Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

by Zora Neale Hurston

  Seeing how the Haitian people, high and low, far and near, love and trust him, I tackled him one day on the business of being a white king of Haiti.

  “Doctor Reser,” I called over from one swing-bed to the other.

  “I am not a doctor, you know. I am a pharmacist’s mate, first class, retired U.S.N. They began to call me doctor while I was in the Public Health service at Port-de-Paix and they have just kept it up.”

  “I stand corrected, but getting back to what I started to say, Doctor, the people all seem to love you so much. Now in all the adventure tales I have ever read, the natives, finding a white man among them, always assume that he is a god, and at least make him a king. Here you have been in Haiti for eleven years according to your own story. You are on the most friendly terms with the Haitians of any white man in Haiti and still no kingly crown. How is that?”

  “Well, I tell you, Zora, if you show yourself sincere, the Haitians will make a good friend of a white man, but hardly a king. They just don’t run to royalty.”

  “Not even a white man?”

  “Not even a white man, and the Haitians who made themselves kings did not fare so well, either, if you will recall.”

  I sat bolt upright at that. He had his mouth open and he was making broad statements.

  “But on the island of La Gonave they made a king out of a sergeant of Marines.”

  “Oh, no, they didn’t.”

  “But King Faustin Wirkus—”

  “All I have to say about Wirkus and that white king business is that he had a good collaborator. Let’s have another round of orange juice.”

  “You mean to say he was no king at all?”

  “I mean just that.”

  “May I quote you as saying that?”

  “Certainly. Now, how about that orange juice?”

  “With pleasure, Doctor. Can I change the subject and talk about you instead?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Why is it then that the Haitians and the Haitian peasants particularly love you so much?”

  “They are infinitely kind and gentle and all that I have ever done to earn their love is to return their unfailing courtesy.”

  One tall lanky patient of the asylum hung around the porch and kept reciting the tales of Fontaine. It was a steady monotonous flow of syllables with his eyes fixed on us. It was a curious thing to see his mouth so active and the upper part of his face so still. It was plain that the upper part of his face did not know what the lower part was doing. One Syrian, formerly a merchant in Port-au-Prince, kept standing with his face against the porch wishing Dr. Reser well.

  “Doctor Reser! Doctor Reser!” he kept calling. “I like for you to eat a very good eating. The very best eating in the United States.”

  “Thank you very much,” Dr. Reser answered each time.

  “Dr. Reser, I was driving very fast to Port-au-Prince—about sixty meters an hour—and I make three times around a pork [pig]. I tell the man, ‘You pay five dollars duty to American government every time you leave pork in the street.’”

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Reser answered with feigned interest. “Perhaps you want to go and look after the chickens for me.”

  The man hurried off very happy in the thought of performing a service for Dr. Reser and the conversation took up again on the porch.

  I was speaking of returning to Port-au-Prince but Dr. Reser would not hear of it. They were expecting Joseph White, the American Vice-Consul, and his little new wife; M. C. Love, of the West India Oil Company; Frank Crumbie, Jr., of Nyack, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Scott and John Lassiter, American fiscal agents to the Haitian government; all were coming out that night with some newly arrived officials of the Pan American Airways.

  Dr. Reser was giving a Voodoo dance for them and he was asking me to stay. I was on very friendly terms with all of them and so I was grateful to Dr. Reser for asking me. Cicerone, the greatest drummer in all Haiti, performed upon the Hountah, the great thundering rada drum, that night. Everyone who cannot go to Africa should go to Pont Beudet, Haiti, to hear Cicerone play. He is not much to look at. He is past middle life, and is small and black and sort of shaggy. The magic of him is in those hands. The sun-stuff that places him among the geniuses of the timpani is found in those fingers that have actually been modified by their association with the taut heads of drums. Ah, yes, one must hear Cicerone of Pont-Beudet!

  It was all very glinty and strong, what went on that night. The white visitors, whether they would have had it different or not, were a sort of audience around the walls. Strong action in the center. Many of Dr. Reser’s Haitian friends came in. Some were upper class, educated men who received the introduction with poise and charm. Some were the peasants who were going to participate in the dance. They were all so glad to see Dr. Reser and made extravagant expressions of pleasure. One dark brown man with aquiline feature told him, “It is such a pleasure to see you again. I would have been humpbacked if I had not met you!” All of this was spoken in Creole, of course.

  The evening got under way. Cicerone and the other drummers paid many of the guests the compliment of playing a special salute for each, after which the guest paid the drummers the compliment of a round of drinks or the cash for the purpose. The evening rose in spirit—the drumming, the singing, the dancers and the dancing. I was taught the Jean Valou. Midnight dashed past us on the run. Finally the others left and I was put to bed in Dr. Reser’s bedroom while he and the others who lived there slept in the swing-beds on the porch.

  The crowing of roosters, the small waking noises of the world, and the little dawn wind, all acknowledging the receipt of the new day, got me up. It took shape out of a ropy white mist, but there it was, the very last day that God had made, and it went about the business of changing people the way days always do. I got up to go home at once.

  But I did not go as I had planned. A young woman came to bring a message to Dr. Reser. It was from Aux Cayes in the south. It had been passed along by word of mouth of market women until it came to the young woman in Port-au-Prince, and it was an invitation to attend a ceremony in the south. What kind of ceremony was it going to be? It was to be a ceremony where the food was to be cooked without fire. Real food? Yes, a great pot of real food—enough to feed all of the people attending the ceremony—would be cooked without fire. Was such a thing possible? The young woman asked for a cup and saucer, a piece of laundry blue, a cup of cold water and a fresh egg. No, she did not wish to acquire the egg herself for fear that we might believe that she had one prepared. Dr. Reser went out and got one himself and gave it to her. She placed it in the cup at once. Poured some of the cold water on it and covered the cup with the saucer and made a cross mark on the saucer with the bluing. Then she bowed her head and mumbled a prayer for a few minutes. None of us could catch the exact words of what she said in that prayer. When it was over, she lifted the saucer and offered the egg to Dr. Reser with a diffident smile and told him to break it. He refused on the grounds that he had on his best gray suit and did not wish to have it spattered with egg. She assured him time and time again that the egg would not spatter over his clothes. At last he broke the egg very carefully and found it done. That was startling enough. But the realest surprise came when the egg was found to be harder in the center than anywhere else. The young woman now begged him to eat the egg. He was so reluctant to do so that it was necessary for her to coax him a great deal, but she prevailed at last and he ate the egg. Then she assured him that he would never die of poisoning. He would always be warned in time to avoid eating poisoned food or touching poisoned surfaces. Would he now accept the invitation to the ceremony? He would with great unction and avidity. I asked to come along and so it was arranged. A few days later we jolted over the rocky road south to Aux Cayes. It was night when our party arrived. A guard stood beside the main highway to guide us to the hounfort. After the proper little ceremonies of greeting an important guest and the one of entering was over we were assigned sleeping space and went to bed, on ou
r nattes under a great mimbon tree.

  Their ceremony was held in the court of a great hounfort and the members of the society all came bearing foodstuffs. There were great heaps of peas, carrots, cabbage, string beans, onions, corn meal, rice and egg-plant.

  The next morning the women were up preparing the little cups of coffee that everyone drinks in Haiti before breakfast. Then there was breakfast. After that the women went about dressing the food for the ceremony while the men amused themselves with a game of dice that is played with three “bones” instead of the two that we used in the United States.

  Many, many things came to pass in a ceremonial way and then the “cooking” of the food without fire began. All that I could see, and afterwards when I talked it over with Dr. Reser, he confirmed my impression, was that the people formed a circle about the big iron pot that contained the mingled food. The Mambo began to sing, with the Ascon of course, and then the drums began to sound. At the first note of the boulatier, the smallest of the Rada drums, the men took off their hats and the women the colored handkerchiefs that every woman wears to a ceremony and began to dance, circling the pot. As they went they chanted and waved their hats and handkerchiefs at the pot as if fanning an invisible flame. This went on and on. When the houngan and the Mambo concluded the ritual, the food was dipped up with a wooden spoon and served to all. Everybody ate with their fingers for it is an unbreakable law of this ceremony that no metal except the pot must touch this food, so knives, forks and spoons are forbidden.

  How was the food cooked? I do not know. Dr. Reser and I tried bribery and everything else in our power to learn the secret, but it belongs to that small group and nothing we could devise would do any good. Dr. Reser knew the girl who had boiled the egg in cold water very well indeed. I would say that they are very intimate friends. He concentrated upon her finally, but all she would say was that it was a family secret brought from Africa which could not be divulged. He kept at her and she yielded enough to say that she could not tell him until he had been baptised in a certain ceremony. He went to the trouble and expense to have the baptism. After that was over, she returned to her original position that it was an inherited secret which she could not divulge under pain of death. So that is as far as we got on the food-without-fire ceremony. This is an annual affair and some day I shall try again.

  I visited Dr. Reser many more times and polished my shoulder in his bed-swings and listened and ate. But one thing I never did. I never went to him for the information that I had come to Haiti to seek. One reason for this was that everyone who goes to Haiti to find out something makes a bee line for Dr. Reser and tries to pump out of him all that they can in a few weeks and then they sail off and write as if they had seen something. Be it said right here that Dr. Reser tells no more than he wants to, so what they get is bound to be limited first by Dr. Reser’s own information, which is bound to be limited by the nature of Haiti’s vastly complicated and varigated lore, and second by what he chooses to give out to the lazy mind-pickers who descend upon him. Since he has plans of his own for the future, he gives out nothing of any great importance. Thus they waste their time in Haiti on him. But the most important reason why I never tried to get my information second-hand out of Dr. Reser was because I consider myself amply equipped to go out in the field and get it myself. So my association with him was fifty per cent social and fifty per cent a study of the man himself. I wanted to know all I could about this educated, widely travelled man, this ex-navy man who could so completely find his soul and his peace in the African rituals of Haiti. I have seen him in the grip of the African loa (spirits) known as possession: that is, the spirits have entered his head and driven his own consciousness out. I have seen him reeling as if he were drunk under the spirit possession like any Haitian peasant and I was trying to reconcile the well-read man of science with the credulous man of emotions. A man who could break off a discussion of Aristotle to show me with child-like eagerness, a stone that he had found which contained a loa. So I spent as much time as I could spare from other things on his porch sprawled upon one of his bed-swings. Besides he is a very fine and generous person; and then again, so many things happened around his place.

  He is very kind and tender with the unfortunate people in the asylum. Though many have applied for his job, he is still considered by the Chief of the Service d ‘Hygiène the best man for the place. Of course, the criminally insane and the violent ones are strictly confined, but the harmless have a measure of liberty. And some days they hang around Dr. Reser’s porch and say things and say things. He never drives them away nor speaks to one of them harshly.

  One afternoon on the porch I fell to wondering what part of the United States Dr. Reser came from. I had tried to place him by his accent but I was not sure. So I asked, “Where are you from, Dr. Reser.”

  “I am from Lapland, Zora.”

  “Why, Dr. Reser, I thought you said you were an American.”

  “I am, but I am from Lapland just the same.”

  I fell to wondering if Lapland had become an American colony while my back was turned. He saw my bewilderment and chuckled.

  “Yes, I am from Lapland—where Missouri laps over on Arkansas.”

  Naturally I laughed at that and he went on in the brogue of the hill-billy reciting about folk-heroes: “Yes, I’m the guy that chewed the wad the goat eat that butted the bull off the bridge!”

  Just then the Syrian hurried up to the porch and called:

  “Dr. Reser! Dr. Reser! The soldiers of Monte Carlo killed the Dead Sea, then they built the Casino!”

  “Thanks for the information,” Dr. Reser replied.

  The patient who spent all of his waking hours quoting Fontaine’s fables came to the porch too. I had laughed heartily at Dr. Reser’s quotations from the folk lore of the Ozarks, and perhaps our merriment attracted them. Another patient came up and began to babble the Haitian folk tales about Brother Bouki and Ti Malice.

  Dr. Reser went on: “Raised on six shooters till I got big enough to eat growed shotguns. I warm up the Gulf of Mexico and bathe therein. I mount the wild ass and hop from crag to crag. I swim the Mississippi River from end to end with five hundred pound shot in my teeth! Airy dad gummed man that don’t believe it, I’ll hold him by the neck and leave him wiggle his fool self to death.”

  “Dr. Reser! Dr. Reser!” The Syrian attracts attention to himself. “They have horse racing in Palestine. The horses have contracts in Jewish and Arabic and English and the Jewish horse must be second. It’s political.”

  The man who recited Fontaine pointed his stagnant eyes on the porch and babbled on as if he raced with the man who was talking about Ti Malice and Bouki, but he had a weaker voice. So we heard very distinctly:

  “Of course, Bouki was very angry with Ti Malice for what he had done and Ti Malice was afraid, so he ran away very fast until he came to a fence. The fence had a hole in it, but the hole was not very big, but Malice tried to go through—”

  “Dr. Reser! Dr. Reser! Never speak to person with tired physinomic! I drive car five years without license and the United States Government was very content.”

  “Are they annoying you?” Dr. Reser asked me. “They never worry me at all.”

  “Oh, no,” I answered. “It is very interesting. Let them go on.”

  “All right, then. It will soon be time for them to go to bed anyway.”

  The Syrian was very close to the screen now. “When you write to the president, every amigo here remember you,” he was advising us. “Dr. Reser, what is love?”

  “I really don’t know,” Reser replied. “What is it?”

  “Love is the heart. And what is the heart? It is the communication of the body.”

  The sun was setting and I lifted my eyes as the father of worlds dropped towards the horizon. In the near distance a royal palm flaunted itself above the other foliage with its stiff rod of a new leaf making assignation with life.

  “Dr. Reser, I know love what it is,” the Syrian went o
n. “I go in Cuba once and they have a house there. The bell ring ‘ting!!’ and you go in and they shake you like this and in the morning you come out and you know about life.”

  The Syrian turned suddenly and walked over to the shrubbery and began to gather hibiscus blooms. Dr. Reser sent the man who always quoted Fontaine to stop him from denuding the plants. Then we could hear the other one still telling his story of Malice and Bouki. “—Malice was stuck in the hole in the fence and he could not go forward neither could he back out. His behind was too big to pass through. So Bouki found him there but he did not know it. He saw this great behind stuck in the fence but he was impatient to overtake Malice so he slapped it and said:

  “‘Behind, have you seen Malice?’

  “The behind said, ‘Push me and I’ll tell you.’

  “So Brother Bouki gave a great shove and bushed Ti Malice through the hole and he ran away. It was only after he was gone that Bouki knew it was Malice, so—”

  He received the signal that supper was being served so he abruptly left us. In a short while we saw a file of men being conducted through the grounds to their sleeping quarters. Several women stood about within their enclosure, which was fenced in by heavy chicken wire. As the line of men came abreast of the space where the women were standing, one of the women walked up to the fence, suddenly lifted her skirts up around her waist and presented herself. Instantly one of the men broke from the line and ran to her. It was all unplanned, simple and instinctive. Presently the guard who was marching in front heard the commotion and looked around. He rushed back and dragged the man away with the help of two others. The woman stumbled back to a stool and drooped down in a sort of apathy. The man was forced to his cell and could be heard cursing and howling all night long.

  As for us, we waited outside until the black curtain ran all the way around the hoop of the horizon. Then Telemarque announced and we went inside and ate the delicious bits of lean cured pork that Telemarque knows how to cook. We ate jean-jean and rice, which is Haiti’s most delicious native dish. Jean-jean is a little wild mushroom that grows there and Mme. Jules Faine prepares jean-jean and rice better than anyone else in Haiti.