The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  “Long ago the Shanpwel did not exist. The four great Makala nations, that of the north, south, east, and west, formed the Bizango to create order and respect among their people.”

  “In the time before the blanc?”

  “Yes, before and after. There was a girl from the south who kept taking the words of one leader and passing them around. She was the mouthpiece stirring up trouble. Finally, the four leaders came together, and once they realized what was going on they had to have her executed. A great public feast followed, and it was announced to the people that what happens within the four nations must stay there, and what happens outside stays outside. That’s when they formed the Bizango to protect against the dangers of the mouth. That’s why even today if someone speaks against the society he must be made to respect his mouth. So we all come together.”

  “To form a judgment?”

  “No, a council. Someone gets the feast organized—the rice, beans, colas, rum, and so on—and then the major members of the Bizango move apart. The groupe d’état-majeur—president, ministers, the queens. We pass the person. Once we agree that, say, so and so should die January 15, then we go to the emperor, in this region myself, and if the emperor agrees we mark the paper and the person dies. But if anyone disagrees, the case may drag on. Every three months or so we will convene a séance to discuss the case. If we reach an impasse we form a group of thirteen members, and the majority will rule. This is how the Shanpwel works. But a society cannot judge someone who hasn’t directly affected a member. You can’t just work against anyone.”

  “Is this what it means to sell someone to the society?”

  “Only in that there is a justice. There is always a justice. But selling is different in that it is an action that starts from the people, not the leadership of the society. Selling is a means for each member of the society to seek his own justice. If you have a dispute, you make a small deposit of money and give your name and a description of the problem to the emperor, and if it is conscientious the society will pass both you and the offending party through a judgment.”

  “But does the body of the person appear before the society?”

  “A stupid question. I tell you again and again, but you don’t listen. I say it is a justice. Of course the accused appears. The emperor dispatches the chasseur, the hunter. That is his task. What kind of justice would judge a man from afar?” Leophin shifted in his chair impatiently. “But naturally these affairs may become complicated. Sometimes the one who has been sold may remain ill for as long as three years while the judgment is pending. In that case, since everyone knows that the sick one is on the list, the family may hire a diviner to go out and find out what happened. Once he does so, the family has one chance to make retribution. Word goes out and the society to whom the person was sold gathers. The family must pay each of the four leaders of the society.”

  “So the punished one may be bought back?”

  “Under certain circumstances.”

  “Such as?”

  “Look, I tell you it is a judgment, so the circumstances will vary.”

  “But what if I just want to get rid of someone?”

  “You will be judged, for it will be you who breaks the code of the society.”

  “What code?”

  “The seven actions.” Without our asking, like a master of jurisprudence, Jean-Jacques Leophin enumerated the seven transgressions for which one could be sold to a society. These were, in order:

  1. Ambition—excessive material advancement at the obvious expense of family and dependents.

  2. Displaying lack of respect for one’s fellows.

  3. Denigrating the Bizango society.

  4. Stealing another man’s woman.

  5. Spreading loose talk that slanders and affects the well-being of others.

  6. Harming members of one’s family.

  7. Land issues—any action that unjustly keeps another from working the land.

  The list read like a character profile of Clairvius Narcisse, and listening to it sent me whirling back to his case.

  Clairvius fought often with various members of his own family. He sired numerous children whom he didn’t support. By neglecting these and other community obligations, he managed to save enough money so that his house was the first in the lakou to have the thatch roof replaced by tin. But although his profligate existence certainly offended his extended family, the dispute with his brother was basically a question of access to land, and a dispute as serious as that between the Narcisse brothers would likely have involved arbitration by the Bizango society. Herard Simon had told me that it had been an uncle of Clairvius who had actually requested that the tribunal be convened. We can only surmise what might have occurred at that judgment, but there are several points to consider. The father of the two brothers was still alive at the time, and Clairvius Narcisse did not have any children recognized by the community. Now in Haiti it is customary that family land-holdings not be divided up “among the first generation of heirs, since younger brothers would not take it upon themselves to imply such disrespect of the senior ones as to demand that their tracts be split off.” What’s more, if heirs “insist on a formal division before the death of their elders, tradition brands them disrespectful and impertinent.” One of the brothers was clearly wrong in terms of the proper code of conduct of the Haitian peasant society. The most important obligation of a patriarch in Haiti is to keep “family resources intact in order to provide a start in life for children.” This explicit emphasis on posterity would have placed the childless, wifeless Narcisse in a less favorable position compared to the brother who had a large family to support at the time. Furthermore, if Narcisse had, in fact, been in the right and had been zombified by the guilty brother, it is difficult to imagine that the secret society would have permitted that brother to live on in peace in the village for close to twenty years. Given the current chilly relationship between Narcisse and his family, it seems more likely that Clairvius was the guilty party, a conviction held by the majority of my informants in Haiti and reinforced by an extraordinary statement made by Jean-Jacques Leophin the moment I mentioned Narcisse’s name.

  “Narcisse’s brother sold him to a society of Caho. It was the seventh condition. It was the parent’s land. He tried to take it by force.” He paused, then added emphatically, “But this doesn’t mean that the society is an evil thing. If someone on the inside of your house betrays you, they deserve death. But that doesn’t make your house a bad place.”

  “So the people who took Narcisse were not from his village?”

  “This happens. For example, I’m here at Fresineau. Everyone knows that Leophin is the master of the area. I have my limits from Gros Morne up to Montrouis. That’s my quarter. Another society can’t leave Archaie to catch someone in my territory unless he comes to me first. He’ll explain the problem, and if it seems reasonable, I’ll call a séance to discuss giving away the guilty one. If my people object, or if the accusation is unjust, I place him under my protection, and he won’t be harmed. All the emperors communicate between each other, sometimes in person, sometimes by means of the superviseur, the messenger.”

  “The Bizango reaches into every corner of the land,” Rachel said in honest amazement.

  “It doesn’t reach,” Leophin corrected her. “It is already there. You see, we are stars. We work at night but we touch everything. If you are poor, I will call an assembly to cover your needs. If you are hungry, I will give you food. If you need work, the society will give you enough to start a trade. That is the Bizango. It is hand in hand.

  “There is only one thing that the society refuses to get involved in. You can do almost anything, and the society may let you off, but if you stick your mouth in government talk, you can forget it. The society says you must respect the grade of the chief of the law. You can’t just seize any office, you must deserve it. Go through elections and hear the voice of the people.”

  “But what if, for example, there is a policema
n, abusing a member of the society,” I asked.

  “If you like the government, then you’d best remember that all the king’s dogs are kings, even those doing evil. On the other hand, if the policeman is a real bother, one day his chief will call him in and tell him that he’s been transferred. We don’t want to harm him, but we too have our limits of tolerance.”

  “So the Bizango presidents work actively with the government. What happens when …”

  Leophin interrupted somewhat indignantly. “The government cooperates with us. They have to. Imagine what would happen if some invaders landed in some remote corner of the Department of the Northwest. They would be dead before they left the beaches. But not by the hand of the government. It is the country itself that has been prepared for such things since ancient times.

  “The people in the government in Port-au-Prince must cooperate with us. We were here before them, and if we didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be where they are. There are not many guns in the country, but those that there are, we have them.”

  This last statement of Jean-Jacques Leophin was no idle boast, at least if we are to judge by the zeal with which prominent national politicians, most notably Dr. François Duvalier, have courted the Bizango societies. The Duvalier revolution, often misrepresented in the Western press and remembered only for its later brutal excesses, began as a reaction on the part of the black majority to the excessive prominence of a small ruling elite that had dominated the nation politically and economically for most of its history. When Duvalier was first elected in 1957, he was unable to trust the army—indeed by the end of his tenure in office there would be over a dozen attempted invasions or coups d’état—and thus he created his own security force, the Volunteers for the National Security, or the Ton Ton Macoute, as they became known. (The latter name, incidentally, comes from a Haitian folktale that admonishes misbehaving children that their Ton Ton, or uncle, will carry them off in his macoute, his shoulder bag.) To date, however, nobody has adequately explained the genesis of the Ton Ton Macoute as a national organization, or the remarkable speed with which it was established and emplaced in virtually every Haitian community. An explanation may lie in the network of the Bizango societies discussed so candidly by Jean-Jacques Leophin.

  François Duvalier, a physician by training, was a keen student of Haitian culture. A published ethnologist, he was in his youth a pivotal member of a small group who put out an influential journal called Les Griots, and it was within its pages that the germ of Duvalier’s movement was sown. Though themselves scions of the elite, well educated and thoroughly urban, the intellectuals galvanized by Les Griots were responding to the humiliation of the American occupation and the flaccid acquiescence of their bourgeois peers. They did so by espousing a new nationalism that openly acknowledged the African roots of the Haitian people. At a time when drums and other religious cult objects were being hunted down and burned, and the peasants forced to swear loyalty to the Roman Catholic church, the members of Les Griots declared that vodoun was the legitimate religion of the people. It was a courageous stand, and one that earned Duvalier the unqualified support of the traditional society. During the 1957 election that brought him into power, Duvalier actively sought the endorsement of the houngan, and in certain sections of the country vodoun temples served as local campaign headquarters. With his success, François Duvalier became the first national leader in almost a hundred years to recognize the legitimacy of the vodoun religion and the rights of the people to practice it. During his term in office, he appointed houngan to prominent governmental positions. At least once he had all the vodoun priests in the country brought to the national palace to confer with him. And he was himself rumored to be a practicing houngan. It was an extraordinary transformation of official government policy. A year or two before the accession of Duvalier, vodoun drums were still being burned; a year after, a vodoun priest was serving as minister of education.

  Critically, François Duvalier knew that he was surrounded by enemies, and he recognized with equal clarity that his strength and the ultimate power of any black president lay within the traditional society. Throughout his time in office, he went out of his way to penetrate the network of social control that already, as Jean-Jacques Leophin had suggested, existed within that society. He openly courted prominent houngan, and it is no coincidence that a man such as Herard Simon—a man both deeply religious and deeply patriotic—became the effective head of the Ton Ton Macoute for a full fifth of the country. Before Duvalier, blacks had limited access to public or governmental positions. In some cities there were parks where by unwritten agreement blacks were not permitted to walk. For men like Herard, Duvalier seemed like a savior. That was why, when I once asked him if he had had to kill many people during the early days of the struggle, he could reply sincerely, “I didn’t kill any people, only enemies.”

  Undoubtedly Duvalier’s close contacts with the houngan put him directly in touch with the Bizango societies and their leaders. Significantly, he was the first national president to take a direct personal interest in the appointment of each chef de section. It is also intriguing that the Haitian peasantry came to regard Duvalier as the personification of Baron Samedi, a spirit prominently associated with the secret societies. In his own dress and public behavior Duvalier appeared to affect that role quite deliberately: the ubiquitous black horn-rimmed glasses, the dark suit, and narrow black tie are the apparel that show up time and again on the old lithographs of the popular spirit. In short, whatever his motives, François Duvalier succeeded in penetrating the traditional vodoun society on a number of levels. The leaders of the secret societies almost inevitably became powerful members of the Ton Ton Macoute, and if the latter was not actually recruited from the Bizango, the membership of the two organizations overlapped to a significant degree. In the end, one might almost ask whether or not François Duvalier himself did not become the symbolic or effective head of the secret societies.

  Josephine, the old woman who had befriended us that night at the ceremony, sold beans in the Saint Marc market, so she wasn’t hard to find. By then we were recognized by most of the Shanpwel, and a dozen familiar but peculiarly anonymous faces guided us through the cluttered market stalls. It made for a strange sensation, weaving past the telling smiles, being known but still not knowing.

  When we reached her shop—a simple wagon with an awning of tattered cloth, a rusty measuring tin, and a few neat piles of speckled beans—it was untended, but within moments Josephine came scampering back like a schoolgirl, so surprised and delighted that she could scarcely keep still. Leaving her business in the care of a neighbor, she marched us back through the market, pausing often to caper about the stalls of her friends until finally by the most circuitous route imaginable we reached the jeep. Then rather than taking the most direct road to the home of the president of her society—for that was the point of our visit—she managed to have us drive not once but twice through the market.

  Eventually Josephine directed us along a dirt road that ran through the irrigated land east of Saint Marc. The valley, like so many along the central coast of Haiti, is an oasis in the midst of a barren man-made desert, and as we reached just past the edge, where the lush fields gave way to scrubland, we stopped. It was a melancholy place—a few tired trees leading up to a small compound literally carved into the porous sidehill. There were two main structures, both small, linked by a tonnelle and surrounded by a wattle fence. Though not old, the mud surface of the temple had already cracked into a thousand pieces. Overhead, a limp Haitian flag hung on a long staff.

  Inside it was cooler, and as our eyes adjusted to the light, Josephine introduced us to her president, Andrés Celestin. As it happened we had seen him twice before, once at the ceremony where he had been presented with the other Bizango leaders, and a second time when Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié had pointed him out in the main plaza of Saint Marc. Then he had appeared rather dashing, dressed in the stiff denim uniform of the Ton Ton Macoute. Now
he seemed a broken man, lying prostrate on a cot with much of his face swollen and distorted by a sharp blow received, as we would learn later, when two Rara bands had met and clashed several nights previously. He was in no condition to receive anyone, and when despite his obvious pain he tried to stand to greet us, Rachel moved quickly to his side to ease him gently onto his back. He was severely concussed, and though the wound itself was not serious, it had become dangerously infected. We remained with him only long enough to promise to return the next day, and then, leaving some money for food, we hurried back to Saint Marc to purchase medication, which we dispatched with the old woman Josephine. We did return the next day, and each day after that until slowly his condition improved. Finally, about a week after being injured, he felt strong enough to speak with us, and by then, of course, he knew exactly what we needed.

  Quite unlike Leophin or Jean Baptiste, established men whose authority was so certain that it appeared transparent, Andrés was a man on the rise, and his every gesture revealed a restless entrepreneurial spirit. As a youth he had deliberately moved close to Saint Marc, a center of Bizango activity, and it came as no surprise to discover later that he had been prominent in Leophin’s society until eventually the competition between them became too great. Dismissed for disobeying orders, he had formed his own society, which he was now in the process of consolidating. He was ambitious, perhaps excessively so, but he wasn’t corrupt, and in a grand manner he was terribly sincere. It was just that like many of his peers, while being true to his gods, he was more than willing to push them a bit toward satisfying his own aspirations. For Andrés, our chance meeting was a potent opportunity, for him no less than us.

  “It is quite normal,” he explained, “that we work together. I have something that you want, which is knowledge. And you have something that I need.” He was speaking of more than just money, but also what our connections could mean for his society, and for my part I found his summation refreshingly frank. Behind him a pod of children gathered around a cooking fire, pushing out their hungry bellies. To one side, a tired-looking woman dislodged a clump of coarse sand from the ground to scour a pot; beside her lay piles of spindly firewood, and tin cans of water too precious to bathe in. A certain undeniable truth lay between us. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he lifted his head from the cot and his croaky laughter sealed our agreement.