by Wade Davis
It was Wednesday, the day when the society met, and that night following Andrés’s instructions we returned to the compound. We were late, as usual, and already most of the members were there, mingling about, waiting somewhat impatiently in the dark for a Coleman lantern so that the ceremony could begin. At the back of the tonnelle, in place of the cooking fires, three women moved impulsively to the rhythm of a small battery of drums. They stopped soon after we arrived. The compound was too small and the members were too few for anyone to feign discretion. Those who knew greeted us fondly; the rest stared in bemused disbelief.
Andrés was completely unfazed by our awkward arrival, and after a few moments of idle conversation he suggested politely that it was a good time to speak with the master. Groping in the darkness, we followed him out of the shelter of the tonnelle and around the corner of his house to a small outbuilding perched precariously on the steepest part of the sidehill. After knocking three times to alert the spirits, Andrés unlocked the rusty latch and led the way inside, passing through a voile curtain that concealed a small altar in the midst of which burned a single wick in a bowl of hot wax. Above the flame, a canopy of dozens of small mirrors and bells hung by ribbons from the ceiling. Rachel and I sat close together, knees touching on two small wicker chairs huddled to one side. Andrés leaned toward us, and for the first time I noticed the black patch that covered his wounded eye.
“You see, you have never met him, and you must. I cannot do something that is beyond my time. He is the one who can really give you the secrets.” Someone coughed behind us, and I realized we were not alone. Andrés pulled back the curtain and ordered whoever it was to bring a bottle of rum. “And tell the people they can dance,” he added before turning back to the altar. “Now, my friends, there are so many lessons. I shall show you great things. Wade, you are a blanc, and Rachel, you must serve as his master to show him all that I show you. Understand? Both of you? Good.”
Andrés picked up a bell and rang it while his free hand swept through the mirrors, sending bits of amber light dancing across every surface. The assistant scuttled back in, placed the bottle at our feet, and backed away. Another chime, and then Andrés sat down, and commenced a hypnotic drone of the liturgy, on and on, beseeching perhaps two hundred or more spirits and powers, until, stumbling over a single syllable, his voice changed. And started to stutter almost uncontrollably. In the guise of the master “Hector Victor,” the pwin, or mystical force, of the society had arrived.
“O-O-O-O-O Wha-wha-what is this? How are you? We-we-we-we have two foreigners here. Where are you from? Port-au-Prince? I-I-I’m glad. I am Hector Victor. I serve anywhere, do-do anything. Listen, little lady. I-I-It seems you need me? You need information? No? What then? O-O-Oh! Ha! So the guy talked to you already. What did he tell you?”
“He said that we should speak with you because you’re the one who knows,” Rachel answered quietly.
“O-O-Oh! It is true. I do know one thing. That is something that costs. It’s like school. Y-You must pay. Y-Y-You see. A-Ahow much can you pay?”
“No, no, Hector Victor, you must tell us the price. I can’t just say any amount.”
“Oh.” The voice paused. “Sa-sa-say, is that rum?” I passed him the bottle. Only in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god. “We-we-well,” Hector Victor continued, “little lady, myself, I know that you can make me much more money than what I make here. So, th-th-this will cost s-s-s-sixty dollars. But you’ll see how worthy it is. Your father is a houngan, no? Y-y-you’ll see how pleased he’ll be.”
“Well,” Rachel paused as if buying vegetables.
“Rachel,” I said quietly, “it’s fine.”
“All right, we’ll pay forty dollars now and owe the rest.”
“Oh. Yes, I can trust you. I surely can. I-I-I’ll take this, but you’ll see that it is worth far more. So, I’ll be going now and let my horse do the work. But remember that Hector Victor can mount any bagi.” Hector Victor turned to the assistant that had brought the rum and handed him one of the bills I had given him. “T-t-t-take this and change it and give it to the others. Tell them they’ll bring more.” The shadowy figure of the assistant scurried out of the bagi.
The master blew his nose into a piece of newsprint, and then sat slumped on his chair looking comically disconsolate. “M-m-m-money,” he sighed, “see how it goes?” Another assistant arrived. “W-w-w-who’s there? Ah! My dear. Listen, there is something we are going to do. Do it well. We need these people. W-w-w-we want them and nothing must go wrong. T-t-t-tell my horse that these people will make us walk over land we never could have walked over.” The assistant distracted us for a moment, insisting that we write down his name so that we could contact him by way of the public announcements on the national radio. The master lifted his one good eye into the light, and once he was sure that the correct information had been recorded, he disappeared, leaving a limp body that soon came to life in the form of Andrés Celestin.
Andrés was exhausted, and it took a few minutes and several drinks of rum before he could pull himself together. Outside the bagi, the rhythm of the drums had changed and the hollow sound of the conch shell signaled the beginning of the séance.
“So,” the president said finally, “now we can get to work. Did Hector Victor speak properly? Good. He can be very rude. Do you have any matches? Stand up, both of you.” Andrés blew out the candle, and the tip of the wick smoldered like a jewel in the darkness before it died.
“This is a moment that is still to come. A hard time when you’ll get very dirty. The clothes you arrive in will be worth nothing when you leave. It is rough, perhaps too rough.” He paused, and I could hear his breathing as he moved away from the altar. “Light the flame!” A match flared and moved toward the candle.
“The candles are stars. Everything falls into flux and day becomes night, the end becomes the beginning. This is the new life. Move away from the light.”
Rachel and I stepped cautiously into the shadows behind the curtain. Andrés took each of us, first Rachel, then me, and taught us how to shake hands, and how to greet the members of the Bizango. Once satisfied, he led us out of the bagi back to the tonnelle. By then the gate of the compound was sealed and guarded, and the Shanpwel had changed skins and fallen into a single rank that ran along the periphery of the enclosure. Andrés called them to attention, then began to speak. Almost every phrase earned him immediate and violent applause. He explained that he had met us at the celebration of Empress Adèle, and that it had infuriated him to have seen us treated so poorly. How many fools could there be, he asked, who did not know that the whites could be important, that they could help when the proper time came?
“The whites need us, and we need them.” Those were his final words, and with them he instructed Rachel and me to shake hands with each member. Slowly, obeying his order, we moved around the ring offering the ritual greeting we had just learned. Some of the members smiled, some giggled, some displayed faces as hard as wood.
The drums began, then stopped, and one of the queens, her voice like a peacock, began the sad plaintive hymn of the adoration. Other women opened the wooden doors of a small earthen chamber and brought out the sacred coffin, the madoulè, the mother of the society. The procession formed, and Andrés added us to its tail, and together with the other members of the Shanpwel we moved in an ever narrowing circle, so slowly that my ankles began to tremble. When the coffin finally came to rest, each member stepped before it, made his or her offering, and saluted. A series of genuflections followed, and there were other lessons. And then, once the coffin had been lifted and marched back to its chamber, Andrés again led us away from the tonnelle to the bagi.
“It is only a beginning,” he told us, “like a shadow of what there is to know.” We would return, he insisted, both to host a feast and to discover other mysteries. After that it would be our duty to come to each séance. Even if I, in particular, was displaced beyond the great water, I woul
d have to send my genie as an emissary—also, of course, the occasional financial offering to hold up those who might be in need. This said, Andrés leaned forward and whispered two passwords that we would have to know. Then, reaching behind him, he brought out four glasses.
“Drink,” he said, handing one to each of us. The green potion seared my throat.
“And this.” The second dose was viscid and syrupy. “Now you will know how things are to be,” he explained. “The first it was bitter. And the second?”
“Sweet,” I replied.
“Yes. Well, this is the Shanpwel. One side is bitter, the other is sweet. When you’re on the bitter side, you won’t know your own mothers.” The president, his silhouette showing through the voile curtain, threw the dregs of each glass onto the ground, and the drops ran together like mercury to sink into the dusty surface of the earth floor.
After that, Rachel and I entered a long, silent passage and for the next month were as strangers to the sunlight.
Epilogue
“SO IS THIS your choice?” Herard asked. We had met on a roadbed beneath a searing sun. I was ill at the time, my body frail and my throat too dry for talk, and the fevers pushed me into the shade of the scrubland. Herard followed.
“You didn’t listen to me,” he said. “You cannot do these things casually. Everything carries its price. There are things to know and things best left unknown.”
“But we have been received well,” I told him.
“Yes, a child’s game. What do you know?”
“I know that the answers I seek will be found among the Bizango.”
“You know nothing.” He looked away. “And when you fall, will the society of this man be strong enough to lift you up?” The words startled me, for they were the very same as those used by Jean-Jacques Leophin; you could join but one Bizango society, he had cautioned, and it had best be one that could support you in time of need.
“You have been lucky,” Herard continued. “Do not wait for a time when you’ll see things that you should not see.”
“Do you mean the sacrifices?”
“That is the time. Near the end of each year they must gather their powers.”
Herard turned and began to make his way slowly back to the road. As he reached the jeep he called back to me, “You may choose to join the Bizango, or you may come with me and serve the loa. You cannot do both.”
Here were two diverging paths that represented less a choice than a signal that my work had come to a temporary end. To the last Herard would condemn the Bizango, and what he had told me contained a deep warning, a powerful declaration that my actions bore consequences. To complete the initiation into the Bizango society of Andrés Celestin would be an irrevocable step. No longer would I be an outsider, free to alight wherever I chose. I would become part of a matrix, bound to the other members by vows and obligations.
I had arrived in Haiti to investigate zombis. A poison had been found and identified, and a substance had been indicated that was chemically capable of maintaining a person so poisoned in a zombi state. Yet as a Western scientist seeking a folk preparation I had found myself swept into a complex worldview utterly different from my own and one that left me demonstrating less the chemical basis of a popular belief than the psychological and cultural foundations of a chemical event. Perhaps more significantly, the research had suggested that there was a logical purpose to zombification that was consistent with the heritage of the people.
To be sure, I had failed to document a zombi as it was taken from the cemetery, but this was no longer something I deliberately sought out. In the last weeks I had, in fact, been offered two promising opportunities to do so, provided, of course, that the cash payment to the bokor be sufficient. I had gone as far as making the preliminary contacts before I realized that the whole concept had changed. A year or two before I would have gone ahead, emboldened by the deep skepticism I had brought with me to Haiti; now that I had completely overcome my doubts, I found myself forced by that very certainty to turn aside an opportunity that might have offered final proof to those who still shared my early skepticism. The money that the party in question demanded was considerable. If the affair turned out to be fraudulent, I would have wasted the money. If, on the other hand, it turned out to be legitimate, I would have no way of being certain that the money had not been responsible for the victim’s fate. It was an ethical Rubicon I was not willing to cross.
What did remain were the secret societies, but to pursue that connection demanded a new orientation. It would not be enough to document a set of principles as perceived by the Bizango leadership; I would have to observe how they were played out in the day-to-day lives of the people. To do that I would have to enter a community and undertake a study that would require months, not weeks. It was another level of commitment that might well involve completing my initiation into the Bizango society—not as an end in itself but only as a means. It was not something to be undertaken lightly. Regretfully, I decided to curtail my work with Andrés.
It was, in any case, a time for change. Rachel had reports to prepare before she returned to her university and had to stay in the capital. I had a book to write. But it was summer again, the season of the pilgrimages, and just before returning to the States I was drawn north to the festival at Plaine du Nord, where those who serve the loa pay homage to Ogoun, the god of fire and war.
A sacred mapou tree marks the place where once each year a mud pond spreads over a dry roadbed near the center of the village. Like the waters of Saut d’Eau, the mud of the basin is said to be profoundly curative, and each year thousands of pilgrims arrive, some to fill their bottles, some to cleanse their babies, many to bathe. Unlike Saut d’Eau, the area around the basin is constricted by houses that funnel all the energy of the pilgrims into a small, intensely charged space. And in place of the serenity of Damballah, there is the raging energy of Ogoun.
Around the periphery of the basin a ring of candles burns for the spirit, and the pilgrims dressed in bright cotton lean precariously over the mud to leave offerings of rum and meat, rice and wine. There is a battery of drums to one side, and those mounted by the spirit enter the basin, disappear, and emerge transformed. One sees a young man, his body submerged with only his eyes showing, move steadily like a reptile past the legs of naked women, their skin coated with slimy clay. Beside them, children dive like ducks for tossed coins. At the base of the mapou, Ogoun feeds leaves and rum to a sacrificial bull; others reach out to touch it, and then the machete cuts into its throat, and the blood spreads over the surface of the mud.
I was watching all this when I felt something fluid—not water or sweat or rum—trickle down my arm. I turned to a man pressed close beside me and saw his arm, riddled with needles and small blades, and the blood running copiously over the scars of past years, staining some leaves bound to his elbow before dripping from his skin to mine. The man was smiling. He too was possessed, like the youth straddling the dying bull, or the dancers and the women wallowing in the mud.
Glossary
ADORATION The song that accompanies the offering of money at ceremonies.
AGWÉ Vodoun loa; the spirit of the sea.
APHONIA Loss of voice due to functional or organic disorder.
ASSON The sacred rattle of the houngan or mambo; a calabash filled with seeds or snake vertebrae and covered by a loose web of beads and snake vertebrae.
AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM That part of the nervous system regulating involuntary action, as of the heart and digestive system.
AYIDA WEDO Vodoun loa whose image is the rainbow; mate of Dam-ballah.
AYIZAN Vodoun loa, patroness of the marketplace and mate of Loco.
BAGI Inner sanctuary of the temple, the room containing the altar for the spirits.
BAKA An evil spirit, a supernatural agent of the sorcerers that often takes the form of an animal.
BARON SAMEDI Vodoun loa, the lord and guardian of the cemetery, represented there by a large cross placed over
the grave of the first man to be buried there. Important spirit of the Bizango.
BÊTE SEREINE Animal of the Night, an appellation for the members of the Bizango societies. Literally, “serene beast.”
BIZANGO The name of the secret society; also connotes the rite practiced by the Shanpwel. The name is possibly derived from the Bissagos, an African tribe that occupied an archipelego of the same name off the coast of Kakonda, between Sierra Leone and Cape Verde.
BLANC “White,” but more precisely “foreigner,” and like the term gringo in parts of Latin America, not necessarily pejorative.
BOKOR Although the word is derived from the Fon word bokono, or priest, in Haiti the bokor has come to represent the one who practices sorcery and black magic as a profession.
BOUGA The toad Bufo marinus.
BOURREAU The executioner, a rank in the Bizango societies said to be responsible for enforcing the decisions of the groupe d’état-majeur.
CACIQUE Term is still used in Haiti to refer to the pre-Columbian Amerindian rulers and divisions of the country.
CALABASH A gourd used as a water container or ceremonial vessel.
CAMIONNETTE A small truck used as a bus.
CANARI A clay jar that is used for sheltering the ti bon ange, and which is broken at funeral rites.
CANNIBAL A term for a secret society.
CANZO The ordeal by fire through which the adept passes into initiation.