4] “I suppose old Dr. Fuller would tell me this was about my subconscious’ imprintation on my mother . . . “ Dr. Fuller here referenced is Simon Cantrell Fuller, an analogue of Solomon Carter Fuller, the first Black psychiatrist IOTL. Here he’s a Palmey rather than a Liberian and has access to a much larger and more welcoming medical establishment, allowing him to a play a foundational role in the emerging language of psychiatry in Palmera much like Freud did (and his parallel will still do) in the wider world.
[5] Lucine was a Tribulationist missionary and was accustomed to wear the sect’s robes and turban during the missionary work in which Jack first encountered her.
[6] “the hollow drones of vaksins a constant” -- the vaksin is a Haitian horn much similar in function to the abeng seen earlier in the Parrish Field Ruction.
[7] Danastor, the country is for you
This is a species of betiz, a kind of ribald genre of Kriyol social satire commonplace in Haitian rara music (especially later in the day after the libations have started flowing; rara also features more traditional Vodoun prayer songs). Take my Kriyol, the accompanying translation and even the notion that betiz like this were being sung this early in the twentieth century all with a big dash of salt. That said, the gleefully profane tone and content is based on real examples of betiz, which is why I couldn’t resist. There is an unusually bitter and overtly political note present here which aside from indicating a possible downside to the increased integration of Vodoun and political involvement, also hints at a harsh mood rising in the country. Hence Jack’s concern.
[8] “the full-length Haitian historical epics Danastor was so fond of” Danastorisme was very much concerned, by both Palmeran and Danastor’s own design, with establishing an internationally-recognized sense of Haitian history and identity. Both parties had perceived that film was a key tool in making this happen.
[9] “As Lucine and I stepped into the front hallway” The Parisiana was a converted church and lacked much in the way of a lobby space. The front hallway here is much as you’d find in most churches. The real Cinema Parisiana in Haiti was burned down in arson attack in 1930 IOTL; that it still stands here is a testament to at least some success by Palmey and regime forces in keeping the country stable.
[10] “Quite an age” Meaning it’s been a long time. Emerging as a common Palmey greeting in this period.
[11] “ all dem ah feh fi boh-yoh kapa . . .”’They’re all doing the best they can.’ Very Haitian-influenced Chatta.
[12] “pettey” -- A little bit.
[13] Gad Pendarvis is an emigrant from British Guiana and the Union’s answer to figures like Cagney and Bogart (who have parallels ITTL). He’s in the first flight of his fame here and though he makes his early name in pseudo-historical swashbucklers, he will later be known for his multi-faceted tough guy roles like Enemy of the Crown. He is an analogue of Percy Verwayen.
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
Finishing up in Haiti for a while so I can switch the focus back to Palmera proper.
The Parisiana
(from Ayo Perline! by Maj. Jack Heyland, OP, OBE, CMG)
(from Ayo Perline! by Maj. Jack Heyland, OP, OBE, CMG)
Jack Heyland commanded a detachment of scouts in Artibonite, supposedly protecting a roads and sanitation project which--as Edwin Morel had predicted--quickly ground to a halt as the Great Depression set in. He also guarded several missionary operations in the Department, many of which continued stubbornly to operate as best they could money or no money, and several of which came down with the mysterious cases of vandalism or random attacks so characteristic of the Nonwar.
Of particular interest to Heyland was the Temple de Saint-Salomon mission in La Chappelle. This was one of the Tribulationist missions that Edwin Morel referred to as having “surprised” people, and it was run in part by a particularly beautiful and virtuous prêtresse named Lucine Saroyan[a], who came to occupy a significant place in the memoir. While on leave to Port-au-Prince in 1931 he persuaded Lucine to accompany him, and eventually to join him at one of the city’s great centres of culture and nightlife, the Cinema Parisiana.
The excursion was a hard sell: Lucine’s faith frowned on modern indulgences like the cinema. That she finally agreed laid the stage for an evening that would change Jack Heyland’s life in more ways than one.
* * *
When I first laid eyes on Prêtresse Lucine Saroyan, she was dressed in the simple habit of her sect in a white robe and turban and was leading a group of Haitian children in the Israelite Hymn to Unity[1]. I remember seeing her dark eyes shine with the kind of fervour that my beloved Statie had used to have when we first met[2]. Her voice soared with theirs, strong and clear, making me painfully conscious of my uniform and weapons and the days’ worth of sweat on my body and unkempt stubble on my chin.
I remember being struck by seeing the real acceptance and love the community seemed to have for someone with what I at first took to be a Lanney face and complexion[3].I was struck, too, not just by the extraordinary beauty of her features--though make no mistake, it wasn’t lost on me that she was a living work of art--but also by the force of her conviction. Something in me has always been attracted to religious women full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, and it certainly doesn’t have much to do with being very holy in my own right. I suppose old Dr. Fuller would tell me this was about my subconscious’ imprinting on my mother, and I’d have to say he was right, and that there’s certainly nothing to be done about it now.[4] But I remember thinking, when I first saw her then: She will never look more beautiful than at this moment. My first sight of her on our evening at the Parisiana disproved that belief conclusively.
As I went to retrieve her from her billet in Pétion-Ville, a far cry from my quarters at the Beau Rivage, it was only my second time seeing Lucine without her religious garb[5]. She wore a dainty white evening dress of lace and georgette and had her flowing locks bound up in a more casual style of headdress--she even allowed herself some colour here, for this turban was in Haitian colours of red and blue--and she sported a pair of earrings and the silver necklace I’d once gifted her. It was the extent of her concessions to fashion; Lucine inveighed often against the industry of cosmetics and refused to wear them, but then she of all women had no need to.
I remember the shyness of the smile she gave me, as if she felt naked without the garb of her faith, and I tried to reward the trust she was showing me by being at my most attentive, protective and solicitous as we climbed in our rented Hayer and I chaperoned my sweetheart, with the some misgivings, into the rowdier streets of greater Port-au-Prince.
It was the weekend after Defile Kanaval and there were rara processions in the streets even now, the sound of drums and trumpets and the hollow drones of vaksins a constant[6]. By this time of the evening the lyrics had gotten ruder and we caught snatches of song through the windows that made Lucine blush a little, for all that she was familiar enough with the earthy side of Haiti not to shock easily. Some of them shocked me, too, for somewhat different reasons:
"Danastor, peyi a se pou ou
Pran bouzen jan ou tanpri
Danastor, pi bon ou vis bouzen
Pase ke ou vis peyi a
Danastor, pi bon ou rete arebò langèt
Pase ale andedan pèp la"[7]
Pran bouzen jan ou tanpri
Danastor, pi bon ou vis bouzen
Pase ke ou vis peyi a
Danastor, pi bon ou rete arebò langèt
Pase ale andedan pèp la"[7]
Normal though it was for rara to get more and more irreverent as a day went on, there was something different in the tone of that one that made my hair stand on end.
I tried not to let my disturbance show, and Lucine reassured me for her part, simply grinning and saying: “Ah, what scamps. You see why I love my rude little mission so much.”
“I do,” I laughed, perhaps a bit forced. “I love it, too, you know that. But when I learned you hadn’t been to the cinema yet, well… trust me when I tell you this is worth it.”
Lucine, not in the least given to displays of affection in public, actually gave me a peck on the cheek and a smile, then, and let out a tinkle of gay laughter as she saw my look of wonderment. “Of course I trust you, Jack. That’s why I’m here.”
* * *
In truth I should’ve preferred to visit with Lucine in the more rarified precincts where her billet lived, except that I was keen to show her the wonders of modernity we’d played a role in bringing here, and its central showcase was the Parisiana, where many of our compatriots convened of an evening. I’ll admit it could be that I was keen to have her associate me with the bustling excitement of the city’s downtown, too.
That one overheard rara aside, actually the city was showing a friendly face that night. It was a perfect night for an outing, a cool breeze wafting in from the sea to keep some of the city’s more pungent smells at bay. The talking film was all the rage and the films at the Parisiana gave us all a nostalgic taste of home: you could go there to see Gad Pendarvis in The Fox or The Sword and the Bow, or watch Blango and Copes poke fun at life’s absurdities in Nuts for Coconuts, or weep along with Myrtilla van Alsten as she fell extravagantly in love with one handsome beau or another. It also served as a propaganda vehicle for His Excellency the President, who always purchased half the theatre outright as seating for the city’s poor. Palmey sponsorship for the Haitian National Cinema Foundation was one of the few support projects still fully funded outside of the military, and tonight there was great buzz about the double screening of a new Pendarvis swashbuckler, Our Man Israel, and L’Empereur Dessalines, the latest of the full-length Haitian historical epics Danastor was so fond of[8].
The Parisiana crowd was, as my friend Edwin once put it, “a who’s who of whoever is who” in the city at any given time. As Lucine and I stepped into the front hallway[9], I wouldn’t say I was exactly showing her off, it would have been beneath either of us, but I must confess I did notice the way some of the men’s eyes followed us with envy, and it did put an extra puff of pride in my chest.
Lucine held tight to my hand as we bought our tickets and stood in line for a concessions which mainly served tea or Kremas (I yearned for the latter but bought the former). But she was personable and outwardly unflappable as we encountered a rotating cast of Palmey officers and their Haitian mistresses.
I was disagreeably surprised to see that one of these was Chester Tredwell, who run an outfit in Marmelade and who I’d thought was still in country. He was a boor’s boor and dark rumours swirled around his boys, but he had somehow over the past couple of years conceived the idea that he and I were bosom friends, and he quickly homed in on me.
“Jack!” He thumped me on the back. “Quite an age[10]! How’s it now?”
“Chester.” I tried to tread the line between politeness and reserve as I introduced Lucine, who gave him one of her radiant, open-hearted smiles as I politely inquired after his health and the welfare of his lads.
“Can’t none of us complain,” said Chester expansively. “The lads are having a fine time of it, all dem ah feh fi boh-yoh kapa, ah yeh[11]?”
“Glad to hear it.” I tried for prudent restraint, but I couldn’t stop myself from adding: “Ah sake ah I heard about some troubles, pettey?[12]”
“Bah.” He made a dismissive gesture and grinned. “Ti gason yon praal ti gason, you know how it is. I don’t take notice of it. The job is the job, you’ve got to let them blow off some steam.”
“Boys will be boys. Tru deh, Chester. We’d say the same in our country, ah yeh?”
Chester’s smile faltered into a quizzical frown. I had plainly failed to keep the bitterness out of my reply, neutrally as I tried to phrase it, for a moment later Lucine was adroitly steering us clear of him before either of us could say anything more. I fumed and had to clench my jaw to suppress my rage as she counselled me, sotto voce: “Easy now, my love. Try not to get us in a tappey.”
I breathed deep and heeded her words. She was right. Getting in a fistfight with a colleague was not the best way to set the tone for a night out. But my anger simmered. Chester’s boys has become infamous for what could most charitably be described as inappropriate liaisons with the locals, in some cases girls younger than twelve, and they’d occasioned great fury from the people as a result. His was the kind of attitude that made the Mission far more difficult for the rest of us.
Luckily our next encounter en route to our seats was more pleasant. It was with Samfeyo Calixte and his wife Timize, both intimates of His Excellency the President. Samfeyo was a Lieutenant Colonel, one of those rare individuals in the Haitian Army who was well regarded by mulattoes, Palmeys and Blacks alike; he himself was as Black as Haitians came, as was his wife, an actress from a poor and obscure background whose beauty no man of any race could dispute, one of those women -- much like Lucine -- who seemed simply to glow from the inside out. The pair of them were like a palate-cleanser after the brief and unpleasant encounter with Chester Tredwell, and Lucine warmed to them immediately.
We fell in and I chatted with them for some time about the relative virtues of various Pendarvis[13] films, on which the Calixtes were something of an authority. (They were thorough partisans of The Fox, though they reluctantly admitted the virtues of The Sword and the Bow.) Timize was the most excited of all the company for L’Empereur Dessalines, having many times seen the play on which it was based and expressing mixed emotions of anticipation and guardedness about its adaptation to the cinema. We took our seats together and gabbled at each other until the master of ceremonies took the stage and the house quieted. Not long after his brief speech, the magic commenced.
As Our Man Israel began in earnest, I caught the glance of a gentleman in the foreward rows. He nodded and winked at me. I could scarcely refuse to acknowledge him, though I can’t say his presence was entirely welcome on this of all occasions. It was none other than my old friend Edwin Morel.
* * *
As was the custom, the whole house rose in applause to His Excellency--who was in personal attendance, as was not uncommon--at the end of the show. Lucine by this time was altogether a convert to the idea of the cinema, on account of having been moved to cheers by the first feature and reduced to tears by the dreadful tragedy of the second. The excursion was a palpable hit, which delighted me -- along with certain looks of wholly welcome passion shorn of shyness in my lady’s eyes -- but I had a hurdle to overcome before the end of the night. For as we made our way for the exit, basking in our mutual affection, Teddy Morel caught up with me.
He caught me by the elbow. By the left elbow in particular; it’s curious how vivid that little detail is in retrospect. Grinning and leaning in as if to tell me a joke, he immediately put paid to my joie de vivre with a single utterance.
He told me: “One of ours is turned.”
I felt frozen as I heard him say it. Managed back, sotto voce: “Are you sure?”
“There are patterns,” he elaborated. “Emanating from a point in your Department. It can only be a Palmey, he knows too much about how our patrols move. He’s a Vodoun enthusiast, or thinks of himself as one, and he has designs on other ‘foreigners.’ You’ll need to deal with him. I’ll be in touch.”
I have to confess that the intrusion of matters of blood and death on this golden evening wasn’t welcome. I must have seemed dreadfully distracted for the last part of the night, but Lucine was gracious about it, generous as her nature always was.
I daresay I came back fully to myself when I was dropping her home and her lips touched mine, fully and sweetly, for the first time. In normal circumstances, whatever those might be, I would have thought of little else but the dissolve into that honeyed kiss on my way back to the hotel.
But Morel’s voice nagged at me. The thought of one of our very own conducting the accursed Nonwar against us chilled me to the bone. Could it possibly be true?
To my eternal regret, it was. And the hunt for that grotesque malcontent, one of the most malign individuals it was ever my misfortune to encounter, would be one of the most harrowing episodes of my entire venture in Perline.
* * *
Jack Heyland was at this time three years away from departing Haiti, returning to Palmera in 1934. As he and other occupying forces left -- Lucine Saroyan left with him and became his second wife -- a mulatto lawyer named Mauleart Roy, aide to Danastor and arguably the second-most-powerful figure in the Haitian government behind His Excellency, was sworn in as President.
The Second Expeditionary Force did indeed achieve its minimal condition of victory: Ovince Danastor left office peacefully and had no need to flee the country. Roy himself was a staunch Catholic who did not remotely understand the essence of Danastorisme, however, and did not follow through on its promises to both the “house” and the “field.” It would seem at first as though this part of the Palmeran mission was a failure.
However, Danastor remained an eminence grise in Haitian politics, and was in fact suspected of being the motive force behind a conspiracy to unseat Roy, who did not last long. Come 1937 he was deposed by the Calixtes, who did understand Danastorisme and used it to the full, effectively becoming houngan and mambo, Mother and Father to the nation. Though they would nominally hold elections, theirs would effectively be a dictatorship, the longest-lived government in Haitian history after Danastor himself, lasting until the mid-Fifties. In Palmera, the Calixtes had a whole network of friends and associates cultivated--like Jack and Lucine Heyland--during the Nonwar years, which translated into political influence and a generous source of support and credit. Among these men and women the basic fiction of their being democratically elected leaders and more importantly of their being a force for the long-term stabilization of Perline became something of an article of faith.
Heyland’s book was not an action yarn and would be curiously reticent on the details and identity of the Nemoist traitor Morel alerts him to here, whom he eventually tracked and killed over the ensuing few months in Artibonite; the man proved lethal, wily and elusive, and even writing the story years later, Heyland would seem baffled and frustrated by how his target, a non-native, seemed to have so much support from malleys in the countryside. What he did not understand--what very few Palmeys ever understood--was that Vodoun’s most important feats of syncretism were not between African faiths and Christianity, but among the African faiths themselves. There were twenty-one different Nanchons or “nations,” of which (to put it a bit over-simplistically) Danastorisme chiefly represented the Radha tradition; it was the Petro Nanchon, fiery and revolutionary and sometimes violent, that had captured the heart of Heyland’s adversary, and the story of the Hunt in Artibonite (which actually became a later subject of films and books by people other than Heyland) was testament to its unrecognised power.
The Petro Nanchon would grow seemingly quiet to outside eyes during the Calixte regime. But its return to the stage of politics was coming.
* * *
[1] A version of “Out of the Depths, I Cry to Thee, O Lord” by Martin Luther. The most profound differences begin to appear in the second verse: “Tribulation is Thy Will, O Lord / And heart alone avail us / Prayer on prayer could ne’er our guilt remove / Faith at Last Hour would fail us. / We know that none may seek escape from Thee / But own in troth Thy Will shall always be / Union among the Righteous.” And it proceeds in that vein.
[2] A reference to Statira King-Heyland, Jack’s first wife from whom he was at this point separated and would soon be divorced. “Statie” was already cutting a figure among religious evangelists of this era in Palmera herself; she and Jack never had children.
[3] Lucine was Armenian, and looked somewhat Mediterranean to most eyes and “Lanney” from a Palmey perspective, save the straightness of her hair.
[4] “I suppose old Dr. Fuller would tell me this was about my subconscious’ imprintation on my mother . . . “ Dr. Fuller here referenced is Simon Cantrell Fuller, an analogue of Solomon Carter Fuller, the first Black psychiatrist IOTL. Here he’s a Palmey rather than a Liberian and has access to a much larger and more welcoming medical establishment, allowing him to a play a foundational role in the emerging language of psychiatry in Palmera much like Freud did (and his parallel will still do) in the wider world.
[5] Lucine was a Tribulationist missionary and was accustomed to wear the sect’s robes and turban during the missionary work in which Jack first encountered her.
[6] “the hollow drones of vaksins a constant” -- the vaksin is a Haitian horn much similar in function to the abeng seen earlier in the Parrish Field Ruction.
[7] Danastor, the country is for you
Take whores as you please
Danastor, better you screw whores
Than that you screw the country
Danastor, better you stay on the side of the clitoris
Than go inside the people
Danastor, better you screw whores
Than that you screw the country
Danastor, better you stay on the side of the clitoris
Than go inside the people
This is a species of betiz, a kind of ribald genre of Kriyol social satire commonplace in Haitian rara music (especially later in the day after the libations have started flowing; rara also features more traditional Vodoun prayer songs). Take my Kriyol, the accompanying translation and even the notion that betiz like this were being sung this early in the twentieth century all with a big dash of salt. That said, the gleefully profane tone and content is based on real examples of betiz, which is why I couldn’t resist. There is an unusually bitter and overtly political note present here which aside from indicating a possible downside to the increased integration of Vodoun and political involvement, also hints at a harsh mood rising in the country. Hence Jack’s concern.
[8] “the full-length Haitian historical epics Danastor was so fond of” Danastorisme was very much concerned, by both Palmeran and Danastor’s own design, with establishing an internationally-recognized sense of Haitian history and identity. Both parties had perceived that film was a key tool in making this happen.
[9] “As Lucine and I stepped into the front hallway” The Parisiana was a converted church and lacked much in the way of a lobby space. The front hallway here is much as you’d find in most churches. The real Cinema Parisiana in Haiti was burned down in arson attack in 1930 IOTL; that it still stands here is a testament to at least some success by Palmey and regime forces in keeping the country stable.
[10] “Quite an age” Meaning it’s been a long time. Emerging as a common Palmey greeting in this period.
[11] “ all dem ah feh fi boh-yoh kapa . . .”’They’re all doing the best they can.’ Very Haitian-influenced Chatta.
[12] “pettey” -- A little bit.
[13] Gad Pendarvis is an emigrant from British Guiana and the Union’s answer to figures like Cagney and Bogart (who have parallels ITTL). He’s in the first flight of his fame here and though he makes his early name in pseudo-historical swashbucklers, he will later be known for his multi-faceted tough guy roles like Enemy of the Crown. He is an analogue of Percy Verwayen.
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The Dawn of a Tumultuous Decade
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
The Parisiana. Jack Heyland's later adventures in "Perline."
The Dawn of a Tumultuous Decade: 1932 was a year of great significance in Palmera just as it was abroad. As the Union had been focused on its own troubles and, to an extent, those of the "near abroad" -- most especially Haiti -- the world had been hurtling from one precipice to another. It was partly the failure of her long-time political elites to fully understand the challenges of this new world that would finally end Palmera's sixty-five years of Jucker political dominance. Two strands of noireist nationalism, each of which grasped different elements of the political moment, were propelling the Liberty and Justice Party to the forefront of the national political scene.
The first of these, educated and eloquent, voluminously specific about its policy plans and driven by concern with Jucker corruption and political sclerosis, had chosen a "Tumbley" firebrand named Horace Cayton as its champion. In a way it could be seen as the "wonks' wing" of the LJP, sometimes called the "Talented Tenth" in a phrase that had originated with liberal philanthropists and been popularized by the Chicuchatty Movement[1]. It was determined to defend democratic traditions on the world stage and disgusted by the increasing failure of the Juckers to do so. One of its most stirring -- and famous -- representatives was a professor named W.E.B. DuBois, Berlin-educated intellectual and long-time leader of the Chicuchatty Movement, who helped give voice to public disgust over the growing stench of corruption that was becoming harder and harder to mask on the Jucker establishment and eloquently embraced and championed what the LJP saw as a fresh version of the expansive, muscular cultural and economic vision of great figures of the past like Micajah Dalton.
The second strand was populist, in many ways imitating the fine old backslapping, deal-making style of a figure like Big Ike Forsyth, but pitched more stridently to a different audience and trading on the same rude spirit of populism that was stirring elsewhere in the world. This was a noireist movement named for a now-dead Jamaican coproral who'd been called Marcus Garvey, carried forward as a martyr to the Black cause by his squad-mate Godwyn Marchioness, who now went by the assumed African name of Manu Mansu. Manu Mansu's Garveyism was every bit as proudly nationalist as Cayton's liberalism, but it was considerably less worried about facts and policies and democratic niceties: it was politics of the gut, happy to ride in the same cart with the populism of Teton "Bats" Wallace nearby in the Marches[2], or even with the brutish Vultists of Italy or the Verkampfers of Germany (both of whom it periodically deplored but behaviourally imitated) [3]. Mansu began dressing in kente cloth and cap in the style of a West African chieftain[4] even as he entertained a motley cast of mobsters and opportunists from abroad who sensed he might well become the next Prime Minister. He harangued crowds in his rich baritone and above all took up the cause of Africa's exiled royals, who he maintained must be returned to their thrones.
Both of these wings of the LJP were fiery in denunciation of the Montserrado Forced Labour Scandal (also called the Bioko Crisis) of 1930 that was widely seen as spelling the real end of the Jucker dynasty: a scandal in which several companies close to the Bolton Government were found to be availing themselves illegally of forced labour marginally laundered through a Spanish colony off the coast of Africa known in Europe as Fernando Po. Proof positive that the Bolton Government had learned nothing from its embarrassment and near-collapse after the affair in Daltonville several years prior, the Bioko Crisis provided grist for LJP candidates right up until election day of 1932... although some people noticed with suspicion that Manu Mansu, who denounced the whole affair with the same fire as anyone else, was a major stockholder in one of the affected companies[5].
Outside of such opportunism, though, there were other things that stirred disquiet, and an urgency of action, in the "Cayton Wing" of the LJP. One of these was a fact-finding tour that embarked for Germany in the year of 1932, including several LJP magistrates and old Secret Service hands along with Cayton and DuBois. What they observed as political turmoil seized the country -- the chilling VDP or Vereinigte Deutschlandparty, known in popular parlance as the Verkampfers, taking an unorthodox route to power behind their ranting messianic leader Karl Kreiger -- was a movement that embodied all the most terrible qualities of a figure like old Leopold II, the Butcher of the Congo, allied to a frightful mass movement that was feeding gleefully on the worst in the national soul. This particularly shook DuBois, whose struggles for racial justice had been inspired and shaped by the critical spirit of Berlin academe, but who now found himself having conversations with one of his tour-mates like this one[6]:
The Vultists in Italy, led by the bombastic Pietro Craxi, were if anything even more alarming. They had been in power since the early Twenties, providing the model for similar Vultist movements across Europe, and aside from the police state that was giving birth to the term "totalitarianism" they were also increasingly loud in their desire to redeem Italy's modern imperial ambitions, in particular by avenging their defeat in Ethiopia. More ominously yet on the home front, the Mutual Respect Societies and their various ideological cousins -- increasingly frustrated in their desire to corner a share of a tourism market that it was beginning to seem might never recover anyway -- were growing increasingly tempted by the thuggish braggadoccio and outsized ambition of their European fellows[7]. Come 1931, police in various cities found themselves cracking down on Sutchey riots at a scale that hadn't been necessary for decades.
Every part of the political spectrum denounced this violence and resolved to combat it, of course, even the Respecters themselves; and every part of the political spectrum denounced the rest for not walking the talk. But Cayton and his faction went further. They conceived of the Palmera's mission as being, on the whole, one of anti-fascism on the world stage and at home, and advocated military spending to increase the nation's readiness to intervene on behalf of allies like Ethiopia.
This was a deeply controversial stance. For one thing, the Great Depression was at its nadir and it was not yet clear that Britain's abandonment of the gold standard -- a suit which Palmera had followed -- would accelerate the process of recovery, much less that increased military spending was a good idea. This was as deep a fissure in the LJP coalition as the class antagonism between Garveyite populism and Talented Tenth wonkishness; much of the Garveyite movement was opposed to foreign adventurism, or like Mansu had direct memories of the carnage of the trenches, recalled bitterly the fate of Black POWs on the Western Front and still resented the now-waning fiasco of the Nonwar in Haiti. This stance was in close alignment with Jucker establishment politics, which while not averse to foreign activity in principle was certainly determined (and this was a particular obsession of Bolton, who remembered the faces of Palmera's mothers looking blankly back at him as he got up to deliver his first "victory" speech) not to risk participating in another Great War should the occasion arise. And besides this, there was the question of testing Britain's patience as Ike Forsyth had done in the Haitian affair.
Such a fissure in the LJP movement gave the Juckers some reason for hope going into the 1932 election. It wasn't the only factor: they were also encouraged that the LJP remained undecided about its leadership until almost the last possible moment. As a younger man, Horace Cayton had led the LJP before... to a pasting in the 1920 elections so severe that he was forced to resign the leadership. Palmey politics didn't come equipped with second chances as a rule, and current LJP leader Henry Annisette was reluctant to step down in favour of either Horace Cayton or Manu Mansu, the latter a "ridiculous" figure in his estimation who might nevertheless beat a weak opponent at a leadership convention. He held the moment off until November of 1931, and Cayton won the prize by an uncomfortably small margin. The Juckers could be forgiven for seeing his trip with DuBois to Germany as a desperate last-minute election stunt, which in a way it was.
Perhaps more than this, the Juckers simply couldn't conceive of losing power. Bolton's anointed successor, Jim Kelty, was as solid and stalwart a Jucker as had ever lived, and heir to a political dynasty that had survived everything six-and-a-half decades of tumult could throw at it. Recent challenges notwithstanding, the nation had done better out of Jucker rule than anyone could have dreamed in 1867. Now that the world was growing yet more threatening and unstable, who would really want to change horses?
What the Juckers did not count on was the depth of public feeling roused by the old specters of Sutchey unrest and potential imperialist aggression. Cayton's seemingly controversial stance still tied in to a basic part of the national soul whose durability would surprise his opponent. More than that, the corruption scandals of the Twenties had gone further to tarnishing the Jucker reputation than anyone in the establishment had admitted to themselves. Come election day, the Congress' candidate Jim Kelty was dealt a thumping defeat: the LJP claimed the Commons by a seventeen-seat margin and dominated the Council of Executive Magistrates two seats to one by the time the dust had settled. The political dynasty had come to an end.
It was the beginning of nearly two decades in the political wilderness for a once all-dominating machine. A humiliated Lemuel Bolton went into a retirement at his Jamaican manor that looked a lot like exile. There was little enough time for anyone to gloat at the historic victory, though: events were moving quickly, and a Second World War was coming. It would come for Palmera before it reached most other nations of the West.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] The terminology of the "Talented Tenth" was a real phenomenon of OTL, popularised in both timelines by the work of W.E.B. DuBois. It is informal here, certainly not a part of any official messaging.
[2] Teton "Bats" Wallace is a Huey Long analogue, with similarly unconventional politics, ruthless political acumen and autocratic tendencies.
[3] The Vultists of course are counterparts of Italian Fascism (here their name comes from the crusader slogan "Deus lo Vult" or God Wills It). The Verkampfers of the German Unity Party are Teutonic Vultists, and there are parallel movements all over the European continent as there were IOTL. The broad outlines of how all this plays out will be roughly similar, although the details will of course differ considerably.
[4] The name Manu Mansu comes from a West African language. Godwyn Marchioness did not make up his ties to Marcus Garvey, whose half-formed Pan Africanism really did inspire him and which he has developed eloquently in this timeline.
[5] The Bioko Crisis parallels the Fernando Po Crisis in Liberia of OTL. Marcus Garvey's UNIA did try to get involved with the Liberian rubber trade -- an effort which collapsed before Fernando Po was uncovered -- and here the Garveyite movement has enough influence to stay the course and thus become entangled in the trade affairs of the region this timeline calls Montserrado. Nobody can really make this stick to Manu Mansu, though, who manifests the political skills to keep the affair from tainting his movement.
[6] The conversation here references a genocide in South West Africa which happened in OTL and was an antecedent for the Holocaust.
[7] You may recall the Respecters as that circumspect white supremacist faction who tried to stealth-segregate their own portion of the nascent Palmey beach tourism trade. Since it is already clear that their hopes in even this modest aim are not going to come to fruition, their composure is now fraying.
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
The Parisiana. Jack Heyland's later adventures in "Perline."
The Dawn of a Tumultuous Decade: 1932 was a year of great significance in Palmera just as it was abroad. As the Union had been focused on its own troubles and, to an extent, those of the "near abroad" -- most especially Haiti -- the world had been hurtling from one precipice to another. It was partly the failure of her long-time political elites to fully understand the challenges of this new world that would finally end Palmera's sixty-five years of Jucker political dominance. Two strands of noireist nationalism, each of which grasped different elements of the political moment, were propelling the Liberty and Justice Party to the forefront of the national political scene.
The first of these, educated and eloquent, voluminously specific about its policy plans and driven by concern with Jucker corruption and political sclerosis, had chosen a "Tumbley" firebrand named Horace Cayton as its champion. In a way it could be seen as the "wonks' wing" of the LJP, sometimes called the "Talented Tenth" in a phrase that had originated with liberal philanthropists and been popularized by the Chicuchatty Movement[1]. It was determined to defend democratic traditions on the world stage and disgusted by the increasing failure of the Juckers to do so. One of its most stirring -- and famous -- representatives was a professor named W.E.B. DuBois, Berlin-educated intellectual and long-time leader of the Chicuchatty Movement, who helped give voice to public disgust over the growing stench of corruption that was becoming harder and harder to mask on the Jucker establishment and eloquently embraced and championed what the LJP saw as a fresh version of the expansive, muscular cultural and economic vision of great figures of the past like Micajah Dalton.
The second strand was populist, in many ways imitating the fine old backslapping, deal-making style of a figure like Big Ike Forsyth, but pitched more stridently to a different audience and trading on the same rude spirit of populism that was stirring elsewhere in the world. This was a noireist movement named for a now-dead Jamaican coproral who'd been called Marcus Garvey, carried forward as a martyr to the Black cause by his squad-mate Godwyn Marchioness, who now went by the assumed African name of Manu Mansu. Manu Mansu's Garveyism was every bit as proudly nationalist as Cayton's liberalism, but it was considerably less worried about facts and policies and democratic niceties: it was politics of the gut, happy to ride in the same cart with the populism of Teton "Bats" Wallace nearby in the Marches[2], or even with the brutish Vultists of Italy or the Verkampfers of Germany (both of whom it periodically deplored but behaviourally imitated) [3]. Mansu began dressing in kente cloth and cap in the style of a West African chieftain[4] even as he entertained a motley cast of mobsters and opportunists from abroad who sensed he might well become the next Prime Minister. He harangued crowds in his rich baritone and above all took up the cause of Africa's exiled royals, who he maintained must be returned to their thrones.
Both of these wings of the LJP were fiery in denunciation of the Montserrado Forced Labour Scandal (also called the Bioko Crisis) of 1930 that was widely seen as spelling the real end of the Jucker dynasty: a scandal in which several companies close to the Bolton Government were found to be availing themselves illegally of forced labour marginally laundered through a Spanish colony off the coast of Africa known in Europe as Fernando Po. Proof positive that the Bolton Government had learned nothing from its embarrassment and near-collapse after the affair in Daltonville several years prior, the Bioko Crisis provided grist for LJP candidates right up until election day of 1932... although some people noticed with suspicion that Manu Mansu, who denounced the whole affair with the same fire as anyone else, was a major stockholder in one of the affected companies[5].
Outside of such opportunism, though, there were other things that stirred disquiet, and an urgency of action, in the "Cayton Wing" of the LJP. One of these was a fact-finding tour that embarked for Germany in the year of 1932, including several LJP magistrates and old Secret Service hands along with Cayton and DuBois. What they observed as political turmoil seized the country -- the chilling VDP or Vereinigte Deutschlandparty, known in popular parlance as the Verkampfers, taking an unorthodox route to power behind their ranting messianic leader Karl Kreiger -- was a movement that embodied all the most terrible qualities of a figure like old Leopold II, the Butcher of the Congo, allied to a frightful mass movement that was feeding gleefully on the worst in the national soul. This particularly shook DuBois, whose struggles for racial justice had been inspired and shaped by the critical spirit of Berlin academe, but who now found himself having conversations with one of his tour-mates like this one[6]:
"You see him there, on the stand behind Krieger?" My companion pointed to him. "I've seen his writings. His father was Governor of South-West Africa in 1904."
"Oh?" The date tugged at the corner of my mind, but there was such a profusion of colonial atrocities to choose from that I couldn't quite place it. "Remind me?"
"The suppression of the Herero and Nama tribes," he said grimly. "Like the Kitchener Camps in South Africa, only much worse. Extermination orders, mass slaughters -- they gave their victims serial numbers, sent people to their camps in cattle cars. In Britain they try to forget atrocities anywhere close to that, but him up there? He celebrates that stuff in his memoirs, idolizes his father for having done it. He wants to do the same thing to the Jews and Gypsies here. It speaks volumes that he's on that stage with Krieger."
"But... surely he won't have the chance?" I tried to say this with conviction, but I was looking with disquiet at the scale and fervour of the crowd that was soaking up Krieger's oratory. "They've gone as far as they can go, it seems to me. Krieger will never be Chancellor as he so earnestly demands to be."
My companion simply shrugged. It was as though he already knew.
"Oh?" The date tugged at the corner of my mind, but there was such a profusion of colonial atrocities to choose from that I couldn't quite place it. "Remind me?"
"The suppression of the Herero and Nama tribes," he said grimly. "Like the Kitchener Camps in South Africa, only much worse. Extermination orders, mass slaughters -- they gave their victims serial numbers, sent people to their camps in cattle cars. In Britain they try to forget atrocities anywhere close to that, but him up there? He celebrates that stuff in his memoirs, idolizes his father for having done it. He wants to do the same thing to the Jews and Gypsies here. It speaks volumes that he's on that stage with Krieger."
"But... surely he won't have the chance?" I tried to say this with conviction, but I was looking with disquiet at the scale and fervour of the crowd that was soaking up Krieger's oratory. "They've gone as far as they can go, it seems to me. Krieger will never be Chancellor as he so earnestly demands to be."
My companion simply shrugged. It was as though he already knew.
The Vultists in Italy, led by the bombastic Pietro Craxi, were if anything even more alarming. They had been in power since the early Twenties, providing the model for similar Vultist movements across Europe, and aside from the police state that was giving birth to the term "totalitarianism" they were also increasingly loud in their desire to redeem Italy's modern imperial ambitions, in particular by avenging their defeat in Ethiopia. More ominously yet on the home front, the Mutual Respect Societies and their various ideological cousins -- increasingly frustrated in their desire to corner a share of a tourism market that it was beginning to seem might never recover anyway -- were growing increasingly tempted by the thuggish braggadoccio and outsized ambition of their European fellows[7]. Come 1931, police in various cities found themselves cracking down on Sutchey riots at a scale that hadn't been necessary for decades.
Every part of the political spectrum denounced this violence and resolved to combat it, of course, even the Respecters themselves; and every part of the political spectrum denounced the rest for not walking the talk. But Cayton and his faction went further. They conceived of the Palmera's mission as being, on the whole, one of anti-fascism on the world stage and at home, and advocated military spending to increase the nation's readiness to intervene on behalf of allies like Ethiopia.
This was a deeply controversial stance. For one thing, the Great Depression was at its nadir and it was not yet clear that Britain's abandonment of the gold standard -- a suit which Palmera had followed -- would accelerate the process of recovery, much less that increased military spending was a good idea. This was as deep a fissure in the LJP coalition as the class antagonism between Garveyite populism and Talented Tenth wonkishness; much of the Garveyite movement was opposed to foreign adventurism, or like Mansu had direct memories of the carnage of the trenches, recalled bitterly the fate of Black POWs on the Western Front and still resented the now-waning fiasco of the Nonwar in Haiti. This stance was in close alignment with Jucker establishment politics, which while not averse to foreign activity in principle was certainly determined (and this was a particular obsession of Bolton, who remembered the faces of Palmera's mothers looking blankly back at him as he got up to deliver his first "victory" speech) not to risk participating in another Great War should the occasion arise. And besides this, there was the question of testing Britain's patience as Ike Forsyth had done in the Haitian affair.
Such a fissure in the LJP movement gave the Juckers some reason for hope going into the 1932 election. It wasn't the only factor: they were also encouraged that the LJP remained undecided about its leadership until almost the last possible moment. As a younger man, Horace Cayton had led the LJP before... to a pasting in the 1920 elections so severe that he was forced to resign the leadership. Palmey politics didn't come equipped with second chances as a rule, and current LJP leader Henry Annisette was reluctant to step down in favour of either Horace Cayton or Manu Mansu, the latter a "ridiculous" figure in his estimation who might nevertheless beat a weak opponent at a leadership convention. He held the moment off until November of 1931, and Cayton won the prize by an uncomfortably small margin. The Juckers could be forgiven for seeing his trip with DuBois to Germany as a desperate last-minute election stunt, which in a way it was.
Perhaps more than this, the Juckers simply couldn't conceive of losing power. Bolton's anointed successor, Jim Kelty, was as solid and stalwart a Jucker as had ever lived, and heir to a political dynasty that had survived everything six-and-a-half decades of tumult could throw at it. Recent challenges notwithstanding, the nation had done better out of Jucker rule than anyone could have dreamed in 1867. Now that the world was growing yet more threatening and unstable, who would really want to change horses?
What the Juckers did not count on was the depth of public feeling roused by the old specters of Sutchey unrest and potential imperialist aggression. Cayton's seemingly controversial stance still tied in to a basic part of the national soul whose durability would surprise his opponent. More than that, the corruption scandals of the Twenties had gone further to tarnishing the Jucker reputation than anyone in the establishment had admitted to themselves. Come election day, the Congress' candidate Jim Kelty was dealt a thumping defeat: the LJP claimed the Commons by a seventeen-seat margin and dominated the Council of Executive Magistrates two seats to one by the time the dust had settled. The political dynasty had come to an end.
It was the beginning of nearly two decades in the political wilderness for a once all-dominating machine. A humiliated Lemuel Bolton went into a retirement at his Jamaican manor that looked a lot like exile. There was little enough time for anyone to gloat at the historic victory, though: events were moving quickly, and a Second World War was coming. It would come for Palmera before it reached most other nations of the West.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] The terminology of the "Talented Tenth" was a real phenomenon of OTL, popularised in both timelines by the work of W.E.B. DuBois. It is informal here, certainly not a part of any official messaging.
[2] Teton "Bats" Wallace is a Huey Long analogue, with similarly unconventional politics, ruthless political acumen and autocratic tendencies.
[3] The Vultists of course are counterparts of Italian Fascism (here their name comes from the crusader slogan "Deus lo Vult" or God Wills It). The Verkampfers of the German Unity Party are Teutonic Vultists, and there are parallel movements all over the European continent as there were IOTL. The broad outlines of how all this plays out will be roughly similar, although the details will of course differ considerably.
[4] The name Manu Mansu comes from a West African language. Godwyn Marchioness did not make up his ties to Marcus Garvey, whose half-formed Pan Africanism really did inspire him and which he has developed eloquently in this timeline.
[5] The Bioko Crisis parallels the Fernando Po Crisis in Liberia of OTL. Marcus Garvey's UNIA did try to get involved with the Liberian rubber trade -- an effort which collapsed before Fernando Po was uncovered -- and here the Garveyite movement has enough influence to stay the course and thus become entangled in the trade affairs of the region this timeline calls Montserrado. Nobody can really make this stick to Manu Mansu, though, who manifests the political skills to keep the affair from tainting his movement.
[6] The conversation here references a genocide in South West Africa which happened in OTL and was an antecedent for the Holocaust.
[7] You may recall the Respecters as that circumspect white supremacist faction who tried to stealth-segregate their own portion of the nascent Palmey beach tourism trade. Since it is already clear that their hopes in even this modest aim are not going to come to fruition, their composure is now fraying.
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Man, it's alive! Thanks for that CeeJay, appreciated!
I like that Palmera's existence didn't change the sequence of things on global scale just for the sake of butterflies, that was nicely handled.
If Ethiopia could modernize her military force with Palmeran help faster, which might help with the depression, Italy would be in for another rude wake up call.
Wouldn't Mansu be discredited should DuBois return from Germany with the rather chilling tidings associated with Fascism/Vultists?
Looking forward to the next chapter.
I like that Palmera's existence didn't change the sequence of things on global scale just for the sake of butterflies, that was nicely handled.
If Ethiopia could modernize her military force with Palmeran help faster, which might help with the depression, Italy would be in for another rude wake up call.
Wouldn't Mansu be discredited should DuBois return from Germany with the rather chilling tidings associated with Fascism/Vultists?
Looking forward to the next chapter.
For the Honor of His Imperial Majesty
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
The Dawn of a Tumultuous Decade. More than six decades of Jucker dynasty in Palmera come to an end as the ominous stormclouds of Vultism menace the globe.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
The Parisiana. Jack Heyland's later adventures in "Perline."
For the Honour of His Imperial Majesty: The election of the Cayton Government in 1932 inaugurated a profound shift in the Union's foreign policy. From the first, Cayton -- to loud and nervous criticism even from his own supporters, at first -- pivoted from the relative quietism of the Bolton years into a firebrand stance in the League of Nations, one which denounced an Italian incursion into Ethiopia's border territory at the oasis of Ual-Ual where the Craxi regime had constructed a fort in clear violation of treaty in 1930[1]. The denunciation, in a speech that came to be called "Tall Againt the Vultist Threat," was to Cayton's way of thinking a definitive means of announcing the end of the Bolton era of corruption and "timidity." Opinion would be divided then and long afterwards about whether Cayton himself was at least partly culpable for what followed.
Even Yohannes V himself, undergirded by an almost semi-divine reputation but now an ageing monarch with what seemed a doubtful grip on his country, seemed nervous. He was restrained in echoing Cayton's "provocations" at the League and emphasized in neutral tones that Ethiopia -- Abyssinia, as the European powers still knew her -- would maintain her independence of policy and territorial integrity against any and all foreign interference. The Italian dictator Craxi, who was harbouring clear designs on Abysssinia and beating the drums for a true Italian colonial empire, hypocritically praised this restraint and furiously upbraided the "upstart Nero."[2] France and Britain both remonstrated with the Cayton Government to moderate its rhetoric and take the League's lead, in Britain's case threatening possible economic consequences at the very least if the Lion's Cub did not come to heel.
Ethiopia was not remotely ready for a confrontation. Palmeran aid had modernized her military somewhat, but this process had stagnated first with the mission in Haiti -- which was the nation's clear priority in the post-Great War years -- and then with the Depression. The famous Palmey Viceroy in Ethiopia, Heniri Addisu as he was known even at home, cut a fine figure at state banquets and in the society pages on his visits to his home country's shores but commanded little real influence; and all modernization efforts aside, "Abyssinia" was a feudal country still, full of fractious Rasses who chafed at the continued rule of what they called the Tigrean Dynasty. Outside the Emperor's own guard and the forces of his key supporters, most of its potential soldiers were occasional levies armed with an array of antique rifles and muskets or even spears. Palmera's own militia was winding down the last phases of the Nonwar and many prominent voices even in the cabinet were urging patience about new spending, warning Cayton that the public would not countenance further "foreign adventure," although this muscular stance had been explicitly part of his election platform.
Cayton, though, held firm. His journals and letters would confirm for later generations that he was firmly convinced, after what he had seen in Germany, that Vultism was coming for the world sooner rather than later and that inaction would only make it worse. News of the establishment of the first Verkampfer concentration camp in 1933[3] -- news whose full import Palmey officialdom clearly understood, for by now the actions of Germany in Namibia were required reading for officials in the Touladi -- swiftly transformed Cayton's rhetoric into action. Later generations would discover that the Gideon Project, as it came to be known, became official policy mere weeks after that fateful milestone. To Cayton, it was all part of the same conflict, and as Ethiopia went, so would go the world.
1. The Gideon Project & The Ethiopian War: The European powers, fortunately for Cayton, wavered in acting against the Union's "provocations" as they did in most other things, suffering an understandable ambivalence to put it mildly at the prospect of another general war, complicated by the threatening rhetoric of Krieger's regime in Germany, which was acting swiftly to crush all opposition and vigorously rearming. This ambivalence paradoxically gave Palmera herself a freedom of action which she would not otherwise have had, and Cayton and his government took full advantage of it.
The Gideon Project was a sweepingly-conceived strategy of confrontation, preparation, propaganda, and military modernization and aid, astonishing in its scope and ambition for a small nation that had suffered what Palmera had suffered in the last half-decade. It conceived of broad swathes of foreign and domestic policy as integral parts of the mission to confront Vultism, which it analyzed as an existential threat both at home and abroad in terms that to some participating officials seemed overly apocalyptic... at first. Its components included:
At the outset it all seemed like, and frankly was, an appalling financial, military and political gamble. But it also spoke powerfully to something in the national zeitgeist, and in the Black zeitgeist generally beyond the Union itself. The results would surprise even Cayton.
Yes, there were voices of caution and resistance in Palmera, veterans who stayed reticent out of bitter memory of what a general war really meant; there were even those who somewhat naively painted Cayton and his Government as embracing a "tyranny" no different from those of Craxi and Krieger. On the other hand, the rather ambivalent business of the Haiti Mission had generated a great thirst for a return to Palmera's role to what many thought of as her "true" historical place as a champion of freedom abroad. The spectacle of Vultism's forward march had lent much urgency to that impulse and undermined the credibility of isolationists like Manu Mansu, who found himself quietly displaced from the forefront of the Garveyite movement he had built as newer, younger leaders like William Gilman appropriated his haranguing style in favour of the "Abyssinian mission" as a priority for the true noireist. (Mansu tried to pivot to recapture the limelight and reverse the views that had set him in confrontation with Cayton, but within a span of months he found himself suddenly cast in the role of Johnny-come-lately and never did recover his former authority over the movement[7].)
Cayton's assertive -- or "belligerent," depending on who you asked -- stance abroad struck chords well beyond Palmera's shores. Not a few Black Americans were inspired by his bold rhetoric and actions and there was a noticeable uptick in whyrah from the States which brought with it famous figures like Langston Hughes and Frank Marshall Davis, figures of Harlem Renaissance letters who would go on to immortalise the volunteers of the Ethiopian War in their writings[8]. From across the Caribbean, too, many volunteers came, Black volunteers most of all, inspired by the prospect of being at the forefront of an heroic cause that wouldn't try to consign them to menial duties in the mess hall. The Jamaican religion of Yohannism, now fully flowered from its Shaker roots at the settlement of Revelation, shot into popular consciousness with its veneration of His Majesty the Emperor and alongside the strains of laconic mento music, cousin to the mandey music that had had its own rise previously. It would become part of the national soundtrack in the latter half of the Thirties, though the Yohannists' "idolatrous" creed would lead to actual Ethiopians regarding them with considerable bemusement[9].
The Gideon Project thus became a seminal moment not just in Palmey consciousness, but in global Black consciousness, assuming semi-sacred (or in some cases outright sacred) importance. Its result was that as war broke out in 1935, though Ethiopia seemingly stood alone, in fact almost twenty thousand volunteers from across Palmera, the States, the Caribbean and elsewhere took the field -- under the command of Yohannes V's heir-designate Ras Seyoum Mengesha -- against the initial Italian invasion[10].
It was not, unfortunately, enough to actually stop Ethiopia from falling. Italy's military buildup had been a decade in the making by that point, and the army that took the field against Craxi's force of nearly half a million was still motley and disorganised by comparison[11]. Addis Ababa fell and Yohannes V and his family fled into exile, becoming the latest of the growing trove of discarded African royals at Eleutheria.
It was, however, the beginning of a resistance movement that would render Ethiopia largely ungovernable by the Vultist conquerors, under the command of Seyoum Mengesha who remained behind to become a near-mythic figure far out of proportion, some veterans would later recall, with his actual competence. The Abysssinian Resistance continued through the outbreak of war years later in Europe and continued to draw idealistic volunteers in their thousands[12]. It would command a place in Palmeran history and consciousness that could be fairly compared to a holy war, and turn the act of making whyrah into something near to a crusader's calling. A few of the Palmey volunteers even found themselves inducted into the "feudal" order as Rasses in their own right, heirs to old Heniri Addisu who blessed their struggle from his deathbed in Eleutheria -- where he had joined his beloved Emperor in exile -- in 1936. Many once-rootless young men found meaning, and more importantly training and tempering as military leaders themselves, in the struggle[13].
In Ethiopia both at the time and afterwards, there was some ambivalence over all this, even a feeling in some quarters that the "foreign freebooters" were nearly as much of a scourge as the Italians were. But in the Union, even at the time, it acquired a burnish of unalloyed heroism with such rapidity that Cayton virtually romped to re-election in 1938, his platform simply being "Carry On the Struggle." And the cultural and economic impacts on the home front were profound.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] Parallel to the unfolding of the IRL Wal Wal Incident.
[2] "Upstart Nero" -- despite his thuggish tendencies, Craxi could be surprisingly deft and subtle with rhetoric. This is a characteristic example, double-referencing race and the Roman Emperor of this name.
[3] The Verkampfers here parallel the rapid Nazi establishment of a concentration camp system IOTL. In this timeline the Verkampfers deliberately model their system on the "enemy alien" internment camps of Britain and Canada during the Great War--although their purpose is far broader and of course their springing up outside of wartime is telling in itself--and due to the Vultist fondness for modelling themselves on Crusade-era chivalry the camps remain run by a diverse assortment of "Ritterorden," paramilitaries much like the SA. They would eventually be loosely centralized under the control of the OSK (Order of the Black Cross, roughly similar to the SS).
[4] "Laurence D. Fulker" has become President in the United States. He's analogous in a limited way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though he will not develop a similar personal electoral dynasty, dying near the start of his second term and instead marking the beginning of a succession of liberal Democratic Presidents who would hold power until the early Fifties. Many of the basic policy outcomes of this are similar to FDR's tenure but there are important differences: the period inspires no tradition of Presidential term limits, and provides no single figure to act as a lightning rod for conservative discontent as FDR and his legacy did.
[5] Blackbirding was the press-ganging of indigenous labour in slavery-like conditions in the Pacific, practiced by Australia and New Zealand and at its height from the early 1840s to the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Palmey freebooters had a limited presence in the Pacific but played some role in exposing and combating this trade, a role "The Interceptors" exaggerates. One family of freebooters, the Herricks, wound up by the vagaries of mercenary work for various local kingdoms founding their own small kingdom on a land grant from the Sultans of Brunei in northern Indonesia. This family became the Bronze Rajahs of Sarawak, parallels to the real-life Brooke family who became the White Rajahs of Sarawak. A Palmeran pseudo-dependency, Sarawak had a little fame as an outport of the anti-blackbirding movement but gained a considerably higher pop-culture profile at this time as a symbol of the Palmey spirit of intrepid global adventure.
[6] Another parallel to the unfolding of the real-life Abyssinia Crisis. The presence of the Freedom Brigades is of relatively minor military significance in the early stages but of major later cultural significance, as we will see shortly.
[7] To this point Manu Mansu had been heading a faction within the LJP rather than the kind of separate populist organization that IOTL Marcus Garvey had headed. There was nothing formally for him to be displaced from, but as Garveyism did acquire its own formal corporate infrastructure during these years as the United Congress of African Peoples, Mansu was largely left behind as the Presidency of UCAP went to his former secretary Philander Copes.
[8] The world is thus deprived of the magisterial works about American life and identity that Langston Hughes produced IRL, but is compensated with his paeans to Palmeran courage and insights into the complex feelings of a Black man fighting a pseudo-colonial war in Black Africa. Frank Marshall Davis is both a poet and a major music journalist and sports reporter who will develop a fascination with cricket and soccer; he's as famously socialist in this timeline as he was in ours and goes on to exert a degree of political influence in Palmera that was never possible for him IOTL America (I suppose unless one believes the right-wing conspiracy theory that he was Barack Obama's real dad, which I've just discovered was a thing).
[9] Many Yohannists who volunteered in Ethiopia would later convert to the country's Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity and found churches of their own back home in Palmera. Others clung stubbornly to their original faith.
[10] Foreign nationals were present in the Ethiopian army IOTL too, but in the dozens, not the thousands.
[11] The fall of Ethiopia is particularly instructive to the Palmeys about the growing importance of air power, which proves the really decisive advantage for Craxi's forces. From this point on the Union will work assiduously, in partnership with Britain and Canada, to develop and deploy air units. The formal establishment of the National Militia Air Service comes less than two years later.
[12] Eventually they would be supported by the full might of a true Expeditionary Force, but volunteers auxiliaries retained an important role throughout the war.
[13] Particularly famous among these would be Rakoto Nafy, Afonso Nzinga and Thaddeus Gandel, all formerly of the Hocus Pocus Club that we encountered in Song of Songs and eager to prove their worth as practical men.
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
"Ayo Perline!" ['Nonwar' & The Sunset of the Haiti Mission], Introduction. A brief summary of events in the totally-not-an-occupation of Haiti.
The Dawn of a Tumultuous Decade. More than six decades of Jucker dynasty in Palmera come to an end as the ominous stormclouds of Vultism menace the globe.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Other Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
A Dinner in Daltonville. Organised crime and corruption hit the headlines in Palmera in a truly spectacular way.
Cocktails with a King-Maker. A Palmeran officer en route to his command encounters the all-seeing eye of Special Branch.
The Parisiana. Jack Heyland's later adventures in "Perline."
For the Honour of His Imperial Majesty: The election of the Cayton Government in 1932 inaugurated a profound shift in the Union's foreign policy. From the first, Cayton -- to loud and nervous criticism even from his own supporters, at first -- pivoted from the relative quietism of the Bolton years into a firebrand stance in the League of Nations, one which denounced an Italian incursion into Ethiopia's border territory at the oasis of Ual-Ual where the Craxi regime had constructed a fort in clear violation of treaty in 1930[1]. The denunciation, in a speech that came to be called "Tall Againt the Vultist Threat," was to Cayton's way of thinking a definitive means of announcing the end of the Bolton era of corruption and "timidity." Opinion would be divided then and long afterwards about whether Cayton himself was at least partly culpable for what followed.
Even Yohannes V himself, undergirded by an almost semi-divine reputation but now an ageing monarch with what seemed a doubtful grip on his country, seemed nervous. He was restrained in echoing Cayton's "provocations" at the League and emphasized in neutral tones that Ethiopia -- Abyssinia, as the European powers still knew her -- would maintain her independence of policy and territorial integrity against any and all foreign interference. The Italian dictator Craxi, who was harbouring clear designs on Abysssinia and beating the drums for a true Italian colonial empire, hypocritically praised this restraint and furiously upbraided the "upstart Nero."[2] France and Britain both remonstrated with the Cayton Government to moderate its rhetoric and take the League's lead, in Britain's case threatening possible economic consequences at the very least if the Lion's Cub did not come to heel.
Ethiopia was not remotely ready for a confrontation. Palmeran aid had modernized her military somewhat, but this process had stagnated first with the mission in Haiti -- which was the nation's clear priority in the post-Great War years -- and then with the Depression. The famous Palmey Viceroy in Ethiopia, Heniri Addisu as he was known even at home, cut a fine figure at state banquets and in the society pages on his visits to his home country's shores but commanded little real influence; and all modernization efforts aside, "Abyssinia" was a feudal country still, full of fractious Rasses who chafed at the continued rule of what they called the Tigrean Dynasty. Outside the Emperor's own guard and the forces of his key supporters, most of its potential soldiers were occasional levies armed with an array of antique rifles and muskets or even spears. Palmera's own militia was winding down the last phases of the Nonwar and many prominent voices even in the cabinet were urging patience about new spending, warning Cayton that the public would not countenance further "foreign adventure," although this muscular stance had been explicitly part of his election platform.
Cayton, though, held firm. His journals and letters would confirm for later generations that he was firmly convinced, after what he had seen in Germany, that Vultism was coming for the world sooner rather than later and that inaction would only make it worse. News of the establishment of the first Verkampfer concentration camp in 1933[3] -- news whose full import Palmey officialdom clearly understood, for by now the actions of Germany in Namibia were required reading for officials in the Touladi -- swiftly transformed Cayton's rhetoric into action. Later generations would discover that the Gideon Project, as it came to be known, became official policy mere weeks after that fateful milestone. To Cayton, it was all part of the same conflict, and as Ethiopia went, so would go the world.
1. The Gideon Project & The Ethiopian War: The European powers, fortunately for Cayton, wavered in acting against the Union's "provocations" as they did in most other things, suffering an understandable ambivalence to put it mildly at the prospect of another general war, complicated by the threatening rhetoric of Krieger's regime in Germany, which was acting swiftly to crush all opposition and vigorously rearming. This ambivalence paradoxically gave Palmera herself a freedom of action which she would not otherwise have had, and Cayton and his government took full advantage of it.
The Gideon Project was a sweepingly-conceived strategy of confrontation, preparation, propaganda, and military modernization and aid, astonishing in its scope and ambition for a small nation that had suffered what Palmera had suffered in the last half-decade. It conceived of broad swathes of foreign and domestic policy as integral parts of the mission to confront Vultism, which it analyzed as an existential threat both at home and abroad in terms that to some participating officials seemed overly apocalyptic... at first. Its components included:
- Ambitious military spending, and potentially ruinous borrowing, to modernise Palmera's Militia and Naval Service and update her Secret Service. Part of this was a substantial upgrade in aid to Ethiopia, which vaulted to the forefront of foreign policy priorities. A companion to this was the planned construction of a new naval base at Helena which raised specters of failed "Tequesta, County of the Future" boondoggles and whose necessity even many naval officers questioned, and that many in opposition and in the press denounced as an outright regression to the worst corruption of the Bolton years.
- A deliberate foregrounding of the domestic Vultist and white supremacist threat as a domestic Secret Service priority, mandating not only the infiltration and destruction of nascent Vultist parties and their allies among movements like the "Respecters," but also the active recruitment of Sutcheys to be trained as operatives against Italy and, if necessary, even Germany. Many old Service hands revelled in this mission but civil libertarians and proponents of minority rights professed worry, ameliorated only slightly by...
- A call for national unity and a much-publicised crackdown on crime, corruption and Nemoism headed by a new Minister of Justice by the name of Ajax Legare, even more fanatical about his cause than Cayton himself. Legare's bull-headed approach to his new mandate raised local law enforcement hackles -- and drew a few rebukes for overzealous prosecution from the General Court of Appeal -- and his admittedly swift success in hammering operations like the infamous Osceola Merry drew criticism for being show without substance, especially since a new administration north of the border had rescinded Prohibition and with it much of the booney-men's business model in the year of Cayton's own election.[4]
- A propaganda push funded by a revived War Office, one which funded a noticeable rash of patriotic films that had a swift impact on popular culture. Silver screen star Gad Pendarvis, for example, took time out from filming the Depression-era bandit biopic Enemy of the Crown (which exploited popular fascination with the infamous Pleasant Gang of bank robbers) to shoot the stirringly patriotic The Interceptors, a romantic swashbuckler in line with his classic fare centered on Pacific anti-blackbirding freebooters in the service of the Bronze Rajahs of Sarawak in the late nineteenth century[5]. This choice of subject matter was no accident, as it prefigured...
- The recruitment of so-called Freedom Brigades in 1934, as confrontation between Italy and Ethiopia reached crisis levels and looked set to lead to war. Palmera could not openly declare war on Italy without Britain and France's lead, but she could bitterly upbraid the European powers for selling Ethiopia out and essentially granting Craxi a free hand after fighting broke out at Ual-Ual[6], and she could provide cut-rate supplies and transport to volunteers -- many of them veterans of Perline, others idealistic young men who had yearned for a chance to cut figures in the national destiny like the heroes of the Great War -- who wanted to fight on freedom's behalf. Although many at the time noted the irony that this rhetoric about "freedom" and a "cavalier attitude to Palmey lives" was being deployed in service of a feudal monarchy.
At the outset it all seemed like, and frankly was, an appalling financial, military and political gamble. But it also spoke powerfully to something in the national zeitgeist, and in the Black zeitgeist generally beyond the Union itself. The results would surprise even Cayton.
Yes, there were voices of caution and resistance in Palmera, veterans who stayed reticent out of bitter memory of what a general war really meant; there were even those who somewhat naively painted Cayton and his Government as embracing a "tyranny" no different from those of Craxi and Krieger. On the other hand, the rather ambivalent business of the Haiti Mission had generated a great thirst for a return to Palmera's role to what many thought of as her "true" historical place as a champion of freedom abroad. The spectacle of Vultism's forward march had lent much urgency to that impulse and undermined the credibility of isolationists like Manu Mansu, who found himself quietly displaced from the forefront of the Garveyite movement he had built as newer, younger leaders like William Gilman appropriated his haranguing style in favour of the "Abyssinian mission" as a priority for the true noireist. (Mansu tried to pivot to recapture the limelight and reverse the views that had set him in confrontation with Cayton, but within a span of months he found himself suddenly cast in the role of Johnny-come-lately and never did recover his former authority over the movement[7].)
Cayton's assertive -- or "belligerent," depending on who you asked -- stance abroad struck chords well beyond Palmera's shores. Not a few Black Americans were inspired by his bold rhetoric and actions and there was a noticeable uptick in whyrah from the States which brought with it famous figures like Langston Hughes and Frank Marshall Davis, figures of Harlem Renaissance letters who would go on to immortalise the volunteers of the Ethiopian War in their writings[8]. From across the Caribbean, too, many volunteers came, Black volunteers most of all, inspired by the prospect of being at the forefront of an heroic cause that wouldn't try to consign them to menial duties in the mess hall. The Jamaican religion of Yohannism, now fully flowered from its Shaker roots at the settlement of Revelation, shot into popular consciousness with its veneration of His Majesty the Emperor and alongside the strains of laconic mento music, cousin to the mandey music that had had its own rise previously. It would become part of the national soundtrack in the latter half of the Thirties, though the Yohannists' "idolatrous" creed would lead to actual Ethiopians regarding them with considerable bemusement[9].
The Gideon Project thus became a seminal moment not just in Palmey consciousness, but in global Black consciousness, assuming semi-sacred (or in some cases outright sacred) importance. Its result was that as war broke out in 1935, though Ethiopia seemingly stood alone, in fact almost twenty thousand volunteers from across Palmera, the States, the Caribbean and elsewhere took the field -- under the command of Yohannes V's heir-designate Ras Seyoum Mengesha -- against the initial Italian invasion[10].
It was not, unfortunately, enough to actually stop Ethiopia from falling. Italy's military buildup had been a decade in the making by that point, and the army that took the field against Craxi's force of nearly half a million was still motley and disorganised by comparison[11]. Addis Ababa fell and Yohannes V and his family fled into exile, becoming the latest of the growing trove of discarded African royals at Eleutheria.
It was, however, the beginning of a resistance movement that would render Ethiopia largely ungovernable by the Vultist conquerors, under the command of Seyoum Mengesha who remained behind to become a near-mythic figure far out of proportion, some veterans would later recall, with his actual competence. The Abysssinian Resistance continued through the outbreak of war years later in Europe and continued to draw idealistic volunteers in their thousands[12]. It would command a place in Palmeran history and consciousness that could be fairly compared to a holy war, and turn the act of making whyrah into something near to a crusader's calling. A few of the Palmey volunteers even found themselves inducted into the "feudal" order as Rasses in their own right, heirs to old Heniri Addisu who blessed their struggle from his deathbed in Eleutheria -- where he had joined his beloved Emperor in exile -- in 1936. Many once-rootless young men found meaning, and more importantly training and tempering as military leaders themselves, in the struggle[13].
In Ethiopia both at the time and afterwards, there was some ambivalence over all this, even a feeling in some quarters that the "foreign freebooters" were nearly as much of a scourge as the Italians were. But in the Union, even at the time, it acquired a burnish of unalloyed heroism with such rapidity that Cayton virtually romped to re-election in 1938, his platform simply being "Carry On the Struggle." And the cultural and economic impacts on the home front were profound.
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[1] Parallel to the unfolding of the IRL Wal Wal Incident.
[2] "Upstart Nero" -- despite his thuggish tendencies, Craxi could be surprisingly deft and subtle with rhetoric. This is a characteristic example, double-referencing race and the Roman Emperor of this name.
[3] The Verkampfers here parallel the rapid Nazi establishment of a concentration camp system IOTL. In this timeline the Verkampfers deliberately model their system on the "enemy alien" internment camps of Britain and Canada during the Great War--although their purpose is far broader and of course their springing up outside of wartime is telling in itself--and due to the Vultist fondness for modelling themselves on Crusade-era chivalry the camps remain run by a diverse assortment of "Ritterorden," paramilitaries much like the SA. They would eventually be loosely centralized under the control of the OSK (Order of the Black Cross, roughly similar to the SS).
[4] "Laurence D. Fulker" has become President in the United States. He's analogous in a limited way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though he will not develop a similar personal electoral dynasty, dying near the start of his second term and instead marking the beginning of a succession of liberal Democratic Presidents who would hold power until the early Fifties. Many of the basic policy outcomes of this are similar to FDR's tenure but there are important differences: the period inspires no tradition of Presidential term limits, and provides no single figure to act as a lightning rod for conservative discontent as FDR and his legacy did.
[5] Blackbirding was the press-ganging of indigenous labour in slavery-like conditions in the Pacific, practiced by Australia and New Zealand and at its height from the early 1840s to the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Palmey freebooters had a limited presence in the Pacific but played some role in exposing and combating this trade, a role "The Interceptors" exaggerates. One family of freebooters, the Herricks, wound up by the vagaries of mercenary work for various local kingdoms founding their own small kingdom on a land grant from the Sultans of Brunei in northern Indonesia. This family became the Bronze Rajahs of Sarawak, parallels to the real-life Brooke family who became the White Rajahs of Sarawak. A Palmeran pseudo-dependency, Sarawak had a little fame as an outport of the anti-blackbirding movement but gained a considerably higher pop-culture profile at this time as a symbol of the Palmey spirit of intrepid global adventure.
[6] Another parallel to the unfolding of the real-life Abyssinia Crisis. The presence of the Freedom Brigades is of relatively minor military significance in the early stages but of major later cultural significance, as we will see shortly.
[7] To this point Manu Mansu had been heading a faction within the LJP rather than the kind of separate populist organization that IOTL Marcus Garvey had headed. There was nothing formally for him to be displaced from, but as Garveyism did acquire its own formal corporate infrastructure during these years as the United Congress of African Peoples, Mansu was largely left behind as the Presidency of UCAP went to his former secretary Philander Copes.
[8] The world is thus deprived of the magisterial works about American life and identity that Langston Hughes produced IRL, but is compensated with his paeans to Palmeran courage and insights into the complex feelings of a Black man fighting a pseudo-colonial war in Black Africa. Frank Marshall Davis is both a poet and a major music journalist and sports reporter who will develop a fascination with cricket and soccer; he's as famously socialist in this timeline as he was in ours and goes on to exert a degree of political influence in Palmera that was never possible for him IOTL America (I suppose unless one believes the right-wing conspiracy theory that he was Barack Obama's real dad, which I've just discovered was a thing).
[9] Many Yohannists who volunteered in Ethiopia would later convert to the country's Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity and found churches of their own back home in Palmera. Others clung stubbornly to their original faith.
[10] Foreign nationals were present in the Ethiopian army IOTL too, but in the dozens, not the thousands.
[11] The fall of Ethiopia is particularly instructive to the Palmeys about the growing importance of air power, which proves the really decisive advantage for Craxi's forces. From this point on the Union will work assiduously, in partnership with Britain and Canada, to develop and deploy air units. The formal establishment of the National Militia Air Service comes less than two years later.
[12] Eventually they would be supported by the full might of a true Expeditionary Force, but volunteers auxiliaries retained an important role throughout the war.
[13] Particularly famous among these would be Rakoto Nafy, Afonso Nzinga and Thaddeus Gandel, all formerly of the Hocus Pocus Club that we encountered in Song of Songs and eager to prove their worth as practical men.
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