by Wade Davis
A steel door opened behind me, and I heard the shuffling of bare feet on concrete. Douyon returned, trailed by a nurse and two patients. One of them I recognized.
When representatives of two completely different realities meet, words like normal become relative. I was in no position to judge if Clairvius Narcisse had been permanently affected by his ordeal. Physically he appeared fit. He spoke slowly but clearly. When questioned about his experience, he repeated basically the same account that I had heard from Nathan Kline. But he added certain extraordinary details. A scar he bore on his right cheek just to the edge of his mouth had been caused by a nail driven through his coffin. Quite incredibly, he recalled remaining conscious throughout his ordeal, and although completely immobilized, he had heard his sister weeping by his deathbed. He remembered his doctor pronouncing him dead. Both at and after his burial, his overall sensation was that of floating above the grave. This was his soul, he claimed, ready to travel on a journey that would be curtailed by the arrival of the bokor and his assistants. He could not remember how long he had been in the grave by the time they arrived. He suggested three days. They called his name and the ground opened. He heard drums, a pounding, a vibration, and then the bokor singing. He could barely see. They grabbed him, and began to beat him with a sisal whip. They tied him with rope and wrapped his body in black cloth. Bound and gagged, he was led away on foot by two men. For half the night they walked north until their party was met by another, which took custody of Narcisse. Traveling by night and hiding out by day, Narcisse was passed from one team to the next until he reached the sugar plantation that would be his home for two years.
Douyon lit a menthol cigarette for the second patient. She held it aimlessly, letting the ash grow until it dropped onto her lap. This was Francina Illeus, or “Ti Femme,” as she was known. In April 1979 peasants from the Baptist mission at Passereine had noticed her wandering about the market at Ennery, had recognized her as a zombi, and reported her presence to the American in charge of the mission, Jay Ausherman. Ausherman traveled to Ennery and found an emaciated Francina squatting in the market with her hands crossed like kindling before her face. Three years before, she had been pronounced dead after a short illness. The judge at Ennery, uncertain of what to do with someone who was legally dead, willingly granted custody to Ausherman, who in turn passed her over to Douyon for psychiatric care. At that time she was malnourished, mute, and negativistic. For three years Douyon had attempted through hypnosis and narcosis to speed her recovery. He believed that there had been improvement. Still, her mental faculties were marginal. Her eyes remained blank, and every gesture was swollen with effort. She spoke now, but softly in a high thin voice and only when prodded gently by Douyon. There was little spontaneous emotion, and when she left the room she walked as if on the bottom of the sea, her body bearing the weight of all the oceans.
5
A Lesson in History
IN THAT FIRST WEEK in Haiti, and for several days that followed, I often spent mornings wandering restlessly between my room and the veranda of the hotel, picking up a pen only to drop it, a book only to leave it open on a table. I lied to tourists about who I was. After twelve days I still had nothing. Marcel Pierre’s powder was clearly fraudulent. For now, there was little more to be learned at Douyon’s clinic. The nation baffled me. Stunned by her multitudes, awed by her mysteries, dumbfounded by her contradictions, I paced. Only at dawn, when from sheer exhaustion or moved by the splendor of the city basking in such soft light, was I still. Sometimes with my eyes closed, and the silence broken only by the odd bird, I would hear whispered messages of the land that intuitively I understood, if only for a moment. Eventually I came to respect those moments, for the cycle of logical questions was getting me nowhere.
That was why I welcomed Max Beauvoir’s suggestion that I forget about zombis and go with him to gather some leaves for his treatments. It is difficult and perhaps unimportant to capture the flavor of those outings, clouded as they now are by nostalgia. We took in the land, traveling its length, speaking constantly of its strengths, its weaknesses, its history, more often than not becoming lost in our thoughts and forgetting the purpose for which we had set out. Max Beauvoir placed the country before me like a gift. Images survive: streetside herbalists sheltered by ragged bits of awning, naked men in rice paddies, a string of peasants on a mountain trail, the angelic faces of their children, black as shadows. The days were fleeting and had a way of running into the night, and sometimes the singing never stopped and the drums called out painfully until one did not know which would be worse, to have them continue for another instant, or to have them stop. In the end, what emerged from these travels was a lesson in history, a lesson that served as a key to the symbols of the land.
In the closing decades of the eighteenth century the French colony of Saint Domingue was the envy of all Europe. A mere thirty-six thousand whites and an equal number of free mulattos dominated a slave force of almost half a million and generated two-thirds of France’s overseas trade—a productivity that easily surpassed that of the newly formed United States and actually outranked the total annual output of all the Spanish Indies combined. In the one year 1789 the exports of cotton and indigo, coffee, cacao, tobacco, hides, and sugar filled the holds of over four thousand ships. In France no fewer than five million of the twenty-seven million citizens of the ancien régime depended economically on this trade. It was a staggering concentration of wealth, and it readily cast Saint Domingue as the jewel of the French empire and the most coveted colony of the age.
In 1791, two years after the French Revolution, the colony was shaken and then utterly destroyed by the only successful slave revolt in history. The war lasted twelve years, as the ex-slaves were called on to defeat the greatest powers of Europe. They faced first the remaining troops of the French monarchy, then a force of French republicans, before driving off first a Spanish and then a British invasion. In December of 1801, two years before the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon at the height of his power dispatched the largest expedition ever to have sailed from France. Its mission was to take control of the Mississippi, hem in the expanding United States, and reestablish the French empire in what had become British North America. En route to Louisiana, it was ordered to pass by Saint Domingue and quell the slave revolt. The first wave of the invading force consisted of twenty thousand veteran troops under Bonaparte’s ablest officers commanded by his own brother-in-law, Leclerc. So vast was the flotilla of support vessels that when it arrived in Haitian waters, the leaders of the revolt momentarily despaired, convinced that all of France had appeared to overwhelm them.
Leclerc never did reach Louisiana. Within a year he was dead, and of the thirty-four thousand troops eventually to land with him, a mere two thousand exhausted men remained in service. Following Leclerc’s death, French command passed to the infamous Rochambeau, who immediately declared a war of extermination. Common prisoners were put to the torch; rebel generals were chained to rocks and allowed to starve. The wife and children of one prominent rebel were drowned before his eyes while French sailors nailed a pair of epaulettes into his naked shoulders. Fifteen hundred dogs were imported from Jamaica and taught to devour black prisoners in obscene public events housed in hastily built amphitheaters in Port-au-Prince. Yet despite this explicit policy of torture and murder, Rochambeau failed. A reinforcement of twenty thousand men simply added to the casualty figures. At the end of November 1803, the French, having lost over sixty thousand veteran troops, finally evacuated Saint Domingue.
That the revolutionary slaves of Saint Domingue defeated one of the finest armies of Europe is a historical fact that, though often overlooked, has never been denied. How they did it, however, has usually been misinterpreted. There are two common explanations. One invokes the scourge of yellow fever and implies that the white troops did not die at the hand of the blacks but from the wretched conditions of the tropical lands. Although without doubt many soldiers did succumb to fever, the supposition
is contradicted by two facts. For one, European armies had been triumphant in many parts of the world plagued by endemic fevers and pestilence. Secondly, in Haiti the fevers arrived with the regularity of the seasons and did not begin until the onset of the rains in April. Yet the French forces led by Leclerc landed in February of 1802 and before the beginning of the season of fever had suffered ten thousand casualties.
The second explanation for the European defeat refers to fanatic and insensate hordes of blacks rising as a single body to overwhelm the more “rational” white troops. It is true that in the early days of the revolt the slaves fought with few resources and extraordinary courage. Accounts of the time report that they went into battle armed only with knives and picks, sticks tipped in iron, and that they charged bayonets and cannon led by the passionate belief that the spirits would protect them, and their deaths, if realized, would lead them back to Guinée, the African homeland. Yet their fanaticism sprung not only from spiritual conviction but from a very human and fundamental awareness of their circumstances. In victory lay freedom, in capture awaited torture, in defeat stalked death. Moreover, after the initial spasm of revolt, the actual number of slaves who took part in the fighting was not that high. The largest of the rebel armies never contained more than eighteen thousand men. As in every revolutionary era, the struggle was carried by relatively few of those afflicted by the tyranny. The European forces suffered from fever, but they were defeated by men—not marauding hordes but relatively small, well-disciplined, and highly motivated rebel armies led by men of some military genius.
If the historians have clouded the character of the struggle, they have also inaccurately idealized the revolutionary leaders—Toussaint L’Ouverture, Christophe, and Dessalines, in particular—disguising their ambitions in lofty libertarian visions that they most certainly did not have. The primary interest of the French in the immediate wake of the uprising was the maintenance of an agrarian economy devoted to the production of export crops. How this was accomplished was of little concern. Once they realized that the restoration of slavery was not possible, and before Napoleon arose to attempt to storm the island by force, the French ministers devised an alternative system whereby freed slaves as sharecroppers would be forged into a new form of indentured labor. The plantations would essentially remain intact. Lacking the military presence to enforce this scheme, the French turned to the leaders of the revolutionary armies and found willing collaborators, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, who became a major figure in the restoration of French authority on the island. The French, however, made a critical error in assuming that this co-opted leadership would submit to the whims of Paris. On the contrary, the black leadership did what they had always planned to do. They secured for themselves positions at the top of a new social order.
Toussaint L’Ouverture had no intentions of overseeing the dismantling of the colonial plantations. In the abstract he was committed to the freedom of the people, but in practice he believed that the only way to maintain the country’s prosperity and the free status of the citizens was through agricultural production. One of the most persistent myths about the Haitian revolution is the belief that the original plantations, having been destroyed in the initial uprising, never attained their former prosperity; the tacit assumption being that in the wake of the revolt the blacks who took over were incapable of governing. This is historically untrue. Within eighteen months of attaining power Toussaint L’Ouverture had restored agricultural production to two-thirds of what it had been at the height of the French colony. Had the French bourgeoisie been willing to share power with the revolutionary elite, it is possible that an export economy might have been maintained for some time. It was destined to collapse, however, not because of the lack of interest or inability of the new elite, nor even because of the chaos unleashed by Leclerc’s invasion. Its eventual demise was assured by an expedient policy begun by the French long before the revolution in 1791.
The French plantation owners, faced with the difficulty of feeding close to half a million slaves, had granted provisional plots of land so that the slaves might produce their own food. The slaves were not only encouraged to cultivate their plots, they were allowed to sell their surplus, and as a result a vast internal marketing system developed even before the revolution. Thus the plantation owners in a calculated gesture had inadvertently sown the seeds of an agrarian peasantry. Yet another lingering myth concerning the revolution asserts that once the slaves were liberated from the plantations it was virtually impossible to entice them back onto the land. In fact, in the wake of the revolt, the majority of the ex-slaves went directly to the land, and energetically produced the staple foodstuffs that the internal market of the country demanded. Reading popular accounts of the twelve-year revolutionary war, one would assume that the entire population had scavenged for its sustenance. On the contrary, they were eating yams, beans, and plantains grown and sold by the majority of ex-slaves who cultivated their lands as freemen. The problem of the revolutionary elite was not to get the people back to the land, it was to get them from their own lands back to the plantations.
An independent peasantry was the last thing the black military leaders wanted. Jean-Jacques Dessalines maintained a dream of an export economy based on chain-gang labor up until his assassination in 1806. Henri Christophe, who ruled the northern half of the country until 1820, was temporarily successful, using measures every bit as harsh as those of the colonial era. For ten years he was able to produce export crops that allowed him to build an opulent palace and support a lavish court. Yet eventually his people revolted, and with his death in 1820, there disappeared the last serious attempt to create a plantation-based economy.
What emerged in the early years of independence was a country internally vigorous but externally quiescent. Productivity of export crops declined completely. At the height of the colony, over 163 million pounds of sugar were exported annually; by 1825, total exports measured two thousand pounds, and some sugar was actually imported from Cuba. Foreigners considered the economy to be dead, and again cited the inability of blacks to organize themselves. What these statistics in fact indicated was the unwillingness of a free peasantry to submit to an economic system that depended on their labor to produce export crops that would only profit a small number of the elite. The Haitian economy had not disappeared, it had simply changed. With negligible export earnings, the central government soon went broke. As early as 1820, then President Boyer was forced to pay his army with land grants. Thus unleashing the common soldier onto the land, he dealt the final blow to any lingering dreams of reestablishing the plantations. Recognizing that no income was going to accrue from nonexistent export commodities, he began to tax the emerging structures of the peasant economy. In placing a tax on rural marketplaces, for example, he generated revenue, but more importantly from a historical perspective, he legitimized the institution itself. Then, unable to impose taxes or rents on the lands that the peasants had already taken as their own, he did the only thing that could raise income. He began officially to sell them the land. It was an extraordinary admission on the part of the central government that the peasants were in firm control of the countryside. The ex-slaves had moved onto the land, and nothing was going to pry them off it. The central government acquiesced and did what it could to generate at least some revenue from a situation that was totally beyond its control.
Yet who were these peasants who had so decisively rooted themselves to the land? Some perhaps were the descendants of the first slaves to arrive with the Spanish as early as 1510, but the majority had actually been born in Africa. Between 1775 and the outbreak of the revolution in 1791, the colony had expanded as never before. Production of cotton and coffee, for example, increased 50 percent in a mere six years, and to fuel such growth the slave population had been almost doubled. Yet because of the wretched conditions on the plantations at least seventeen thousand slaves died each year, while the birthrate remained an insignificant one percent. Hence, during th
e last fourteen years of undisturbed rule the French imported no fewer than 375,000 Africans. In other words, the germ of the modern Haitian peasantry quite literally sprouted in Africa.
The revolutionary slaves who settled the tortuous recesses of a mountainous island came from many parts of the ancient continent, and represented many distinct cultural traditions. Among them were artisans and musicians, herbalists, carvers, metalworkers, boatbuilders, farmers, drum makers, sorcerers, and warriors. There were men of royal blood, and others who had been born into slavery in Africa. In common was their experience with a heinous economic system that had ripped them away from their material world, but critically they also shared an oral tradition that was unassailable—a rich repository of religious belief, knowledge of music, dance, medicine, agriculture, and patterns of social organization that they carried with them into every remote valley. The evolution of these various traditions, their fusions and transformations, was deeply affected by a blanket of isolation that fell upon the country in the early years of the nineteenth century.