by Wade Davis
As expected, our talkative guides were waiting for us just beyond the canebrake. Oris was stretched out in the shade of a mombin batard tree, resting on one elbow and gnawing on a stick of sugarcane.
“Well?” he asked with puckish confidence.
“Well what?” Rachel replied, laughing.
The walk back to our jeep was uneventful, and once we had dispatched the two lads at the marketplace Rachel turned to me.
“It’s odd, you know. A wake is always held at night, and if there were two the body must have been waiting around for what, thirty-six hours?”
“At least.”
“Wouldn’t the family have noticed that it hadn’t begun to decompose?”
“You’d assume so.” I thought for a minute. “What do you make of the boy’s story.”
“I’m not sure. But there is a friend of my father’s on the coast who trades here, and she would know.”
The sun was just going down when we reached the outskirts of Gonaives and pulled up to a dusty compound enclosed by a tall blue-and-green wall decorated with a great naive painting of a mermaid.
“It’s a nightclub sometimes,” Rachel explained. “Clermezine is the mermaid, it’s one of her spirits. She’s a great serviteur.” Rachel said something to one of the idlers hanging around the entrance. He slipped inside and returned in a moment followed by a young woman. Rachel kissed her gently on both cheeks, and we followed her past a concrete dance floor and a broken-down bandstand to the inner courtyard. To one side some kind of noisy cabal was under way, presided over by a most extraordinary woman. When she stood up to receive us she was as regal and imposing as a queen. Rachel disappeared beneath a heap of endearments, and before we had a chance to find the places made for us in the small circle of chairs, a tray of steaming thick coffee arrived.
Within a few moments a great whirlwind of voices enveloped us. I had no idea what was going on. The woman in charge seemed in deadly earnest, and one of the men grew steadily angrier, but Rachel was beside herself with laughter. From what I later gathered the man had been entrusted with some task, which he had failed to carry out. The woman suggested that if he let her down again, “there won’t be a shovel small enough to pick up your pieces.” He in turn threatened to send a loup garou, a werewolf, her way. She countered by saying that she could fly faster than anything he could come up with, especially if, like him, it was hindered “by those things that hang between your legs.” This nattering salacious humor continued for some time, until finally the woman bellowed a few harsh words that cut him off immediately.
The subject of Ti Femme set her off again. She explained that Ti Femme used to come down to Gonaives to buy cornmeal, which she then sold at a profit in Ennery and Savanne Carée. She called her maloktcho, a Creole invective that translates poorly as “crude, uncivilized, raw.” Like young Oris, she said that Ti Femme was rude and always swore at people. She was also dishonest.
“If you went to buy from her, and what she was selling was worth five gourdes, she’d say seven, then six, and you’d say five and she’d take it. But when she had measured it out, she’d hand it to you and say six. That’s why they killed her.”
“Some say her family was behind it.”
“I tell you it was in the market. Everyone hated her. If you left your money out, she’d take it. She was a thief.”
“It could have been anyone, then?”
“All of them! No one person could afford to kill her.”
The next morning we passed by the Baptist mission at Passereine, intending to speak with Jay Ausherman, the American woman who had cared for Ti Femme just after she was found in the Ennery marketplace in 1979. The missionary was out of the country, but as we drove away I noticed a robust, balding man sitting alone on the steps of the cinderblock church. His was not a face readily forgotten. As we soon discovered, Clairvius Narcisse had been living off and on at the mission since being discharged from the psychiatric institute.
In this, the first of a number of informal interviews that took place away from Douyon’s clinic, Narcisse spoke more easily about his ordeal. He had been a very strong man, and almost never sick, he claimed, and he hadn’t suspected anything. There had been a dispute with one of his brothers, a bokor who coveted a piece of land that Narcisse had been cultivating, and only now did he fully understand what had occurred. His brother passed the magic to him on a Sunday. Tuesday he had been in Gonaives, feeling weak and nauseated. By the time he entered the hospital late that day, he was coughing and having difficulty breathing. By noon the next day, he was dying.
“What was this poison they passed onto you?” Rachel interrupted.
“There was no poison,” he replied, “otherwise my bones would have rotted under the earth. The bokor sent for my soul. That’s how it was done.”
“In the basin?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s full of water, but they prick your skin and call the spirit and the water changes into blood.”
Narcisse explained that he had been sold to a bokor named Josef Jean who held him captive at a plantation near Ravine-Trompette, a small village in the north close to Pilate, not far from Cap Haitien. Together with many other zombis, he had toiled as a field hand from sunrise to sunset, pausing only for the one meal they received each day. The food was normal peasant fare, with the one restriction that salt was strictly prohibited. He remembered being aware of his predicament, of missing his family and friends and his land, of wanting to return. But his life had the quality of a strange dream, with events, objects, and perceptions interacting in slow motion, and with everything completely out of his control. In fact, there was no control at all. Decision had no meaning, and conscious action was an impossibility.
His freedom had come about quite by chance. One of the captives had refused to eat for several days and was beaten repeatedly for insubordination. In the midst of one such beating, the zombi got hold of a hoe and in a fit of rage killed the bokor. With the death of the master, the zombis dispersed, some eventually returning to their villages scattered across the northern plain. Only two of them were from the middle of the country—Narcisse and one other, who curiously enough came from Ennery. After being set free, Narcisse remained in the north for several years, until moving south to Saint Michel de l’Attalaye, where he settled for eight years. Although fear of his brother kept him from returning to his village, he did attempt to establish contact with his family. His many letters, however, went unanswered. Finally, when he heard that the brother responsible for his ordeal had died, he returned to l’Estère. His arrival, not surprisingly, had shocked the community. In truth, he confessed, he had not been well received. The villagers had taunted him, and such was the commotion that the government authorities deemed his life in danger and placed him in jail for his own protection. It was at that point that he had come under the care of Dr. Lamarque Douyon. To this day, he returns to l’Estère only for brief visits. His time is spent either at Douyon’s private clinic in the capital or in the refuge of the Baptist mission.
“They called my name three times,” Narcisse told us later that afternoon as he sat in the cemetery at Benetier. Upon our approaching the cemetery, it had taken Narcisse several minutes by the side of the road to become oriented. Then with little hesitation he had woven his way through the crowded tombs of cracked concrete until he reached his own. Scarcely visible, etched into the surface of the cement, was an epitaph written some twenty years before: “Ici Repose Clairvius Narcisse.”
“Even as they cast the dirt on my coffin, I was not there. My flesh was there,” he said, pointing to the ground, “but I floated here, moving wherever. I could hear everything that happened. Then they came. They had my soul, they called me, casting it into the ground.” Narcisse looked up from the ground. At the edge of the cemetery a pair of thin gravediggers stood as still and attentive as gazelles. Narcisse felt the weight of their recognition.
“Are they afraid of you?” Rachel asked.
“No,” he replied, �
��only if I was creating problems, then I’d have problems myself.” He didn’t say anything more for several minutes. The late afternoon light illuminated his face but left a conspicuous dark spot over the deep scar in his right cheek. It was there, he had mentioned earlier, that the nail of the coffin had pierced his flesh.
“They thought I was a bourreau [an executioner], so after they passed the bottle, they bound my arms to my sides.”
“Did you have the force to resist?”
As if he hadn’t heard me, Narcisse went on, “Then I was taken for eight days of judgment.”
“By whom?” Rachel asked excitedly, “where did it take place?”
Again Narcisse ignored the question, and began to make his way out of the graveyard. He paused momentarily by a large erect tomb, and then continued to the road. As we reached the jeep, he turned to us both and said very quietly. “They are the masters of the country, and they do as they please.”
“The only tribunal that my brother knew was the cemetery.” Angelina Narcisse sat back in her chair, her legs wide apart. The morning sun had conquered the clouds and driven us into the shadows of the thatch shelter. Between the thin rafters ran long strings displaying dozens of photographs of President Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife. Michelle Duvalier’s face stood out, polished and quite lovely. Between the photographs were small Haitian flags, red and black, the same colors as Angelina’s long dress. All around us the houses of the lakou stood as one, fused like stones encased in dry clay. In one corner iron rods had been set into the earth, at their base a pile of black coals. Once while out with Beauvoir I saw a possessed man implant such a rod in the ground, his bare hands wrapped around the iron, its tip red-hot, his face indifferent.
“Unless, of course, it was a tribunal at night, in which case nobody should know of it. So we don’t know of it.”
In a harsh voice, Angelina laid out her version of her brother’s case. Long before the death of their parents, Clairvius had been involved in innumerable disputes with his various brothers. Land was often an issue, but there were others. Clairvius had done well financially, but showed no willingness to spread his earnings through his family. Once, for example, his brother Magrim sought a twenty-dollar loan, which Clairvius refused categorically. An intense argument had followed, which had culminated in Magrim striking Clairvius in the leg with a log, while Clairvius responded by hurling stones. Both of them had ended up in jail.
Apparently Clairvius had antagonized not only his family. He had compromised innumerable women, scattering children to all corners of the Artibonite Valley. None of these he accepted responsibility for, nor had he built houses for the various mothers. As a result he had approached middle age with few financial burdens, which freed him to advance further than his more responsible peers. He placed a tin roof on his house, for example, before anyone else in the lakou. Clairvius had profited at the expense of the community, and in all likelihood, suggested Angelina, it was one of the aggrieved members, probably a mistress, that had sold him to a bokor.
“But we know nothing of poisons in our family,” she concluded. “My brother was sick for a year. It was not a disease from God, and there was no poison, or he would still be in the ground.”
Whatever the cause of her brother’s demise, the family lost no time taking over his fields, which Angelina and another sister still work today. Although Clairvius has made a claim in the national courts for his land, his sisters have absolutely no intention of releasing anything to him. As far as they are concerned Clairvius remains a dead man, a spirit that should never have returned to the village. In fact, the first member of the family to recognize him when he appeared in the l’Estère market in 1980 had sent for Angelina, and then told Clairvius to go away. Another sister arrived from the lakou and offered Clairvius money, but also ordered him to leave the village. By then a great crowd had gathered, and the police arrived to take Clairvius Narcisse to the protection of the government jail.
Death in a family should be like a stone cast into a lake; it makes a brief hole, but the waves of sorrow reach to the edge of the bloodline. In the case of Clairvius Narcisse, however, the stone slipped into the water without leaving a trace. Not long after leaving the family lakou, we discovered why. In the searing midday sun, we pulled off the road to offer a ride to a solitary peasant burdened by a ponderous load. Quite by chance he was a cousin of Clairvius, and with little difficulty Rachel persuaded him that we knew more than we did.
“Of course it was someone in the family, that is certain,” the man told us. “But you’ll never know what he did unless you can speak with the one who judged him.”
“But the houngan said that the tribunal was never summoned,” Rachel replied, leading him on deliberately.
“There must be a tribunal in a case like that,” the cousin insisted. “They must call the dead. Otherwise they cannot set the trap.”
“To take his soul?” I asked, remembering what Clairvius had told us at the mission.
“They must.”
“His sister said the bokor passed a coup l’aire,” Rachel said.
“No. They wanted the body for work. Only a coup poudre could bring him down.”
“Coup poudre?” I looked toward Rachel.
“A magical powder,” she explained.
The cousin was uncertain what was in it. A large lizard called the agamonty perhaps, and apparently two toads, the crapaud bouga, and another called the crapaud de mer, the sea toad.
“Where is the poison placed?”
“There is no poison,” he answered. “Narcisse came out of the ground. A poison would have left him where he lay.” The cousin looked perplexed, and suddenly I understood and felt terribly foolish. I had been asking for a poison, but what I called a poison they called a trap or a coup poudre. For them what created a zombi was not a drug but a magical act.
It was two in the morning before the other guests left the Peristyle de Mariani, and Rachel went inside, leaving her father and me alone on the terrace. In the wake of the ceremony and the ebullient conversation that invariably followed, there was a welcome stillness that allowed one to notice things, like the fragrance of the lemon trees, or the high whistle of the fruit bats.
“You are not in your plate tonight,” Max said, drawing me back into his own realm of words. A bat swept beneath the roof of the peristyle and in an instant was gone.
“Perhaps,” I said offhandedly.
“Do you want a drink?”
“If you do. Rum on ice.”
“How’s the work?”
“It goes. Rachel didn’t tell you?”
“Some of it. They seem to be quite a pair.”
“Ti Femme?”
“And the other one.”
“Max, somebody has it all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ti Femme wasn’t innocent. People hated her. And Narcisse’s own sister tried to throw him out of the village, after not having seen him for eighteen years.”
“Probably she was afraid of him.”
“How can you be afraid of something that has no will?”
Beauvoir had started to laugh, but what I said stopped him. His face turned like a mask into a different pose.
“And how,” I continued, “can a being without will deliberately choose to kill someone? That, according to Narcisse, is how they gained their freedom. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“I don’t believe he was an innocent victim. Neither of them. Narcisse said there was a judgment, so did his cousin.”
Beauvoir didn’t say anything for several minutes, and when he did there was an unfamiliar edge to his voice. “You spoke to his sisters?”
“Just the tall one, Angelina. We saw the others some time ago.”
“What did you make of her?”
“Powerful, totally in charge. No love lost for her brother.”
“Nothing peculiar? Think about it.”
“No.” I paused for
some time. “Except, I suppose, when I asked to photograph the family.”
“And?”
“She was the only one to change her dress.”
“So you did notice.”
“Yes, but I don’t …”
“She is a queen, and you surprised her.” I began to interrupt again, but he didn’t let me. He lifted his drink and the light caught the edge of the glass.
“To understand Haiti,” he said, “you must think of a glass of water. You cannot avoid touching the glass, but it is just a means of support. It is the water that slakes your thirst and it is the water, not the glass, that keeps you alive.
“In Haiti the glass consists of the Roman Catholic church, the government, the National Police and army, the French language, and a set of laws invented in Paris. Yet when you think of it, over ninety percent of the people do not understand, let alone read, French. Roman Catholicism may be the official religion, but as we say the nation is eighty-five percent Catholic and one hundred and ten percent vodoun. Supposedly we have Western medicine, but in a country of over six million, there are but five hundred physicians, and only a handful of these practice outside of the capital.
“No, from the outside Haiti may appear to be like any other forlorn child of the Third World struggling hopelessly to become a modern Western nation. But as you have seen, this is just a veneer. In the belly of the nation there is something else going on. Clairvius Narcisse was not made a zombi by some random, criminal act. He told you he was judged. He spoke about the masters of the land. Here he did not lie. They exist, and these are the ones you must seek, for your answers will only be found in the councils of the secret society.”
6
Everything Is Poison, Nothing Is Poison
I COULD SEE THE horizon stained by the sea, and the first shafts of light to the east. The air was cool and serene. It was a special time when the city shifted its mood, when the people emerged as the night angels fled, and the light made the buildings blush.