by Wade Davis
In the end, the solution to this aspect of the zombi mystery had a certain elegance. For the vodounist the creation of a zombi is essentially a magical process. However, the bokor in creating a zombi cadavre may cause the prerequisite unnatural death not by capturing the ti bon ange of the living but by means of a slow-acting poison that is applied directly to the intended victim. Rubbed into a wound or inhaled, the poison kills the corps cadavre slowly, efficiently, and discreetly. That poison contains tetrodotoxin, which acts to lower dramatically the metabolic rate of the victim almost to the point of clinical death. Pronounced dead by attending physicians, and considered materially dead by family members and even by the bokor himself, the victim is in fact buried alive. Undoubtedly in many instances the victim does die either from the poison itself or by suffocation in the coffin. The widespread belief in the reality of zombis in Haiti, however, is based on those cases in which the victim receives the correct dose of the poison, wakes up in the coffin, and is taken from the grave by the bokor. The victim, affected by the drug, traumatized by the set and setting of the total experience, is bound and led before a cross to be baptized with a new name. After the baptism, or sometimes the next day, he or she is made to eat a paste containing a strong dose of a potent psychoactive drug, the zombi’s cucumber, which brings on a state of disorientation and amnesia. During the course of that intoxication, the zombi is taken away into the night.
There remained one haunting question. If the formula of the poison and the sorcerer’s spell explained how a zombi succumbed, it said nothing about why he was chosen. Many, including those who had formulated Haiti’s national laws, had concluded that zombification was a random criminal activity, yet another symptom of a conspiracy of fear that was presumed to be the common plight of the peasant. But the longer I remained in Haiti, and the more I learned of the vodoun society, the more impressed I was by its internal cohesion. Sorcery was certainly a potent force to be dealt with, but to a great extent it had been institutionalized as a critical component of the worldview. To ask why there is sorcery in Haiti is to ask why there is evil in the world, and the answer, if there is one, is the same as that provided by all the great religions: evil is the mirror of good, the necessary complement that completes the whole of creation. The Haitians as much as any people are conscious of this sacred balance.
So the suggestion that zombification was a haphazard phenomenon ran in the face of my data. In obtaining the various preparations, I had come into direct contact with a number of secret societies, and in certain instances it had been their leaders who controlled the powder. There was strong circumstantial evidence that both Narcisse and Ti Femme had been exceedingly unpopular in their respective communities, and I had it from a number of sources that zombification was a process that included some kind of judgment before a tribunal. Max Beauvoir had gone so far as to suggest that the answer to the mystery lay within the councils of the secret societies. But what did this mean? In my search for the poison, instinct unfettered by bias had served me well, but as I probed deeper my intuitions were increasingly clouded by my ignorance. The secret societies—who were these groups, what was the nature of their organization, and how did they relate to the other national authorities? It was with the desire to explore these questions, as much as on account of Kline’s summons, that I returned to America. I would have to go back in time to the beginning and the harsh days of the French colony.
11
Tell My Horse
IT HAPPENED on a plantation near Limbé in the year 1740. At first even the man himself did not notice the iron rollers of the cane press flush crimson with his own blood. By the time the child’s scream alerted the driver to slice the leather traces connecting the horse to the shaft of the mill, the arm was crushed to the shoulder, and the blood mixed freely with the sweet sap of the cane. Pain was not new to the slave, and what he felt now was numbed by the rage of an intolerable impotence. His free hand flailed at the press, and with all the force of his sinuous body he pulled back, reversing the rollers, withdrawing fragments of his mangled arm. Delirium took him, leading him back on a hallucinatory passage to the land of his birth, to the Kingdoms of Fula and Mandingo, to the great cities of Guinea, the fortresses and vast markets that drew traders from an entire continent and beyond, the temples that made a mockery of the paltry buildings in which the French worshipped their feeble god. He never noticed the rope tourniquet placed around his shoulder to seal the flow of blood, nor did he hear the call for the machete that would complete the crude work of the press. He felt only the beginnings of the sound, of a single syllable rising from the base of his bloodstained legs, recoiling through the hollow of his gut until what left his lips was no longer his. It was the wrathful call of crystallized hatred, a cry of vengeance, not for himself, but for an entire people stolen from Africa and dragged in chains to the Americas to work land stolen from the Indians.
François Macandal should have died, but the Mandingue slave was no ordinary man. Even before the accident he was a leader among the slaves of the northern district around Limbé. By day, they had watched him endure the cruelties of the overseers with indifference, his bloodshot eyes casting scorn at the whips of knotted cord, or the stretched and dried penis of a bull. By night he had calmed the people with his eloquence, spinning tales of Guinée that had emboldened even the most dispirited of men. When he spoke people considered it an honor to sit by his side, and as he slept the women vied for the chance to share his bed, for his dreams were revelations that allowed him and those by him to see into the future. But it was the fearless way Macandal endured the accident in the mill that confirmed what the people had always suspected. Only the whites could fail to note that Macandal was immortal, an envoy of the gods who would never be vanquished.
The accident freed Macandal to wander. No longer fit to work in the fields, he was made a herder and sent out each daybreak to drive the cattle into their mountain pastures. No one knew what he did during the long hours away from the plantation. Some said he discovered the magic in plants, foraging for leaves that mimicked the herbs he had known in Africa. Others said he sought out the old masters who dwelled in caves, whose footsteps alone caused the earth to tremble. Only one thing was certain. Macandal in his wanderings was not alone, for the mountains around Limbé were one of the refuges of the thousands of Africans who had fled the plantations, runaway slaves with a price on their heads and known to the French as Maroons.
Bloated by wealth unlike anything seen since the early days of the conquest, the colonial planters of Saint Domingue made an institution of cruelty. Field hands caught eating cane were forced to wear tin muzzles while they worked. Runaways had their hamstrings sliced. Brandings, indiscriminate floggings, rape, and killings were a matter of course, and for the slightest infraction a man was hung from a nail driven through his ear. Slaves like cane were grist for the mill, and the death toll in some years rose as high as eighteen thousand. The documented excesses of certain owners almost defy belief. One slave was kept in chains for twenty-five years. A notorious planter was known always to carry a hammer and nails just to be prepared to hang from the trees the severed ears of those he punished. Other common tortures included spraying the flesh with boiling cane syrup, sewing the lips together with brass wire, castration and sexual mutilation of both men and women, live burial, binding men—their skin glazed with molasses—across the paths of ants, enclosing people in barrels with inward protruding nails, and stuffing the anus with gunpowder which was then ignited, a practice common enough to give rise to the colloquial expression “blasting a black’s ass.” So systemic was the abuse of the slaves that it supported a profession of executioners whose fees were regulated by law. The charge to burn a man alive, for example, was set at sixty French pounds. A hanging was only thirty, and for a mere five pounds you could have a slave branded and his ears cut off.
Such savagery was the rule, not the exception, and the fact that first the Indians and then thousands of indentured whites—pet
ty thieves, convicts, or simply urban poor kidnapped in the port cities of Europe—had toiled in servitude before them did little to still the rage of the Africans. Forced labor was the foundation of an economic system that knew no color boundaries; like an open sore the plantations grew upon the Caribbean, and when the Indians died, and the supply of white trash failed to meet demand, the merchants tapped deeper into Africa, drawing away men and women not because they were black, but because they were cheap, limitless in number, and better. European class societies whose elite thought nothing of hanging an English child for petty theft, or packing indentured workers, white or black, like herring into the festering holds of ships, cared less about the origins of their laborers than the production of their labor. Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. In the first days of colonialism, when the merchants sailed away from the insular world of Europe, the color of the worker’s skin meant no more to them than it did to the kings of Africa, rulers who lorded over thousands of their own slaves, and who for a suitable profit were more than willing to pass them along. Of course, all of this mattered little to the men and women unloaded into bondage in Saint Domingue. For them the enemy had a face, and there was no doubt as to its color.
Confronted by unrelenting intimidation and torture, the options of the slaves were few. Those who chose to submit and endure did what was necessary to ease their plight: self-inflicted wounds allowed a respite from the brutal labor in the fields, women gave themselves to the overseers, or spared their unborn children by practicing abortion. Others sought immediate relief in suicide. But those who could not be broken and whose desire for freedom drove them to accept desperate measures fled the plantations under the cover of night. Some remained close by, hiding out by day and dependent on the collusion of their families and friends that remained behind. Others, especially the skilled workers fluent in Creole, slipped into anonymity in the cities, passing themselves off as freedmen and seeking work among the faceless crowds in the markets or on the docks. Still others made for the Spanish frontier of Santo Domingo, overland across the savannas and mountains and through the dense forests that still blanketed the island. Like stray cattle, these runaways were but a nuisance to the planters, readily dealt with by professional bounty hunters and their dogs. If recaptured on the fringe of the plantation, they were simply returned to be flogged and publicly humiliated, made to kneel outside the white man’s church to beg forgiveness for “insubordination to the situation in which God had placed him.” Should the runaway be unfortunate enough to be discovered some distance away, or should he resist capture, he was summarily killed—shot and ravaged by the hounds—once his identifying brand had been sliced away from his skin.
But there was another type of Maroon, men like Macandal who were not content to hover in the shadows like animals, or waste away in the limestone sinkholes and caves that dotted the land. These were Africans who would take responsibility for their fate, men who sought not just to survive but to fight and to seek revenge for the weight of injustice that had tormented their people. When these men and women left the plantations, taking with them anything of value they had managed to pilfer—a mule, knife, machete, field tools, clothing—they joined the organized bands in remote sanctuaries deep in the hinterland. There they lived in armed camps, sealed off by palisades surrounded by wide ditches, fortified at the bottom by pointed stakes. They cleared gardens, and to a great extent were self-sufficient, supplementing what they grew with periodic raids on the plantations. If solitary runaways were a mere irritation to the French, these independent Maroon retreats were no less than training grounds for guerrilla fighters that threatened the order and stability of the entire colony.
The French regime responded by waging an incessant campaign of extermination. Specialized military forces known as marcehaussée were maintained and sent on frequent and costly forays into the mountains. Some of these expeditions were moderately successful, returning with captives who were publicly broken on the wheel. Others never came back at all. And not one was able to penetrate or destroy the principal strongholds. For the French could not be everywhere, and the Maroons were—in the mountains rising behind the plantations of the northern plain at Cap Francis, the Cul-de-Sac near Port-au-Prince or the rolling valleys near Cayes in the south. As a result, by the mid-eighteenth century entire regions were effectively sealed off to whites. One rebellion that covered a vast mountain block in the south lasted a hundred years, until the French finally abandoned the zone altogether. Further north a Maroon community in the Bahoruco Mountains thrived for eighty-five years, until the French proposed a truce under the terms of which the Maroons would be permitted to form an independent clan. When the leader of that particular band of rebels arrived to negotiate, it was discovered that he had been a Maroon for over forty-five years.
As the French military expeditions collapsed in the mountains, the colonial administration did what it could to destroy the clandestine network that maintained the flow of goods and information between the plantations and the Maroons. Fear of the rebels was behind the constant legislation restricting the movement and normal interaction between the slaves. Blacks were prohibited from going out at night, visiting neighboring plantations, using boats, or even talking among themselves without the master’s permission. Night searches were frequent, and anyone caught with weapons or aiding runaways was brutally and publicly punished. But at a time when slaves outnumbered whites a hundred to one on the plantations, there was really very little the French could do. For even if some of the slaves came to fear the wrath and disruption of the Maroons as much as they did the whip of the planters, there could be no doubt that the rebel bands fought for freedom, and as a result with each successive generation their legend grew. With increasing impunity, the guerrillas came out of the hills, raiding stores, pillaging plantations, and all the while spreading along with terror the idea of liberty. By 1770, according to a contemporary report, the number of Maroons had increased to such proportions that “security became nonexistent” and it was unwise to wander alone in the hills.
Just who and how many chose to follow this desperate path is uncertain, but colonial records provide some clues. Between the years 1764 and 1793, for example, newspaper advertisements alone indicate some forty-eight thousand cases of Maroonage. How many of these ended up in the Maroon enclaves is not known, but the figure does provide a sense of the scale of the problem that faced the French. Significantly, a large percentage of those who did flee had not lived in the colony more than a year, and many escaped virtually off the docks. One colonial document covering a single port for a fifteen-day period in January of 1786 lists 43 new slaves escaped or recaptured. In 1788, out of 10,573 slaves disembarked over a ten-month period at Cap Francis, more than 2,000 got away. Critically, while the Creole Maroon could slip inconspicuously into the bowels of the city, these fresh arrivals from Africa, ignorant of the ways of the colony, were the ones invariably to flee to the hills. Thus a good many of the recruits to the Maroon communities were the individuals least socialized into the regime of the whites. Into their new homes, then, they brought not the burdens of slavery but the ways of Africa.
Behind a veil of secrecy that alone allowed them to survive, these Maroon communities developed genuine political, economic, and religious systems of their own. Their leaders were culled from what contemporary observers described as a “new class of slave” that arrived in the colony throughout the eighteenth century. These were men of royal blood, often educated not just by their own oral traditions but by Arab teachers, and endowed by birth with intelligence, moral vigor, and the call of a militant tradition. Their people were also a chosen lot, mostly young men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five, each one the end product of a tortuous selective process. Merely to reach the Maroon camps implied surviving the brutal passage from Africa, enduring the abuse on the plantations, and then outwitting the hounds of the bounty hunters to face willingly a life of daily risk, physical de
privation, and constant adversity.
Acceptance into the ranks of the Maroons was strictly controlled. Only those who came voluntarily were taken, and these only after making sure that they were not colonial spies. Blacks captured during raids could be made slaves, and on the slightest suggestion of betrayal were put to death. Newly arrived runaways had first to erase their past, mutilating their brands with knives or the juice of toxic plants—acajou or bresillet—that caused disfiguring welts. They endured rigorous initiations in which they learned the secret handshakes and pass words that would distinguish friend from foe during the raids. Publicly they swore allegiance to the community, and discovered in graphic terms what would occur should they betray the secrets of the group. If secrecy defined and protected the integrity of these communities, the obvious models for their internal organization were the secret societies that at least some of the ex-slaves must have joined in their youth in Africa.