The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  If vodoun charged the revolt, the tactics and organization of the rebel bands came directly from the precedent established by the Maroons. With increasing boldness the rebels poured out of the hills ravaging plantations, disrupting communication, and plundering supply trains. Raiding by night, they left in their wake fire, poison, and corpses, before retreating at daybreak into every inaccessible gorge and ravine in the land. There they lived as they had always, protected by palisades and rings of sentinels, and most critically by the potent magic of their sorcerers. A French force of some twenty-four hundred troops dispatched in early February 1792 to invade and destroy rebel camps reported being “astonished to see stuck in the ground along the route large perches on which a variety of dead birds had been affixed…. On the road at intervals there were cut up birds surrounded by stones, and also a dozen broken eggs surrounded by large circles. What was our surprise to see black males leaping about and more than 200 women dancing and singing in all security…. The Voodoo priestess had not fled … she spoke no creole…. Both the men and the women said that there could be no human power over her … she was of the Voodoo cult.” The leader of the French expedition also encountered the cloak of secrecy that continued to protect the rebels as it had the Maroons. From a woman initiate he learned that “there was a password but she would never give it to me…. She gave me the hand recognition sign: it was somewhat similar to that of the Masons. She told me this as a secret, assuring me … I would be killed or poisoned if I tried to penetrate the great mystery of the sect.”

  Perhaps unfortunately for the ex-slaves, they were not alone in their quest for freedom. For some time tension had been growing between the white planters and the enfranchised mulattos. The latter, though equal in numbers to the whites, and entitled by law to all the privileges of French citizens, were, in fact, treated as a class apart. Social discrimination of the crudest sort had made them resentful, and at the same time their energetic exercise of their right to property had made them exceedingly wealthy and powerful; this was a dangerous combination for the French, especially once fanned by the rebellious ideas that had grown out of the American and French Revolutions. Even before the uprising of the slaves, a force of mulattos had marched on the government demanding full implementation of the accords worked out by the revolutionary assemblies in Paris. Their incipient revolt failed, and the leaders were brutally tortured, but it was the first incident in a struggle that would, in time, pit whites against mulattos, whites against mulattos allied with blacks, and mulattos against whites working sometimes with and sometimes against the interests of the black ex-slaves. The result was a reign of confusion, chaos, and destruction that after two years left the French in control of the cities, the blacks firmly entrenched in the countryside, and the mulattos still caught in between.

  In February 1793 the Haitian revolution was profoundly affected by the war that broke out in Europe between Republican France and England allied to Spain. To the problems of the colonial administration, already preoccupied by political events in Paris, stunned by the uprising of the slaves, and torn asunder by the power struggle between mulatto and white planters, was now added the threat of an enemy army moving overland from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. The Maroons predictably aligned themselves with the invaders, and their leaders Biassou and Jean François—Boukman by then being dead—became officers in the Spanish army, as did Toussaint, an ex-slave who had not left bondage until some months after the uprising, but who was about to begin his meteoric rise to power.

  The French, hard-pressed even before the Spanish invasion, were now forced to negotiate with the Maroons, and in the summer of 1793, under pressure from the rebel leaders, the colonial administration officially abolished slavery. But the Maroons soon recognized the proclamation for what it was—no more than a desperate attempt to defuse the explosive potential of the blacks, while retaining intact the essential structure of the colonial economic order. Biassou and Jean François rejected the French offer and defiantly remained allied to the Spanish, who had promised unconditional emancipation. But for reasons that would only come clear in the light of subsequent events, Toussaint shifted his allegiance back to the French. Then, at a time when he remained unquestionably less powerful than the prominent Maroon leaders, Toussaint and his forces ambushed the camps of Biassou and Jean François, killing many of their followers and turning those that survived over to the French authorities.

  Toussaint moved quickly to consolidate his position, and by 1797, having defeated two foreign armies as well as a rival mulatto force, this ex-slave, by now christened Toussaint L’Ouverture, emerged as the absolute ruler of all Saint Domingue. He then set to work to restore under French rule the order and prosperity of the colony. And of what type of colony, there could be no doubt. The people, though nominally free, were in fact compelled to work in a manner reminiscent of exactly the system they had fought so desperately to overthrow. Toussaint’s autocratic decrees prohibited movement between plantations and ordered those without urban trades to the fields, where they labored under military supervision. True, he eliminated the worst excesses of the colonial brutality, but the essential structure of the plantation system remained just as the French had intended. As for the traditional beliefs of the people, Toussaint as a devout Roman Catholic had no interest in what he considered the pagan beliefs of Africa.

  If there were any doubts as to the ambitions of the new black military elite, they were to be quelled by events that took place following the invasion of Leclerc’s French army in 1801, the betrayal of Toussaint by Napoleon, and his ignoble deportation to France. The French, of course, had never intended to tolerate black rule in the colony, and even as Toussaint struggled to rebuild the plantations, plans for his overthrow were laid in Paris. Napoleon, himself, clearly identified his real military enemy in the colony and ordered his brother-in-law to concentrate his efforts, following the deportation of Toussaint, on destroying the remnants of the Maroon bands. As was predicted in Paris, it was a task that the French commander was able to assign to local generals that had so recently served under Toussaint—in particular Dessalines and Christophe, who by historical record applied themselves and their troops willingly to the slaughter.

  Still the Maroons resisted, and as the pressure mounted their forces were in place to receive both black freedmen and mulattos into the final alliance that would wage the war of independence. There were a number of pitched battles, but there is little doubt that the tried-and-proven tactics of the Maroons—raids, fire, poison, ambush—provided the margin of victory. Yet in the final defeat of the French, the Maroons were as soon forgotten as they had been after the wars of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The dictatorial rulers that emerged in the vacuum of independence lost no time in revealing the depths of their dedication to equality or liberty. Christophe—a former slave who had fought by the side of Toussaint, taken part in the deceitful raid on the forces of Biassou and Jean François, and then temporarily joined hands with the French armies of Leclerc—became the ruler of the northern half of the country in 1806. He declared himself king, and in the ways of kings he wasted the lives of twenty thousand subjects to build himself an opulent palace and a fortress that would never fire a shot.

  With Christophe the betrayal of the Maroons appeared to be complete, but their struggle, in fact, continued. Those of their leaders who were still alive, and who had been instrumental in maintaining the revolt, had long grown accustomed to deceit, and they were, if nothing else, resilient. In the early years of the republic, as they faced new oppressors, they also found a new and remarkable means of protecting their freedom.

  Some fifty years ago, Zora Neale Hurston, a young American black woman and a former student of the great ethnographer Franz Boas, stumbled upon an extraordinary mystery while preparing for her first field trip to Haiti. In what was at the time perhaps the only reliable monograph on the vodoun society, she read that in the valley of Mirebalais there were secret societies that terrorized the local inhab
itants. According to the author, the noted Africanist Melville Herskovits, these clandestine organizations were called together at night by the beating of one rock against another in a manner reminiscent of the Zangbeto, a secret society he had studied in Dahomey. So feared were these Haitian groups that only with great difficulty had Herskovits obtained the names of two. One was the bissago, whose members appeared at night “wearing horns and holding candles,” and the other was Les Cochons sans Poils—the Pigs without Hair. Both societies were believed capable of changing their members into animals and sending them into the night to spread evil.

  Although this was the first report of secret societies in Haiti that Hurston had come across, the persistence of such a prominent West African cultural trait had not surprised her. For Zora Neale Hurston, born at the turn of the century in a small all-black village in Florida, had come at an early age to sense the African roots of her people. Her father was a Baptist preacher, and behind the frenzy of his service, the wailing gospel hymns, the sermons and spirit possession, she had perceived even as a young girl what she would recognize as the raw power of African worship. Nine years old when her mother died, Zora Neale promptly left home and drifted north, working as a maid for a traveling theatrical troupe before eventually ending up in Baltimore, where she finished her schooling. Luck rode with her, and her interest in literature and folklore led her to Howard University, and hence to a scholarship at Columbia. There she met Boas, who became her “Papa Franz,” her confidant, intellectual mentor, and strongest supporter.

  At the time Franz Boas was in the process of revolutionizing the field of anthropology. In an era when British social anthropology was still an explicit tool of imperialism, he rejected arbitrary notions of progress and evolutionary theories that invariably placed Western society at the top of a social ladder. Instead he championed the need to study cultures because of their inherent value. Every culture possessed a certain logic, he would say, and they appeared peculiar to the outsider only because he or she did not understand that logic. More than anyone before him, Boas saw anthropology as a calling, an opportunity to herald the wonder of cultural diversity, while revealing the intricate weave of the human fabric that binds us all together. In the spirit of her teacher, Zora Neale Hurston had been one of the first to undertake scholarly research in the field of Afro-American folklore. At this time when racism was fashionable, she had written boldly that the “Hoodoo doctors [of the American South] practice a religion every bit as strict and formal as that of the Catholic Church.”

  Inspired by Boas’s stress on the need for fieldwork, Zora Neale Hurston developed her own style, to say the least. Packing a pearl-handled pistol, she roamed the dusty backroads of the deep South in a beat-up Chevrolet, seeking out the hoodoo doctors, guitar players, and storytellers, herself playing just about as many roles as there were characters in the stories she collected. Sometimes they thought she was a bootlegger’s woman on the run, or a widow looking for a man. And when she sped away singing some bawdy song, they were certain she was a vaudeville star looking for new material. This amazing woman decked out in her beret and cheap cotton dresses, with all she possessed stuffed into a flimsy suitcase, reached into every bayou and woodlot in the South, and when she got there she carried to its limits what anthropologists stiffly call participant observation. Once to satisfy a hoodoo priest she had to steal a black cat, then kill it by dropping it into boiling water; after the flesh fell away, she was instructed to pass each bone through her teeth until one tasted bitter. During an initiation ceremony in New Orleans, she had to lie naked for sixty-nine hours on a couch with a snakeskin touching her navel; at the tolling of the seventieth hour, five men lifted her from the floor and began a long ritual that culminated with the painting of a symbolic streak of lightning across her back. Then the hoodoo priest passed around a vessel of wine mixed with the blood of all present. Only by sharing in this ritual drink did Zora Neale become accepted by the cult.

  It was this spirit of adventure combined with a passionate desire to continue her investigations and promote vodoun as a legitimate and complex religion that drew Hurston to Haiti. There is little doubt that by the time she read of the secret societies her proposed journey had become something of a personal crusade. For some time American and European foreign correspondents had indulged their readers’ perverse infatuation with what was known as the Black Republic, serving it up garnished with every conceivable figment of their imaginations. For Americans, in particular, Haiti was like having a little bit of Africa next door, something dark and foreboding, sensual and terribly naughty. Popular books of the day, with such charming titles as Cannibal Cousins and Black Bagdad, cast the entire nation as a caricature, an impoverished land of throbbing drums ruled by pretentious buffoons and populated by swamp doctors, licentious women, and children bred for the cauldron. Most of these travelogues would have been soon forgotten had it not been for the peculiar and by no means accidental timing of their publication. Until the first of this genre appeared in 1880—Spenser St. John’s The Black Republic, with its infamous account of a cannibalistic “Congo Bean Stew”—most books that dealt with vodoun had simply emphasized its role in the slave uprising. But these new and sensational books, packed with references to cult objects such as voodoo dolls that didn’t even exist, served a specific political purpose. It was no coincidence that many of them appeared during the years of the American occupation (1915-1934), and that every Marine above the rank of captain seemed to manage to land a publishing contract. There were many of these books, and each one conveyed an important message to the American public—any country where such abominations took place could find its salvation only through military occupation. Zora Neale Hurston, as much as anyone, was aware of these slanderous accounts, and she was quick to realize how the material she had collected in the American South could be exploited if placed in the wrong hands. Thus it was not only a trained but a judicious eye that now was turned on the Haitian secret societies.

  Even within her first weeks in Haiti, as she moved at will through the streets of Port-au-Prince, Zora Neale heard the whispers running along the front edge of the night. They came at first alone, single incidents without any obvious pattern. First there was the drum that sounded one Thursday above her village, a rapid staccato beat, highly repetitious and unlike any rhythm she had heard in a hounfour. She woke up her housegirl and suggested they investigate, much as they had done many times before. But instead of the eager companion she had grown accustomed to, Zora Neale beheld for the first time a trembling child, unwilling to step beyond the threshold of their doorway. Then some weeks later, again at night, Hurston was disturbed by the acrid smell of burning rubber in her yard. When she questioned the man responsible, he apologized profusely but explained that the fire was necessary to drive away those who planned to take his child, the Cochons Gris, or Gray Pigs, who he claimed ate people. Apparently he had already seen them parading by the house, figures draped in red gowns and hoods. Yet a third incident occurred on a sailboat en route to the island of La Gonave, when she encountered a force of militia moving in to suppress some society based in a remote region of the island. No details were provided, just a few words followed by a hush of uneasiness, which Hurston interpreted as fear. Finally back in the capital, a contact led her to the house of a houngan in the Bel Air slum, and there she saw a temple unlike anything she had known. At the center of the sanctum was an immense black stone attached to a heavy chain, which in turn was held by an iron bar whose two ends were buried in the masonry of the wall. As she stood before the stone, her host handed her a paper, yellow with age and patterned with cabalistic symbols, and a “mot de passage”— password of the secret society known as the Cochons Gris.

  Following these and other leads, Zora Neale over the course of several months managed to put together an astonishing portrait of the Haitian secret societies. According to her informants they met clandestinely at night, called together by a special high-pitched drumbeat; members recog
nized each other by means of ritualized greetings learned at initiation, and by identification papers—the passports. In a vivid description of a nocturnal gathering, she mentions a presiding emperor accompanied by a president, ministers, queens, officers, and servants, all involved in a frenzied dance and song ritual that she likens to the “sound and movement of hell boiling over.” The entire throng formed a procession and marched through the countryside, saluting the spirits at the crossroads, picking up additional members before convening in the cemetery to invoke Baron Samedi, the guardian of the graveyard, and beg him to provide a “goat without horns” for the sacrifice. With the spirits’ permission, scouts armed with cords made from the dried entrails of victims combed the land for some traveler foolish enough to be still journeying after dark. If the unfortunate wayfarer was unable to produce a passport indicating his membership in a society, and thus his right to move by night, he was taken to be punished.