by Wade Davis
Just beyond a cemetery of whitewashed tombs, the road bursts into the open, and for the first time since entering the Carrefour one senses the sea at hand. About three kilometers beyond, where the nose of the mountain touches the water, my driver turned into a grove of trees.
A porter met me at the gate, and I followed him through a marvelous garden toward a small outbuilding on the edge of the property. There, among a dusty collection of amulets and African art, Max Beauvoir awaited me. He was immediately impressive—tall, debonaire in dress and manner, and handsome. Fluent in several languages, he questioned me at length about my previous work, my academic background, and my intentions in Haiti. In turn, I offered my initial hypothesis concerning the use of poisons in the creation of zombis.
“And should you find these zombis? Will you not laugh at their misery?”
“I can’t say. Maybe, just as I laugh at my own.”
He smiled. “Spoken like a Haitian. Yes, we do laugh at our misfortune, but we reserve that right for ourselves.” He hesitated, pulling deeply on a cigarette. “I am afraid you shall be looking for this poison for some time, Mr. Davis. It is not a poison that makes a zombi, it is the bokor.”
“The bokor?”
“The priest who serves with the left hand,” he said cryptically. “But that is a false distinction.” He paused. “In a way, we are all bokors, we houngan. The houngan must know evil to combat it, the bokor must embrace good in order to subvert it. It is all one. The bokor who knows the magic can make anyone a zombi—a Haitian living abroad, a foreigner. Likewise, I can treat a victim, should I choose. It is our force, and our greatest defense. But this talk is in vain. This is a land where things are not the way they seem.”
Beauvoir led me back to my car, exchanging pleasantries but offering neither comment nor information related to my assignment. Instead, having revealed to me that he was a vodoun priest, a houngan, he asked me to return that night to witness his vodoun ceremony. The land we stood on was his hounfour—his temple, a sanctuary, and shrine.
Max Beauvoir held a commercial vodoun ceremony every night. Anyone was invited, and there was a ten-dollar charge for tourists that supported his family and the thirty or more people who worked for him. I arrived around ten and was taken into the peristyle, the roofed court of the hounfour, and was led around a semicircle of tables to the one where Beauvoir sat at the head. A waiter brought me a drink. Beauvoir invited me to scan the assembly of visitors, an eclectic gathering that included some French sailors, several groups of Haitians, an anthropology professor from Milan who had visited earlier in the day, a pair of journalists, and a party of American missionaries. There was the sound of a rattle, and Beauvoir directed my attention to the rear of the temple.
A white-robed girl—one of the hounsis, or initiates in the temple—came out of the darkness into the peristyle, spun in two directions, then placed a candle on the ground and lit it. The mambo, or vodoun priestess, repeated her motion bearing a clay jar, then carefully traced a cabalistic design on the earth, using cornmeal taken from the jar. This, Beauvoir explained, was a vévé, the symbol of the loa, or spirit, being invoked. The mambo next presented a container of water to the cardinal points, then poured libations to the centerpost of the peristyle, the axis along which the spirits were to enter. Further libations were offered to each of the three drums and the entrance of the temple. Then, with a flourish, the mambo led the initiates into the peristyle and around the centerpost, the poteau mitan, in a counterclockwise direction until they knelt as one before the houngan. Bearing a rattle, or asson, Beauvoir led the prayer, an elaborate litany that invoked in hierarchical order the spirits of the vodoun pantheon. He recited in an ancient ritual language whose sounds evoked all the mysteries of an ancient tradition.
Then the drums started, first the penetrating staccato cry of the cata, the smallest, whipped by a pair of long thin sticks. The rolling rhythm of the second, the seconde, followed, and then came the sound of thunder rising, as if the belly of the earth were about to burst. This was the maman, largest of the three. Each drum had its own rhythm, its own pitch, yet there was a stunning unity to their sound that swept over the senses. The mambo’s voice sliced through the night, and against the rising chords of her invocation the drummers beat a continuous battery of sound, a resonance so powerful and directed it had the very palm trees above swaying in sympathy.
The initiates responded, swinging about the peristyle as one body linked by a single pulse. Each hounsis remained anonymous, focused inward and turned away from the audience toward the poteau mitan and the drums. Their dance was not a ritual of poised grace, of allegory; it was a frontal assault on the forces of nature. Physically, it was a dance of shoulders and arms, of feet flat on the ground repeating deceptively simple steps over and over. But it was also a dance of purpose and resolution, of solidity and permanence.
For forty minutes the dance went on, and then it happened. The maman broke—fled from the fixed rhythm of the other two drums, then rushed back with a highly syncopated, broken counterpoint. The effect was one of excruciating emptiness, a moment of hopeless vulnerability. An initiate froze. The drum pounded relentlessly, deep solid blows that seemed to strike directly to the woman’s spine. She cringed with each beat. Then, with one foot fixed to the earth like a root, she began to spin in a spasmodic pirouette, out of which she soon broke to hurtle about the peristyle, stumbling, falling, grasping, thrashing the air with her arms, momentarily regaining her center only to be driven on by the incessant beat. And upon this wave of sound, the spirit arrived. The woman’s violence ceased; slowly she lifted her face to the sky. She had been mounted by the divine horseman; she had become the spirit. The loa, the spirit that the ceremony had been invoking, had arrived.
Never in the course of my travels in the Amazon had I witnessed a phenomenon as raw or powerful as the spectacle of vodoun possession that followed. The initiate, a diminutive woman, tore about the peristyle, lifting large men off the ground to swing them about like children. She grabbed a glass and tore into it with her teeth, swallowing small bits and spitting the rest onto the ground. At one point the mambo brought her a live dove; this the hounsis sacrificed by breaking its wings, then tearing the neck apart with her teeth. Apparently the spirits could be greedy, for soon two other hounsis were possessed, and for an extraordinary thirty minutes the peristyle was utter pandemonium, with the mambo racing about, spraying rum and libations of water and clairin, directing the spirits with the rhythm of her asson. The drums beat ceaselessly. Then, as suddenly as the spirits had arrived, they left, and one by one the hounsis that had been possessed collapsed deep within themselves. As the others carried their exhausted bodies back into the temple, I glanced at Beauvoir, and then back across the tables of guests. Some began nervously to applaud, others looked confused and uncertain.
It was only the beginning of an extraordinary night. More was to follow, Beauvoir explained. What we had just seen were the rites of Rada, derived almost directly from the services of the deities of Dahomey. In Haiti, the Rada have come to represent the emotional stability and warmth of Africa, the hearth of the nation. Customarily in the Port-au-Prince region they are followed by those of a new nation of spirits, forged directly in the steel and blood of the colonial era. These are the Petro, and they reflect all the rage, violence and delirium that threw off the shackles of slavery. The drums, dancing, and rhythm of their beat are completely distinct. Whereas the Rada drumming and dancing are on beat, the Petro are offbeat, sharp, and unforgiving, like the crack of a rawhide whip.
The spirits arrived again, only this time riding a fire burning at the base of the poteau mitan. The hounsis was mounted violently—her entire body shaking, her muscles flexed—and a single spasm wriggled up her spine. She knelt before the fire, calling out in some ancient tongue. Then she stood up and began to whirl, describing smaller and smaller circles that carried her like a top around the poteau mitan and dropped her, still spinning, onto the fire. She remained
there for an impossibly long time, and then in a single bound that sent embers and ash throughout the peristyle, she leapt away. Landing squarely on both feet, she stared back at the fire and screeched like a raven. Then she embraced the coals. She grabbed a burning faggot with each hand, slapped them together, and released one. The other she began to lick, with broad lascivious strokes of her tongue, and then she ate the fire, taking a red-hot coal the size of a small apple between her lips. Then, once more she began to spin. She went around the poteau mitan three times until finally she collapsed into the arms of the mambo. The ember was still in her mouth.
After the ceremony ended, a number of the audience came over to speak with Beauvoir, but I was drawn toward the fire at the foot of the poteau mitan. I felt its heat. I teased an ember out of the flames, and lifted it between two pieces of kindling.
“It surprises you.”
I turned to the voice and found one of the hounsis, her white dress still wet with sweat.
“Yes, it is amazing.”
“The loa are strong. Fire cannot harm them.”
With that, she excused herself and moved toward Beauvoir’s table. Then I realized she had spoken perfect English. This was Rachel Beauvoir. She was sixteen, and she walked as if her dancing never stopped.
It seemed like days later when I returned to the Ollofson that evening. The hotel appeared to have shifted its mood yet again. In the daylight when I had arrived it was a white palace, fragile and pretty, a gingerbread fantasy of turrets and towers, cupolas and wooden minarets decorated in lace, which paint alone kept from collapsing into the sea. By late afternoon it had fallen into desuetude, its beams swollen by the moist heat, its atmosphere dense from the impending storm. Later, in the wake of the deluge that tumbled every day like an avalanche onto the tropical plain of the city, the building’s facade washed clean, it glowed again with warmth and beauty in the soft air of dusk. Now, by night and a shrouded moon, it had grown morbid, abandoned, overgrown, staring out over the city with shuttered windows, its gates bound by lianas, its gardens unkempt and wild.
I sat on the veranda, too restless to sleep, attempting to make sense out of what I had seen at Beauvoir’s. There was no escaping the fact that a woman in an apparent state of trance had carried a burning coal in her mouth for three minutes with impunity. Perhaps even more impressive, she did it every night on schedule. I thought of other societies where believers affirm their faith by exposing themselves to fire. In São Paulo, Brazil, hundreds of Japanese celebrate the Buddha’s birthday by walking across beds of coals, the temperature of which has been measured at 650 degrees Fahrenheit. In Greece, tourists regularly watch the firewalkers at the village of Ayia Eleni, acolytes who believe that the presence of Saint Constantine protects them. The same sort of thing goes on in Singapore and throughout the Far East. Western scientists have gone to almost absurd lengths to explain such feats. Generally they invoke the “Leidenfrost point,” citing the effect that makes drops of water dance on a skillet. This theory suggests that just as heat vaporizes the bottom of the water droplet as it approaches the skillet, a thin protective layer of vapor is formed between the burning rocks, for example, and the firewalkers’ feet. I had to smile as I recalled this explanation. To my mind it begged the question entirely. After all, a water droplet on a skillet is not a foot on a red-hot coal, nor lips wrapped about an ember. I still burn my wet tongue if I place the lit end of a cigarette on it. And my own experience in Indian sweat lodges, where the temperatures may reach the boiling point, had taught me that only concentration and the guidance of the medicine man allowed one to endure such a test. Now, after what I had seen at Beauvoir’s, any explanation that did not take into account the play of mind and consciousness, belief and faith, seemed hollow. The woman had clearly entered some kind of spirit realm. But what impressed me the most was the ease with which she did so. I had no experience or knowledge that would allow me either to rationalize or to escape what I had seen.
“And you, mon cher, what are you here for?” The words startled me, and I turned to face a narrow man dressed in fine linen, perched on the edge of the hotel veranda like a shorebird. In his right hand spun an ebony cane inlaid with silver.
“A journalist, no doubt. And which of the many faces of this land shall you see? Shall you see the misery, the suffering, and call it the truth?”
He took three slow steps across the veranda and dropped gracefully into a wicker chair, crossing his legs as he sat. Above him the slow whirl of a wooden fan paced his practiced words like a metronome. He seemed fraudulent, yet I was drawn to him as one is to a caricature. He turned despondent.
“My country, my beautiful country, is run by fools. Watch them descend from the heights in their silver cars, hands clasped to teak steering wheels. Mon cher, they smile like satyrs that have deflowered a nation.”
He spoke almost like a drunkard, yet his eyes were clear.
“Perhaps you shall know the other Haiti, if you can bear it. We are a nation of three—the rich, the poor, and myself. We have all forgotten how to weep. Our wretched past is forgotten as a foul dream, an awkward interlude.”
I stood up to leave.
“I see I frighten you. My deepest apologies.”
I bade the stranger goodnight and crossed the veranda toward my room. He watched me in a faded mirror.
I awakened early the next day and decided to drive north to the town of Saint Marc to look up Marcel Pierre, the houngan who had provided the BBC with its sample of the reputed zombi poison. Beauvoir called me before I could leave, and when I told him my plans he suggested that I take his daughter Rachel with me as an interpreter.
I was waiting on the veranda of the Ollofson when they arrived. Rachel wore a cotton dress, and as they walked up the alabaster steps of the hotel, the patterns ran together like a watercolor.
The trip up the coast was unlike any other drive I had taken in the Americas. It began by the docks, where the black shanties face the cruise ships, and men with legs like anvils drag rickety carts laden with bloody cowhides. Passing out of the city through the lush canefields of the Cul de Sac Plain, it reached the slopes of the Chaine de Matheux and turned back to the sea. Further on, among the wattle-and-daub houses thatched in palm, the concrete ancestral tombs, and the long lines of sleek bodies and bicycles by the roadside, one sensed Africa at hand. All the produce of this surprisingly abundant land is carried on the head—baskets of eggplant and greens, bundles of firewood, tables, a coffin, a single piece of cane, sacks of charcoal, buckets of water, and countless unidentifiable drab bundles. Everything large or small is carried atop out of habit as much as necessity, like a delightful but defiant challenge to the laws of gravity. By the roadside in the shaded tunnel formed by planted neem trees, the passages of rural life come on theatrical display.
I felt lucky to have Rachel with me. Like a child set loose in a carnival, she delighted in the landscape and took pleasure in pointing out things I could not have seen, let alone understood—all the incidental visual anecdotes that for her somehow formed a whole. Yet she herself seemed such a mix of lives. The night before I had sat at the peristyle transfixed by the magic of her and the other hounsis; now as we spoke—and we did continuously—I realized that she was also a high school senior, and an American one at that. Rachel, in fact, had been born in the United States and had spent the first ten years of her life in Massachusetts. Her family, once back in Haiti, and with an eye to her future university education, had enrolled her in the private school run for all the English-speaking children of the foreign diplomatic community. Hence, as we traveled north to try to obtain a poison from Marcel Pierre, our conversation ran from zombis to high school yearbooks, proms, college admission boards, and back to the loa. I don’t know if she noticed how strange it all seemed to me. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked at one point.
“Mainly, I’m an ethnobotanist.”
“What’s that?”
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br /> “Somewhere between an anthropologist and a biologist. We try to find new medicine from plants.”
“Have you found any?”
“No.” I laughed.
“I’d like to study anthropology, or literature. But I think I like anthropology better.”
“So do I. You get tired of just books.”
“I already am.” She was looking out the windshield watching the slopes of the mountains that loomed above the coastal road. “Somewhere around here a friend of my father saw a ball of fire come out a cave,” she said.
Saint Marc was still. In the white heat of midday, not even a dog ventured forth. The pallid luster of haze shimmered at the ends of long dusty streets. Buildings of brick and wood, ravaged by time, stood braced by the surrounding hills, scabrous and stripped of vegetation, and mile after mile of featureless hills rose to distant mountains trapped by the horizon.