The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  Although the chef de section derives his authority from the central government, the basis of his power is not his official status so much as the consensus of the residents of his own section. He does not act alone, but rather heads a large nonuniformed force of local peasants that in turn derive their extrastatutory authority not from him but again from their own people. The chef de section can be quite helpless without such popular support, and historically efforts of the central government to place outsiders in the position—most notably when the American occupation forces attempted to replace vodounists with literate Protestants—have always failed. Haitian law provides for the chef de section to retain certain assistants, but as Murray indicates, “the particular form the structure of police control will take in a particular region will be largely governed by local traditions and by adaptive adjustments to local social reality on the part of local law enforcement officials, who are themselves intimately familiar with this reality.” What this implies is that the official government, in order to reach the peasants, must tap into their own traditional networks of social control, in the person of the chef de section.

  Who is this chef de section? Above all he is himself a local peasant. Typically he maintains his own fields, is polygynous, and serves the loa. In many instances he is a prominent houngan. His behavior, personal values, and expectations are not those of a bureaucrat, but rather those of a leader of the traditional society. Although technically he receives a salary from the capital (and sometimes the money actually arrives), he depends financially on his own land, and like the African patriarch he considers it his right to recruit unpaid labor for his fields. This service the community members willingly provide, in effect as compensation for the hours he must spend attending to their affairs. It is his task, after all, to investigate conflicts and convene the informal tribunals at which virtually all local disputes are said to be resolved. With their power thus rooted in their own jurisdictions, the chefs de section remain relatively unaffected by political upheavals in the capital, and as Murray points out they retain, sometimes for indefinite periods, virtual unchallenged control of their areas. Threats to that power and their position, then, come not from Port-au-Prince but from dissatisfaction among their own people, so it is with them that the loyalties of the chef de section lie.

  In brief, though the institution of the chef de section serves as an interface between the two separate worlds that make up the Haitian reality, the man himself is a member of the traditional society, and the network of contacts he taps is the network within that society. It was, therefore, by no means a trivial discovery to learn from Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié that in most instances the chef de section was also the president of a Bizango secret society.

  Jean Baptiste surprised us by turning up dressed in the uniform of an army corporal and driving a military vehicle, looking like all the anonymous soldiers one runs into at the scattered roadside outposts in Haiti, the ones you catch napping behind their desks when their subordinates lift you from your car for a passport check. Yet within moments of stepping off the street into the privacy of his home he again assumed the air of quiet dignity and authority that had so impressed me the night before. He spoke freely, answering every question we put to him, and as we listened the nefarious facade of the Bizango crumbled piece by piece.

  “No, no. It was an accident. Children are the little angels. They can do no wrong. Children do not fall within the sanction of the society. What you saw was an unfortunate victim. Another society needed to take someone, but the coup l’aire fell upon her by mistake.”

  “Who did they want to take?”

  “That is their business.”

  “It could be anyone?”

  “Not at all. Listen, you must understand that the Bizango is just like a normal government. Everyone has their place. It is a justice.” Jean Baptiste reviewed each member’s grade. The leadership consisted of the emperor, presidents, first, second, and third queens, chef détente, and vice-president. This ruling body was known as the chef d’état-majeur. There were other queens—the reine dirageur, who was generally the emperor’s wife; the flag queens; and the flying queens. Other lesser positions read like a list from the French civil service-prime minister, conseiller (advisor), avocat (lawyer), secrétaire, trésorier, superviseur, superintendant, intendant, moniteur, exécutif. Military titles included general, prince, brigadier general, major, chef détente and soldat. Finally, there were three positions of note: the bourreau, or executioner, whose task it was to enforce the collective decisions of the society; the chasseur, or hunter, who was dispatched to bring culprits before the society; and the sentinelle, who was positioned at the gate as a scout to prevent unwelcome individuals from entering a society gathering.

  According to Jean Baptiste, his was but one of as many as a dozen Bizango societies in the Saint Marc region alone. Each one maintained control over a specific area and was led by a founding president known also as the emperor. In time members of the society’s hierarchy might launch out on their own, establishing their own bands still within the umbrella of the original leader, and as a result within any one Bizango territory in Saint Marc there might be as many as three societies operating. Each principal society was supposed to respect the borders of its neighbors, and disputes if necessary could be taken before the one selected by all the society emperors to reign as the emperor of the entire region.

  The purpose of the Bizango, as Jean Baptiste insisted on reiterating, was to maintain order and respect for the night. To its members and their families it offered protection, and since almost everyone had some relative initiated, the Bizango became the shelter of all.

  “For the sick, or the troubled,” he explained, “it is a wonderful thing, whether you have money or not. But it is only good because it can be very bad. If you get into trouble with it, it can be very hard on you.”

  “Do you mean someone bothering the society, or just anyone?”

  “No, of course not anyone. I tell you it is a justice, so they must judge you. Listen, say someone is out on the street and the time is not his. Then perhaps he will receive a coup l’aire just as a warning. He becomes sick a little, and then he remembers not to walk by night.” Jean shrugged, as if what he was saying was the most obvious thing in the world. “But if someone disturbs a member of the society for no reason it will be something else. The guilty one will be sent to sit down. You see, we have our weapons.”

  That arsenal, as Jean explained, contained a number of spells and powders—the familiar coup l’aire, coup n’âme, and coup poudre—that were surreptitiously applied to the victim at night. To do so the society executioner set traps in places the person was known to frequent. A powder sprinkled in the form of a cross on the ground to capture a ti bon ange was one example of such a trap. Once caught, the victim could only be saved by the intervention of the society president, a treatment that could cost him dearly.

  “They say we eat people,” Jean continued, “and we do, but only in the sense that we take their breath of life.”

  “But Herard said that the Bizango will do far more than that.”

  “The commandant says what he wants to say.”

  “He’s a society of one,” I said with a smile, remembering Herard’s words at Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Jean looked at me, but he didn’t return my smile.

  Just what was going on was uncertain—as was whether Herard was still involved. The image he had presented so forcefully of the Bizango was unlike anything we were seeing with Jean Baptiste; yet at the same time he had led us to the ceremony, introduced Jean, and sat all evening delighted to see us participate.

  “When might a society take someone?” Rachel asked.

  “They are out at night,” Jean began, then hesitated, “or word may come through even by day. Just as long as it becomes known that someone has been talking improperly. Perhaps he is the one who runs to the blanc or the upper-ups in the government and tells them what such and such a society is doing. The pe
rson may try to hide, but we shall find him. That is how a man ends up passing through the earth twice.”

  “A zombi?” I asked.

  Jean regarded me steadily. “Every evildoer will be punished. It is as we sing.” In a high voice that took us back to the night before at Gonaives, he proceeded to sing:

  They kill the man

  to take his zombi

  to make it work.

  O Shanpwel O

  Don’t yell Shanpwel O

  They killed the man

  to take his zombi

  to make it work.

  Jean was laughing aloud even before he finished the verse.

  “And what about thieves?” Rachel asked.

  “You need proof, you always need proof. If someone complains to the society, they will investigate. If it is true, the trap will be set. If a Shanpwel steals, he is rejected immediately from the society.”

  “And if he escapes?” I asked, recalling the way Isnard described dodging the trap.

  “For those who are guilty there is no escape. The society will follow him to the ends of the land, even to the height of the Artibonite.”

  “Across the water?”

  “Even to the streets of New York.”

  “But on the land, is this not the work of the chef de section?”

  “Yes. It is all the same. The society moves by night, and since most crimes are done in the dark we naturally prevent many things. We work together. The chef de section must know what goes on, and so we tell him. He’ll find out anyway. If the society is going into a territory to take someone, and the chef de section is told and he knows the culprit is guilty, he won’t interfere. Anyway, most often the chef de section is a houngan or president Shanpwel. He walks by day, but by night he too changes his skin.”

  “The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate,” Rachel said, echoing the words of Marcel Pierre.

  Jean laughed once more. “My friends, what you have seen is so little.” He explained that the ceremony the night before had been no more than a bimonthly training session of a single society. The next week there was planned a regional gathering of all the Saint Marc bands to celebrate the founding of a new society. It would be his honor if we would accompany him as his guests.

  13

  Sweet As Honey, Bitter As Bile

  BLOOD IN HAITI costs the peasant twenty dollars a liter, assuming he can get the official price at the door of the Red Cross blood bank. Marcel Pierre, Rachel, and I stood by the hospital bed and watched yet another bag of it enter the frail arm of Marcel’s wife, and almost as quickly seep out between her legs to soak the cotton sheets. Public hospitals in Haiti have something in common with the jails; the care of the inmates depends less on their condition than on the ability of their kin to pay—for medicines, food, bedding, even rental space on the lumpy mattresses left over from the American occupation. Marcel had sold most of what he owned, and still no one had done anything to cure his wife. He had shuttled her from hospital to hospital, bringing her south from Saint Marc by camionnette squeezed in among the market women and chickens. Earlier in the day he had spent his last money getting her to the capital only to have to watch her now, lying in the hospital bed, knowing that if he didn’t get more blood by nightfall she would die.

  It was under these conditions that his pride allowed him to turn once again to us. For some time I had been giving him money—“advances,” as we agreed, against another preparation. He knew I didn’t need it, just as he knew that the money I had already paid him was far more than any powder was worth. Still, all this remained unsaid that evening when he turned up forlornly at the Peristyle de Mariani. Rachel kissed on him on both cheeks and rushed off to fetch a tray of food. Marcel and I embraced, then sat together on the couch. By now, of course, we knew all about him, not only his business and reputation, but also his relative position in the traditional hierarchy of Saint Marc. He was small stuff, really, a houngan nieg as some had said—one who must walk the streets to have any presence at all. Marcel was an outcast, a pimp, a malfacteur, a powderer, and now more than ever I sensed his isolation. Haitian men do not cry, but tears slipped from Marcel’s eyes. My hand held his, but there was nothing more I could do. Watching Marcel beside me, I realized just how far he and I had come from the early days and the foolhardy images we had both projected to each other.

  Max Beauvoir knew all about Marcel’s reputation as well, but when he walked into the room with Rachel he received him as a peer. It was an important gesture, one that moved Marcel visibly. And that night before the ceremony, Max took Marcel aside, and they worked together in the inner sanctum of the temple. Later, after the opening prayer, he honored Marcel by inviting him to lead the ceremony. Marcel took this to heart, and the singing transformed him. In time the spirit Ogoun came up on him, and he raced around the periphery of the peristyle, ripping the tablecloths from beneath the drinks of the startled audience. Beauvoir did nothing to stop him. Ogoun burned with a raging intensity. An hour before, death had seemed so close. Now the man had become a god, and death was suddenly an impossibility.

  Rachel and I spent most of the next day moving around Port-au-Prince with Marcel—buying more blood, finding a clinic for his wife, a rooming house for his daughter. It was one reason we were late getting to Saint Marc that night for Jean Baptiste’s Bizango ceremony. There were others. The rain again flooded the Truman Boulevard, backing up traffic halfway down the Carrefour Road, and then we ran into the presidential motorcade that blocked the road just north of the capital. Finally, there was Isnard, who had turned up unexpectedly at Mariani with an invitation to attend a Bizango ceremony early that same evening in Archaie. By the time we had negotiated the various traffic snarls and ferried Isnard on a number of last-minute errands in the capital, it was already well past dark. A blinding rain slowed our journey north, as did the unsuccessful diversion at Archaie. The site of Isnard’s reputed ceremony was deserted and the hounfour shrouded in darkness, save for the warm embers of a recent fire. Behind a crack in the sealed door of a neighboring hut a lone woman dressed in red and black informed Isnard that someone had died during the ceremony, and the society had fled. By the time our jeep once more gathered momentum against the deepening night, we knew that we would be late for our rendezvous with Jean Baptiste.

  Even Jean’s oldest son, with his father already having left, did not know the exact location of the Bizango gathering, but following his father’s instructions he led us along a fretted track to a crossroads just south of the town. There we waited. The storm had passed and the trade winds overhead blew away the last wild rage of tattered clouds revealing a night sky deep with stars. The stillness was broken only by the sound of the waves beating the shoreline. When, after close to an hour, the expected contact failed to appear, we swallowed our disappointment and began to make our way slowly back toward Saint Marc. It was just after we turned away from the sea that Isnard heard the sound of the Bizango drums. Leaving him by the roadside, we returned to town to drop off Jean’s son, then immediately doubled back. By then Isnard had discovered the source of the distant rhythms. He led us to an open field enclosed by a living fence of caotchu. At the center of the field stood a complex of low buildings.

  Instantly an enormous man bearing the rope bandoliers of the sentinelle stepped before us to plug the gap in the fence. A second guard appeared in the path behind, blocking our rear.

  “Who are you?” demanded a harsh anonymous voice.

  “Bête Sereine. Animals of the Night,” Isnard replied flatly. The sentinelle moved aside, revealing yet a third Shanpwel, who accosted Isnard by clapping his hands on each of our friend’s shoulders.

  “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

  “I come from the heel.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going into the toes.”

  “What toe?”

  “I am the fifth.”

  “How many stars do you walk with?”

  “We are t
hree.” Isnard offered his hand but the gesture was ignored. The arms of the shadowy figure remained firmly anchored to his sides. Rachel moved confidently forward.

  “We have come to you by invitation of our friend Jean Baptiste,” she said politely. The man glanced at her suspiciously.

  “He expects you and the blanc?”

  “Yes, we are late. There was too much rain.” Loosening his hold on Isnard, the man dispatched the sentinelle to take our message into the ceremony. For several awkward minutes we stood quietly, listening to the rhythms of the Bizango drums. Though the temple was but a hundred meters away, the sound was fainter than it had been when we first heard it from the roadside. It was just as Herard had said. “When the Bizango drum beats in front of your door, you hear it as from a great distance, and when it is miles away it sounds as if resonating in your own yard.”

  The arrival of a messenger from Jean Baptiste broke the tension. The man’s warm greeting sent the sentinelle and his companions back into the shadows. Chatting idly, then falling silent, we followed the messenger along a narrow path toward the temple. The incessant drumming continued to soften, and as we drew near we heard the words of the song:

  The band is out, the society is out,

  Watch out mother who made me.

  The band’s out, the society is out

  Mothers of Children

  Tie up your stomachs.

  The society was out, its procession winding past some distant crossroads, but the temple was still packed, a catacomb of gestures and faces that seemed vaguely inimical as we eased our way into the crowded entry. To one side in a small open space around the poteau mitan a handful of men and women dipped and swayed, and just beyond, hidden from the light, a group of drummers stood straddling their instruments, teasing the dancers like puppeteers. The music didn’t stop, but the drummers looked up, and their throaty irreverent voices announced our presence in no uncertain terms.