Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  The road rolled on, sometimes over high dry desert plateaus, sometimes down into luxuriant oasislike clefts, occupied by little villages with their verdant gardens of maize, millet, sweet potatoes, mangoes, custard apples, bananas, and breadfruit.

  There were no other vehicles around. I had the land all to myself again and was enjoying the solitude and sense of self-containment. And then, in the early evening and with no warning, came Bombardopolis. A huge cemetery appeared out of the bushes, hundreds of hefty stone sarcophagi (the heftier the better, according to Haitian beliefs, to keep the deceased well and truly in the ground and prevent the emergence of the dreaded “living dead”—the zombies), crammed together over four acres of bare land at the edge of town.

  As towns go in Haiti, this was quite small, but after all those wide-open spaces it felt like a teeming metropolis. A long main street, lined with a mix of concrete block and mud-and-thatch houses was dominated at the far end by a dainty, pastel-painted church. The weekly market was still in full swing on the main plaza in front of the church. Scores of women in brightly colored dresses and scarves sat cross-legged by blankets and plastic sheets on which were displayed all the traditional wares of country markets—from staple foods, fruits, and dried fish to long bars of domestic soap purchased by the inch, little piles of sundried coffee beans, hairpins and combs, round brown paper packages of unrefined brown sugar, tiny packages of sea salt, even tinier twists of wrapped tobacco and clay pipes, Marlboro and Kent cigarettes sold singly, piles of boxed matches, and bottles of cheap and potent crude rum known as clairon.

  I bought some small straw-woven baskets, beautifully crafted by two young men who sat weaving together near the water fountain as the women came to fill their plastic containers for the evening meal.

  “Kouman ou yeh?” (“How are you?”) was my attempt at a greeting to the curious faces, which broke into smiles and giggles at my hesitant Creole. Children scampered up, stared in disbelief at my beard and cameras, and rushed off to bring more children. Old men approached gracefully and offered a handshake in welcome. For a while I became the feature attraction of the afternoon. “We do not see many blans,” explained one young man in hesitant English. “I hope you like my town, thank-you-very-much.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. I did like his town. It had life, vigor, and color. I wandered around as the evening sun turned the whole place orange and gold. By the time I returned to the square in twilight, the market was gone, but the little pink, green, and white church still glowed. A full moon rose up behind the belltower.

  As for a place to stay, I was in luck. CARE had a modest guest house near the cemetery, and for a few dollars I was given a bed and an evening meal of saltfish, plantain fritters, sweet potatoes, rice, and beans—a regal repast for a rather weary traveler.

  I couldn’t resist a last stroll before turning in to the cemetery, of course, spiritual center of the Haitian psyche. The stone coffins, silvered by the moon, seemed larger than they did during the day. They were set in apparently haphazard fashion, wherever a bit of spare land existed, some even encroaching on the road itself. I was the only person around and, in spite of the bright moonlight, I felt uneasy. All those voodoo tales of zombies and the crushing of old bones for spiritual potions…I didn’t hang around long.

  After a breakfast of superb French-roasted Haitian coffee, fried eggs with more plantain fritters, a huge flat round of cassava bread, and orange juice fresh squeezed from oranges grown in the guest house garden, I was ready for the road again.

  And the road was ready for me too. A mile or so out of Bombardopolis I had my first puncture on a particularly rocky stretch in the middle of a wilderness of thornbushes. I thought I’d have to go through the whole arduous business of tire changing all by myself, but hardly had I climbed out of the Jeep when I was surrounded by helping hands—children, young strapping men, and old pipe-smoking grandfathers, full of advice and encouragement. They seemed to appear from nowhere (an experience I later got used to in Haiti). The job was done in no time. I had to drive back to the town to fix the punctured tire (crossing this country without a reliable spare is a guaranteed catastrophe). I sat bemused for half an hour as the inner tube was pried out, patched, and then heat-sealed using a “make-do” device of metal clamp and iron pot in which kerosene was burned to create the heat to heat the clamp to seal the patch. Ingenious innovations everywhere in Haiti.

  The first two hours or so after dawn in Haiti are idyllic—early-morning perfumes, dewy blossoms on corn tassles, the haloed tops of tall millet plants, the curling smoke of new fires, the sounds of cocks, donkeys, sleepy dogs. After that the heat increases by the minute, and by 8:30 A.M., I’m usually a pathetically dripping wretch seeking shade wherever I can find it. I drove with the windows wide open, choking in the dust but finding some relief in the humid breeze. Usually there are trees around or buildings, but in the deserty northwest cactus and thornbush provide little relief from the hammering heat.

  It was hard to believe here that Haiti was once almost covered in rain forest. Although deforestation is not a new phenomenon, it was a problem even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the peasants, liberated from the old French plantation system (the island was one of the richest colonies on earth under its European occupiers), began clearing their own land in the mountain foothills for small-farm cultivation. This, coupled with the still extensive use of charcoal for cooking, has resulted in a situation today where less than four hundred square miles (about three percent of the country) still have viable tree cover. Elsewhere erosion, abandoned farms, and lost irrigation potential have led to a semidesert transformation of much of the island. Later in my journey I passed through one of the last remaining rain forests, a powerful reminder of how this poor nation has wasted one of its greatest natural resources.

  Beyond a remarkably large church, the remnants of a stone fort and magnificent white sand beaches, Môle St. Nicolas seems to have little else to boast about. Vacant lots, abandoned buildings, a small harbor whose main source of income is the transport of charcoal (one wonders how charcoal is made from the stumpy vegetation on the dry hills all around)—the town has certainly seen better days.

  “But we are famous, M’sieur. Very famous.” A rotund middle-aged storeowner, trying to sell me beer at twice the going rate, became adamant about his home town.

  “The famous Christopher Columbus came here, M’sieur, in December 1492. This was the first place he saw in the New World after leaving Spain. We are very proud.”

  “Did he stay long?”

  “Oh well. Not so very long. Just a few hours maybe. But he liked it very much.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Oh, off down the coast towards Cap Haitien. And then he got stuck at Limonade. They were all drinking with the Arawak Indians. He let a young boy steer his ship, the Santa Maria, and he smashed it into a reef!”

  “And then?”

  “Well…” his voice became conspiratorial. “Very strange. No one really knows. Columbus left thirty-nine of his men behind to build a fort and get gold from the Indians and he went off in the Nia for about a year. When he came back he found the fort and houses burnt down and all his men gone…”

  “Where were they?”

  “Ah, no one knows…. They were never found…. The Indians had gone too…. Very strange, M’sieur.”

  I gave him a cigar. He paused to light it with exacting care.

  “Haiti has so many stories like this, M’sieur,” he said. “And where are you going now?”

  “East. Through Jean Rabel and Port-de-Paix. Hopefully to Cap Haitien.”

  “It’s a bad road, M’sieur.”

  “I’ve got a good Jeep.”

  He paused again, undecided about something. Then he leaned across the counter, pushing the bottles of beer aside.

  “What do you know about Haiti voodoo?”

  “Not very much. No one talks about it—except for foreigners!”

  “Yes, that is so t
rue. Those who know least always talk the most. Isn’t that true about so many things?”

  We chuckled together and his face disappeared in a cloud of cigar smoke.

  “This is an excellent cigar. I have not had one for over two years now. I thank you.”

  He became serious and conspiratorial again. “Today is Saturday. When you get to Anse à Foleur—it’s a small village about halfway between Port-de-Paix and Cap Haitien—ask for Jean-Claude.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Tell him Jules at Môle sent you and give him one of your cigars. Maybe give him two.”

  “And then?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he’ll show you a few things…”

  A wink, followed by more billows of smoke. “Haiti is a very strange country, M’sieur. Full of surprises….”

  I thanked Jules and loaded the beer into the Jeep.

  “M’sieur,” he seemed a little embarrassed, “Is it possible that you have just one more cigar for me?”

  There were times when I really questioned the sanity of this journey. True the scenery was magnificent, the beaches, the sky, that purple-blue ocean, but the track along which my poor Jeep bounced and crashed was idiotic. It seemed that an army of workers had carefully cleared all the adjoining land of boulders and rocks and then thrown them, higgledy-piggledy, across my road.

  It was a barren brittle terrain of limestone crags and broken strata, holed like Swiss cheese, gleaming white under a searing sun. At first glance it seemed utterly devoid of people and vegetation. But then, peering through the heat shimmers, I began to see mud and straw kays among the boulders, and tiny patches of tilled earth. Something was being grown here. Four-foot high plants surrounded by piles of rocks. They looked like fledgling trees. I’d heard that CARE had forestation projects in the northwest but surely not here, not in this wilderness?

  There were patches of millet, too, and other staples. And women out in the hellish heat, clearing more land. The endurance and perseverance of the Haitian hardscrabble farmers hit home that day. Their instinct for freedom, independence, and land to call their own drives them to the most herculean efforts just to keep alive—to grow enough to eat, to sell a little at market, to buy seed to grow again…the eternal cycle. Yet no matter how hopeless their situation seems to outsiders, you see pride and life and determination in their eyes. Somehow they make it work. Year after year after year. As governments tumble in Port-au-Prince and millions of treasury dollars disappear into political pockets, and the Pétionville princes and princesses drive around in shining and ever-larger sedans and the world throws up its hands at the horrors of hapless Haiti, the peasants keep on clearing their fields, planting their crops, and living lives whose rhythms and patterns have ancient origins in their original West Africa homeland, long before the slave traders and the colonialists and the kingly dictators and the never-ending chaos….

  Somehow in spite of the boulders, I reached Jean Rabel. A pretty little blue-and-white church, perched on a bluff at the end of a long line of palms, acted as a beacon. The track then promptly became a riverbed—not a ford—but the actual bed of a river for a few miles. A novel way of traveling.

  At a riverside market, I bought bags of mangoes, oranges, and bananas for pennies, and gorged my way across the fertile foothills of the Chaine de St. Nicolas to Port-de-Paix. Here at the docks I sat overlooking the famous Tortue Island, once a cavelaced haven for pirates and buccaneers in the days of gold-filled Spanish galleons.

  Soup seemed to be the only dish available at the dockside restaurant in spite of its wall painted with every kind of fish and seafood and a sign in Creole boasting “We got everything!” The soup looked tolerable at first, big chunks of chicken and potatoes and carrots. But I’d missed the chilies, whole green chunks of those nefariously lethal, lip-searing, stomach-scorching creatures, obliviously slurped down with the rest of the broth and now sending me into somersaults of agony as I swallowed beer after beer, trying to douse their fires.

  Fortunately the coast road after Port-de-Paix was tolerable. The fords were not very deep, the boulders smoothed, and the ruts flattened. My inflamed stomach could at least travel unknotted as I passed lovely beaches and little fishing villages and arrived in Anse à Foleur feeling almost recovered. I even found Jean-Claude without any difficulty, although I still wasn’t sure why Jules had recommended I seek him out. He was very black, very short, and by the wrinkled skin of his face and arms, very old.

  One cigar got me a smile, two a handshake, and three a gush of information given at great speed in a raspy half-whisper (the whispers seemed unnecessarily melodramatic as we were sitting in the Jeep), all about voodoo ceremonies, back in the hills, tonight, special celebrations, a houngan called Alisio, and a mamma (female voodoo priest), Theral.

  I didn’t believe a word of it. He was so theatrical he was ridiculous. Voodoo, I’d been told by people who claimed to know, had virtually disappeared since the ouster of Papa Doc. I was being treated as a tourist and a sucker. I told Jean-Claude that I had to leave to reach Cap Haitien by evening. He looked surprised and hurt. I gave him two more cigars. I didn’t mean to offend him, but Haiti gets too much of a bad rap with all this voodoo stuff…. (Looking back it’s hard to believe I could have been so arrogant—and so dumb.)

  From Anse à Foleur the track took a sudden turn inland. My map showed an alternative route along the coast but I was told it had been washed out by recent storms.

  “The only way is over the mountains.”

  So—over the mountains it was, back to the boulders and gulleys. I had no choice, so I sang songs, ate my mangoes and generally tried to ignore the thrashing and crashing of the poor Jeep as we edged up into the clouds, further and further from the coast.

  At the crest of the climb the clouds melted away and I looked down into a magic land. Range upon range of jungle-clad hills rolling away into a violet haze; rivers like bronze snakes winding through the shadowy valleys, thin veils of waterfalls between the canopied tiers of trees. No sign of people or villages.

  This was virgin country. All Haiti must have looked like this once, way back before the days of slaves and plantations and colonial empires. I sat by the roadside watching the clouds play tag across the green peaks. The wind was so cool and fresh you could almost drink it. I had been lucky on this journey. I had seen a part of the island few whites had ever seen and this was the climax, this glimpse of ancient Haiti. A moment to treasure.

  But Haiti can be mean with its moments. The wind became stronger and colder, the clouds moved in, covering the ranges and the forest. It was suddenly dark, really dark. Leaves and branches began to blow across the track. Time to move on, down the mountainside, into the shelter of the valley. Only the track was even worse on this side, great diagonal gashes of gouged earth littered with loose rocks. I turned the beams on full and drove down slowly through the cloud. Thunder pounded the hills. I tried to whistle to myself as the Jeep creaked and skidded. It could be worse, I thought. We could be having one of those notorious Haitian rainstorms…

  And—guess what. A notorious Haitian rainstorm. Wonderful. Just what I needed to end a day that began with a puncture, followed by a morning of the worst desert roads imaginable, followed by a river for a road, a stomach seared by chilies, some phony voodoo peddlers, and now, just when there might be a chance of a nice fluffy bed in Cap Haitien, an evening of skidding down mountainsides, mud slides, and the distinct possibility of being drowned in some raging river crossing. Not my idea of a perfect day.

  The rain was like a band of rum-crazed drummers on my roof. I could hardly see anything in front of me. The windshield wipers were useless.

  At the first village I knew it was hopeless to go on. The last stream I’d crossed had gone mad, tearing at its own bank, tossing huge branches like twigs, almost toppling the Jeep as I eased her through the surge of syrupy brown water, frothing furiously at the doors.

  I’m not sure the village even had a name, it was such a small ramshackle ki
nd of place, looking utterly forlorn in the sheeting rain. I stayed in the Jeep and saw people peeping at me through the narrow doorways of their kays. They probably thought I was mad; they were probably right.

  After about half an hour, things eased off. No, that’s completely the wrong image. Someone switched off the storm like a spigot. One moment it was a gray miasma outside, then the pounding on my roof ceased, to be replaced by a pleasant dewy dripping. Color eased back into the picture as if someone was playing with the controls of a TV set. The village actually began to look quite pretty with its little gardens and cottages crouched in the shade of palms. Well—time to move on. Who knows—I might still reach that fluffy bed in Cap Haitien.

  A boy came running up, waving his hands.

  “Non, blan.”

  I pointed ahead.

  “Non.” He was adamant.

  A few of his friends joined him. I opened the window.

  “M’sieur. Rain very strong. No good.”

  The other boys all nodded their heads.

  “The river. Much water. Very danger.”

  They were right. The streams would be full and, according to my map, I had quite a few fords ahead of me. Cap Haitien would have to wait.

  And then the strangeness began.

  It wasn’t frightening, at least not in the usual way. It was just that things got out of control—out of my control at least. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on except me. I had apparently arrived in the middle of some celebration. The rain had been merely an amusing diversion. Now it was over, I saw all the movement, the lights of candles, the murmurs of songs; I heard drums, not in the village but somewhere back in the hills. There was a sense of festival in the air….

  An old man dressed in a torn shirt and baggy black pants came over to me carrying two candles, skinny things, strips of rope dipped once in tallow. He looked at my eyes and laughed, revealing a black maw of a mouth with three enormous teeth. Then he handed me a candle and pointed to where other villagers were walking, up through the forest, beyond the mango trees. Well—why not?