by Wade Davis
Rachel’s aunt had been the mayor of Saint Marc, but we didn’t need her help to locate Marcel Pierre. He was well known. A mechanic pointed out a bar and dry goods store at the northern end of town in an area known as the Wasp’s Gate. Marcel Pierre owned the Eagle Bar, as the place was called. Behind it he had built his hounfour.
In the shadowy doorway of the bar a Dominican woman leaned on a Wurlitzer, apparently inured to the raucous music that even at this time of day poured from the machine. Rachel greeted her. The woman motioned us to a table on the porch, then turned and left, trailing the sour scent of cheap perfume. The music was unbearable, we agreed, and we got up to venture inside. The rear of the bar was divided into a number of dark and dingy cubicles, each no longer than the straw mat on its floor, each with a crudely drawn number on its door. A single unshaded light bulb hung from the ceiling. I imagined the place by night, a small labyrinth of cells, each inhabited by a soft, pliant body.
A young boy appeared, and after a brief exchange with Rachel he led us out the back of the bar, past a number of small houses, and through a gate of rusted tin that marked the entrance of the hounfour. He knocked three times. Marcel Pierre emerged from his temple with a woman. She was short and languid. He was tall, with muscles that moved at bone level, and below his flat face, hidden by dark glasses, his thorax stood out in bold relief. He wore red, and a golf cap bearing the emblem of a manufacturer of insecticides.
As we had agreed on the drive, Rachel introduced me as a representative of powerful interests in New York who were willing to pay generously for his services provided no questions were asked and my instructions were followed precisely. He was not impressed. He fixed us with a long disconcerting stare, and when he began to speak he held his head stiffly as if conversing through an imaginary intermediary. He seemed uncommonly calm, and it soon became clear that his only concern was money—how much and how soon.
I asked to see a sample of the reputed zombi poison, and he led us into his bagi, the inner sanctum of the temple. An altar piled deep with artifacts took up most of the room. Displayed prominently among the brilliantly colored powders, the rum and wine bottles, the playing cards, feathers, heads, and Roman Catholic lithographs, were a doll’s head and three skulls, one of them dog and two human. On the wall was a swollen carcass of a puffer fish, a sisal whip, and a staff decorated with horizontal bands of light and dark wood. Marcel reached into the pile on the altar and brought out a plastic bag containing a white aspirin bottle. From a ketchup bottle he poured an oily emulsion onto his hands and rubbed all exposed parts of his body, then instructed us to do the same. The potion smelled of ammonia and formaldehyde. Next, having wrapped a red cloth around his nose and mouth, he carefully opened the bottle. Inside was a coarse, light brown powder. Marcel stood back from the altar, and placidly lifted the red cloth from the left side of his face to reveal a mottled scar. This, he suggested, was proof of the powder’s efficacy.
The negotiations began. He presented me with what amounted to a grocery list—so much for the zombi, so much for the poison, so much to dig up the necessary bones in the cemetery, so much for all three. His brusque offer, void of mystique, left me neither hopeful nor suspicious. By now, after but forty-eight hours in Haiti, I was becoming aware that in this surrealistic country anything might be possible. I merely insisted on certain conditions. I would pay him the negotiated price for the poison provided that I would be able to observe the entire process and collect raw samples of each ingredient. He hesitated, but then agreed. I told him that within twenty-four hours I would let him know if we needed any of his other services.
That evening when I was back with Rachel at the Peristyle de Mariani, I discussed Marcel’s various propositions at some length with her father, Max. He assured me that an individual made into a zombi could be readily treated by a houngan. His confidence combined with my own skepticism that zombis even existed persuaded me to push Marcel Pierre as far as he would go. I would have a look at his poison, and if it was promising, other possibilities might follow.
We returned early the next morning, and Marcel Pierre took us to the local military post to request permission to enter the graveyard to dig up bones. This was denied, not for ethical reasons but because I had failed to obtain the necessary papers from the capital. Marcel suggested to me that we forget about obtaining fresh material from the cemetery and instead use some bones he had on hand at his temple. I agreed, and the three of us spent the rest of the morning assembling the various ingredients of the reputed poison. From an old apothecary we bought several packets of brightly colored talc—magical potions with such exotic names as “break wings,” “cut water,” “respect the crossroads.” Then we drove north to a barren scrubland to gather leaves. We were back at the hounfour that afternoon, and beneath the thatch shelter of his peristyle Marcel Pierre prepared his zombi poison. He first ground the leaves in a mortar, then grated a human skull, adding the shavings to the mortar along with the miscellaneous packets of talc. It seemed a desultory process, his moving from task to task laboriously like an insect, drooping his shoulder with each step. It was near the end of the afternoon when he handed me a dark green powder, finely sifted and sealed in a glass jar.
Rachel cracked open the tin cap of a rum bottle, tipping it lightly to the ground three times to feed the loa. Marcel nodded approvingly. In between long swigs of rum I mentioned to Marcel that I planned to test the poison on an enemy I had, a white foreigner living in the capital, and that I would be certain to let him know the results. I thanked him profusely and paid him the substantial sum I had promised, plus a sizable bonus. I left his hounfour certain that he knew how to make the zombi poison. I was equally convinced that what he had made me was worthless.
When we drove up to the house at Mariani late that night, four men were waiting for us. Max Beauvoir introduced me but not them, saying simply that they wanted to know what I was doing in Haiti. Opening my pack, I laid Marcel Pierre’s prepared poison on the table. One who seemed to be their leader, a short, gruff man with an enormous belly, took the poison, poured it into the palm of his hand, and stirred it with his index finger. Turning to Beauvoir, he said, “This is too light to be anything.” Max laughed, and the others joined in. The four stayed long enough to have a drink and then left without waiting to see the ceremony.
“Who were they?” I asked Max as soon as they were gone.
“Important men.”
“Houngan?”
He nodded.
I spent the next several days in the south looking for plantings of datura and the Calabar bean. All the species of datura that had been reported in Haiti were feral and quite weedy, and I had expected to find them growing in disturbed sites almost anywhere. Curiously, after walking the hills along the road over the mountains toward the southern port of Jacmel, and the barren fields along the east coast as far as Anse-à-Veau, I found but a single specimen—a scandent shrub of Datura metel, at a house site in a small coastal village, planted, I was told, as a remedy for asthma. As for the Calabar bean, I was equally disappointed. Having combed a number of low swampy habitats, and having perused the dusty herbarium at the Ministry of Agriculture, I found no evidence that the plant had become naturalized in Haiti.
But then, out with Max Beauvoir in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, I did find a species of the tree datura of the genus Brugmansia, planted as an ornamental. These are short, gnarly trees, almost invariably covered by large pendulous trumpet-shaped flowers. Though quite distinct in appearance from the spindly datura shrubs, they share the same active chemical principles and are equally toxic if ingested. This, in fact, was the same species used by the curanderos of northern Peru, the one known as cimora. I knew that the tree daturas were native to South America and had only recently been introduced into Haiti, but I was uncertain whether its special properties had been identified by the Haitian peasants. Apparently they had, for no sooner had I begun to collect specimens than a small rancorous group of hill peasants gather
ed, demanding to know why I was cutting that particular tree. But as soon as Beauvoir said a few words, their demeanor changed dramatically. They approached me expectantly, and a couple of young boys clambered up the trees for flowers. I turned to Beauvoir for an explanation.
“I told them that you are Grans Bwa, the spirit of the woods.” He indicated an old woman, gnawing on a small pipe. “She has asked that you bathe them with herbs. I explained that we have no time. She argues that at least you must bathe the children. But come, I told her perhaps another time.”
At that, I gathered my specimens and started down the hill toward the road. By then the ground at the base of the tree was blanketed with blossoms and the people had started to sing:
Leaves in the woods, call me
Oh, leaves in the woods, call me
Leaves in the woods, call me
Ever since I was small, I have danced.
Intrigued by the unexpected scarcity of datura in the fields of the south, I decided it was time to look up the last of my three leads on this increasingly enigmatic assignment. On a sultry afternoon when the capital smelled of spice, I contacted Lamarque Douyon, the psychiatrist who had been working with Clairvius Narcisse.
A secretary showed me into a stark office dominated by a massive mahogany desk and two photographs, each hung on a turquoise wall in frames that matched the desktop. One was a poster-sized presidential portrait of Dr. François Duvalier, a fixture that in most Haitian government offices has long since been replaced by a likeness of his son. The smaller photograph showed a young, almost unrecognizable Nathan Kline in a crewcut and horned-rimmed glasses. On another wall hung a plaque acknowledging the contributions of the American research institutions that had helped finance the initial construction of the clinic in 1959, and a second plaque thanking the foreign pharmaceutical companies for their contributions of free drugs for the first two years of operation. Beneath the barred windows stood a shock therapy unit, so archaic that it evoked a perverse nostalgia. The entire room was a freeze frame of the late fifties, the only time when research funds had flowed. Since then, not even the furnishings had changed.
Lamarque Douyon impressed me as a benign, soft-spoken man hampered not only by lack of funding but by the difficulties of reconciling his Western scientific training with the unique rhythms of his own culture and its thoroughly African foundations. He is a physician who straddles two very different worlds. As Haiti’s leading psychiatrist and the director of its only psychiatric institute, he remains accountable to a peer group of foreign scientists; yet as a clinician he treads through an utterly non-Western landscape where European notions of mental health lose their relevance.
Douyon’s scientific interest in the zombi phenomenon dates to a series of experiments he conducted in the late 1950s while completing his psychiatric residency at McGill University. That was the heyday of the early psychopharmacological research. Psychiatrists, having discovered that certain mental disorders could be successfully treated with drugs, were actively experimenting with a number of potent psychotropic substances on human subjects under controlled circumstances. What Douyon observed during some of these experiments reminded him of accounts of zombis he had heard as a child; he recalled as well the prevalent belief among many Haitians that zombis were created by a poison that brought on a semblance of death from which the victim would eventually recover. By the time he returned to Haiti in 1961 to take his position as director of the Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurologie, he, like Kline, was convinced that such a poison existed.
“Zombis cannot be the living dead,” he told me. “Death is not merely the loss of bodily function, it is the material decay of the cells and tissues. One does not wake up the dead. However, those who have been drugged may revive.”
“This zombi preparation, Dr. Douyon, do you have any idea what it contains?”
“Snakes, tarantulas, most anything that crawls.” He hesitated. “Or leaps—they say there is always a large toad. Human bones … but they go into everything.”
“Do you know the species of toad?”
“No, but I don’t think … there is a plant that grows here. We call it the concombre zombi, the zombi’s cucumber.”
“Oh, you mean datura.” I shared with him my thoughts about the Calabar bean.
He told me that he had never heard of the plant in Haiti and returned to the subject of datura. “When I was at McGill, my advisor suggested that I test a number of plants commonly associated with the zombi folklore. We fed a preparation of datura leaves to mice and induced a catatonic state for three hours. Unfortunately these experiments stopped when Professor Cameron left the institute.”
“Was that Ewen Cameron?”
“Yes, you know of him?”
“By reputation.” But I knew nothing of this connection. The late Ewen Cameron had been the director of the Allan Institution in Montreal during what Kline liked to refer to as the dark ages of psychiatry. Between 1957 and 1960 he conducted psychic driving and brainwashing experiments, funded partially by the CIA. He was notorious for combining LSD with massive doses of electroshock therapy in his studies of schizophrenia. After he left the institution, the subsequent director promptly banned all of Cameron’s therapeutic techniques.
“Datura must be the principal ingredient in the poison,” Douyon continued. “It is a powder that is placed in the form of a cross on the ground or across the threshold of a doorway. The peasants say that the victim succumbs just by walking over the cross.”
“How much of this powder?”
“Very little, no more than a spoonful.”
“Just on the bare ground?”
“The toxins must be absorbed through the feet,” he concluded.
This I had trouble with. In East Africa certain tribes surreptitiously administer poisons by coating spiny fruits and placing them along footpaths. Datura is topically active, but without at least this type of mechanical aid it was difficult to imagine it or any substance passing through the callused feet of a peasant. It was also unclear how the poisoner, who was supposed simply to sprinkle the powder on the threshold of a hut, might ensure that only the intended victim suffered. I was curious whether Douyon had attempted to contact individuals responsible for making the zombi poison.
“I know a bokor in Saint Marc,” he replied, “who supplied me with a vial of the poison, a white powder.”
“Marcel Pierre?”
“You know him?” He seemed surprised.
“I got his name from the BBC. I was with him several days ago. Was that the white powder that you sent as a sample to Kline?”
“We had no facilities here to test it. Kline never sent me any results.”
“There weren’t any, at least nothing positive.”
Douyon was disappointed, until I mentioned that the preparation obtained by the BBC had shown some biological activity.
“Did they get it from Marcel Pierre?” he asked. I nodded and he looked away. “Strange man, this Pierre. Did he tell you how many he has killed?”
“No.”
Douyon frowned. “These people are criminals,” he said. “It is always dangerous.” He told me how he had once taken a foreign film crew to a cemetery in the town of Desdunnes to attempt to document a zombi being taken from the ground. They had been met at the entrance to the graveyard by an armed band of peasants who destroyed their cameras and placed them in jail overnight. He had never tried it again.
Douyon rose and started out to take a call. Before leaving he passed me a paper from a folder on his desk. It was a copy of a legal document, Article 249 of the Haitian penal code, that referred specifically to the zombi poison, prohibiting the use of any substance that induced a lethargic coma indistinguishable from death. It indicated that should a victim of such poisons be buried, the act would be considered murder no matter what the final result. The Haitian government apparently recognized the existence of the poison with some assurance. I had a look at several other papers in the folder. One was Clairvius Na
rcisse’s medical dossier from the time of his death at the Schweitzer Hospital. I noted his symptoms: pulmonary edema leading to acute respiratory difficulties, rapid loss of weight, hypothermia, uremia, and hypertension.
I was not sure what to make of Douyon. On the one hand I had nothing but respect for his tenacious efforts, which after close to twenty frustrating years had finally yielded the provocative cases of Narcisse and Francina Illeus. Yet his pursuit of the reputed zombi poison had been less successful, and he seemed uncertain whether its formula would ever be discovered. He remained convinced that the active ingredient was datura, the same logical choice I had made when formulating my Calabar hypothesis. Yet despite his years of research, the only evidence that implicated datura was the fact that the plant was called the zombi’s cucumber. The experiments he had conducted at McGill years before meant very little; any number of plant extracts injected into mice might induce a catatonic stupor. Datura might still be the prime candidate, but after more than twenty years Douyon had done little to test his hypothesis. He had yet to obtain a documented preparation of the poison.
There was another problem. As a Western psychiatrist he had redefined a zombi as a man or woman who—having been poisoned, buried alive, and resuscitated—manifested a certain set of symtoms. Yet the measure of a victim’s psychiatric condition could never explain why an individual had become a victim in the first place. For example, in psychiatric terms, a zombi might be called a catatonic schizophrenic; both conditions are characterized by incoherence and catalepsy with alternate moments of stupor and activity. But catatonic schizophrenia as a syndrome exists worldwide and may result from a number of different processes that severely disrupt mental stability—including, perhaps, zombification. Certainly, if Narcisse’s testimony was to be believed, we were talking about an extraordinary phenomenon that actually caused an individual to be buried alive. Such a traumatic experience might readily drive one mad. But a zombi represented far more than a set of symptoms; if true, zombification was a social process unique to a particular cultural reality. There had to be men and women actually creating this poison, deciding how, when, and to whom it should be administered, and completing the act by distributing and caring for the victims. Above all, if zombis actually existed, there had to be a reason, an explanation rooted in the structure and beliefs of the Haitian peasant society. Rather than seeking the cause and purpose of zombification within that traditional society, Douyon assumed zombification to be a random criminal activity and limited his efforts to observing and treating its effects. One point he had made about Francina Illeus’s case had been particularly curious. When he attempted to return her to her home village, the family had refused to accept her. Douyon had explained that the people could not afford to feed an unproductive person. Yet in the short while that I had been in Haiti, I had already seen evidence that the elderly and infirm were well cared for by their families. I had an intuitive feeling that in her village, Francina represented far more than an extra mouth to feed.