by Wade Davis
The nation that emerged from the revolutionary era was a pariah in the eyes of the international community. With the exception of Liberia, which was a limp creation of the United States, Haiti ranked as the only independent black republic for a hundred years. Its very existence was a constant thorn in the side of an imperialistic age. The Haitian government irritated the European powers by actively supporting revolutionary struggles that vowed to eliminate slavery. Simon Bolívar, for example, was both sheltered there and funded before he liberated Venezuela and the other Spanish colonies. In a more symbolic gesture, the government purchased shipments of slaves en route to the United States only to grant them freedom. Moreover, Haiti defied international commercial interests by prohibiting any foreigner from owning land or property within the country. By no means did this law bring trade to a standstill, but it dramatically modified its nature. In a century wherein European capital moved into virtually all regions of the world, Haiti remained relatively immune. Even the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church was checked. The clergy, which had never had a particularly strong presence in colonial days, lost virtually all influence after the revolution. In fact, for the first half-century of Haiti’s independence, there was an official schism between the country and the Vatican. Roman Catholicism remained the official religion of the emerging political and economic elite, but during the seminal years of the nation, the church had practically no presence in the countryside.
Within Haiti, isolation of a different form occurred. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the colonial infrastructure of roads decayed and was not replaced, the physical gap between town and country widened. This, in turn, sharpened an emerging cultural hiatus between two radically different segments of Haitian society, the rural peasants and the urban elite. The former, of course, were ex-slaves; the latter, in part, descendants of a special class of free mulattos that during the colonial era had enjoyed both great wealth and all the rights of French citizens, including the ignoble privilege of owning slaves. During the early years of the independence, the obvious differences between these two groups crystallized into a profound separation that went far deeper than mere class lines. They became more like two different worlds, coexisting within a single country.
The urban elite, though proudly Haitian, turned to Europe for cultural and spiritual inspiration. They spoke French, professed faith in the Roman Catholic church, and were well educated. Their women wore the latest Parisian fashions, and their men naturally formed the chromatic screen through which European and American commercial interests siphoned what they could of the nation’s wealth. Their young men frequently traveled abroad, for both higher training and amusement, invariably returning to fill all business and professional positions, as well as governmental and military offices. There they promulgated the official laws of the land, all of which were again based on French precedent and the Napoleonic Code. By all foreign standards, it was this small circle of friends and extended families—for the elite never numbered more than 5 percent of the population—that controlled much of the political and economic power of the nation.
In the hinterland, however, the ex-slaves created an utterly different society based not on European models, but on their own ancestral traditions. It was not, strictly speaking, an African society. Inevitably European influences were felt, and only very rarely did pure strains of specific African cultures survive or dominate. What evolved, rather, was a uniquely Haitian amalgam forged predominantly from African traits culled from many parts of that continent. Typically, its members thought of themselves less as descendants of particular tribes or kingdoms than as “ti guinin”—Children of Guinée, of Africa, the ancient homeland, a place that slowly drifted from history into the realm of myth. And, in time, what had been the collective memory of an entire disenfranchised people become the ethos of new generations, and the foundation of a distinct and persistent culture.
Today evidence of the African heritage is everywhere in rural Haiti. In the fields, long lines of men wield hoes to the rhythm of small drums, and just beyond them sit steaming pots of millet and yams ready for the harvest feast. In a roadside settlement, or lakou, near the center of the compound, a wizened old man holds court. Markets sprout up at every crossroads, and like magnets they pull the women out of the hills; one sees their narrow traffic on the trails, the billowy walk of girls beneath baskets of rice, the silhouette of a stubborn matron dragging a half-dozen donkeys laden with eggplant. There are sounds as well. The echo of distant songs, the din of the market, and the cadence of the language itself—Creole—each word truncated to fit the meter of West African speech. Each of these disparate images, of course, translates into a theme: the value of collective labor, communal land holdings, the authority of the patriarch, the dominant role of women in the market economy. And these themes, in turn, are clues to a complex social world.
Yet images alone cannot begin to express the cohesion of the peasant society; this, like a psychic education, must come in symbols, in invisible tones sensed and felt as much as observed. For in this country of survivors and spirits, the living and the dead, it is religion that provides the essential bond. Vodoun is not an isolated cult; it is a complex mystical worldview, a system of beliefs concerning the relationship between man, nature, and the supernatural forces of the universe. It fuses the unknown to the known, creates order out of chaos, renders the mysterious intelligible. Vodoun cannot be abstracted from the day-to-day lives of the believers. In Haiti, as in Africa, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane, between the material and the spiritual. Every dance, every song, every action is but a particle of the whole, each gesture a prayer for the survival of the entire community.
The pillar of this community is the houngan. Unlike the Roman Catholic priest, the houngan does not control access to the spirit realm. Vodoun is a quintessentially democratic faith. Each believer not only has direct contact with the spirits, he actually receives them into his body. As the Haitians say, the Catholic goes to church to speak about God, the vodounist dances in the hounfour to become God. Nevertheless, the houngan’s role is vital. As a theologian he is called upon to interpret a complex body of belief, reading the power in leaves and the meaning in stones. Yet vodoun not only embodies a set of spiritual concepts, it prescribes a way of life, a philosophy and a code of ethics that regulate social behavior. As surely as one refers to Christian or Buddhist society, one may speak of vodoun society, and within that world one finds completeness: art and music, education based on the oral transmission of songs and folklore, a complex system of medicine, and a system of justice based on indigenous principles of conduct and morality. The houngan as de facto leader of this society is at once psychologist, physician, diviner, musician, and spiritual healer. As a moral and religious leader, it is he who must skillfully balance the forces of the universe and guide the play of the winds.
Within the vodoun society, there are no accidents. It is a closed system of belief in which no event has a life of its own. It was within this society that Clairvius Narcisse and Ti Femme became zombis.
“Look into the sky and what do you see?” Rachel asked, staring far into the darkness. There was a small cooking fire between us, and in the flamelit smoke her face softened, her skin flushed in copper.
“Stars, sometimes.”
“When I was small my father took me to a planetarium in New York. You have millions of stars, and your astronomers have even more.” She stood up and walked slowly into the shadow, her words falling away like sparks into the night.
“Look into this sky. We have only a few, and when the clouds come in even fewer. But behind our stars, we see God. Behind yours, you just see more stars.”
Her words saddened me unexpectedly, exposing as they did the gap that lay between me and her people. I gazed down the slope and across the crowded valley alive with twinkling fires, and followed the movements of a torch beam as it climbed erratically toward the crest of a draw. I rememb
ered a recent day when her father and I had been out walking. We had come to a height of land where we could look across a scorched valley stripped to the bone, with haze rising off hot white stones and a few gnarly native trees among the ubiquitous thornscrub and neem. Max Beauvoir had taken a deep breath as if the very sight of such a landscape might bring tears to his eyes—and it probably could have. He had waxed eloquent as if words alone might have squeezed beauty out of that wretched sight, from the wasteland created by years of neglect. It had been extraordinary. I could only think of locusts, he of angels, yet who was the wiser?
Like all contented men, Max Beauvoir had by middle age found his rest. It had not come easily. The son of a bourgeois physician, he had left Haiti as a youth on a remarkable odyssey that led him from the streets of New York to the Sorbonne in Paris and finally to the court of the king of Dahomey. After fifteen years abroad he returned to Haiti, a chemical engineer intent on growing sisal, from which he would extract cortisone. His plantings were barely established when his work was interrupted by the death of a grandfather, a houngan, who from his deathbed instructed Max to take on the mantle of the religious tradition. Soon after, his commercial venture abandoned, Max Beauvoir began a second journey. For five years he crisscrossed Haiti observing the traditional rites, partaking in the pilgrimages and listening to the houngans. Finally, for a spiritual parent he chose an old man from the south and joined the community of his hounfour, eventually becoming initiated as a houngan himself. Into that world he led his wife, a lovely French painter, and perhaps more reluctantly their two daughters. The young girls were teased by their classmates because of their father’s beliefs. At first they had been ashamed, but as they grew older it became their greatest source of pride.
“My father’s great-grandfather had green eyes,” Rachel said, returning to the fire, “and a gold watch. He came from the east, on horseback and with everything he owned stuffed into a calabash that hung around his neck. He could take that watch—it had a mirror on the inside—and just by opening it and staring into the mirror, he would disappear.” She glanced at me, as if uncertain whether I would believe the story.
“He wandered all over the country and finally settled in Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. He became really important.”
“Aided no doubt by his watch,” I teased.
“Perhaps.” She smiled. “He was a great houngan. He lived for many years, but he knew when he was going to die. Just before, he gave away everything he owned and called together all the family. They found him beneath a great mapou tree, and one by one he called for his grandchildren, including Max’s father. He said something to each one and then he just left.”
“Where to?”
“No one knows. He placed a few things in a saddlebag, and rode away. They say towards the Dominican Republic.”
“That was the end?”
“Yes. Can you imagine? No one ever knew his birthplace or where he died.”
I looked across the fire at her but said nothing. For weeks the two of us had been as blind accomplices inadvertently placed on the same trail pursuing different goals. I was chasing an elusive phenomenon that I scarcely believed in; she sought a sense of place. For she was young, and whether she knew it or not she was torn between two worlds, that of her lineage, which she bore like a weight, and everything that awaited out there beyond the ocean. One knew just by looking at her that she would have to go sometime. She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience. At the same time I was drawn to warn her somehow, for hers was a beauty that filled one with a premonition that it could easily become the target of destructive forces. Yet you could not feel sorry for her; her pride forbade it. And moreover, nothing evil had yet befallen her; she lived with the brash confidence of a person who has never lost.
The dusty road to Savanne Carée passes through the old market center of Ennery, with its cobbles and thick-walled caserne and forlorn statue of Toussaint L’Ouverture, then runs along the Rivière Sorcier, crisscrossing a number of affluents before climbing into a high, rolling landscape dappled with mango trees. It is rich land with clusters of white houses, orchards swollen in fruit, and fallow slopes camouflaged by thick grass. Millet grows to the edge of the valley where the fields become broken, and the skirt of the mountain rises to steep cliffs draped in cascading remnants of native vegetation. In the hedgerows there are even wild things, and overhead the odd raptor scrapes the sky. After the barren lands to the west around Gonaives, there is an innocence to such abundance. Yet somewhere in this picturesque valley Ti Femme squandered her birthright and was made a zombi.
Just beyond a crossroads littered with the remnants of the morning market, Rachel and I noticed a young lad prostrate on the stony ground, relaxed as a lizard. He must have seen us at the same time. He leapt to his feet and in an instant was joined by another. As we came nearer, I saw that the first was a small wisp of a boy, with electric eyes and the large head and long limbs typical of many peasant youths. This was Oris. The other was René, and he was younger and clearly subordinate. From that moment on we were four.
“Of course, I know her. The one that passed beneath the ground,” Oris said to Rachel as we made our way along the narrow trail. “She’s the one who died, but her breath of life didn’t leave, it stayed here,” he added, pointing to his armpit.
“They buried her?”
“Naturally, and then at night the person who killed her went to get her.” René was running up and down the trail like a rabbit anxious not to miss anything. Every so often his excitement overflowed in laughter, gay and sparkling.
“Who did this to her?”
“We don’t know,” René said, glancing ahead toward his friend.
“Her aunt,” Oris said matter-of-factly. “Then they put her to work cleaning cornmeal. That’s all she was good for.”
“And the bokor?”
“You can’t know. To find out you’d have to know who killed her.”
“I thought you said the aunt.”
“She had many aunts, and some have died. Besides, nobody cared anyway.”
“What do you mean by that?” Rachel paused, squatting by the side of the trail, her skirt spread out from her waist like a tent. Oris swaggered by her unabashed. A market woman with a healthy corpulence and a lugubrious air was walking up the trail toward us, and Oris didn’t say anything until she had passed.
“Ti Femme was mean. She was doing everything she shouldn’t have done. And she didn’t like people.”
“Why? What did she do?” Rachel asked.
“Well, for example, you don’t do anything and she stands up and swears at you. She swore at people for no reason. But here they kill people for almost nothing,” Oris said casually. “It’s just like the woman in the elections,” he continued, referring to the recent political campaign for the National Assembly. “We didn’t like her. She was ill behaved and had meetings and swore at the children. So we got her. I, myself, voted five times for the doctor. He promised to bring the president’s wife to our lakou.”
We followed our insouciant guides into a dense canebrake and then made our way slowly until reaching a narrow path that pointed to a small house perched on a high mound of earth. In the shade of its porch two men were pounding grain in a mortar, the rhythmic movement of the pestles fluid and powerful. Oris nodded to Rachel, then he and his companion backed away and the reeds closed behind them.
“Honneur!” Rachel called out as we approached. The men glanced up, and one of them sent a young child scurrying into the house. They continued to look at us for a while, then returned to their work. It was a crude welcome, far below the standards of peasant etiquette. We waited beneath a tree laden with green oranges until a frail old woman appeared. She was the mother of Ti Femme, and her name was Mercilia. We gave her ours, and she invited us into the front chamber of her home, where we shared cigarettes and cof
fee. After several minutes of perfunctory chatter, we came to the point of our visit.
“The girl died by God’s will,” Mercilia said, “and was revived by God’s will. We know nothing of these things. They are wrong to say someone killed her. She died, she just died.”
“Yes, that is what we have heard. And she had been quite ill, I suppose.”
“For months, fever and a pressure from beneath her heart. She was a good girl, everyone liked her. They all came to the funeral. There were two wakes.” She nodded confidentially toward Rachel. “The coffin didn’t come, and then it rained.”
Rachel cast a perplexed glance my way, then turned quickly back to Mercilia. “Where was she when she died?”
“Right here in the house of her birth. In the night. They buried her at daybreak. I went to the grave three days after.” She was rocking slowly on the edge of her chair. “Ti Femme never said anything about passing through the earth, only that she heard people say she was dead like she was dreaming and she couldn’t do anything. When I went I didn’t know she wasn’t there.”
“Where is she now?” Rachel asked.
“With the state, in the clinic. If I could, I would have her here, but my husband is dead and Ti Femme has no one and is a child. When they found her, she couldn’t even bathe or comb her own hair.”
The door creaked open revealing a pod of children eavesdropping. Mercilia shooed them away. A pair of chickens slipped past her legs and sped into the room, clucking and pecking the cement floor out of habit. Rachel and I stood up to leave.
“There was not a single person who didn’t like her,” Mercilia volunteered, as she took a little money from my hand. “She never had arguments with anyone.”