Books will be issued only on presentation of library card. Please report lost cards and change of residence promptly. Card holders are responsible for all books, records, films, pictures or other library materials checked out on their cards. by Selden Rodman Verse AJviAznsrG YEAH.: A Diary in. Verse THIS THEl I^A-WIUENGE:; TMK I-AST TRIXTIS^PKI AJNT> OTHtKIt Art JPORXRAXX Oir TKE: ARTIST AS ANT HAITI : A. ]STegro Paintier Irx Amerloa. OISTOE: HTJisroREo jvioDEiiusr I>OEIVI:S TE HXJ>rOHJEr> AJVIERI ANT> TMK: ^OET ("witliL Rioliard CMF Travel : The Black Republic THE BLACK REPUBLIC The Complete Story and Guide by S ELD EN RODMAN THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY NEW YORK Copyright 1954 by Selden Rodman All rights reserved Permission to reproduce material from this book must be obtained in writing For information address the publishers, THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY, 23 East 26 Street, New York 10. Printed in the United States of America Canadian agents: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., Toronto Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-10816 First printing November 1954 Second printing March 1955 To II>iei and make a work-slave (zombi) of it. This widely-held superstition is based to some extent on an African practice of drug- ging people with the root of a certain tree, the effect of which is to turn the taster into an automaton. The extraordinarily heavy slabs 37 HAITI: of stone with which all Haitians cover graves is added insurance that the dead won't rise again. THE ELITE To the foreign visitor who, whatever he is, is not a peasant, peasants the world over seem more or less alike. Every ruling group, however, seems sharply distinguished by national peculiarities. This is particularly true in Haiti. I attended two dinner parties in Haiti some years ago. One was at the home of a very old family, its sons married to French or American women so that their children could not have been taken for Negroes anywhere; in fact, the daughters were now in finishing school in New England. The women and this is true of the Mulatto aristocracy generally would have been considered beautiful anywhere in the world: pale bronze or off- white, the eyes deep-set and incredibly clear but languorous under very long lashes, in carriage supple, feline Tike caged panthers dreaming.' The men were as typical of their caste and as striking: proud, fiery of mien, graceful in all their gestures but intensely mas- culine, relaxed and socially at ease. The dinner itself was an elaborate affair of many courses and many wines. The dress was formal. The conversation was about subtleties in the acting of the Com6die Fran?aise. And after dinner in the drawing-room there was polite piano playing to which every- one listened politely. Then the men withdrew to discuss world poli- tics and some pretty critical things were said about the current American effort to keep the Communists out of Asia, Our host, who insisted that the American State Department was "reactionary" and "imperialistic" was then well known for his opposition to the Hai- tian government's effort to impose a mild income-tax and permit the organization of labor unions. The other party, given by a leading intellectual and attended by government officials as well as literary figures, was informal There was as much a profusion of food, but the dishes were "peas- ant" plantains and dried fish, and the only drinks served were rhum- sodas and whiskey. The women, even more than at the other party, were relegated to the background, sat by themselves, and drank kola-champagne, a soft-drink. The conversation was much more animated and as the evening progressed became really brilliant. The men provided after-dinner entertainment by singing vaudou songs to the accompaniment of a guitar, and during one number a young officer of the Garde performed an impromptu bonda dance climaxed 38 The Story of the Black Republic by a feigned crise de possession which brought down the house. Very late in the evening some of the more adventurous youth de- parted to join the "Orthophonique," one of the largest Mardi Gras bandes with a special reputation for wildness; accompanying the revellers in old clothes and masks they would be sure to find plenty of excitement without being recognized. At the first party the decor had been a little stuffyacademic still-lif es, Chinese vases and screens, heavy uncomfortable furniture of dark mahogany. The ladies fanned themselves and did not smoke. At the second, a Coca-Cola calendar, a photograph of a favorite soccer-star and a card-size reproduction of a Matisse were tacked haphazardly to the bare walls. The guests in shirt-sleeves sat cross- legged on the floor or steps, and they helped themselves. At both parties the American guests were treated with impeccable consider- ationand just enough formality to make them sensible of the priv- ilege they were being accorded. In 1939 Leyburn was able to describe the elite as that 3% of the Haitian population which does not work with its hands. The percentage may have risen a point or two; and the employment of a well-born Haitian woman as a stenographer, hostess or curio-shop saleswoman, is no longer uncommon; but the definition still holds. Other criteria listed by Leyburn included education and the ability to speak French, an almost religious devotion to "culture," resi- dence in the cities ("One must see and be seen by other members of one's caste"), formal marriage, and skin-color. The last qualification has relaxed greatly under the administra- tions of the Negro presidents, Estim6 and Magloire. The so-called "Two-Hundred Families," mostly very light in complexion and tracing their ancestry to Revolutionary times, are still the most im- portant component of the 6Hte socially speaking, but the bulk of the caste consists of the wealthy, the intellectually brilliant, and the more recently "arrived" among politicians and the military. It is from the latter that large accretions of dark-skinned Haitians have swelled the ranks of the 6tite under the last two administrations. And this, coupled with the rise of the small but aggressive urban middle-class, who now dispute even the sacrosanct Cabane Chou- coune with the aristocracy, has led some Haitians to insist that the term 6lite itself has become anachronistic. The ffite established its character during the 72 years that fol- lowed Boyer's downfall, a period in which Mulattoes ruled for only nine. Adapting themselves to life under Negro (mostly military) presidents, the Mulattoes controlled business, monopo- 39 HAITI: lized the Law, became state secretaries and diplomats, valedictorians and poets. To the extent to which one may generalize, the elite then assumed such social-psychological traits as elegant deportment, fiery patriotism, conversational brilliance, a love of indirection and intrigue, mild anti-Americanism, 1 extreme Francophilism, indiffer- ence toward religion, cynicism in politics, laissez faire in economics. At the same time the elite was developing that social sctvoir faire for which it is renowned, its attitudes toward others were solidifying: a contempt for the benighted peasantry, a stern benevolence toward domestics, a double standard as regards women and a belief that children should be (if nothing else) bien elev. Somewhere along the way, the elite acquired a marked taste for poetry and belles lettres, but little interest in any of the other arts including interior decoration. "There are among the elite" Leyburn wrote, "broad- minded, tolerant and cultured persons. The average member of the caste, however, like the average American, is full of prejudices of all kinds. Travel produces a superficial polish; their patriotism con- sists of antagonism toward the outside world and an eff ort to secure position for themselves; they are sure that Haiti's laws are sounder, her culture superior, her schools more advanced, her civilization in general higher than those of most other nations (France generally excepted)." There used to be a saying that when somebody sneezes in France, they have whooping-cough in Haiti. Times have changed since Leyburn wrote. France has lost prestige. Americans have abandoned much of their racial myopia, have come to Haiti to learn as well as to criticize. The common man everywhere has found champions. In the arts, primirivisrn and indi- vidualism have relegated academic standards to the dustbin. Haitian intellectuals have taken an interest in folklore, vttudou, Marxism, New Dealism. Poems and plays in the once-despised Creole have been publicly read and received with enthusiasm. The Slite has not rendered Leyburn's description of them obsolete but it has given cause for sharp revisions. That ambivalence which on the one hand i It is to the Mite's great credit and sense of proportion that they are not deeply anti-American, because it was under the Occupation that they were treated for the first time with social-racial contempt and in their very homes. **It made many of us," a Haitian journalist says, "ashamed in our hearts of our own race* ashamed of our birth and of our families and of the blood that flows in our own veins. For not all of us are strong enough to laugh and say 7* w?tn ficfa* as I do . . . The gen- eral's wife often invites us to tea and finds us charming, but the sergeant's wife, or the captain's, who maybe did her own washing at home, was our social superior and would feel herself disgraced to shake hands with any nigger. n Chauvet, quoted in Seabrook, op. cit. The Story of the Black Republic sought to emulate the Whites (even in coloration) and on the other regarded the "vulgar" foreign visitor as proof of the superiority of everything Haitian, has all but vanished. The 6lite Haitian of today may not be the most humble or self-critical of men, but he is one of the most hospitable and charming, and his ancient fear that wide- spread education would topple his eminence is rapidly giving way to a knowledge that his future and Haiti's are involved in the com- mon weal. POLITICS: The Government and the Army THE GOVERNMENT. According to the Constitution of 1950 which was drawn up at Gonaives by a Constituent Assembly headed by Dantes BeUegarde, all Haitians are equal before the law without regard to sex, creed or color, save that women, though per- mitted to participate in municipal elections and to hold office, are temporarily not eligible to vote for national office. The government is divided into legislative and executive branches. The former consists of a National Assembly comprising a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. The Deputies, directly elected by the people for four-year terms, number 37 and are distributed according to the population. The Senators, numbering 21, are elected for six years by the primary assemblies of each department (provincial state) . The chief executive, the President, is elected for six years and is not eligible for re-election. He is elected on the basis of a majority vote of communal electors, chosen by direct suffrage and secret ballot. He has the right to dissolve the Assembly, name all judges of courts and tribunals, and choose the members of his cabinet heading the various executive departments. The President, in whose person and that of the Army which he commands, resides the real power in Haiti, receives a salary of $z4,ooo a year. He lives and works in the National Palace on the Champ-de-Mars in Port-au-Prince, adjoining the Cassernes Dessa- lines, which houses the Palace Guard. His cabinet consists of seven departmental secretaries (State and Religious Cults, Interior and Jus- tice, Finance and National Economy, Foreign Affairs and National Education, Public Health and Work, Commerce and Agriculture, Public Works) each receiving a salary of $7200, and four Under- secretaries receiving $4800 each. Almost one-fourth of the annual budget for 1953-4 (totaling 4* HAITI: $25,839,379) was allocated to the most important of the ministries, that of the Interior, whose share was $6,040,620, but about $5,000,- ooo of this sum covered the expenses of the Army, and $147,996 went to the Secret Police. Education and Public Health came next with budgets of about $3,000,000 each. $1,500,000 was allocated to Public Works. Foreign Affairs, Finance, and Commerce- Agricul- ture each received about $1,000,000; and the office of Secretary of State to the Presidency (which includes also support of the Catholic Church) $500,000. The sum total of these expenses, which includes the funding of the public debt and carrying forward of Haiti's share in the Artibonite Project, is paid out of customs duties ($17,513,- ooo), internal revenues ($6,733,000) and other taxes ($1,591,000), In assessing the progress toward democracy in Haiti, two facts must always be remembered. Military dictatorships, of varying de- grees of severity and efficiency, were the rule during the Nine- teenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Even P6tion, though pre- serving the republican forms and never a tyrant, made the major decisions unassisted. The second fact is that no matter how demo- cratic a constitution may be and Bellegarde's contains many safe- guards of people's rights custom and usage are the ultimate arbi- ters; no more than 10% of the people participate in government even to the extent of voting, and it is inevitably in the interests of this minority that the lines are drawn and the laws enforced* The fact that the combined circulation of all newspapers is less than 50,- ooo and that there are only a few thousand radio receiving sets in Haiti must also be taken into account. THE GARDE D^HAixi. Haiti's small but well-disciplined Army, the Garde d'Haiti, consists of 400 officers and 4000-5000 enlisted men, and contains within itself the police force whose khaki uni- forms are undifferentiated from the other services. Since policing is the main function of the Army in the country districts, a very large proportion of the Garde is delegated to this activity. Branches of the Army are the Coast Guard, whose half-dozen small launches and torpedo boats patrol the coast and give aid to navigation; the Air Force, which efficiently moves all passenger and air freight within the country in addition to its military duties; and the Artil- lery, a part of the ground forces, which is equipped with French 75S and American 1055 and a few tanks. A battalion of the ground forces (40 officers and 500 men) constitutes the Palace Guard. The Army also maintains Haiti's prisons. Qualifications for an enlisted man in the Garde are literacy and loyalty. A private gets $2 1 a month plus $6 for board and clothing, 4* Catholicism . . . The Catholic Church dominates Port-au-Prince as it dominates Haiti, m terms of formal religion and educational influence, Below: Pere Augustm, the first Negro Bishop in the Republic's history, is invested in the presence of the President and the Apostolic Delegate. Vciudou: the Drmimer Vaudou: tbe Vever With the flour-drawing of these intricate symbols by the howigm around the center-post, the ceremony begins. When the loa answer the summons, the severs have served their purpose and are danced away. 9 #*i Vaudou: Possession Vaudou: Prayer By far the largest part of a ceremony is devoted to prayer, the preparation of offerings and sacrifices, the lighting of votive candles; in these phases of J_. ^1 . /V.I 1' ' n Sautd'Eau: Ville-Bonheur Site of a great Catholic fete July 15, attended by scores of thousands, the near- by waterfall serves as a perfect setting for vcwdou baptismal rites which are observed simultaneously. Vttudou: the Houwtfor Not every temple is as simple as this one depicted by Wilson BigaudL The altar may be painted with vevers, decorated with everything from automobile headlamps to soft-drink calendars. The feathered dolls are pacquets congo, powerful charms carried on the head. In Enguerrand Gourgue's dramatic presentation, one such unfortunate automaton is being led back to his open grave by the sorcerer after a night's work in the fields. Haitian Cemetery This particular one, appropriately illuminated by a thunder-storm, is near St. Louis du Sud. But all are notable for their heaw above-ffronnd tomb- This kindly priestess of vaudou from Bizoton posed for her picture with the asso'fi, symbol of authority in one hand, and a sacrificial goat in the other. Ba&le's 'Triumph' A symbolic painting of Christ and the Virgin by primitive painter Castcra Ba/ilc shows the vaudou influence in the 'mystery' on the altar and in its flat patterns. It Protestant Apse Painted by Catholic artists Bazile (right), Benoit (left), Leveque (vault), and Protestant Obin (center), this greatest of Haitian murals was commis- sioned for the Episcopal Cathedral of St.-Trinite. Ttoe Story of the Black Republic and a mess allowance of $7 monthly. Qualifications for the officer corps are twelve years of school and a three-year course at the Mili- tary Academy at Freres where each year 15-20 second lieutenants are graduated. Competitive examinations, not membership in the tlite, are the final basis of selection. More than 50% of the officers are dark-skinned. A few officers rise from the ranks. Aids to the Garde in maintaining order in the rural areas, are the civilian chefs de section who wear blue denim, nickel badges and pith helmets. 550 in number, each is issued a carbine or revolver on a one-year signed contract with the Garde; their salary of $10 monthly is paid by the Garde, to whom (or to the local judge) they turn over malefactors. A bill is pending before the legislature to in- crease the salaries of the chefs de section, double their number and require literacy tests. The chef exerts his authority mainly by moral persuasion; the most respected man in the community is generally selected to be chef. 43 CHAPTER IV RICH LAND, POOR LAND: Physical Facts and Economic Theories IN THE INTRODUCTION we had occasion to mention some of the para- doxes of Haiti's situation and the delight that amateur economists take in solving her age-old dilemmas on paper. Some years ago one such benevolent visitor, who prided himself on his practicality, ob- served that the peasants near St. Marc were getting few vitamins. He therefore imported a whole shipload of cocoanuts and had them planted in neat rows. In a decade or two, he reasoned, there would be an abundance of milk and white meat for everyone. Returning to inspect the work a week later, he discovered that every one of the nuts had been dug up and eaten. He was outraged, but he need not have been. He had simply neglected to consider two basic fac- tors. The community was wholly without education. And even if it had been educated to the point of appreciating long-range plan- ning and conservation, it is doubtful whether its members would have been able to let the thought of tomorrow's plenty alleviate to- day's hunger. A similar thing happened in 1952 when reforestation technicians planted a hundred-thousand seedlings to preserve the capital's dangerously denuded watershed above Turgeau; every sin- gle seedling was pulled up and burnt for fuel. To understand what is being done, and what can be done, to alleviate this pitiful necessity of living from hand to mouth, one must know a little about the land: what it provides and does not provide; what is being done to equip the peasant with a healthy body and an informed mind. The value of various approaches to a happier future can then be measured. But the reader who comes to Haiti to enjoy himself, or, as we suggested in the Introduction, to temporarily escape into a way of life utterly removed from his own, can be grateful that everything related to the "dismal science" of economics has been relegated to this one chapter where he is at liberty to skip it. 44 The Story of the Black Republic GEOLOGY AND CLIMATE We are not concerned with how Haiti took shape, geologically speaking, except to note that the island dates from the pre-Creta- ceous period: sandstone and conglomerates overlaid with clays, limestone and chalk. Most of the soils derive from weathering of limestone in the mountains. On the plateaus there is red clay and clay loams. The alluvial soils on the coastal plains are fertile except in the dry areas where the earth tends to be alkaline. The sponge- like quality of the limestone underlying Haiti has prevented the formation of lakes in the mountains, but by the same token has fa- vored the storage of fresh water underground. There are no active volcanoes on the island. Earthquakes are fairly common, one such having toppled most of the houses in Anse-a-Veau on the South Peninsula as recently as 1952. Severe hurricanes, like the one that levelled the Dominican capital in 1930, are rare; but disastrous floods, resulting from torrential rains in the tree-stripped mountains, are frequent. As early as 1788 Baron de Wimpffen remarked sadly 'on the propensity of the planters to cut down every last tree within hundreds of yards of a settlement. No- ticing one magnificent avocado that had been felled "for timber," he observed wryly that enough ordinary wood to rebuild the whole French Navy was available on an adjacent hill. It isn't any longer. Today a story is told of a flood in Jacmel where the rivers in the rainy season get completely out of hand. A gros Negre had just re- turned from Port-au-Prince in his dynaflow and although warned by the Garde not to attempt to drive to his home up the river val- ley, persevered. The Jacmelians smiled and waited. In half an hour he was back. Five minutes later his car arrived. And five minutes after that his house ... Rainfall on most of the South Peninsula averages 60 inches but varies on the North Peninsula from as much as 60 inches around Port-de-Paix to less than 20 inches at Mole St. Nicholas. Rainfall along the semi-arid coast between the two peninsulas varies from 20 to 40 inches, but in the upper Artibonite Valley it reaches a max- imum for all of Haiti of 122 inches at Mirebalais. Sheltered as it is by the high mountains along the Dominican border from the pre- vailing wind out of the East, Port-au-Prince is hotter than any of the other Haitian cities (all of which are seaports), temperatures ranging there in summer from 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and in winter between 70 and 80 degrees. But due to its proximity to the mountains behind it, the capital's environs (Petion-Ville, fifteen 45 HAITI: minutes away, 1500 feet above sea-level; and Kenscoff, thirty-five minutes away, 5000 feet) are cool the year round. The so-called "rainy season" varies greatly from one part of the country to an- other, but in Port-au-Prince it takes place between April and Octo- ber, most of the rain falling in the evenings. BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS Visitors to Haiti have always been surprised that a country with a richness and variety of vegetation unsurpassed in the world should have so few animals. One can travel for days in Haiti with- out seeing a single wild creature, excepting the lizard and an occa- sional pigeon, guinea hen or waterfowl. No people, for all that, is more dependent on domestic creatures than the Haitian peasant and none treats them with as curious a mingling of blood-familiarity, superstition and downright cussedness. A whole volume, and an en- tertaining one, could be written about the ambivalent relationship of man and beast in Haiti, and it could begin with the three aston- ishing reasons given for cropping a cat's ears. 1 It would ask such questions as why a horse, even when confronting a loaded cawnon on a hairpin turn, is invariably held at the extreme end of a very long tether rather than by the bridle, and why an overloaded bou- rique that has fallen and can't get up is caned over the head instead of being relieved of its burden. It would include a stern lecture on the virtual extermination by slingshot of inedible (but ecologically indispensible) small birds. And it would certainly explore every fascinating facet of cockfighting, not excluding the under-the- wings baptism of a gladiator with a courage-bearing bath of rum and ginger-root sprayed through the teeth, and the advisability of an all-over "tasting" of your opponent's body before Round One to make sure his owner isn't the type who substitutes red pepper for ginger to give your bird the sneezes. It was the late Ralph Adams Cram who called Port-au-Prince "City of Ten-Million Roosters," but William Krauss, complaining that Cram had ignored "the packs of dogs that bay the moon and the uncounted burros that retch and whoop to make hideous the false dawn," found a better symbol of Haiti in the ponderous hush that accompanies the death or day: "A single dog, uncertain and tentative, will bark. On the instant, triumphantly, a thousand dogs will answer. You draw a breath. The stars appear. Life goes on. There is no death." distinguish it from wildcats (are there any in Haiti?), to make it come in out of the rain (by tickling of the inner hairs) and to keep it home (by burying the ears, which, of course, it wouldn't want to be far from, in the yard). The Story of the Black Republic The largest Haitian mammals, the agouti and the mongoose, are nocturnal. The iguana, or giant lizard, is almost extinct. Snakes, none of them venomous, are scarce. Crocodiles are still to be found near the mouths of some of the small rivers, and in the fitang Sau- matre, Haiti's one considerable lake. Wild cattle, horses, pigs, and dogs, descendents of those brought from Europe centuries ago, once roamed the less settled areas, are now rarities. The coastal wa- ters teem with an abundance of tropical fish, but few are caught in the primitive straw traps and seines of the natives. The variety of insects that will congregate about a light bulb on a dry evening is as astonishing as the brilliance of their colors and markings; taran- tulas, scorpions, centipedes and malarial mosquitoes are an infre- quent menace. Bats are as common, and as harmless, as moths. The Encyclopaedia Britannica does not exaggerate when it says of Haiti that "all tropical plants and trees grow in perfection, and nearly all vegetables and fruits of temperate climates may be suc- cessfully cultivated in the highlands." Cotton, rice, maize, tobacco, cocoa, ginger, native indigo, arrowroot, manioc (cassava), pimento, banana, plantain, pineapple, artichoke, yam and sweet-potato are indigenous to Haiti. Mango and breadfruit trees (both said to have been imported from the East Indies by Captain Bligh of "Bounty" fame) grow in every part of the country, along with cocoanuts, oranges and shaddock (the original and sweeter grapefruit), sup- plying that portion of the peasant diet for which he does not have to work. So rich are mangoes in food values that Revolutionary generals are said to have planned their campaigns to fall within the "Mango Season." Other important food products are coffee and sugar (Haiti's No. i and No. 3 exports), melons, cabbage, caimite (star apples) , almonds, grapes, mulberry and fig. During an hour's walk behind Jacmel once die author counted no less than eighteen edible fruits growing wild, including such exotic items as carrasol, grenadine and guava. Of the larger trees which do not bear edible fruit, the acajou (mahogany) , rosewood, satinwood, manchineel and lignum vitae are most valuableand in danger of total extirpation. The French colo- nists, as a matter of fact, made every eif ort to destroy the manchi- neel in their fear that the slaves would make effective use of the fruit whose juice is a deadly poison. This is the tree under which the lov- ers in Meyerbeer's UAfricaine, falling asleep in each other's arms while the dew sifts through the deadly branches, are found dead in the morning. Mapous with buttressed roots (sacred to vaudouists), sabliers (whose fruit is poisonous) and Antillean Oak attain heights exceed- 47 HAITI: ing 100 feet. Most beautiful for their deeply scented blossoms are the frangipani (white), the constellated immortelle (red) and the leguminous flamboyant (orange). Twelve-hundred species of palm are to be found in Haiti but the spear-straight Royal and the wind- bent Cocoanut are the most common-and most beautiful. The cala- bash tree furnishes the peasant with a natural receptacle for carry- ing water. Occidental pine, Spanish cedar, eucalyptus and mimosa flourish in the higher mountain ranges. The bamboo, though it may be considered more a grass than a tree, sometimes attains a height of 100 feet. In the desert and brackish lowlands are to be found man- grove and logwood, cactus and mesquite, tamarind and tcha-tcha. Of shrubs to grace the porticos of the villas of the elite, one need only mention camellia and oleander, hibiscus and bougainvillaea, jas- min and poinsettia, the rose and the crape-myrtle. Cattails, tamarix and the rope-like lime with its lavender flower grow wild among the rocks. The figier-maudit, a fearsome parasite which grows from a seed deposited in a tiny flaw of the mapou's bark, embraces the mighty tree with its snake-like arms, eventually strangling it. And in the 6ooo-foot-high jungle of the South Peninsula are to be found the giant fern, the rose-apple and a dazzling variety of orchid. WAYS OF MAKING A LIVING With a population density of 300 per square mile, Haiti is more overpopulated than any country in the Western Hemisphere. Only one-third of Haiti's 10,000 square miles is tillable at all, which means that there is less than an acre per person to go around. Considering this, it is extraordinary that any cultivation at all beyond the pri- mary needs of the peasants is possible. No less than 94% of the peo- ple gain their livelihood as small proprietors, lessees or tenant-farm- ers, from agriculture or such related occupations as charcoal and lime-burning, village handicrafts and fishing. Of the remaining 6% (182,240), 83,500 earn wages in agricultural industries, and 75,000 in domestic service, leaving a total of only 23,740 engaged in trade, government service and small industry. This fantastic disproportion may have altered somewhat since the United Nations made the foregoing survey in 1949,* but not substantially. The minimum in- dustrial wage has risen from 30^ a day in 1939 to 70^ at the present time. But very few peasants are engaged in even part-time work for wages. Estimates of the average annual cash income of the Haitian 1 See Mission to Haiti. Report of the United Nations Mission of Technical Assist- ance to the Republic of Haiti. Lake Success, New York. 48 The Story of the Black Republic run anywhere from $25 to $65 which may be compared with a $50 figure for the bulk of the world's population rather than with the $800 obtaining in England and $1600 in the United States. During the fiscal year 1953 imports exceeded exports by $7,- 360,830. As a result the Government, which depends upon export- import taxes for most of its revenue, ended the year with a deficit of $780,000, and this was a principal reason why a program of home industries was put into high gear. The budget for 1953-4 was $25,- COFFEE. Coffee is and always has been (except during World War II when sisal and sugar temporarily displaced it) Haiti's most valuable export crop. 'Black Gold,' as it is sometimes called, was introduced into Saint-Domingue in 1739, and by 1791 production on 800 estates totaled 65,151,180 Ibs., a figure not equalled for over a hundred years. In 1900, the record year of modern times, 700,000 bags of coffee were exported, as compared with a 1952-3 figure of 289,041. Three companies Brandt, Wiener and Madsen sort and ship more than half of the annual crop which is bought from the individual peasant (who generally decorticates the bean himself in a wooden mortar) at about 40^ a pound. It was the cutting off of the European market during the War that resulted in the impoverishment of such provincial towns as Cayes, Jacmel and J6remie a loss of prosperity from which they have not recovered. But another cause of the decline of Haiti's cof- fee trade has been the growing scarcity and high price of food, which has forced the peasant to turn some of the best coffee-grow- ing slopes into vegetable gardens. Haitian coffee is of excellent qual- ity, especially prized in France and Italy, but is produced by the peasant from a few bushes to which he gives little care. In conse- quence, the yield is small and the quality not what it could be. Com- posting, soil conservation and afforestation (coffee grows well only in shade) will be necessary before this industry ever regains its im- portance in Haiti and the world market. SISAL. The low price of sisal, which enjoyed a boom during the War years in the absence of Manila hemp, contributed greatly to the decline of government revenues in 1952-3. Haiti's 35,000 tons annual production accounts for 12 % of the world market. Sisal is now used largely for bailer and binder twine. The cactus plant from which it is extracted was introduced to Haiti by Captain feligh (on the same voyage in which he brought breadfruit) from Cen- tral America. Sisal is produced almost entirely by large privately-owned or 49 HAITI: government plantations on semi-desert land unfitted for other crops. The 30,000 acres on which the largest of these companies, the American-owned-and-managed Plantation Dauphin, operates in the Northeast, has a rainfall of only 25-30 inches a year. Before Dauphin started planting in 1927, these fields were covered with nothing but mesquite, although in Colonial times campeche (log- wood *) provided a valuable export. 8000 workers at peak opera- tion, 5000 in 1953-4, are employed by Dauphin, though double-row tractor cultivation and the introduction of automatic machines to process the waste, threaten soon to reduce this figure drastically. SHADA'S government plantation is next in size with 12,000 acres; then Crooks' American company, also in the Northeast; and fourth, the very efficient all-Haitian company of Joseph Nadal with its 4000 acres northwest of Port-au-Prince. SUGAR. Spaniards brought sugarcane from the Canaries to Hispaniola in 1 506, but it was not until 1680 that French settlers first planted it in the western part of the island. Very soon sugar had supplanted indigo as Saint-Domingue's chief product. It was grown, for the most part, in four flat and fertile areas: the Plaine du Nord, surrounding Cap Hai'tien; the Valley of the Artibonite; the Leo- gane plain; and the Cul-de-Sac. It is in the latter lowland, north and east of Port-au-Prince, that most sugar is now grown. In 1791 there were 792 sugar mills in operation producing 150,000,000 Ibs. (67,- 000 tons) of raw sugar annually. By 1826 production had fallen to 33,000 Ibs., and thereafter disappeared entirely from the list of products exported from Haiti. In 1919 the Haytian-American Sugar Company (HASCO) commenced operating. By 1951-2 it was producing 65,000 tons, more than 90% of the sugar processed in all of Haiti in that year of record output. A little more than half of HASCO'S production is exported in raw form where it is sold on the world market, most- ly to the United Kingdom, at the world price with no protection. The import quota for sugar from Haiti to be sold in the United States (where sugar brings the high price of $5 a hundred-pounds) is negligible-thanks to the power of the Cuban and Puerto Rican lobbies. 47% of HASCO'S sugar is refined at the huge Port-au- Prince factory for the local market. Molasses, a by-product of the refining process, is shipped to the United States in tankers for cat- tle-feed. The Company's own fields supply 40% of the cane proc- essed. The rest is bought from between 7000 and 9000 peasant pro- 1 The indigo dye extracted from logwood trees was Saint-Domingue's No. 3 ex- port. Since 1018 indigo has been replaced by synthetic arialynes. 5 The Story of the Black Republic ducers. There are 700 employees in HASCO'S factory; its total staff of 5000 includes ox-cart drivers, stevedores and technicians who operate its sugar-railway running between Leogane in the South and St. Marc in the North. The Company paid the Haitian Government the sizable sum of $852,326 in taxes in 1953. Haitian and Cuban-owned sugar "centrales" are getting under way at Cap Hai'rien and Les Cayes. The small mills seen on country roads, in which the cane is ground between wooden rollers turned by a horse or mule, produce not sugar but sirup, molasses sticks (rapadou), and tafia, a potstilled raw rum. HASCO has facilities for producing raw rum, which it once distilled and sold by the millions of gallons, but does not at present because of unfavorable legisla- tion. Haitian refined rum is not exported. The largest producer for the internal market is Jean Gard&re & Co., whose Barbancourt dis- tillery, not far from HASCO, uses sugarcane entirely from its own fields. BANANAS. In 1947, Haiti's biggest banana year, peasants were getting $1.10 for a nine-hand stem which now brings 70^; seven million stems were being exported as compared with half a million in 1953. Whatever the moral or political justifications may have been, the forced withdrawal of Standard Fruit Co.'s Haitian branch in 1952 constituted the major cause of this catastrophic decline. Standard Fruit came to Haiti in 1936. Its plantations were in the Artibonite Valley and it fertilized the land with nitrates and am- monium sulphate. It controlled "leaf-spot," the principal disease of the plant, with regular sprayings. It had the investment required to aff ord moving its plantations to new land at such times as three plantings (covering a fifteen year period) should exhaust the soil. In 1947, Standard Fruit's Haitian operations, in which the fifty- million dollar corporation had invested three million dollars, ac- counted for three-and-one-half million of the seven million stems exported, the rest having been shipped by six Haitian independents financed by small importers in Miami. When Standard Fruit departed, the independents grouped to- gether in a combine called HABANEX, headed by a Haitian busi- ness man who had been imprisoned under the Estim6 regime for al- leged monopolistic practices. Under the present government, he took up the claims of the six companies. HABANEX, with $700,- ooo backing from the latter and $552,000 from the government, then began to push the development of new plantations. But the difficulty has been that Miami, out for a quick profit, has not been willing to make the long-term investment required for distribution 51 HAITI: of new plants to the peasants, fertilization of the ground, control of leaf-spot, and crop rotation. HABANEX now buys mostly from the individual peasant producer and most peasants prefer to grow non-exportable green plantains, a cousin of the yellow banana, which more readily resists diseases, requires less irrigation, and is more nutritious. COCOA. Hopes that Haiti can regain her Colonial position as a leading exporter of cocoa have been revived by the establishment of a million-dollar American processing plant near Anse d'Hainault in the South. Even in the 1952-3 season cocoa ranked ahead of ba- nanas as the fourth product on Haiti's export list. $1,155,940 worth of beans were shipped out in that year. The new company plans to dry the beans under cover and supply peasants with young cocoa trees as well as technical assistance. COTTON, TEXTILES. Cotton, another crop suff ering under inde- pendent peasant auspices from desultory cultivation and unchecked insect pests, is exported in very small quantities. Most current pro- duction is now absorbed by die new spinning and weaving plant constructed in 1950 by O. J. Brandt, a native Jamaican who is Hai- ti's largest coffee and textile merchant. Mills operated by Madsen and the Zephirin brothers will be in operation soon. RICE. Haiti's production of rice in 1952-3 was estimated at 64,000,000 Ibs., an increase of 15% over the previous fiscal year and of almost 100% over the previous decade. Most of it was cul- tivated in the paddies of the Artibonite Valley, a good part on land reclaimed by irrigation with American aid. If the reclamation con- tinues, Haiti will soon become self-sufficient in this vital food staple. INDUSTRIES, MINING. In 1954 the Government opened Haiti's first cement plant at Fond Mombin near Port-au-Prince, making the country at a stroke completely independent of this expensive import and providing cement to users at 20% less than before. The plant employs 300. Rubber of excellent quality, free from South American "leaf- blight," can be grown in the rainy South where experiments under American technicians are now being made at Marfranc. Three per cent of Haiti's exports consist of essential oils, 95% of which are distilled from the extensive and efficiently managed grass plantations of Senator Louis Dejoie at St. Michel de TAtalaye and Ducis. Bauxite the natural base of aluminum is mined in small quan- tities near Miragoane and Gonaives, and is to be found elsewhere. Firms have been given licenses to export manganese from Trouin; 5* The Story of the Black Republic this ore in Haiti analyzes at 61% as compared with 30% ore now being taken out of Cuban mines profitably. FISHING. Between 4000 and 5000 Haitians are estimated to be engaged, at least part of the time, in marine fishing. Their equip- ment consists of small sailboats and dugout canoes, straw traps (often baited with no more than an orange) and seines. Almost no deep-water fish are caught, but marine turtles, shrimp, rock lobster (langouste) ^ oysters and conch (Iambi) make up part of the catch, most of which, in the absence of refrigeration, is sold and eaten within a few hours of the time it comes ashore. Partly because heavy trawling is not feasible in the coral reefs that surround Haiti, and partly because the fishermen have no seafaring tradition and rarely venture far from shore, attention has centered recently on means of increasing Haiti's fish diet by stocking streams and lakes with fresh-water varieties. Under United Nations sponsorship, Javanese carp and African tilapia were introduced in 1953 as a supplementary source of food for the peasant. Simon Tal, the Israeli fish expert most recently in charge of this successful experiment, has also built a number of model artificial fish-ponds near Port-au-Prince; private enterprisers, he points out, may derive $1000 a year clear profit from a pond costing only $500 to construct, and thus supply the under-stocked city fish markets as well. ELECTRIC POWER. The Haitian Government has a contract with the American-owned and operated Compagnie d'clairage lec- trique des Villes de Port-au-Prince et du Cap Hai'tien to supply power to these two largest Haitian cities and their environs until 1970. The company is frequently criticized by the Government for keeping its rates too high, and once it was actually attacked in the Senate for shifting over (1923) from wood-burning to diesel oil, "thus depriving the peasant of a valuable source of income"! The company's defense against the first charge is that its rates are lower than Westchester County's although the labor ratio (220) is actually higher in Haiti, the productivity of labor being so low and supervisory costs so high that labor costs more than fuel. In con- sequence of this, the company says, no dividends have been paid to stockholders since 1941, this in turn shutting off new investment and making plant increases to keep up with the growing number of consumers impossible. Haitian consumers, who believe none of this, have their own way of beating the "imperialistic" power trust. Appropriately enough it was said to have peen invented by an ingenious American 53 HAITI: named Cumberland, and bears his name to this day. A groin) of native "electricians," operating clandestinely, and of course for a fee, have a way of making the meter lie. If you don't pay their fee (and don't be surprised some da^ if yon find a handful of fellows you have never seen before digging a small hole in your bedroom wall) they have an equally effective device for shutting off your power permanently. Small government-operated diesel plants supply Gonaiyes, Cayes, Jeremie, and Port-de-Paix. St. Marc has no electricity. Jacmel is supplied by Haiti's first hydroelectric plant, opened in 1920 and owned and operated by the Boucard family. A very small looHP hydroelectric plant serves Belladere. The great Peligre dam on the Artibonite is being constructed in such a way that generators can be added eventually at a cost of $6,000,000. These would be capable of supplying the Western provinces of the country, including Port-au-Prince. A wholly auto- matic plant there, costing considerably more, could take care of the entire Republic. HEALTH When the Marine Occupation ended Haiti's century of isola- tion in 1915, it was found that reputable physicians were few, hos- pital facilities were lacking and that an overwhelming proportion of the population were suffering from malaria, yaws, hookworm and a variety of intestinal diseases. 67% of the people were infected with malaria, 26% with hookworm, and 78% with yaws which had been brought over from Africa as early as 1509. Even before that, the Spaniards had introduced smallpox which wiped out thou- sands of the Indians, and the Indians themselves had unintentionally retaliated by infecting their conquerors with syphilis which shortly thereafter swept over Europe. The slaves, as we have seen, were largely immune to yellow fever, which gave the coup de grdce to the French. All of these plagues, to which typhoid and tuberculosis were later added, flourished during the Nineteenth Century among a people who have always been susceptible in consequence of over- crowding, malnutrition, and lack of elementary sanitation, Camille Lherisson, a contemporary Haitian doctor, says that the peasant diet has not improved substantially since slave days; but today Haiti's health problem is mainly a rural one, for three American health missions, in cooperation with Haitian health authorities, have 54 The Story of the Black Republic succeeded in greatly improving sanitary facilities in the towns and in virtually wiping out yaws and malaria. Yaws, Haiti's historic disease, eats away the flesh or cripples by ulcerating sores on the feet. It is transmitted by repeated contact, especially in districts where shoes are not worn and water is scarce. In 1924 the Rockefeller Foundation began attacking it with arsenic- bismuth injections. In 1942 a U. S. Sanitary Mission took over, us- ing penicillin for the first time in 1945, and reducing the number infected to 55%. In 1950 the United Nations Childrens' Emer- gency Fund offered to pay for the expensive drug, and the Ma- gloire Government, setting up injection centers, had needled 1,750,000 cases by April of 1953 at a cost of $500,000 to Haiti and $650,000 to TJNICEF. The job was then taken over by the Service Cooperatif Inter-Ainericain de Sante Publique (SCISP), which had been operating successfully since 1948 in place of the Amer- ican Sanitary Mission. With the Haitian Government contributing 60% and Point Four 40%, sixteen clinics were set up and SCISP is hopeful of holding yaws to a negligible phenomenon. SCISP'S general health work began in 1944. Water was the underlying problem and Port-au-Prince, where 1 25,000 people who required 12,000,000 gallons a day were getting only 3,000,000, came first on the agenda. Major Edwin Dudley, for seven years chief of the Mission, partially solved this problem by tapping un- derground reservoirs in the limestone ridges back of the city, in- creasing the flow of pure water to 8,000,000 gallons. The rural water supply situation, however, remains desperate, with thousands of peasant catties five or more miles from water, the springs un- capped and polluted and in many regions drying up entirely. Between 1942 and 1946 the Rockefeller Foundation carried out extensive drainage projects in Petit Goave and Aquin, seaports suffering terribly from malaria. Other drainage systems were in- troduced later in Jacmel, Cayes, L6ogane, Gona'ives, St. Marc and Cap Haitien by the American Sanitary Mission in cooperation with the Haitian government. The projects were effective but malaria was not entirely wiped out from these coastal regions because up- keep on the drainage canals has not been sufficient to prevent them from periodically filling up. Apart from the control of these prevalent diseases to which may be added tuberculosis and hookworm which still flourish among the poorly housed and barefooted Haiti's health dilemma comes down to a lack of trained doctors and rural clinics. In 1948 only fifteen doctors were graduated from Haiti's one medical 55 HAITI: school, and out of Haiti's total of 292 physicians in service, 17 were abroad for study, 150 were practicing in or near Port-au-Prince and 99 were established in provincial towns. In 1950, the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, the ten provincial public hospitals, and the private clinics in the capital, employed between them a total of 76 doctors and had 1570 beds. This would take care, though far from adequately, of the few hundred thousand Haitians living in towns of more than 15,000 population. But the 3,ooo,ooo-odd other Haitians in smaller towns and rural areas had to get along as best they could with the services of just 26 additional physicians. The latter, on salaries of $60 to $160 a month, operated out of a scatter- ing of poorly equipped clinics which could not supply them with even minimum transportation facilities. As the UN report stated wryly, "a civil service which does not provide means of transport or compensation for travelling expenses cannot reasonably order its officials to travel on duty." A three-hundred-bed million-dollar hospital planned for the Artibonite Valley is to be constructed soon on the site of the old Standard Fruit Co. headquarters at Borelle. The hospital was con- ceived by Dr. & Mrs. W. L. Mellon, Jr., of New Orleans and will be realized through funds of the Grant Foundation. EDUCATION A recent edition of the World Almanac contained, under Haiti, the sentence: "Education is free and compulsory; illiteracy is 90%." The percentage of the uneducated has fallen a few per- centage points, but the paradox remains. To understand it, one must go back a long way. Moreau de St.-Mery noted in 1797 that the French planters had been short on culture, that in fact they had created no schools in Saint-Domingue either for themselves or for the slaves. The Haitians were obliged to start from scratch. Under Toussaint there was little time for education. Dessalines had no use for it. Chris- tophe ^educated strenuously during the dozen years of his reign. But Petion and Boyer, who inherited a united country, were the first of a line of elite presidents who were aristocrats and governors precisely because they were educated. Not until Geffrard, in 1875, was any attempt made to extend the schools beyond Sttte ranks. By 1919 there was an enrollment or 61,313 pupils, and by 1946 this figure had risen to 103,310, or one child out of four or five. By 1953 the number had advanced to 181,638. The Story of the Black Republic Breaking this last official government figure down, there were enrolled in all primary urban schools, public, religious and private, 79,839 students. Public and private secondary schools correspond- ing roughly to American high schools and colleges, and going be- yond the first four years-accounted for 6,827 more. There were 2042 enrollees in professional schools. The balance of 92,833 in- cluded all pupils participating in public and religious primary schools in the rural areas. Only 97 Haitians matriculated in schools preparatory to the teaching profession. With a total educational budget of only $3,206,855, and with educated Haitians rarely willing to become teachers (especially in the rural areas) because of the low pay and isolated living condi- tions, it will be readily seen what the government's effort to reduce illiteracy is up against. It must be born in mind also that the primary reasons why three out of four rural children of school age do not attend schools at all, are: i) because schoolbooks and uniforms must be supplied by the parents; 2) because the few rural schools themselves are often physically out of range; and 3) because the average peasant family depends on school-age children for a large share of the day-to-day work, and, even if it didn't, would be un- convinced of the practical value of reading, writing, arithmetic and French. Efforts have been made over the past decade to break down the barrier between the Creole-speaking peasantry and the fraction of the population which speaks French. Instruction in the primary schools, at least in the first grade, is now generally given first in French, then in Creole. Creole primary readers have been prepared by the UN Pilot Project at Marbial and by some of the Protestant missions, but have not received wide distribution. A difficulty in this regard was highlighted by a printing of parts of the Bible in Creole; it failed because people from the North objected that the dialect used was not their Creole and they couldn't understand it. French, taught in a simple phonetic system by teachers employing Creole may be the answer at least until such time as the present effort of intellectuals to write some of their works in Creole has produced a body of printed literature. Following the French system, education in the primary schools occupies four to five years; secondary education through the lyctes and into the University another seven or eight. Standards and out- put in the Catholic lycees are higher than in government schools because the former tend to reject the slow and the stupid. Private schools maintained by the Church or by individual educators must 57 HAITI: follow the same course as those prescribed by the Government. Co-education is the exception, not the rule. The University of Haiti, whose rector is also editor of the Catholic newspaper La Phalange, is divided into an engineering school (4 year course), a medical school (6 years), dentistry (5 years), agriculture (4 years) a normal school (3 years, with some scholarships available), a law school (3 years), and shorter courses in pharmacy, surveying and ethnology. Of these schools, that^ of Law has the largest attendance because in Haiti this profession has been traditionally the key to wealth through a government career. Of the 785 students enrolled in the University in 1953, about 300 were studying law and 200 medicine. The J. B. Damier Trade School in Port-au-Prince, recently renovated and reopened by the Magloire Government, is providing Haiti's first student workshops to train mechanics and electricians. With financial assistance from the International Labor Organiza- tion, much machinery has been made available and courses in masonry, locksmithing and plumbing opened up. The school is named after an eminent Haitian Minister of Education whose father had been arrested and whipped by Christophe for failing to send his son to school. A school unique in the Caribbean, for the training of hotel employees and bartenders, was opened in 1953 to cope with the expanding influx of visitors to Haiti. Schools offering enrollment to the families of foreign residents, as well as the specialized Institute Frangais and Institute Haitien- Americain, are described in the chapter on Port-au-Prince and in Appendix III. Many schoolchildren in Port-au-Prince come from families whose homes are still without electricity. Visitors who have seen these kids doing their homework under the dim street lamps of the capital will never doubt that Haitians are eager for an education. PROSPECTS Three roads, if traveled upon simultaneously, promise to re- lieve Haiti of much of its burden. The first and most difficult to plot, but also the most vital, involves helping the peasant to help himself. The second, symbolized by the giant storage dam under construction on the upper Artibonite, has to do with reclaiming the land and establishing home industries. The third is tourism. The Service Cooperatif Inter-Americain de Production Agri- 58 The Story of the Black Republic cole (SCIPA) constitutes the latest approach to the first objective. It came into being in the 40'$. Its first experiments were in the Artibonite Valley where it was demonstrated that rice cultivation on artificially irrigated land brought share-cropping peasants the unheard of yield of $80 per year per acre. It was on the basis of this experiment that the Export-Import Bank approved a $4,000,000 loan in 1949 to irrigate 70,000 reclaimable acres. Sharing in the same program, peasants at the "ghost-town" of Fond Parisien near the capital stood in the new irrigation ditch and screamed with delight when water flowed for the first time in forty years. SCIPA operates at present with a staff of U.S. engineering, agricultural guidance and home economics experts, and a budget out of which every $2 supplied by Haiti is matched by $i from Point Four (now F.A.O.). The home economics branch is trying to introduce wood-conserving smokeless stoves and get the peasants to eat regularly such foods as vitamin-rich mangoes and goats' milk. But its somewhat Utopian approach, and the attempt of the agri- cultural guidance experts (agronomes) to impose advanced cultiva- tion methods on the uneducated, are regarded by many Haitians as ridiculous. A better approach, some of these critics of SCIPA feel, would be to have the government create semi-experimental farms with schools, stores and seed stations attached, as a means of ridding the peasant of the anarchic fluctuation of prices in the town markets; these eventually would become genuine producers' cooperatives, controlling their own funds to minimize graft, and with only the original government cost of setting them up to be amortized. With- out some such system, it is felt, the hoped-for introduction and widespread use of hydroelectric power would only mean that city slickers would be in a position to buy out the poor peasants and operate big plantations with virtual slave labor. The reason for the failure of UNESCO'S Pilot Project (1949- 53) to rehabilitate and educate the 30,000 illiterate and diseased peasants in the isolated Gosseline River Valley at Marbial was pre- cisely because it was not part of a nation-wide program. The mo- ment UNESCO funds cease, the hopeful valley, in which for a time Haitian and foreign experts had accomplished miracles, was permitted to "rejoin" the primitive economy surrounding it. Infinitely sounder is trie thinking behind the huge Artibonite project at Peligre. Its inception dates from 1949 when it was seen that the original $4,000,000 American loan to provide irrigation works in the lower valley would be vitiated by the alternating 59 dry spells and floods from above. In 195 1 the cost figure was revised to allow for more than $20,000,000, and in 1953 work started on the dam, a quarter of a mile wide and almost 200 feet high, behind which a deep lake 18-20 miles long would insure that enough water and never too much would be available the year round to make of Haiti's largest (and dryest) plain a farmers' paradise. One serious objection has been raised to this project an objection that highlights Haiti's Sword of Damocles. It was pointed out as early as 1950 that in thirty years, if the river continues to carry its present silt-load from the unforested slopes, the reservoir behind the dam will be filled up and useless. Whether this predic- tion is exaggerated or not, the acceleration of erosion in Haiti's mountains is something fearful to contemplate. At the present com- bined rate of birth and erosion, Haiti will have 7,000,000 people in the year 20oo-and almost no cultivatable land. Except for the Pine Forest near Morne La Selle and a few almost inaccessible mountain slopes on the South Peninsula, Haiti's original forest cover is gone. As a result, the peasant fields, cultivated by the most destructive primitive methods and stripped of the surrounding bush which is burnt for firewood, charcoal and lime, is exposed to devastating floods which carry the vestiges of remaining topsoil of ten together with the peasant's crop, and even his home into the sea. Efforts by UN experts to plant seedlings, at least near threatened reservoirs and for shade on coffee plantations, have been poorly understood by the peasant and inadequately supported by the government. Tourism, the third causeway to Haiti's salvation, offers the most immediate returns. Before the opening of the Bi-Centennial Exposition in 1949 tourists could be numbered by the hundreds, and hotels on the fingers of one hand. In 1952, 20,000 visitors came to Haiti and in the following year 34,439. By this time there were 21 hotels in Port-au-Prince and its environs and three in Cap Haitien. The number of tourists was still a long way from the Bahamas' 68,000, Jamaica's 93,000 and Cuba's 216,000, but a coun- try with potentially more to offer than any of those conventional island-resorts, seemed to have no limit to the expansion possible along this golden avenue. The $4,000,000 spent by tourists in Haiti in 1953 was already a source of revenue second only to coffee. Feasible development of good beaches near Cap Haitien and Port- au-Prince, and the building of a direct road from the capital to Jacmel, a Caribbean port with just about everything to offer, could easily raise Haiti's tourist traffic over the 100,000 mark by the end of the decade. 60 CHAPTER V MEN POSSESSED AND LIVING GODS: The Religions of Haiti THERE is A SAYING in Haiti that ninety per cent of the people is Catholic and one hundred per cent vaudou. The saying is true only in the most general or symbolic sense the sense that vcwdou is the traditional popular belief, and that Catholicism, having been super- imposed on it and widely accepted, is practiced by many Haitians concurrently and even interchangeably. If one attempted to make a more accurate estimate of religious groupings in a situation where reliable statistics do not exist, it might be hazarded that ten per cent of the people are under the influence of various denominations of Protestants, which tend to immunize them more effectively against vaudou than does ritualistic Catholicism, Of the remaining ninety per cent, perhaps two-thirds are nominally Catholic and one-third more or less actively so. It is within the nominally Catholic segment let us say sixty per cent of the total population of the country that the active vaudouists are to be found. Another ten per cent of the people Catholics, Protestants and Indifferents may attend a vaudou ceremony from time to time, for some special reason or out of curiosity. If a disproportionate share of this chapter seems to be devoted to vaudou that is because vaudou beliefs and practises are found in their purest form in Haiti; being exotic, they will naturally interest the foreign visitor more than those creeds with which he is familiar. The Catholic Church is dealt with briefly because (with the ex- ceptions to be noted) its program and practise are the same every- where. The Episcopal experience is singled out for specific descrip- tion because its members are the most active of the Protestant sects, and to describe each separately would be tiresome and repetitive. CATHOLICISM The early religious history of Haiti is extremely revealing. The French planters treated the Church with indifference or in- 61 HAITI: science. France itself, though still officially recognizing Rome, was entering the Enlightenment, and the colonists of Saint-Domingue were too busy making fortunes and spending them to give much thought to another world. Priests who showed interest in the souls of the slaves were regarded as subversive; in fact the Jesuits were expelled for precisely this in 1764. "The safety of the Whites," a Governor wrote home at the time, "demands that the Negroes be kept in profound ignorance." In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that the priests accommodated themselves to local mores. A report to the Vatican charged some of them with leading lives "so indecent . . . that the citizens and Negroes have lost all the sentiments of religion which the Jesuits gave them/' The free Mulattoes, for their part, are reported to have been as licentious as the Whites. What the slaves believed in, at least until the Cere- mony at Bois Caiman brought their secret ambitions into the open, is not recorded. Toussaint's Constitution of May 9, 1801, while granting free- dom of conscience and worship, declared that "the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion is the only one publicly professed in Haiti." But Dessalines' Constitution of 1805 ("The law admits no dominant religion") separated Church and State and made marriage a purely civil compact. For the next fifty-five years an open schism existed during which the Vatican refused to allow any of its priests to en- ter the country. The consequence of this was that while Ca- tholicism persisted in Haiti, it became confused with folk prac- tices. By the time of Soulouque (who openly served vaudou) the rites of the heretical Church were scarcely distinguishable from the African ones. And by the time President Geffrard signed the Con- cordat of March 28, 1860 with Rome (a treaty which has been re-affirmed by every Haitian government to this day) vaudou was much too firmly entrenched to be eradicated. Faced with a competitive religion that accepted everything visible in Catholicism, these first priests of Rome must have been baffled. The elite in revulsion against the pre-Concordat clergy who, it is said, would bless a boat or even a privy for a fee, had be- come open unbelievers. It is little wonder that the missionaries feared to open their ranks to native membership. And it is under- standable that when they went among the peasants they took ad- vantage of the already existing confusion of identities between the Saints and the Mysteres. By 1930 there were 205 priests in Haiti of whom only eight were Haitians. Today there are about 300 of whom eighty are 62 The Story of the Black Republic Haitians. Few of the 220 French priests speak Creole. Each of them receives a monthly salary of $18.75, P^ us expenses, out of the $230,- 923 which the Haitian government sets aside yearly for the "cukes." The Archbishop's salary is $372.50. Although a school for the preparation of a native clergy was established in 1918, almost all of the French priests are Bretons, graduates of the St. Jacques Semi- nary maintained by the Haitian government at Finisterre, France. The first Negro Bishop, Monseigneur Augustan, assistant to Arch- bishop Joseph Le Gouaze, was consecrated in 1953, at which time the Pope is said to have promised informally that the first native Haitian to become Archbishop would be made a Cardinal. Five teaching and charitable institutions exercise their ministry in Haiti with government support. The Fathers of the Holy Ghost conduct the important institution of secondary education known as the College of St. Martial. The Brothers of Christian Instruction established the seminary of higher learning known as St. Louis de Gonzague, which includes the best library in Haiti; many gov- ernment elementary schools are also under their jurisdiction. The Nuns of St. Joseph de Cluny have a large high school for girls and are in charge of many public schools. The Daughters of Wisdom conduct hospitals as well as schools in the provinces. The Belgian Sisters of Mercy manage several vocational schools for young women, including the cole Professionelle lie Dubois in the capi- tal. The important work being done by the Oblate Fathers in die South is discussed in Chapter VII. Such questions as the resources of the Church in Haiti, its in- fluence over the people, and how it handles its chief rival, the priest of vaudou, are difficult to determine. Church spokesmen say the Church owns no property to speak of. On the other hand a semi- official government paper once charged, in an anti-clerical lapse, that the Church had. $80,000,000 stashed away in real estate and foreign banks. One thing can be said with certainty; although the Church is rich in terms of Haiti, compared with the Church in most countries the Haitian branch is very poor indeed. If its influence, notwithstanding, is proportionately far greater in Haiti than, say, in the United States, that is because the Haitian Church is not only financed by the government but controls, through the same alliance, the key positions in education. How deeply the teachings of the Church penetrate, and the ex- tent to which it is winning its cold war with vaudou will be exam- ined in the next section of this chapter. Here it remains to be said that while the Churches are generally full at service-times, Masses HAITI: are said in Latin or French and the peasant regards the typical priest exactly as the priest regards himself as a member in good standing of the elite caste. The elite, whose philosophical scepticism remains strong, exert no social pressure to attend Mass, but neither do most of them neglect to set what they consider a good example. VAUDOU Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alive religion dive as Christianity was in its beginnings and in the early Middle Ages when miracles and mystical illuminations were common everyday occurrences . . . The high. gods enter by the back door and abide in the servants' lodge. It has been a habit of all gods from immemo- rial days. They have shown themselves singularly indifferent to polite company, high-sounding tides, parlors and fine houses . . . indifferent indeed to all worldly pride and splendor. We have built domed temples and vast cathedrals, baited with glories of poly- chrome and marble to trap them, but when the gods come unin- vited of their own volition, or send their messengers, or drop their flame-script cards of visit from the skies, it is not often these gilded temples or the proud of the earth they seek, but rather some road- weary humble family asleep in a wayside stable, some illiterate peasant girl dreaming in an orchard as she tends her sheep, some cobbler in his hut among the Alps. William Seabrook in The Magic Island, 1929. ^ reason the Catholic Church finds itself in the often help- less position of trying to convert the already converted, is that vw- dou, an adaptable cult without written codes or any country-wide hierarchy of its own, has managed to integrate into its own struc- ture almost all the symbols, ceremonies and outward forms of the Roman Church, The Saints have been melded with the African dei- ties (loo), who were also once human beings. The Cross of Christ doubles for the sign of Baron Samedi, and also for the symbol of the treacherous crossroads, guarded over by the African Legba. Baptism is an old African tradition pre-dating Christianity. And no one who has seen in Haiti the once-Catholic observances of Ash Wednesday (Mardi Gras) and Lent (Ra-Ra) will deny that it is the serviteurs of vaudou who have adapted them to their own ends. The Holy Trinity is thought by some students to correspond roughly to the three primitive powers invoked at all vaudou rites, les Mysteres, les Morts, les Marassas" (the Spirits, the Dead, the Twins). And even God himself (le Eon Dieu, le Grand M^tre), is 64 The Story of the Black Republic recognized as having precedence over the loa and is paid at least lip service at all ceremonies: Don't the Catholic and the Vodun worshipper believe in the exist- ence of a supreme God? Don't they both believe in His unceasing intervention in the course of^ human life as well as in the realm of universal phenomena? Don't they believe Him sensitive to offense, terrible in vengeance and yet merciful, responsive to prayer and to the offerings of his poor creatures lost in misery and sin? Don't they both believe in supernatural beings saints, angels and demons who stand between man and his Creator and are ever disposed to concern themselves with the aff airs of this world? * The differences between Catholicism and vtwdou are funda- mental, of course but not so easy to define. Vwdou is a living re- ligion, and where still practiced devoutly is as integrated a governor of a man's whole life as any religion in the world today. Those, as Leyburn observes, who conceive of religion in terms of orthodoxy, monotheism, sin, moral law, eternal rewards or punishments won't understand it at all because, for one thing, "its conception of spirits is anthropomorphic. No man is wholly good or wholly evil, nor is any god." Failing to recognize the Occidental dualism between spirit and matter, and therefore placing no premium on asceticism, the vtwdouist regards the sensual body and the aspiring soul as one; and like the Oriental, as Maya Deren points out, he predicates his faith "on the notion that truth can be apprehended only when every cell of brain and body the totality of a human being is en- gaged in that pursuit." Far from making a primary virtue, as we do, of self-restraint, the vctudouist's whole drive is toward participa- tion in his religion, and therefore the man who becomes "possessed" (or, as they say, "mounted" by the loa that then speaks through his temporarily unhoused body) has achieved the final aim of his faith: communication with the gods. Stanley Reser, one of the very few foreigners who has been accepted as a devotee himself, defines vaudotfs hold in terms rather of the vaudowst's well-known ability to handle live coals or to ef- fect surprising medical cures. "Nothing in this world," he Hkes to say, "is supernatural, but many things are inexplicable or Abnor- mal/ The Haitian peasant is simply closer to nature, and has been for hundreds of years, than we are; so empirically he is in close touch with the laws of nature, many of which are still beyond our comprehension." 1 Quoted from Ainst parla Voncle by Dr. Jean Price-Mars, Haiti's leading ethnologist. 65 HAITI: Since one never sees the same vaudou ceremony twice, since practices vary from place to place and from time to time, and since "authorities" seldom agree on the meaning of any specific symbol or ceremonial object, the difficulties involved in attempting to des- cribe the rites succinctly are manifest. Not every aspect will be of equal interest to every reader. Nor'would a description of any one, or two, or three ceremonies be likely to coincide with any one, two or three that the reader is likely to witness. To overcome some of the difficulties inherent in a narrative, therefore, the remainder of this section will consist of a number of hypothetical questions and answers. QUESTION: What is the meaning of the word "voodoo"? ANSWER: "Voodoo" (or "vodun," or "vaudou" as we prefer to spell it here), although traced by some scholars to a corruption of the French Vaudois (a Waldensian) is probably synonymous with the identical African word for spirit. QUESTION: Where did it originate? ANSWER: Vaudou is first mentioned by Moreau de St.-M6ry, a French savant who had spent ten years in the Colony just before the Revolution of 1791. If one discounts the patronizing tone taken by all Europeans of the period to anything non-European, his de- scription is acute as well as prophetic: It is logical to believe that Vaudoux owes its origin to the cult of the serpent to which the people of Juida are particularly given. They say it originated in the kingdom of Ardra on the slave-coast; and after reading to what a pitch these Africans pushed their super- stition for this animal it is easy to recognize it again in what I have just reported. (The Malabar Indians also worship the snake; they call it Nolle Pambou: Good Snake.) What is very real and at the same time very remarkable in Vaudoux is a sort of magnetic power which compels the participants to dance until they lose consciousness. The contagion is so strong that Whites found spying on the mysteries of this sect and touched by one of the cultists discovering them, have sometimes started to dance and have eventually had to go so far as to pay the Vaudoux Queen to put an end to their torment. However, I cannot help but observe that no member of the police force sworn to combat V&udoux has ever felt this compulsion to dance, which (if exerted) would no doubt have saved the dancers themselves from the necessity of taking flight. 66 Doubtless to soft-pedal the alarm that this mysterious cult of - ux has aroused in the Colony, they (the slaves) pretend to dance it in public, to the sound of drums and handclapping; they even The Story of the Black Republic follow it with a meal at which nothing but fowl is eaten. But I am certain that this is merely a further device to circumvent the vigi- lance of the magistrates and to assure the success of those shadowy secret assemblies which are not held for amusement or pleasure but rather as a sort of school where the weak souls surrender to a dom- ination which a thousand circumstances can render disastrous. It is hard to imagine in what complete subjection the Vaudoux chiefs are able to hold the other members of the sect. Not one among them but would prefer anything to the horrors that threaten him if he does not go assiduously to the meetings and blindly obey what Vaudoux demands of him. We have seen some so seized with terror they lost all reason; who, in attacks of frenzy, uttered shrieks and howls, lost any resemblance to the human and aroused one's pity. In a word, nothing is more dangerous on every score than this Vaudoux cult, founded on an absurdity, yet capable, because of its belief, of being turned into a terrible weapon ... Early vaudou was indeed based on the serpent cult of Dahomey, and snakes, though no longer actually introduced into the ritual, continue to play a symbolic and decorative role. We have seen how Boukman, a papaloi or priest (the word houngan is now used) em- ployed vaudou in its most aggressive (Petro) form to summon the slaves to revolt. Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines prohibited vaudou entirely, the latter with the bayonet; it prevented regimen- tation for work and posed too great a threat to absolute power. P6- tion tolerated vaudou as he tolerated most things; and during the seventy years of the Catholic exclusion, the beliefs assumed their characteristic shape. QUESTION: Does vaudou involve human sacrifice? ANSWER: Whether or not human sacrifices occasionally were made during this period of Haiti's reversion to African patterns, vaudou acquired a bad name when Sir Spencer St. John, an English traveller or anti-Negro persuasion and sensationalist tendencies, re- ported the so-called Affair of Bizoton in 1863. A- peasant in that year had been brought to trial at Port-au-Prince for allegedly sacri- ficing a child, and Sir Spencer promptly indicted the Haitian peo- ple as cannibals. His phrase for the sacrifice, "a goat without horns/ 1 was in turn taken over by such later American sensation-seekers as William Seabrook (Magic Island, 1929), and it was some time before any serious reporting and effort to understand vaudou was made. QUESTION: Is the practice of vaudou legal or illegal? ANSWER: Ever since Dessalines' (Constitution of 1 805 a law has been on the Haitian statute books prohibiting the practice of vau~ HAITI: dou. Only rarely, however, has it been invoked. One such period was the time when the American Marines occupied Haiti. So rig- orously was it enforced during those twenty-five years, in fact, that when Seabrook pled with Dr. Price-Mars to show him a cere- mony, the Haitian scholar had to get special permission from the Commandant to "stage" one, engage a venerable houngan who couldn't find any drums, pay him $80 and finally be informed that it couldn't be managed! Seabrook's subsequent descriptions, Price-Mars says, were based entirely on notes he showed him cov- ering ceremonies that took place before the Occupation, Under Lescot attempts were made to re-apply the ban, and the Church was encouraged to wage a vigorous extermination cam- paign, burning ceremonial objects and drums, and cutting down sacred Mapou trees but to little avail. The present method of con- trolling vaudou is to charge a fee of $30 for any ceremony involv- ing religious sacrifices (cocks, goats, pigs, bulls and the like) but considerably less for ceremonial dances alone. Clandestine cere- monies are hard to hide from the police and the chep-de-section, since drumming is an essential part of all rites and the type of cere- mony being held is clearly indicated by the particular rhythms used. The principal effect of this policy has been to strengthen vaudou in and around the capital where politicians find it expedient to re- main on good terms with the influential houngans, while weakening it in the provinces, at least in the provincial towns, where the Church is strong, QUESTION: When are vaudou ceremonies held, and where? ANSWER: Ceremonies may be held at any time, if an individual serviteur or community is in need of assistance or consolation and is willing to pay for the ritual ingredients required. However cere- monies are almost certain to take place on the major religious holi- days and saints' days, especially around Christmas; ceremonies dur- ing Lent are rare. The "temple" in which the rites are held consists of an outer gathering-place and one or two smaller inner chambers. The gath- ering-place, the peristyle or tonelle, is covered with thatching or a tin roof; its center pole (the poteau-mitari), sometimes banded to resemble a serpent, is the "staircase" by which the loa enters and leaves, and around which the invocational designs (vevers) are drawn. Benches or chairs along the walls accommodate those not actively involved. Sometimes there is a bed to one side for the chil- dren, though any child old enough to keep awake chants and dances with its elders. The inner chamber, the hounrfor proper, 68 The Story of the Black Republic contains the altar, the drums and other ceremonial objects (though the baptised ceremonial drums are sometimes suspended when not in use from the ceiling of the tonelle), the earthenware jars (govis) or pre-Columbian stones (pierres loa) in which the ancestral spirits reside, the houngan's symbols of authority, the sequined flags of the societe, etc. QUESTION: What is the best way to see a ceremony? ANSWER: If you do not know a Haitian who can take you to an authentic rite, the best way is to wander about the poorer quar- ters of Port-au-Prince or its environs on a Saturday or Sunday eve- ning. Listen for the cadence of drums and follow them. If you are not conspicuously dressed, enter the tonelle unobtrusively, say 'Bon sow* casually to those nearest you, and behave with respect, the chances are that you will be ignored or treated courteously; and that if you wait patiently (perhaps for several hours) you may see something interesting. The ceremonies to which tourist agencies conduct foreigners are generally staged for that purpose. If you are on your own, and the "plate" is passed, give a gourde or two; if the requests are repeated, politely refuse or leave. QUESTION: What do the ceremonies signify, and which ones is one likely to see? ANSWER: The ceremonies are a series of graphic demonstra- tions * of the forces of nature, symbolized by the various loa and of the participator's capacity to integrate himself with them. Every ceremony begins with a salutation to the mysteres, following which the houngan lights a candle and draws a vever (by dribbling flour or ashes through his fingers) appropriate to the loa or loos being summoned. It is supposed that the vevers, since they are uncommon in African rites and somewhat resemble Indian sand-drawings, were introduced into vctudou by the aboriginals; intricate and very beau- tiful when skillfully drawn, the vevers serve no purpose once they are completed and are therefore danced on until they vanish. Houn- w, the priest's female attendants and dancing chorus, now enter, dressed in white, and perform gestures and prayers designed to ad- just the relationships of the various participants. The prayer, some- 1 "The serviteur learns love and beauty in the presence and person of Erzulie, expe- riences the ways of power in the diverse aspects of Ogoun, becomes familiar with the aspects of death in the attitudes of Gh6de*. He sings in the chorus, and feels in his own person that surge of security which is harmonious collective action. He witnesses the wisdom of ancestral and divine counsel, and learns the advantages of accepting such counsel, with its history and experience, for his own guidance in action. In effect, he understands the principles because he sees them function." Maya Deren in Divine Horsemen: The Living Qods of Haiti. 69 HAITI: times in Creole and sometimes in langage (a vestigial African tongue understood only by the loos themselves) , may last for hours. The sacrifice, the climax of the ceremony, which follows, depends for its character on circumstances. The mange loa, at which the deity is renewed with food and drink, is the most frequently performed, and may take anywhere from a matter of hours to days. Baptismal ceremonies are closely related to the mange loa. But the next stage of a serviteur's progress, in terms of the hierarchy of the houmfor, is the series of rites known as cawzo (or initiation); once graduated, a canzo initiate is there- after a full-fledged participator in all ceremonies, only outranked by the houngan and his immediate assistants. Canzo ceremonies, and their ultimate stage, the brule-zin, or trial by fire, are akin to death- and-resurrection rites in their symbolism; the initiate is covered with a sheet during his ordeal which involves handling hot meal or walking over live coals. QUESTION: Which are the principal loo, and what are their at- tributes? ANSWER: The principal loa of the Rada family are Damballah and Ay da Weydo; Erzulie; Legba; Agive Woyo and Maitresse La Sirene; Guede; (Baron Samedf) ; Loco and Aizan; Papa 'Zaca; and Ogoun Feraille. Damballah Weydo, the ancient Dahomean rain god and his wife Ay da Weydo are characterized respectively by a heavy con- strictor and a narrow green snake. Ay da is also seen in the form of the rainbow. Chickens are sacrificed to both gods, both control fer- tility, and both are represented as of white color in Haiti. Dambal- lab is sometimes identified with St. Patrick whose symbol is also a serpent. ErzuKe Freda Dahomey goddess of the home, of purity and of love, is invoked by a chequered heart symbol, and is identified in Haiti with the Virgin Mary. She is not to be confused with ErzuKe Jerouge (red eyes) a malevolent goddess of the Petro pantheon. Legba, well-known in Africa as a seducer of women and mis- chief-maker, is known in Haiti as a kindly old man, but he still has to do with fertility and likes sacrifices of goats and cocks. Cere- monies begin with a song to Legba and the sprinkling of a few drops of rum on the ground in his honor. Legba's Catholic equiva- lent is St. Peter. He opens the way from the material to the spiritual world. Agwe Woyo and his wife La Sirene are gods of the sea and the islands therein. Agwe is symbolized by a boat-drawing and sacri- 70 The Story of the Black Republic fices to him are often loaded on small barques and set adrift at sea. His wife takes the shape of a mermaid. Fishermen are naturally much concerned with propitiating these loa. GuedS Nimbo, sometimes known as Baron Samedi, personifies death itself. Dressed in black, always hungry, carrying a cross, smoking a cigar or cigarette and wearing dark glasses, Guede is one of the most powerful and dreaded of loos. Loco Attiso, the master of the houmfor, and Atzan, his wife, are related to Legba. Both axe major healers, and protectors against Black Magic. Papa 'Zaca, or Azzaca, the deity of agriculture, is a crude fel- low with a big appetite and the voice and proclivities of a goat. He wears a peasant's blue denim jacket and carries a macoute (market basket) . Ogoun Ferdtte, one of several powerful Ogouns, is the ancient patron of warriors and iron-makers and carries a sword (or ma- chete) as his symbol; his color is red. He still wears a Revolutionary uniform but is now inclined to concern himself with politics rather than war. QUESTION: What is the difference between Rada and PStro? ANSWER: All of the deities listed above are of the Rada family, the loos most commonly invoked in Haiti. Rada is a corruption of Arada, a West African tribe that supplied many slaves to Haiti. On the whole, Rada gods are benevolent, or at least malleable. Petro deities, on the other hand, while not necessarily malevo- lent, are definitely aggressive. Unlike die Rada family, they are of Haitian not African origin, and their rites (at which pigs are most often sacrificed and which are characterized by frenzy and some- times violence) are said to have originated with a certain Dom P6dro of Petit-Goive, a Spanish houngan of early Colonial times. Some see a distinct influence of Indian rites in Petro ceremonies. It was at a P$tro ceremony, incidentally, that Boukman issued the call to insurrection. Other families of loos such as Ibo, Congo, etc. are less frequent- ly served. QUESTION: What is "possession" and when does it occur? ANSWER: Leyburn defines possession as "something more than the elation of the Holy Roller, and less than the mystical exaltation of the enraptured saints, yet partaking of elements of both." The thing to be noted is that possession occurs according to rules; par- ticipants succumbing at inappropriate times are "out of order" and are not treated with respect, but those seized with the loa being in- HAITI: voked, whether during the drawing of the never, or at the climactic sacrifice, or during the dance that follows both, are handled with great gentleness. J. C. Dorsainvil, an elite ethnologist, regards the crise de possession as "abnormal," resulting in part from an histori- cal tradition making it respectable and in part from neurotic tend- encies in the family of the person seized. But Herskovits, and most other authorities, regard possession as normal in the pattern of Hai- tian culture. The loa for whom the ceremony is given makes known his modest desires through the mouth of the person possessed. The lat- ter, retaining afterwards no memory of what he has gone through, is relieved of his anxieties by becoming the mouthpiece of a force outside himself. What happens to the personality during possession is conveyed in the following fine description by Maya Deren of two simultaneous seizures during a ceremony for A give Woyo: The initial convulsive movement occurred so suddenly that almost no one had remarked it, and now their faces, which had been normally feminine, planed off, imperceptibly, into a masculine no- bility. Water was drawn up from the sea in a pail and poured over them, since normally Agive, being a water divinity, would have im- mediately immersed himself in the bassin. Those who were near saluted the arrival of the divinity, and, through each of the women, Agvst spoke a few words of greeting in a voice which gurgled as if with rising air bubbles, and seemed truly to come from the waters. His mood was not displeased, but it was sober. The Houngan, con- science-stricken, began to explain that he, too, would soon make a ceremony. The two Agws listened to him, their eyes at once for- giving and somehow detached. And, with the same air of noble, gentle sadness, they looked slowly from person to person, from the barque of food, to the mambo. There was something in their regard that stilled everyone. One had seen it in the faces of those who pre- pare to leave and wish to remember that to which they will no longer return. They met each other's eyes, and as a way was cleared for them, approached each other, and crouched down in an embrace of mutual consolation, their arms about each other's shoulders, their foreheads lowered, each on the other's shoulder. So mirrored, they wept. QUESTION: What is the function of the houngari? ANSWER: The houngan (or mambo if the priest is a woman) generally inherits his calling, but to become active he must serve an apprenticeship (as La Place or Houngerdkon to another hourt- gan), and to become influential he must both demonstrate his lead- ership in the community by his superior wisdom and be able to ef- The Story of the Black Republic feet cures. His symbol of authority is the asson, a gourde rattle webbed with beads and snake vertebrae to which a small bell is attached. The houngan's business does not stop with knowledge of the many complex rituals he must conduct, of how to make vevers, of how to impart magnetism to the various participants and style to the ritual, though all of these are important. His equally vital func- tion is as medical advisor to a community generally without doc- tors. In this capacity the houngatfs knowledge of herbal remedies must be profound. He must know how to cure colds with infusions, shock with salt, bleeding with spider-web applications, infections with garlic; there is even a case of a houngan on La Tortue who is said to have cured yaws with poultices of mould the basis of pen- icillin. When the ifiness is beyond his capacity, if he is a reputable houngan (it is the disreputable ones who have given this aspect of vaudou a bad name) he will send the patient to a licensed physician. But many of the houngan's cures are in the realm of psychology. He is apt to be trusted by peasants to whom an elite doctor is as a visitor from some hostile planet. Moreover he insists on the patient "putting himself right" with the offended loos thus often contribu- ting to the patient's peace of mind and his psychic capacity to re- cuperate. QUESTION: Is the average houngan cynical or sincere? ANSWER: Fifteen or twenty years ago the odds were over- whelmingly in the houngm's favor. Today, driven out of many provincial areas by the Church, 1 and concentrated in the Port-au- rrince-L6ogane region where tourism is heaviest, the temptations for a houngan to exploit his powers commercially are enormous. When a notorious hpungan like the late 'Ti Cousin of Carrefour Duf our exploits his office, traffics in Black Magic, operates distiller- ies and a fleet of cannons, and rides to the capital in a Cadillac lim- ousine, enemies of vaudou are naturally quick to take advantage of such a conspicuous break. But an effective deterrent on the average houngarfs capacity to go astray is vaudou's very lack of civil sanc- tions; any communicant is free to change houngans. 1 In some areas, such as the North Peninsula, where the Army has cooperated active- ly with the Catholic priests, persecution best describes the situation. On Tortuga Island, drumming, even for coumbites, has been proscribed. In Cape Haitien most ceremonies now take place far out of town and are not easy to see. The same applies to most provincial towns. Only during great festivals, such as the mass Ra-Ra con- clave at Carrefour Duf our on Good Friday and the July 15 baptismal rites at Saut d'Eau-Mirebalais, is sufficient safety provided by numbers to make secrecy un- necessary. 73 HAITI: QUESTION: What part do sex and liquor play in the rites? ANSWER: The first part 6f this question is difficult to answer, so different are "primitive" and "civilized" notions of what consti- tutes sex. In circumstances where sex is regarded as a wholly nor- mal and unsinful activity, where no conversational inhibitions exist, and where each of the gods is presumed to have an active marital and extra-marital sex life, it is not surprising that even the least Cal- vinistic of Christian observers regard vaudou ceremonies as licen- tious. On the other hand, though occasional fertility rites are ac- companied by overtly sexual acts, most ceremonies are marked by too much discipline, solemnity, and time-honored translation of act into symbol, to permit of anything approaching orgies. Even the dance, it will be noted, does not permit bodily contact; copulative movements are acted out by the dancers' hips and shoulders but never in close proximity as, say, during a "civilized" tango or rhumba. As to liquor, the Haitian peasant drinks fiery clmin in and out of ceremonies without any sense of restraint, but drunkenness is virtually unknown. The author, in nine visits to Haiti, has never seen an intoxicated Haitian. QUESTION: What is Black Magic? ANSWER: Magie Noire is the use by a boungcm or sorcerer (bo cor) of supernatural powers to encompass evil ends, such as the death of an enemy, the destruction of a neighbor's crops or the alienation of his wife. Every houngan knows how Black Magic is made, but no reputable one will have anything to do with it. To practice it, for one thing, a deadly bargain must be made with the evil spirits (baka) or the loups-garou (werewolves) . For this the sorcerer himself will ultimately have to pay. This is not to say that the houngan will not provide appropriate gardes against ouangas (objects obtained from a sorcerer designed to cast a spell over some- one;, but the houngan 9 s work is done in public, and like the work of any other priest's is designed less to bring immediate results than to put the worshipper in tune with the gods and with himself. "In religion the serviteur is changed; in magic the world is changed" (Deren). QUESTION: What is the attitude of the educated Haitian to vaudou? ANSWER: There are many stories of educated Haitians, includ- ing even a President or two, holding private vaudou rites in their homes. In general, however, with the exception of a handful of in- tellectuals who regard vaudou as an interesting curiosity from the 74 Folk Art The decorative paintings sometimes found on the walls and doors of peasant cailles are related to the vever but indicate an aesthetic verve independent of religion. The one at the top was found near Moron (1946), the door was not far from Carrefour on the main road out of Port-au-Prince (1954). Mardi Gras . . . gives play to folk talent in sculpture and painting as well as in dancing music. The bat-man is standing in front of JacmePs Hotel Excelsior (1947). clown with a bottle was photographed from the steps of the National Palace Popular Music ... is here supplied by a Ra-Ra band playing vaccines and tin horns. The Petro drum is responding to the masterful hands (and calloused heel) of Ti Ro-Ro, Haiti's foremost concert drummer. The Dtjean Choir The famous male chorus is here shown at the end of a number which in- volves costumed dancing and acting as well as singing, Lawbi Soloist Music of a more primitive sort is being produced by thr peasant on n conch-shell. Dancing . . . predominates in the Ra-Ra, two of whose "kings" are here shown in a complicated num- ber which involves twirling their batons and keeping them in the air. The candelabra of kerosene lamps will provide illumination on the country lanes far into the night. Poets and Novelists The four poets studying 'Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean' are (left to right) F. Morisseau-Leroy, Ren Piquion, Roussan Camille and Jean Brierre. Phi- lippe Thoby-Marcelin is shown standing by a French Colonial fountain at Fort- Liberte. Robert Theard, short-story writer (in shirt-sleeves) is chatting with Francois DuvaHer, physician and ethnologist. Sculpture in Wood and Cky The wooden figure, perhaps symbolizing the sadness of the peasant's isolation, is by Odilon Duperier, The memorial panel to^Hector Hyppolite is part of Jas- min Joseph's choir-screen for the Cathedral St- Trinite, Both pieces were executed in 1954. Port-au-Prince Chateau This magical elite mansion in a style made popular at the turn of the century is in Bois Veraa, Port-au-Prince, Painters of Genius The late Hector Hyppolite, vaudou priest, is here shown in the last year of his life with several uncompleted pictures of Black Magic in the background. Wilson Bigaud s big canvas, behind its creator, documents such various items as a haircut, a dice-game, the Centre d'Art jeep, a cock-fight, cock thieves and a Ra-Ra procession. m, DuFaut The 'Funeral of Charlemagne Peralte,' generally regarded as Obin's masterpiece, was painted in 1946. DuFaut's 'La Reine Titane,' a symbolic portrait of a lesser vcnidou deity worshipped in Jacmel, was painted in 1950. Auguste, Ex'Litne 'Adam and Eve,' painted in 1949, served as the prototype for Au- guste's mural with a similar theme in the^ Cathedral St.-Trinitc. Rene Exume's charcoal drawing of a family group dates from 1948. Cathedral Murals These details are from tem- pera murals painted in the transepts of the Cathedral St.-Trinite in 1951, The 'Last Supper' is by Obin, the 'Bap- tism of Christ' by Bazile. The Story of the Black Republic point of view of "folklore," the elite Haitian and the middle classes (in conversation at least) characterize the religion of the peasants as "superstition" or "nonsense," a disgrace to the country and a de- terrent to progress. Georges Sylvain, a well-known author, writes that "Today Vodun is nothing more than a mixture of quackery and superstition and it has no other raison d'etre than to provide a subsistence for the houngans . . . who minister to popular credu- lousness." Lion Audain, another Haitian man of letters, insists that "Vodun, at least in its present form, is a pastime. One day I was curious enough to attend a Vodun dance . . . The truth is that the ceremony preceding the sacrifice of unfortunate and docile ani- mals is out of proportion with the objective: to partake of a good M-V^A^l " 1 meal. If few of the tlite have gone further into vaudou than these misinformed comments would seem to indicate, the reason in part is because the educational background of the intellectuals is exclu- sively French; Africanisms, in any form, are deplored or carefully concealed from the foreigner who would presumably receive a bad impression of the country from anything primitive. It might be pointed out, however, that the net eff ect of suppressing vaudou in such areas as the tlite (including the clergy and the military) have found it possible to do so, has been to drive it underground where, inevitably, as in Colonial times, it tends to be practiced in the more aggressive Pttro forms. Discussion of dancing and drumming, two essential ingredients of vaudou, is reserved for the chapter on the arts that follows this one. PROTESTANTISM In 1939-40 when Professor Leyburn was making his penetrat- ing study of the culture of Haiti, he was able accurately to dismiss the non-Catholic Christian elements with a single sentence. "No Protestant sect," he wrote, "has ever gained a real foothold in Hai- ti." Today, several sects, the Baptists, Wesleyans, Methodists, Je- hovah's Witnesses, and others, have managed to gain footholds in Haiti, accounting in their combined influence for perhaps as many 1 Parts of the animals sacrificed are never eaten, but in any event a more complicated means of obtaining a "good meal' 9 would be hard to imagine. Both of these hostile comments are taken from the chapter on vaudou in Haiti, a compendium of writings by Haitian authors published by the Pan-American Union. 75 HAITI: as 400,000 out of Haiti's 4,000,000 people; and one of them, the Protestant Episcopal Church, with 53,362 baptised members and 14,478 additional communicants, has made enough of an impact in several spheres of Haitian life to warrant describing its activities in some detail. The Episcopal Church came to Haiti in 1861 when a group of 1 10 American Negroes decided, because of racial problems at home, to emigrate to an all-Negro country. One-third died, another third returned to escape tropical diseases, but among the third that re- mained was the Rev. James Theodore Holly of Detroit, Michigan, who proposed to improve "corrupting influences of society here where neither the public morality nor religion have yet firmly taken root," and established the Holy Trinity Parish in Port-au-Prince. In 1874, after Holly had established branches of the Church else- where, he was consecrated Bishop and continued his work until his death in 1911. The Rev. Harry Roberts Carson was ordained the first Missionary Bishop of Haiti in 1923. He completed the building of St.-Trinite Cathedral in 1928. By the time of his retire- ment in 1943 the Church had 62 missions, 13 schools, and 18 mem- bers of the clergy in Haiti. The present Bishop, C. Alfred Voegeli, a native of Morristown, New Jersey, was consecrated the same year, and under his vigorous regime the number of organized mis- sions has grown to 79, and the number of active clergy to 3 1, all of whom (excepting the Bishop and the Dean of the Seminary) are native Haitians. The Protestant Episcopal Church operates on a total annual budget of only $75,000, out of which $10,000 is devoted to the edu- cational work of such institutions as the Grace Merritt Stewart School for Girls and the Seminary at Mont Rouis, where all the clergy receive their four-year training, and where a Boy Scout camp is maintained. Another $10,000 goes to the St. Vincent School for Handicapped Children, the only school in Haiti taking care of and training blind, deaf and crippled children. The Church's bud- get is made up mostly of funds contributed in the United States. Although the Episcopalians feel that the Roman Catholics wa- ver between stamping out vaudou and attempting to play along with it, the attitudes of the two Churches vary little in their hos- tility to the cult. Bishop Voegeli, who spends a very large part of his time visiting remote missions, such as one on La Gonave Island which requires a journey of two days in a fisherman's sailboat and twelve hours on horseback, claims to preserve wherever possible the folklore and musical aspects of vaudou, but he asks: "How can 76 The Story of the Black Republic you reason with or explain such distinctions to a primitive peo- ple? Vaudou is their temporary opiate, as we see it, giving them the same kind of release from their poverty and misery as would a drunken binge. Vaudou, far from doing away with anxiety or fear, encourages both." The principal cultural contribution of the Episcopal Church has been its sponsorship of the murals by primitive painters in the Cathedral St.-Trinite, a phenomenon which will be described in the next chapter. 77 CHAPTER VI RENAISSANCE OF THE SEVEN ARTS THE RECENT WORLD-WIDE interest in Haitian 'popular' painters has completely overshadowed concurrent developments in sculpture and architecture and has obscured the fact that a literary revival was in full cry a decade earlier. It has served, however, to focus at- tention on those enduring manifestations of the peasants' aesthetic vitality which survived every hazard of Haiti's history: folklore, music and the dance. FOLK ARTS The aspect of life which distinguishes Haiti most sharply from its Caribbean neighbors is the richness of its folklore. Whatever blessings colonialism may have brought to the other islands in the Nineteenth Century, its persistence there faded and "civilized" na- tive traditions if it did not actually sterilize them. The Haitian peas- ant was not given the amenities of plumbing nor was he made con- versant in a European language; but neither was he subjected to the levelling blight of middle-class provincial taste. For entertainment he had to entertain himself. What music he heard, he made. And if he ever had time to indulge in a carved or painted decoration, the design he used was something that pleased him or seemed appropri- ate to its use, not something he had seen and repeated. Tourists who look in Haiti for the equivalent of Navajo rugs or old Dutch tobacco boxes will be disappointed. The peasant has been content to dance over his finest drawings; he has been too poor and too hard-pressed to search for imperishable mediums. The buyers' market has been a recent phenomenon, and leisure has never existed except for those who made a principle of indulging their taste for luxuries abroad. 78 The Story of the Black Republic The tourist will have to look more closely at a few humble ob- jects whose great beauty is a function of their simplicity. For ex- ample: the colored paper kites of children (cerf-volants) ; the painted swagger-sticks (coco-macaques) of Jaonel; the scooped-log washtubs and canoes and the laundry paddles employed wherever there is water; the brick-red paper trunks, striped with gold; the mortar-and-pesde used for grinding grain; the superbly designed straw saddles, baskets, conical hats and shoulder-bags; the earthen- ware coffee-pots and lidded jars; the tooled-leather scabbard of the peasant's ever-present machete; the elaborately embossed Ra-Ra candelabra made of ordinary American oil funnels and tin cans; and last but not least the painted drums, ceremonial calabashes and Mar- di Gras masks whose variety of invention defies description. If he looks from such simple objects to the more subtle ques- tions of why Haitian women choose head-bandanas of primary flaming hues, and how intricately they knot their wiry hair; and why their carriage as they walk is so freely noble; and the unerring way Haitians have of composing themselves in groups, standing or cross-legged, to harangue each other or to laugh then he will be prepared to enter into their more elaborate rituals with an under- standing that with these people (as with all artists) the grace of do- ing anything is as important as the thing done. With a religion as pervasive and as intimately related to every aspect of life as vwdou, it is inevitable that most aspects of folklore and peasant art will be colored by it to some degree. We have al- ready, in the last chapter, noted the aesthetic nature of the rituals themselves. In most instances, it is the societe^ grouped together in the houmfor, that also organizes whatever is organized in Mardi Gras, Ra-Ra and other fetes. During Mardi Gras, for example, there is a band of young men who get together every year in Port-au-Prince and put on Indian costumes. These costumes include suits of the most gorgeously painted feathers and a headdress of superbly interlocking golden horns. Each Indian makes his own costume but its style, I am told, goes back to a certain houngan who once headed the club. It is not unlikely that this houngan inherited his particular skill from an- other houngan, and that still farther back there was a slave-fomw- gan who knew Indians with similar headgear, or was an Indian him- self. Not all the fetes are connected with vaudou. The Judas Hunt which is celebrated in some parts of Haiti the Saturday before Eas- ter Sunday is an ancient Holy Week ceremonial. In effigy, Mon- 79 HAITI: sieur Judas comes to visit a peasant as one of the Twelve Apostles and an honored guest, but as soon as the death of Christ is an- nounced on Good Friday, the symbolic traitor flees, and, dressed in the hides and mask of a bull, is chased through the streets by a laughing mob that beats him (except when he turns and threatens to gore them) with whips and barrel-staves. In the capital Judas used to be burned in effigy by children, but this led to so many fires that the police put a stop to it. Most of the designs that are used on ceremonial drums, cala- bashes, altars, etc., are derived from the vever. But occasionally, as when they are used to decorate the exterior wall of a caille, they deviate so freely as to approach pure abstraction. MUSIC It may have been precisely because the slaves were deprived of the wooden and cast-bronze effigies of their gods in Saint-Do- mingue, that the compulsion to memorialize everything African in song became so powerful. At all vaudou ceremonies, singing is as important as drumming and dancing, and it is performed by the participants themselves, and for the most part by the hounsis, the priest's female "chorus." Most of the songs sung are in the nature of chants, but they are not sung in harmony. The melodic statement appealing to the god is brief. It is the repetitions of the refrain that intensify the emotional effect. The musical forms, Herskovits x as- serts, "are almost entirely African in their rhythmic structure, but European influence is traceable in their melodic line, which varies from unchanged European folk-melodies to purely African songs. In the use of the falsetto, however; in the statement of a theme by a leader and its repetition by a chorus; and in the countless modula- tions introduced into the song, the singing is entirely African, as are the postures struck by those singing." Most of the songs are very old, handed down with variations from generation to generation, but there is no injunction against creating new ones, and once they catch on they become part of the tradition. Hardly any music in Haiti has been written down, much less copyrighted, but valuable work in preserving and collecting the songs has been done by Professor Werner Jaegerhuber, Mme. Lina Mathon-Blanchet, Harold Courlander and Issa El Saieh. There are songs to every loa and for every conceivable occa- sion, but they may be roughly divided into those that are associated 1 See Life in a Haitian Valley by Melville J. Herskovits. Knopf, 1937. 80 The Story of the Black Republic with the vaudou subdivisions Rada, Petro, Ibo, Congo, Nago, Yen- 170/0, etc. and those that accompany secular activities such as Ra- Ra, a coumbite or a simple party (bamboche). Songs of the sea are inspired by the rhythms of waves and oars. Songs of the plain are "plaintive," long-drawn out. But in the "party" songs, like the mim- icking bal or the elegant meringue, we pass from vaudou and Afri- canism into the world of the elite. After the invocation at a ceremony, and while the ritual draw- ing is being made, the hourisis chant: Apres Dieu houngan vever mom! But after that the choice of songs will depend on the "family" be- ing "served" and the particular loa invoked. If the serviteurs are fishermen such a song to Agwe as the following may be sung: Lans la mer wifalle wfte peche Ague Woyo! etc. 1 To the sea I went, I went fishing, Agu6 Woyo! I lost the hook of my loal I lost the hook of my loal I ask you, what am I going to eat for supper? Litde Conch in the Sea, what am I going to eat? One of the countless songs to Guede is the famous 'Papa Gue- dS bel gagori which is supposed to have originated in a demonstra- tion making fun of the Mulatto President Louis Borno. Another takes the familiar form of reproach: GSdS Nitnbo Papa! That which you do makes you no good. When I am present you speak well of me. Behind my back you speak badly of me . . . Sand jamais, I say soud! A song may be anecdotal, referring to some long-forgotten event, but it is always pointed and often poetic, as in this memorial to a priestess: 1 According to Harold Courlander, whose authoritative Haiti Singing, University of North Carolina Press, 1939, 1 am quoting in this section, without choral repeti- tions, for both Creole first-lines and translations, this song belongs to the Nago cycle, the two that follow to Rada, the fourth to Petro, the last to Congo. 81 HAITI: Mambo Mesire manque noye, etc. Mambo Mesire saves herself from drowning. The day a leaf falls in the water Is not the day it sinks. Tijecm Petro is a bad actor among the loa, feared especially by children, but this song seems to dispel his f earsomeness by reducing it to round numbers: Tijean Petro, combien ti mounes ou mange? etc. Tijean Petro, how many little men have you eaten? I have eaten two-hundred-eighty, I have just begun to make it two-hundred-ninety-two, I have just begun! Finally there is the love song, bawdy and jocular, with none of our romanticism: Vin prend legon nans main mom, ya ya! etc. Come take your lessons in my arms, ya y&\ My mother is not here, come take your lessons in my arms! My mother has gone looking for wood, Come take your lessons in my arms! My mother has gone away for water, Come take your lessons in my arms! Some of these folk songs have been tidied up a bit and are now to be heard in the salons of the iUte^ and even on phonograph rec- ords. Such are the great invocation to Erzulie of Revolutionary times 'Main tande oun canon qui tire' and the immensely moving ceremonial chants 'Damballah, Damballah, Damballah? and 'Minis- tre Azaca. 9 The rousing, ever-popular congo of Jacmel, ^cmamotm tombi] has already been mentioned. Romantic meringues like 'Carolin Acatf and 'Angelico,' although of fairly recent date, are of unknown origin and should be considered genuine folk songs, how- ever hopped-up and manhandled by ballroom orchestras. The nos- talgic, fabulously hypnotic 'Hmti Cherie? the Haitian's paean of love to his homeland, where no one is in a hurry and women are not the same monotonous color, is the masterpiece of Othelo Bayard of Cayes. 8* The Story of the Black Republic Hc&ti chtrie >, pi bel p, passe ou nan poin, etc. Haiti cherie, loveliest country, compared to which there's none, Compared to which . . . One has to leave to sense what you have cost; One has to leave you, Haiti, to know what one has lost, To feel the truth of what you mean, of all that you have done. In countries of the white man, all faces look the same: No mulatresse, no Creole griff e, no lovely marabou, No dress-bewitching and sweet-scented girls come up to you, No beautiful young Negresses whose wit is never tame . . . Only with the organization of the superbly trained male choir of Michele Dejean in 1952 has any effort been made in Haiti to present this corpus of magnificent music with sophistication and style. 1 Musical instruments in Haiti run the gamut from the four-note bamboo flute, the African marimba, the conch-shell (Iambi) and the papaya-stem (piston) to the enormous bamboo base-vaccine, five inches in diameter and more than four feet long, whose thun- derous one-note accompanies the singing, tapping and stamping of a Ra-Ra band during Lent. But everything begins and ends with the drum. The mosquito-drum, with its single plucked string an- chored in the earth, is for children. The tambourine and flat basse are used in coumbites. The giant assator, sometimes played from the branch of a tree, is employed in the rarest of ceremonies and is "baptized" in a ritual having dances of its own. All Rada rites are accompanied by a "battery" of three cowhide pegged drums. The largest, the mwnam, is played with a mallet and one hand and does the "talking"; the middle drum is played with one hand and a bowed stick called a baguette; while the smallest drum, the bula, conveys an unvarying rhythmic tatoo with thin sticks held in both hands. Sometimes a fourth musician, an ogantier, beats a piece of iron with a small rod. In Petro ceremonies, two drums whose goat- skin hides are held to the body of the instrument by laced cords, are used, and it is this drum which is most frequently employed by soloists, accompanists and ballroom ensembles in Port-au-Prince. During a vaudou ceremony it is the drummers, seldom pos- 1 Available recordings of Haitian folk music, including one by the Dejean Choir, are listed in the last paragraphs of Appendix III, following which the score of Haiti Cherie is printed in its entirety. 83 HAITI: sessed themselves, who bring on possessions through the excitement and insistence of their drumming. It is they who signal the passage from one phase of the ceremony to the next and who are em- powered to break the almost unbearable tension their percussion has created, when a break is called for. Instead of being able to move in the long balanced strides of relax- ation [writes Maya Deren] the defenseless person is buffeted by each great stroke, as the drummer sets out to 'beat the loa into his head.' The person cringes with each large beat, as if the drum mallet descended upon his very skull; he ricochets about the peristyle, clutching blindly at the arms which are extended to support him, pirouettes wildly on one leg, recaptures balance for a brief moment, only to be hurtled forward again by another great blow on the dram. The drummer, apparently impervious to the embattled an- guish of the person, persists relentlessly; until, suddenly, the violence ceases, the head of the person lifts, and one recognizes the strangely abstracted eyes of a being who seerns to see beyond whatever he looks at, as if into or from another world. The loa, which the song had been invoking, has arrived. Virtuoso drumming is something else again, and to hear it one must hear (and also see) the now celebrated Ti Roro. 1 DANCING The Haitian peasant, whether he is participating in a cere- mony or in a purely social affair following, let us say, a coumbite, or in a Ra-Ra procession, never dances "with" anyone. The man dances, and the woman dances. Sometimes they are facing each other and sometimes not, but the emphasis is on self-expression or bodily release, disciplined within bounds by what the rite or the musical accompaniment calls for. To a foreigner, observing this for the first time, the general impression is usually summed up in such epithets as "disorganized," "anarchic," "sex-crazed" or "orgiastic." None of them is a correct description. In a people physically uninhibited, sexuality enters into every 1 This individualistic matron of the houmforts whose improvisations and variety of tone have become legendary, arrived once at the Miami airport, en route to a book- ing with the Katherine Dunham troupe, sans passport, sans identification of any kind, and sans money save for seven dollar-bills. Frankly amazed to be asked who he was, he replied '^Everybody knows Ti Roro," and f ollowed this statement with a classical demonstration of drumming. While the authorities were making arrangements to conduct him to an asylum, Roro, who had already stated that his $7 would take him to New York-"and 'Paris"-characteristically stepped over to a drug counter and bought himself a pair of $5 sun-glasses. The Story of the Black Republic dance, by overt suggestion (as in the banda, which frankly imitates copulative movements) or by implication, but it is never stimulated by bodily contact as in Western ballroom dancing. Freedom and relaxation are the keynotes. Shoulders and hips are as active as feet, often more so. In a ceremony the dancers (who are also, of course, the singers) move counter-clockwise around the central post, mak- ing approximately identical movements to the accompaniment of the drums. In a Rada dance, Courlander says, "the foot movement is a step to the side, left and then right, to a one, two, three, rest count; the shoulders move forward and backward, and the arms are in position to retain balance. Dancers pirouette as they please, sometimes moving forward rapidly, sometimes slowly." Petro dances are governed by the rhythm of the second dram, bring the feet more into play, and involve a lot of pairing off. "Women some- times use a Congo pose, with the left hand on the hip and the right arm held outward, a gesture which lends a good deal of grace to what might otherwise be rather violent aesthetics." Maya Deren describes a dance in honor of Agwe as appropriately suggesting water: Before me the bodies of the dancers undulate with a wave-like mo- tion, which begins at the shoulders, divides itself to run separately along the arms and down the spine, is once more unified where the palms rest upon the bent knees, and finally flows down the legs into the earth, while already the shoulders have initiated the wave which follows. With the acceleration of tourism to Haiti in the late 40*8, numerous attempts have been made to stage Haitian dances and to exploit them commercially at home and abroad. Most of the well- meaning attempts to "clean it up" have resulted only in vulgariza- tion, and the efforts to "give it style" in banality. As early as the late 30*5, Katherine Dunham spent some time in Haiti and intro- duced versions of "voodoo" on the New York stage with ques- tionable taste and almost complete loss of authenticity. One of her star performers, the Haitian dancer Jean Leon Destine, had already (under Mme. Mathon-Blanchet's direction) organized Haiti's first folklore troupe which participated in 1941 in the National Folk Festival at Washington. A dancer of sincerity and talent, Destine sought dancers among the peasants, learning from them as he trained them in professional ensemble. His great success as a solo interpreter of Haitian dancing on the New York stage led to Destines recall to Port-au-Prince in 1950 to direct the Troupe Nationale Folklorique in its regular performances on the stage of 85 HAITI: the Bicentennial Exposition's new Theatre de Verdure. This troupe, and others, such as the one later organized by the Haitian singer, Emerante de Pradines, have performed abroad as well as at home with skill and dignity. POETRY AND THE NOVEL With the arts of writing we shift, inevitably, to the world of the Slite. Poetry is a part of the daily life of the peasant, as we have seen, but it is a physical and verbal poetry. The nearest it comes to being literary is in the story-telling sessions that take place on a rainy night in a ccAlle where one peasant asks "Cric?" and if the answer is "Crac!" tells a fable of 'Ti Malice, the foxy urchin who plays tricks on the credulous Bouqui. Until the late 2o's Haitian elite writers devoted themselves to the production of belles lettres in the strictest and narrowest sense. About the turn of the century the poet Massilon Coicou in- troduced Creole words and phrases into such writings for the first time, but this bold gesture did not bear fruit. "From independence to our day," wrote Jacques Antoine, "our constant preoccupation has been to produce favorable evidence of the Negro's intellectual capacity before the tribunal of white opinion" and this defensive psychology inevitably produced works that writers thought would be well received rather than works generated by an inner necessity. The coming-of-age of Haitian Literature coincided with Haiti's occupation by the Marines. "We were children when the Amer- icans arrived in Haiti," Rene Piquion writes, "and we grew up enraged in the presence of a flag that symbolized a military occupa- tion." This national and racial self-consciousness was part of the impetus behind the founding of the R6vue Indigene in 1927. Edited by the poet !mile Roumre, and numbering among its co-founders the now-famous novelists, Jacques Roumain and Philippe Thoby- Marcelin, this short-lived magazine broke the first lances for sym- bolism and Africanism. But it owed the later part of its emphasis to the pioneer work in the study of native folklore contributed by such elite ethnologists as J. C. Dorsainvil, who devoted his life to the study of vaudou, and Jean Price-Mars, who had set for himself the task of answering in the affirmative the questions: "Does Haitian society have a background of oral tradition, legends, tales, songs, riddles, customs, observances and beliefs? . . . And if this folklore exists, what is its value from the literary and scientific point of view?" 86 The Story of the Black Republic The answers to these questions may now seem ridiculously ob- vious, but in 1927 they appear to have hit the intellectuals of the elite like a blockbuster. The poet Carl Brouard was so disturbed by it that he moved from his parents' home in aristocratic Bois Verna to live in the slums. With Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier, who also believed that vaudou must provide the inspira- tion of the new literature, he founded a society to combine African ideas and socialist economic principles. Roussan Camille, in a sheaf of free-verses entitled Assout ct la Nuit, prefaced by Piquion, at- tempted to bridge the gulf between past and future. The tone was nostalgic, but militant: Your fires this evening are as fine as the fires of mystery and hope that burned at Bois Caiman. The Mambo repeats the sacred sign before the persistent flame. Is the wind too soiled with satisfied sighs and cynical laughs to recall to the priestess those ancient promises? O surely the gods who know that our sorrows are as long as the way from Africa to here our black gods now can foretell again the victorious colors of tomorrow's dawn! So these fires are as fine as the fires of mystery and hope, and your dances, painful, triumphant, remind me of the nights (unf orgotten) of battle. 87 HAITI: Camille is now a diplomat and government counsellor. Rou- main went into politics and became a Communist just before he died. Jean Brierre, another poet, emerged as the leader of a student strike and author of fiery dramatic pieces honoring Macandel and Toussaint. Roumere himself wrote poems entirely in Creole. It was recognized suddenly that the most effective poem by the respected elder poet Oswald Durand, who had written volumes of indiff erent verse in French, was the Creole lyric he had contributed to a pop- ular song about Choucoune, a lovely marabout who falls for a French-speaking stranger with a red beard and forgets about her fiance. Roumere, not to be outdone, treated the theme of a similar country wench from his native Jeremie with a more unconven- tionally realistic symbolism: Marabout demon coeur . . . Black bird of my heart, whose breasts are oranges, More savory than eggplant-stuffed-with-crab, you please My taste better than tripe in the pepper-pot; Dumpling in peas and araomatic tea are not more hot. You are the corned-beef in my heart's custom-house; The meal-in-syrup in my throat; the grouse Smoking on the platter, stuffed with rice. Crisper than sweet potatoes, browner than fish-fries, My hunger follows you no wonder crude, You whose buttocks are so rich in food! Still more recently (1952-3) Franck Fouch6 and F. Morisseau- Leroy took it upon themselves to render into Creole two plays of Sophocles, the Oedipus Rex and the Antigone, and both were pro- duced with brilliant effect at the Theatre de Verdure. A poem from the latter poet's Diacoute addresses a tourist in the peasant tongue, grimly: Tourist, don't take my picture Tourist, don't put me in. Fm too ugly. Fm too dirty. Fm much, much too thin. Don't take my picture, white man. The Story of the Black Republic For Mr. Eastman's sake Don't take it: he wouldn't like it. I'm too dirty. I'm too ugly. Your Kodak, I'm sure, will break. I'm too black, tourist Leave me alone, White. Don't take the picture of my donkey; This animal's overloaded, Feeble and small of limb; He hasn't eaten, this donkey Don't take a picture of him. Tourist, don't snap my dwelling, Neither the one of straw Nor the one of mud and guinea-grass: Both are falling apart. Go take a shot of the Palace Or the Bicentennial's art Don't take a picture of my garden. I haven't got any plough. I haven't got a tractor. I haven't any machine. My trees are worthless. My bare feet Are too dirty to be seen. My clothes? Nothing left to tear . . . The poor Negro doesn't look a White In the face, tourist. Look at my hair; Your Kodak isn't used to that color and grit; Your barber wouldn't dare To even try straightening it Tourist, don't take my picture. You don't understand my pose. You don't understand a thing. It's none of your business, I say. Gimme five cents, tourist, And then be on your way! 39 HAITI: It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to conclude that Haiti's poets have "gone native" or that the use of Creole offers any perma- nent solution of their dilemma. That dilemma is: how to establish or retain roots in the rich soil of the peasantry while at the same time leading the sophisticated and sometimes irresponsible life of an elite intellectual and the dilemma has led more than one of Haiti's many talented poets to cynicism, drink, or silence. As late as 1947 when Jean Brierre dedicated his Black Soul "au negre Dumarsais Estime qui nous souhaitons rencontrer toujours dans le sillage de rEmpereur" and called upon Joe Louis to frappe a chaque victoire le gong sonore des revendications de la race the answer seemed clear. But Brierre and his comrades, including Camille, have come to realize that poetry is not the by-product of attitudes but is the distillation of a man's capacity to become in- volved in and reflect his world. The symbolist poet Magloire St. Aude, who has never deviated from the ambiguities of style that are true to his nature, but who has turned his back (like Brouard) on polite society, is becoming more and more the idol of a less- illusioned generation. 1 In the field of the novel, this same dilemma remains unresolved. Rouniain's Masters of the Dew broke virgin soil by entering into the hard life of the peasant community and has not been surpassed for the realism of its presentation and the angry power of its prose; but its weakness stems from the artificial and propagandists nature of its conclusions the Marxist assumption that class-conscious re- bellion will resolve the individual's personal problems. The broth- ers Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, equally well- known abroad for the translations of their novels, Canape Verte, The Beast of the Haitian Hills, and The Pencil of God, seem even more removed in spirit from the peasants whose superstitions and quaint gaucheries they describe with such amused detachment. The MarceUns have been praised for the "objectivity" of their report- ing and for creating "a basic tension between the primitive material and the sophistication with which it is presented, and for this they deserve praise; but again, the younger generation would like to escape from this dualism and create works that do not "look down" 1 For a penetrating study of this poet and of some of the others mentioned in this section, see "Land of Poets" by William Jay Smith in the November 1953 issue of Americas, monthly publication of the Pan-American Union. 90 The Story of the Black Republic on their subject matter, regardless of whether this deals with the peasants or the elite. It remains to be said that literature in Haiti, to a greater extent than in the case of any of the other arts, suffers from provincialism. This is inevitable. Writing is a sophisticated business. Emotion and craft suffice to carry conviction in most of the other arts, but not in writing. The poet can make use of primitive material but he cannot be a primitive unless he chooses to ignore ideas, and the very nature of language makes this difficult. Ideas are rooted in civilizations, and the Haitian writer who goes far afield in their pursuit is in danger not only of alienating himself from his own milieu but of assimilating imperfectly another country's. In Haiti itself, whether they write in French or in Creole, authors are writ- ing for a very small audience. Worse still, they may be writing only for their friends who can hardly be unappreciative. Criticism, as we know it, is non-existent. Freedom of expression is limited. There is no private publishing house in Haiti. There are no posi- tions for professional writers as such, and no scholarships as there are for engineers, painters, etc. Under the circumstances the variety and vitality of Haitian writing is remarkable. ARCHITECTURE Involving as it does the expenditure of large sums of money, a high degree of technical training, and an almost complete sub- ordination of the artist to his employer, it would be surprising if architecture had developed in Haiti any characteristic forms of its own. It hasn't. Yet the three styles that it has borrowed from abroad the African thatched hut, the ginger-bread 6lite mansion of the early Twentieth Century, and the modernistic villa of to- dayhave all assumed typically Haitian guises. The ccdlle, as shelter for the bulk of the population, has already been described. Part of its charm is in the hand-hewn construction that causes it to lean, sometimes precariously, off center. But a bet- ter part is in the carved woodwork, brilliantly painted shutters and doors, and incidental decoration that is to be found where money and time permit. Aside from its tremendous natural setting, the visual glory of Port-au-Prince is in its fin-de-siecle architecture. Those peaked, half-timbered castles of sheer invention, with their stately hinged doors and cuckoo-clock dormers, their elegance, their mystery and their obscure provenience, have been a source of wonder and 91 HAITI: delight to visiting art-lovers. Unfortunately, the elite, who built them and own them, no longer like them, and there is a real danger that in a decade or two they will have vanished. The Vieux man- sion on Lalue now stands in almost solitary splendor. And in the Champs de Mars only the Hotels Mon Reve and Excelsior and the Cafe Savoy- Vincent remain to reproach the iron reviewing stand with its hideous Coca-Cola sign. But Bois Verna and the section of the city lying between it and the Hotel OlofFson are still vir- tually intact. Where this architecture came from is disputed. The likeliest theory is that it grew out of the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1900 where East Indian pavilions and pagodas nudged Mohammedan mosques. It is found, with local variations, in the provinces. The imposing iron balconies of Jacmel were imported from Germany in the '8o's where, presumably, they were cast to grace that coun- try's short-lived overseas empire. Cap Haitien's high shuttered doors, red-tiled roofs and projecting cornices are Haiti's most no- ticeable Spanish heritage; but the indescribably beautiful pastel colors with which this city's dwellings are painted are unique. Most of the villas built in Port-au-Prince since the War are no better and no worse, architecturally speaking, than similar unimagi- native piles of masonry in Kingston, Havana or Miami. But Haiti has produced at least two modern architects of taste, and though they haven't been lavished with commissions, their work may be seen. Older and more traditional of the two is Robert Baussan, who had already (1937) experimented with the adaptation of African materials and forms in Potion- Ville's conical thatched night-club, Cabane Choucoune, when he became Haiti's first Minister of Tourism. Baussan had meanwhile built himself a luxurious villa overlooking the residential suburb, and in 1949, deciding to move where the view would be less spectacularly distracting, he trans- formed it, with a few deft alterations, into one of the Caribbean's loveliest hotels, the Ibo Lel6. Of a younger generation, Albert Mangones, a graduate of Cornell and a cousin of the novelist, Jacques Roumain, has to his credit a similar transformation: the present Villa Cr6ole Hotel, with its terraces, outbuildings and pool. Mangon6s also designed the Theatre de Verdure and Cockfight Arena in the Exposition grounds, but his masterpiece is probably the Diquini home of an American, Mrs. Anne Kennedy. Built of yellow limestone beside a natural waterfall, its tropically planted interior patio gives the 92 The Story of the Black Republic spacious living-room open perspectives of Haiti's natural beauty on both sides. SCULPTURE The failure we have already noted of the African tribesmen imported into Saint-Domingue as slaves to resume and carry on the arts of sculpture in which many of them must have been skilled, has never been adequately explained. For a hundred and fifty years following independence, no carving of any originality was pro- duced in Haiti. Then, suddenly, it began to reappear! One would have to subscribe to Jung's theory of the persistence of a "racial subconscious" to account for it. Unless, of course, one were to as- sume that there were always sculptors but never an audience that considered their pieces worth mentioning. That may well be the case. Two circumstances support it. One is that as soon as tourists in the late 30*5 and early 40*5, aroused by the world-wide interest in primitivism, began to make inquiries, peasants came into town from the hills carrying now a crudely carved but powerful figure in mahogany, now a strange bird or lizard chipped from a block of limestone. The second circum- stance is that although both of Haiti's sculptors of genius, Odilon Duperier and Jasmin Joseph, were discovered by the American sculptor, Jason Seley, neither of them worked in a style in any way resembling his own. Jasmin tried to, when he saw Seley's terra-cotta figures being fired at the Le Baudry brick-kiln, near which he lived; but when Seley saw these imitations standing in a caille beside the boy's own stardingly original work, he was quick to tell him in which direc- tion his future lay. Jasmin had begun by modelling small figurines in clay dancers, horsemen, athletes, lions, dogs. In the beginning he had to be restrained from giving these pieces away, so apprecia- tive was he of recognition and the chance to work night and day at his craft. Then, as his work began to sell at the Centre d'Art, and his paintings also attracted attention, he discovered a startling way of endowing the figurines with monumentality. He fired them in the form of open-work bricks, the figures silhouetted against space and surrounded by foliage. A window made up of 23 such terra- cotta bricks whose piercings permit the light to play among the figures and cast shadows on the floor, was executed for the Kennedy home in 1952-3. Two small windows, less successful because more crowded in composition, were then designed for the transept of 93 HAITI: St.-Trinite Cathedral. But the choir-screen for that church on which Jasmin is now engaged promises to be his masterpiece and the most original, deeply-felt sculpture ever to come from the West Indies. Jasmin's innovation undoubtedly owes something to the wood- carvings of Duperier, who was already established at the art center when Jasmin arrived, and whose favorite theme was a man in a tree, or under one, enveloped in foliage. Duperier was a young carpenter's assistant who had come to Seley and begged for wood and some tools. Duperier worked for years on an elaborate Ark of the Covenant which was to contain scores of saints and demons in its wooden niches, but the project cut him off from the other artists, interfered with his ability to make a living, and ended in disaster. Now on his own for several years, Duperier has carved masks and standing figures for the curio shops, some magnificent, some derivative of African pieces he has been asked to imitate. Another woodcarver of outstanding talent is Andre Dimanche, a native of Jeremie, whose large figures have achieved surprising vogue among discriminating members of the elite. Dimanche chisels his figures out of sucrin (horsewood, a shade-tree for mahog- any), often employing the root itself for serpents, twined limbs, hair, etc. in a most imaginative style. Andre Liotaud, an unlettered man of 60 from Croix-des-Bou- quets and a blacksmith all his life, is the only one of the sculptors to draw upon vaudou for his inspiration. Having forged iron grave crosses and the like, he now uses vevers as the basis for his open- work iron figures and fantasies. His work is handled by the Centre d'Art. * PAINTING Haitians who have visited every part of the country have been heard to confess that they never have seen a painted design on a peasant cdlle. One sees what one is prepared to see. Travellers criss- crossed Africa for centuries without one of them noting the exist- ence of one of the world's great sculptural styles. There were signs, before 1944, that Haitians painted. The decoration of drums, the stippling of center-posts and the depiction of the life of the loa over die altars of hownfors has already been cited. The paintings on cailles were related to these. But painted caittes are rare. To bring the painters themselves into the open, a demand had to be 94 The Story of the Black Republic created. It was created when the Centre d'Art opened its doors and began to offer 'primitives' for sale. The establishment of this market was not, in its initial phase, an attempt to mobilize the latent visual-talents of the vaudou- worshippers. On the contrary its director, DeWitt Peters, himself a painter who had taken a wartime English-teaching assignment in Port-au-Prince, states that his only intention had been to set up classes at which educated Haitians might learn the fundamentals of traditional draftsmanship and oil technique. In so far as Peters had any stylistic prejudices, these may be deduced from his invita- tions, as late as 1947, to contemporary Cubans practicing a neo- Parisian cubistic simplification, to give demonstrations and teach gifted students at the Centre. By this time, however, the primitives were beginning to establish themselves, and Peters was encouraging them to work in their own homes. It had been the fortuitous dis- coveries of Hector Hyppolite and Philome Obin several years be- fore that had opened Peters' eyes to the possibilities of a 'popular' movement, and at the same time turned the Centre into a rallying point for a variety of part-time native artists and talented youths who would probably otherwise had "died on the vine" for lack of a market. This element of "opportunity" in the Haitian experience can- not be overstressed. Hyppolite and Obin, whose arts came to form the two poles of Haitian painting the vatic and the descriptive were in their late 'forties when the Centre opened its doors to them. Both of them had been painting, off and on, for twenty-five years. Without an audience, without the stimulus of even a single sale, there had been nothing in their world to confirm any intuitive sense they may have had of the importance of art. To survive and continue to paint in such an atmosphere requires a kind of genius in itself. The by-ways and back-ways of this earth have their Hyppolites and Obins; but by the same token the score of compe- tent, imaginative men who developed into fine painters once the Centre made art a worthwhile occupation in Haiti, indicates the enormous number of potential artists who range the world dis- guised as taxi-drivers, day-laborers and tramps. The Artist as Priest: Hector Hyppolite. The discovery of Hyppolite came first, Hyppolite was a vaudou priest who appears to have practiced his duties with only a perranctory attention. This is unlike vaudou priests; but it was the measure of Hyppolite's 95 HAITI: genius. So completely, in fact, was the expressive artist enthroned in Hyppolite's frail body that his vevers were notable for their uninspired rote and imprecision. It was his decoration of the doors at a roadside bar in the village of Mont Rouis that led to Hyppo- lite's discovery. Intricate floral patterns and gaily colored birds had been painted there with a brush of chicken-feathers. A sign over- hanging the porch announced grandiloquently "ici LA RENAIS- SANCE." By the time Peters and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (the Haitian novelist whom Hyppolite thereafter identified with John the Baptist, his patron saint) had located the artist, the Centre d'Art was in business. Wifredo Lam and Andre Breton bought his first pictures, and it was the theoretician of French Surrealism who in- troduced Hyppolite's work to Paris where it caused a sensation in the international painting exhibit staged there by TJNESCO in 1947. In 1948, the last year of his life and only the third of his fame, Hyppolite remarked: "I haven't practiced vaudou for a while. I asked the spirits' permission to suspend my work as a houngan, because of my painting. Also, you know, there are so many false priests around today that it saddens me. The spirits agreed that I should stop for a while. I've always been a priest, just like my father and my grandfather, but now I'm more an artist than a priest. When people ask me now what I am, I say that I am an artist . . . Both McAtresseLa Sirene and St. John help me. La Sirtne helps me to earn money and St. John gives me ideas for my paintings." I It was probably the artificial division of his life into the priest who occasionally painted and the painter who occasionally con- ducted religious rites that gave Hyppolite's work its uneven quality. His technique was never wholly adequate to translating his visions into Affective plastic images, and as his life as a medium gave way to his life as an artist, he tended deliberately to forsake the central content of vaudou for the peripheral subject-matter of folklore, zombis and Black Magic which seemed to offer material for a freer exercise of his fantastic imagination. But Hyppolite enjoyed one triumph that probably no painter since the early Italian Renaissance has experienced: he lived to see one of his religious canvases born aloft through the streets of Port-au-Prince by a cheering mob. 1 Quoted from Renaissance in Haiti by Selden Rodman, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948. In writing this section the author has drawn on this book, which is now out of print, as well as the following of his more recent articles on Haitian painting: "The Christ of the Haitian Primitives," Harper's Bazaar, December 1950; "A Mural by Wilson Bigaud," Magazine of Art, October 1951; and "Murals for Haiti: From the Centre d'Art Jeep to the Miracle at Cam," An in America, December 1951. The Story of the Black Republic Provincial Master: PhilomS Obin. The more restrained and disciplined genius of Philome Obin never encountered the distrac- tion of divided loyalty. Obin has been fortunate, from the point of view of his art, in his habitat. His is the art, par excellence, of the provincial master. Cap Haitien, where he was born and where he still lives, is less than 200 miles from Port-au-Prince with its art center and visiting celebrities, but it might be a thousand. In Cap Haitien "nothing happens." Before Obin, no one had ever given the city's life and appearance artistic expression. Years before he sent a picture to Peters in 1944, Obin had regarded himself as a professional painter, accepting his neglect philosophically, so that fame when it did come to him changed neither his way of life * nor his style. He painted many more pictures, since he was released by their sale from the necessity of making a living by other means, and he painted with increasing skill, but his meticulous rendering of detail and his documentary approach to subject matter remained the same. The primitivism of Obin, like that of Henri Rousseau, is a regressive phenomenon. Rousseau admired the academician Bou- guereau and believed he was painting like him. Obin had some academic art training in his youth and asserts that his pictures are no more than the most accurate record of what he has seen, trans- cribed "according to the classical laws of perspective." Neither painter was aware that the charm of his work was precisely in the extent to which both failed to understand and carry out "the rules." The subtle distortions that result from this failure are what give their paintings their resemblance to the work of such "true primi- tives" as Sasetta and Piero di Cosimo and also, in frequent in- 1 The simple one-room shack in which he lives out by the gate leading to the Plaine du Nord is put together of an assortment of old crates, cylinder blocks and boards bearing such legends as TEngine Soap' and 'Hazlehurst & Sons, Ltd., London.' It contains a cot, an armoire, two chairs and a table. The walls are papered with Ches- terfield Cigarette ads and faded copies of La Guerre IlltistrSe: planes, Sherman tanks in echelon, and rows of crosses with the caption "Le Prix de la Victoire" On the table stands a bizarre triumphal arch constructed entirely of matchboxes, each drawer containing a single treasured object a collar button, a safety pin, a feather, a smooth stone. Refreshments in the form of a sweet liqueur in tiny glasses, are served to the artist's guests by a black hand which passes a tray through a slot in the wall leading to an adjoining stable. On the cot is a fine pencil draft of the artist's next picture, a melancholy but lovely girl seated on a rock: she appeared to Obin in a dream the night before, giving him a message which is too intimate to reveal. The blackboard now bears the motto: No. 14: Que 1948 soit pour moi une armee de reconnaissance et de remerciement a Jesus mon Sauveur. Renaissance in Haiti. 97 HAITI: stances, to the deliberate distortions of those moderns who seek to recapture a lost innocence, a more "direct" graphic shorthand. Obin's masterpiece, "The Funeral of Charlemagne Peralte," is a picture of medium size containing no less than 750 individual figures. He worked on it, he says, six hours a day for forty-five days. The emotional content of the subject-matter is rare in Obin's work; in fact this picture, and a related one of the guerrilla leader "crucified" to a door by the Marines, are unique in dealing with subjects in which the painter could be personally involved. In the "Funeral," the impact of the central scene is conveyed by the fact that the street fails to recede to a vanishing-point. It stops abruptly like a man's life. The eye is not carried into the irrelevant back- ground but returns perforce, to the massed mourners for whom the rows of tiny Haitian houses are but a frame. The size of the marchers is depicted in terms of their actual importance rather than in the usual diminishing scale that a true academic artist would con- sider important. We will return to Obin when we discuss the murals of St.-Trinite which are the crowning achievement of Haitian art. DuFaut of Jacmel. Still a third type of Haitian painter is manifested in the person of Pr6fete DuFaut, a peasant living near provincial Jacmel who decorated the walls of his hut with picto- grams of somewhat geometrical design. DuFaut perfected his style, after receiving paints and masonite from William Krauss, an Amer- ican journalist then living in Jacmel, without seeing the work of the other primitives in the capital. This style he lavishes on three and only three subjects. The first is a maplike vision of the streets of Jacmel zigzagging from upper right to lower left across a land- scape of conelike mountains or waves; every building, street-lamp and power-line is exposed frontally without any attempt to simulate depth. The second, equally flat in pattern, shows a huge spider-web with a golden spider at its center hung between trees or build- ings. The third, less formalistic and presumably expressing Du- Faut's debt to a spiritual protectress, represents Mcntresse Erzulie standing in a shrine or on the pinnacle of a temple. DuFaut cannot explain what conscious meaning, if any, these subjects have for him. But the third, especially, is often invested with a wealth of subconscious (and possibly racial-subconscious) detail. The Primitive as Realist: Wilson Bigaud. As in the early Ren- aissance in Italy, the intense religious life of Haiti provides an at- The Story of the Black Republic mosphere and a symbolism that is helpful even to painters without strong religious convictions of their own. Thus Wilson Bigaud, now the most brilliant and technically advanced of the self-taught artists, elects to paint realistic dramatizations of native life dice games, cockfights, murders, thefts, wakes and the like. But when called upon to paint such a subject as his great Marriage at Cana mural in the Cathedral, he was able to do so with sincere reverence and conviction of the reality of miracles, and without sacrificing any of the illustrative flavor of native life for which he was already renowned. I asked Bigaud at the time whether he believed in the divinity of Christ. "They say," he replied, "that He was divine. Who knows? I believe in Him. The priests of vaudou perform miracles too; I've seen them; but that's diabolic. Christ's miracles were to teach lessons, not to arouse fear. 1 Yes, I still go to vaudou ceremonies more often than to church, perhaps, because the cere- monies are more interesting and intimate and certainly more color- fulbut I don't believe in the loos anymore." Bigaud's subsequent development as a painter has been aston- ishing. Only 14 at the time Hyppolite discovered him in 1947, Bi- gaud showed a precocious facility, not only for reflecting the Hai- tian scene he appears to have overcome a dangerous tendency to dramatize with overly-moondrenched highlights but in being able to assimilate the technical innovations of sophisticated painters, as do none of the other primitives, without sacrificing his unmistak- able style. This ability to grow has never diminished; nor has Bi- gaud's capacity for feeling, his pictures of 1953-4 indicating a tragic sense generally associated with the late periods of schools of paint- ing. Bigaud says of his style "I began like Hyppolite. Hyppolite's style was very strong but it had no nuances. I was never influenced by Obin, whose pictures are flat, to my taste, though beautiful. Be- sides, all Obin's pupils paint like him. If I have pupils I shall see that they paint in their own way, not in mine. Today I use only white Sapolin 2 ; the other colors are oils in tubes. I begin a picture with the background of hills, trees, houses, and so forth; I do the clothes and faces last, so that the figures will detach themselves from the background. I never paint from nature . . . My memory is enough." 1 Bigaud, of course, was here echoing the Church's position on vaudou. 2 The furniture enamel employed by all the primitives, at least in the early days of the Centre d'Art. 99 HAITI: Gourgue and the Racial Memory. Still another step removed from direct mystical experience, yet capable of existing nowhere but in an atmosphere of belief, are the pictures of Engu6rrand Gourgue. Gourgue paints for the most part not vaudou but magie noire. He has never had traffic with Black Magic, but like most Haitians he knows all about it, and unlike most he has visualized its cosmos down to the smallest cloven hoof. As an infernal world, it bears striking resemblance to a psychoanalyst's well-equipped dream house. It is complete with all the props and accessories of the racial subconscious. Yet withal, too evenly lighted and gaily col- ored and orderly to be exactly frightening. One has the feeling, though, that one has been in a room like this before perhaps in a nightmare. And the sexual symbols accord well with the popular Creole song: Mother, dear Mother, A snake is after me! Suzanne, my child, when I was young The same thing happened to me ... In a picture that Gourgue painted when he was only 17 (it is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art) a small table with a tablecloth supports a gigantic bull's-head; white light fans out from the eye-sockets and between the bull's horns re- poses the f anged head or a very large python. Attendant devils in a doorway to die right carry (by one foot) a tiny naked man with blood spurting from his heart; this blood, conveniently, is being caught by another serpent. The properties resemble something out of Dali, yet the over-all effect is more in the style of the "Guernica" by Picasso two painters that Gourgue, of course, had never heard of. Gourgue's painting today, with its low color-key, eerie light- ing, dazzlingly smooth technique and sinister atmosphere is utterly unlike that 01 any of the other painters; and in fact Gourgue from the beginning or his career has been a lone wolf. He has been in and out of the Centre. Like Bigaud, he can be called a primitive only in terms of his origins and lack of formal training. If, as he now tells clients, Gourgue was tormented by demons until he painted them, he has a good and very convincing memory. Other Painters. Outstanding among the other self-taught paint- ers are Castera Bazile, an artist with an innate sense of the monu- 100 The Story of the Black Republic mental who has carried his sensitive style to a high degree of refine- ment; Rigaud Benoit, another artist ot originality, whose work has been uneven; Toussaint Auguste, a painter of childlike pastorals rendered with the utmost delicacy and directness; Seneque Obin, whose fierce visions are as revealing an expression of the North as the meticulous documents of his more famous brother; Antonio Joseph, a water-colorist and mural painter of surprising sophistica- tion; and Robert St.-Brice, a middle-class serviteur of the loos, who defies all classification with his crude but compelling fetishes rem- iniscent of Dubuffet. Among the group of artists who broke with the Centre in 1950 to form their own gallery, the Foyer des Artes Plastiques, Max Pin- chinat, Roland Dorcely and Luce Tournier have gone furthest. Pinchinat has worked in the post-Cubist tradition with daring and taste. Dorcely, whose hotel murals have been much sought after, is perhaps too prolific for his own good but handles figures as pat- terns with engaging assurance. Mile. Tournier, the most sensitive of the trio, has tried to relate primitive subject matter to the modern tradition. Christ Reborn in Haiti. During the winter of 1949, in my ca- pacity as Co-Director of the Centre d'Art, I had invited William Calfee, then head of the Art Department at American University in Washington, D.C., to come to Port-au-Prince and give the paint- ers instruction in tempera technique. For the trial run in the Centre, five of the leading "sophisticated" painters of Haiti were given an upstairs chamber. The primitives took over the stairwell and base- ment. Obin, in solitary grandeur, barricaded himself in the library. For a while chaos reigned. The gesso failed to dry. The glue re- fused to dissolve. The eggs would be broken (or eaten) before the basket got to the refrigerator. Brushes would mysteriously disap- pear. A painter would vanish into the hills for a week. Another (Benoit), who much preferred driving to painting, would have to be forcibly removed from the wheel of the Centre d'Art jeep. 1 It was fascinating to watch the differences in approach upstairs and downstairs. One of the "advanced painters," as they were called, worked with the help of a projection machine. Another erased his initial drawing five times; finally gave up. Another would descend from his ladder and ascend to correct with dizzying regularity. And all of this group though three of them finally turned out creditable 1 Before this period the hood and fenders of this Jeep provided the only target for the ambitious painters-without-walls. xoi HAITI: exercises-leaned heavily on Calfee for technical advice and moral support. Downstairs, in contrast, the primitives, once coaxed into an initial effort, attacked their wall-spaces with abandon. The brief- est of charcoal sketches then on with the paint! Talent, not trial and error, separated the sheep from the goats. The untalented pro- duced some real horrors. But Benoit, Leveque, Bigaud, Bazile and Obin simply translated to the dimensions of the wail-space (we had deliberately given an eccentric area to each painter to prepare him for later work) the image of the easel picture that had always been monumental in its simplicity. That month there appeared on the door of the Centre d'Art privy a derisive pencil-scrawl in a primi- tive hand: "Les artistes de Fetage qm se disent des avancSs ne sont pas m$me des prelivmnaires primitives" Hardly had fixitive been sprayed on the completed murals when the attack began. With some notable exceptions, the elite had been unhappy about the Centre d'Art from the start; primitive painting was said to give people abroad a dim view of Haitian cul- turethat culture which they would like to have people believe has nothing at all of Africanism in it. The Catholic press published a series of articles charging that "paganism" was being encouraged. Inspired by fear that primitive murals would be commissioned for the forthcoming Exposition or by Pan American for its new airport building, the academic painters published a pamphlet purporting to prove that the trial paintings would crumble from the walls and that only true fresco should be used in future murals. But the net result of this offensive was that the Exposition imported second-rate talent to vulgarize the facades of its buildings; Pan American stalled until the zero hour before finally employing primitives in a make- shift program; and the Roman Catholic Church lost the opportu- nity of filling its bare churches with unrivalled Catholic painting. The only gainer, paradoxically, was the small Protestant Epis- copal movement whose enterprising bishop at once determined to appropriate the talents of the painters for his new cathedral. Bishop Voegeli's remark to a visiting archdeacon who had been unable to understand his confidence in unschooled painters was typical of the man. "It only shows," he said, "that it sometimes pays to be a little crazy!" As it happened the bishop was called away from Haiti just before the charcoal sketches went on the walls of the apse and didn't return to Haiti until the work had been completed; his re- mark on entering the cathedral revealed how much wisdom lay behind his apparent madness: "Thank God," he exclaimed, "they painted Haitians!" 102 The Story of the Black Republic That, as a matter of fact, was the one stylistic injunction I, as director of the project, had given them. The poo-odd-square-foot area of the apse divided naturally into three 21 -foot-high vertical panels and a fourth area surrounding the windows up under the vault. The widely differing styles of the artists, without artificial demarcation, would provide natural divisions. Unity would be achieved by merging the skies and the horizontal axes of principal interest. The angels above would be carrying flowers, some of which might drop into the panels beneath to avoid a sharp break below the windows. All of the four men in their different ways were devout, though Benoit least so. He alone would not kneel in prayer before beginning to paint. His essentially decorative genius took more interest in what the Virgin would wear than in her face, a conven- tional Byzantine mask. He would devote more time to the concen- tric eyes of the animals and the veining of exotic leaves than to the perfunctory image of the Child. Once when I inquired why he was devoting so much time to a bamboo drainpipe in the roof of a tiny caitte thirty feet from the floor of the cathedral (from which it was not visible) Benoit replied tolerantly: "How long would thatching last in the rainy season without a drain?" Asked why one of the attendant women had an arm cut off above the elbow, he replied laconically "Yaws." But Benoit for all that was not so sure of him- self as Bazile and Obin. He was troubled one day when an Ameri- can tourist asked him why the Virgin's hands were so tiny, out of all proportion to her body, and asked me whether I thought he should alter them. I said: "Do you think that woman knows more about painting than you do? Would you ask her to come up here on the scaffold and finish the mural her way?" Bazile had known exactly what he wanted to do from the time he painted his first picture a recognizable Bazile. He never deviated from that style except in the direction of a greater monumentality. He is a natural mural painter. Though he can paint a hand or a foot in perspective, his instinct tells him in a work of great scale to dis- tort so that the fingers and toes are exposed flat. Though the other artists took the full twenty-eight days to finish their panels, Bazile was through with his in a little over two weeks. He had other pic- tures to get back to and wasted no time. Obin, like Bazile and Leveque, would invariably kneel in prayer before painting but his religion seemed to express less of piety than of proud participation in the Lord's work. As he began 103 HAITI: to advance with the figute of Christ he would sing in a muted fal- setto voice a Protestant hymn with many stanzas which began: Mon Sauveur mount sur la Croix. Gloire A FAgneato de Dieu . . . In the hope that he would put into Christ's face some of that proud strength with which he had endowed the martyred Peralte, I sug- gested that he paint Him without the traditional beard. He was shocked at first but then took to the idea. I was surprised one day to hear him remark to a deacon, who objected, that Christ had died young and that besides "He was a Man, not a Symbol." Obin would often tell me about the laws of perspective while actually engaged in painting a figure in the foreground half the size of one behind it. His Eye of God, looking down out of a cloud, he borrowed from the masonic symbol in his early "Apotheosis of Franklin D. Roose- velt." The wonderfully expressive clasped hands of the Virgin would remind later visitors of Gruenewald. That crowd of respec- table women behind the Cross, who contemplate the tragedy with about as much interest as spectators at a horse-show would devote to the apprehension of a pickpocket, recalls many of Obin's early pictures. But it recalls, too, that atmosphere of everyday life going on amid the spectacular events of history which has permeated the work of so many of the great narrative painters from Breughel and Piero della Francesca to Ben Shahn. The huge "Miracle at Cana" which the 22-year old Bigaud painted on the wall of the south trancept the following winter dif- fered markedly from the murals in the apse both in color-key and in the episodic realism of its content The Miracle, while by no means Bigaud's first mural, was his first successful one. His accept- ance of the principle that a mural should synthesize the elements of a painter's most successful easel pictures led to the realization of his potentialities. Though the space assigned to him, a wall measuring 528 square feet and pierced by two windows, was by far the largest and presented the most problems, the artist never wavered in his execution. The charcoal drawing on the wall itself, which estab- lished the iconography in its final form, took almost two weeks. The actual painting, though interrupted by sabateurs who broke into the Cathedral one night and smeared it with black oil, was ac- complished in twenty-five days. Although the spirit of the St.-Trinit6 murals probably couldn't be reproduced anywhere else on earth for what other country has 104 The Story of the Black Republic remained so insulated against the ravages of visual propaganda, pho- tography and scepticism as Haiti? there is much to be learned from the success of the experiment. In the first place it couldn't have happened without the enterprise of DeWitt Peters, who gam- bled on opening an art center in a place that had never produced an artist, and had the wisdom to let the native painters paint as they pleased. Secondly it required the exceptional faith of Bishop Voe- geli: faith in the talent of the painters and the judgment of their director and the courage to out-face hostility to unconventional art both inside and outside the church. He saw with his own eyes the revival of a Christian art, informed by genuine passion and in- nocence. The Haitian setting, he realized, not only permitted the expression of this art in fresh forms, forms which emerged from the very lives of the artists, but was producing a sequence which might eventually awaken the peasant masses to view the mumbled texts of the Scriptures in a new light the light of reality. Third, the murals cost money though not much more than $5000 for all the expenses of two years work and this money was generously contributed by American friends of Haitian art who remained anonymous, asking no more than that the work be completed as it had been begun. Finally the government of Haiti, though it did not sponsor the project, is to be commended for its aid to the Centre d'Art and for its gracious participation in the ceremonies at which the murals were dedicated. As for what the painters themselves learned-the fact that this was a work of permanence, a painting in a public place, never to be moved or sold or taken to another coun- try, made each artist feel that he was the custodian of a responsi- bility greater than himself. This, and the circumstance that the project's purpose was the edification of their fellow men, perhaps insured its extraordinary ensemble. 105 CHAPTER WHAT TO SEE: The Capital, The Provinces, The Islands PORT-AU-PRINCE AN ENGLISH VISITOR to Haiti in the year 1842 described the Port-au- Prince of Boyer's time as a city of "wooden buildings, with the pavement dislocated or broken up, the drains neglected, filth and stable dung interrupting your steps in every direction." With all its matchless advantages of situation, this disappointed tourist added, "with every inherent capability of being made and kept delight- fully clean, it is perhaps the filthiest capital in the world." An Amer- ican visitor thirty years later reported Port-au-Prince to be a breed- ing place for malaria and yellow fever, without sanitary codes of any kind, where in the open squares "sick animals are taken and lert to die and rot without hindrance from anyone," * Even as re- cently as 1939, Leyburn described the capital as having "hardly half a dozen buildings which would detain the lover of architecture," and he concluded that while as a whole "the city is not a blemish; yet not to have seen it is to have missed no great aesthetic expe- rience." None of these three passages describe accurately the Port-au- Prince of today. There are still wooden buildings and broken pave- ments and unsanitary conditions in parts of the city, founded in 1749 and now having an estimated population of 150,000. But a visitor would have to be jaundiced indeed to deny that die present- day capital from its magnificent bayside esplanade, through the bustling but orderly shopping-center, to the spacious Champ de Mars with its imposing government buildings, and on into the neck- lace of wooded hills the city then so gracefully climbs, enfolding as it goes the elegant shrub-shrouded villas of past and present is one 1 The first quotation is from John Candler's Brief Notices of Hayti, London, 1842, and the second is from Santo Domingo Past and Present: With a Glance at Hayti by Samuel Hazzard, New York, 1873. 1 06 Port-au-Prince-anct out! The capital reaches into the foothills. The airport is left, the Exposition right. Light patches center and right-center are the Champ de Mars and the Cemetery. The camion, as always, is loaded, defiant and dusty. The rich man's car often provides the poor man's entertainment. Anywhere along the Road ; Y wherever fr x esh water is to be found, women will be seen (as here in Lake Miragoane) washing, doing the laundry, filling their calabashes and loading their bouriques. Miragodne Fringing a spacious blue bay, Miragoane, with its little Catholic cathedral is one of the loveliest of coastal towns. Jacmel: Cathedral, Waterfront The tiled roofs to the 'right of the church are part of JacmcTs iron market; the building to the left is a typical balconied town-house. .*,. *** ** Jacmel: Bassin Bleu, Pueblo This turquoise pool is the second of Bassin Bleu's three wonderful waterfalls. The houses with gardens on each other's roofs face the picturesque hilltown's harbor. Cayes, Jeremie East of Camp Perrin, in the heart of the South Peninsula, Saut Mathurin's migh cascade offers fine swimming in the deep green pool at its base. Jcremie's architecti has the reckless, improvised look one would expect at the end of the earth. Cap Ha'itien: Ruins and Streets French plantation gateposts, the mighty ruins at Milot, and the houses and bridges built on the foundations of forts surround the pastel-colored streets whose iron balconies and hinged doors recall Spain. Islands, Beaches, Boats, Mountains Fisherman's wife at the Arcadins. The beach at St. Marc. Boatmen between Port-dc- Paix and Tortuga. The peasants at Furcy were given a gourde to pose; the grinning one is about to abscond with all of it. Surprise! Bassin Zim The peasant woman in the Pine Forest was cooking when the camera caught her. The Bason Zimjaear Hinche was also caught by the camera-in such a way that its falls could be mistaken for marble. Luxury Hotels The terrace at Ibo Lele overlooks the Cul-de-Sac plain, the capital and the bay. Standing in^the foreground of El Rancho's pool is Lorraine Dora of the Gallerie des Arts d'Haiti in one of her hand-painted dresses. aitian Sports SS; oV H E , x ? 1 osition ' s *** Spearfishing does not necessarily mean ith a shark; shallow submanne gardens abound with multi-colored Representative Haitians Fernand Pierre, painter of the 'Visitation' in the Cathedral, at work on a box. Milo and Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, authorities on wudmi, in their P6tion-Ville garden. Doc Reser of Pont Beudet and Bernard Diederich of the Haiti Sun have contributed enough to the Republic to be considered Haitians by adoption. 'V-" ;; l ''"'\.'' t " ' ;;r:/i''ir";^ ;<*",',':"'; r v 1 9 d ''""f^JI %? The Story of the Black Republic of the most beautiful cities in the world. Only Naples, crowned hy Vesuvius, or Rio with its Sugar Loaf, can boast a comparable back- ground. And neither city can offer as breath-taking a reverse view, the panorama that unfolds from vantage-points high above the city. From one such, Le Perchoir, the capital itself lies directly below, dazzling in daylight or sparkling by night, the burnished sheet of mountain-banded bay focusing the sky's deep blue like a giant re- flector; and Gonave Island, cloud-capped, misty, hugely mysteri- ous, provides just enough punctuation to keep the picture within its frame and toe eye from roving uncontrollably. Nor is this all. From here, or better still from one of the crows- nests above P6tion-Ville, you were looking west. Now turn to your right and look north and east into the Cul-de-Sac. Instead of the bay's cerulean plate, you look down upon a perfectly flat carpet of intensest green, a gridded geometry of sugarcane dotted with barely distinguishable clusters of catties stretching as far as one can see except on the clearest of days, when this most pastoral of per- spectives is capped at its misty verge by the great salt lake of Sau- matre shimmering with the ghostly unreality of a mirage on the distant Dominican border. Come down to earth again, and out of the city's murderous noon drive south and west under a canopy of almonds, flamboyants and palms, to Carrefour. Turn left, and when you have gone as far as the road goes follow on foot the rushing Riviere Froide along a narrow jungle path where you will never be alone nor ever want to be. If you prefer mountains and the long view, the longest you may ever see lies beyond Petion-Ville, beyond Kenscoif , beyond Furcy, and still less than an hour from the Palace's glittering domes. There the tradewind howls in the pines and La Selle's eight-thou- sand feet tower less than two-thousand above you though across chasms dwarfing the craters of the moon. Or, if it's desert you pre- ferbut wait! there is that, too, but the city itself deserves at least a perfunctory promenade . . . STREETS; BUILDINGS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE Let us consider three approaches to the city. Supposing you have come by ship and want to visit first the white pavilions of the Presidential Palace that dominated your view once you had sailed past La Gonave. Clearing customs, you walk to the Rue du Quai, turn right a block and then left on the Rue Roux which crosses the Grand Rue (Haiti's Main Street and axis of its shopping center), 107 leading directly to the Roman Catholic Cathedral Started in 1884 and completed in 1915, this pink-and- white stone structure in Ro- manesque style capped by twin towers resembling Moslem mina- rets is visually more rewarding outside than in, but yields in archi- tectural interest to the buildings on either side of it. To the left, as you approach, is the Old Cathedral, built in colonial times but largely restored under the administration of President Vincent. To the right is a half-timbered dwelling with a long sloping slate roof said to have been the home of Comte d'Estaing, a colonial governor of Port-au-Prince, and perhaps the only wholly intact building in the capital pre-dating the Revolution. There are two ways, at this juncture, of getting to the Champ de Mars. The shortest involves turning right and following the Rue Monseigneur Guilloux past the Cathedral St.-Trinh (whose mu- rals have already been described) into the Place Dessalines, where a left fork leads into the eastern part of the great square and a con- tinuation straight ahead passes the Ministries of Finance and Justice with the Palace and the adjoining Casernes Dessalines to your left. The Palace faces the lower portion of the Champ, the Place Louv- erture. The other way of getting there from the Cathedral is longer but more interesting. Continue along the Rue Roux, which be- comes the Rue Borgella behind the Cathedral and starts climbing uphill. At the next intersection, two streets go off to the left; one continues straight up past the National Archives to old Fort Na- tional; and two lead back into the Champ de Mars. Take the nar- row uphill one, the Rue Poste Marchand (Bel Air), because this is in many ways the most picturesque street in the capital, The one- and two-story wooden houses that overhang it are very old. Most of them include small boutiques in which everything from clay pipes to kola-champagne is sold. At the end of the street turn sharp right at the small post-office sub-station and descend into the Champ de Mars by any one of several streets. The lowest passes the headquarters of the Garde d'Haiti, a handsome two-story col- lonaded building of gleaming white with orange and black doors. The highest and nearest, the Rue Capois, runs along the top of the Champ de Mars, passing the Caf 6 Savoy- Vincent, the Hotel Excel- sior, the Rex Theatre, die American Embassy, and (on the fax cor- ner) the Cercle Port-au-Princien, one of Haiti's two most exclusive Slite clubs. If you turn slurp left at the Savoy-Vincent and mount the Rue Magny you will come to the so-called Rond Point des Cinq- 108 Avenues in the middle of which stands a vigilant traffic policeman. The street crossing it at right angles to Magjiy, if followed left, leads back to the main Petion-Ville road just above the postal sub- station where you crossed it; if followed right (but not in a car, un- less you want a ticket) it passes the Restaurant "Aux Cosaques" and continues into the suburb of the city dominated by the Cita- delle, Splendide and Oloffson Hotels. The fork bearing uphill to the right passes the Sans Souci Hotel, the studio of Photo S. Kahn, and the lycSe Odei'de to the Church of Sacr6 Coeur where, in turn, a left fork leads to the residential heights of Turgeau, and a right, doubling back, descends past the Haitian-American Institute and over a bridge to the Rue Capois. Returning for a last time to the "Five Avenues" where that policeman is still standing, the remain- ing fork, up the hill and almost straight ahead, is known as Bois Verna, and is bordered by some of the finest gingerbread chateaux in the Republic. Now, suppose that on debarking at the wharf you decide to put off seeing the heart of the city, and inspect instead the Bicen- tennial Exposition grounds stretching along the seawall to your right. Starting at the illuminated fountain in front of the Post Of- fice, a short boulevard, closest to the sea at this point, passes the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Bar d'ltalie on the left and the Venezuelan Building and the French Institute on the right, before becoming the main Exposition thoroughfare, the Boulevard Harry Truman, at a traffic circle. Two other short avenues, containing shops, newspaper offices and United Nations bureaus parallel it to the circle. At the circle, on the sea side, is the Casino Internationale, for gamblers, and the adjoining Cafe Sorrento, beyond which lies a pier from which spear-fishing tours take off . But following the Boulevard Truman south, a succession of Exposition buildings have been converted into: the Gates Rendezvous, Pigalle and Vert Ga- lant, the Hotel Beau Rivage, the Museums of Ethnology and Fine Arts, the Theatre de Verdure, the Foyer des Arts Plastiques and the Cockfight Arena behind which a fine stand of palms once pro- vided the perfect setting for a night-club but is now unaccountably abandoned. Just before leaving the Exposition there is a two-foot- high bump in the road that has caused at least one cracked skull, and that appears to be permanent; if you're in a taxi, hold tight! At the end of the park, the road forks. Doubling back behind the gas filling station, you come to the Porail Leogane on the Grand Rue, where one right fork leads around the vast and fasci- nating National Cemetery and another to the Stade Magloire, The Story of the Black Republic where international soccer matches are held, and the Port-au- Prince Tennis Club where the best Haitian tennis is played. Con- tinuing right along the main shoreline drive, however, you pass Captain Ace's Ki-Pi nightclub on your right, the Hotels Simbi and Riviera on your left, the Coast Guard Headquarters, the Thorland Club Hotel and Mon Repos on your right, arriving finally at Car- ref our, and beyond that the South Peninsula. But one other entrance to Port-au-Prince remains to be de- scribed. Should you arrive by plane, the airport lies north of the city and you would therefore be entering by the main highway to Cap Hai'tien which is but an extension of the Grand Rue. Bowen Field lies at precisely the point where Dessalines met his death in 1806 and there is a modest monument west of the runway to mark the spot. Turning right, the highway to the Cape first passes the HASCO sugar factory on the left, and a mile or two further out the Agricultural College of Damien and the Barbancourt rum dis- tillery behind it. A little further on is the sugar village of Croix des Missions, where vaudou ceremonies are at their liveliest. And be- yond that, the flat plain of the Cul-de-Sac ends and the cactus desert begins. Turning left on Grand Rue after leaving the airport, and passing on your right the long sheds of the Regie de Tabac, you come to the gates of the celebrated Iron Market. The following description of it by William Krauss, since it cannot be improved on, is reprinted in its entirety: It is the source of racy odors of sweat, blood, chickens, and very dried fish; source too of the perfumes of every known tropical fruit that anyone would care to eat. It is not clean. Why should it be? Only the washed dead are clean. The Iron Market is more vitally alive, more crowded, more clamoring, than the deck of a sinking commuter's ferry. You get the impression that somebody has just shouted 'Last boat to shore.' Foodstuffs are dumped and stacked and scattered everywhere, on the floor overflowing into narrow aisles, on crazy counters, in baskets on the backs and under the rumps of cooing, crying, pipe-smoking, gesticulating, coal- black peasants from nve to ninety-five. Few sales are consummated without the exchange of withering insults. Nobody ever had more fun. (And, for the housewife on the serious side, nowhere on any island is a wider range of supplies availables: everything tropical, much that is temperate, oranges to cauliflowers, bananas to beets, hens' eggs with a real bite, twenty-five cents a dozen.) * i Holiday, March 1949. in HAITI: It might be added that the Iron Market, quite apart from its sun- less atmosphere, is not a good place to take photographs. Save them for what follows, because it is an axiom that the further you get from Port-au-Prince the friendlier are the people. They have seen less of the people who take pictures . . . The following buildings and institutions mentioned in the fore- going paragraphs, together with one or two not previously referred to, are worthy of some description: The National Palace is distinguished in style and impressively sim- ple in its furnishings. Its two predecessors on the same acre of the Champ de Mars were destroyed by revolutions in 1869 and 1912. The present edifice was designed and built by Georges Baussan in 1918. Its south wing contains the offices and living quarters of the President and his family. The Chapel and the Hall of Busts of the Presidents are open to visitors. The National Archives^ back of the Cathedral and near the modern green building of the College St. Martial, contains 32,000 civil registry volumes dating back to Dessalines' time and 120,000 manu- script records, but is seriously endangered by inadequate weather- protection, fire-prevention and filing facilities. The Director, who operates on a yearly budget of less than $25,000, is glad to show visitors his treasures. The National Library stands on the Rue Hammerton Killick par- alleling the Grand Rue to the east. It contains 12,000 volumes. The Magloire government has provided funds for construction of stacks to house 10,000 more books in the rear. The general collection is spotty, but the 4000 volumes in the Haitian collection, built up over the past decade, is exceeded only by that of the Christian Brothers of St. Louis de Gonzague (whose 7000 volumes are encased directly across the street) and by the private collections of Menthor Lau- rent, Edmond Mangon6s and Kurt Fisher. The National Museum^ on a lower corner of the Champ de Mars, suffers from the same budgetary and technical deficiencies as the Library and the Archives. Interesting exhibits are: the 8-foot-high anchor of the Santa Maria\ a primitive painting of Sans Souci Palace said to date from 1812 and, if accurate, a conclusive argument against its much-discussed restoration; an impressive embossed can- non from the Citadelle; and the manuscript of Sonthonax' procla- mation of the Abolition of Slavery. Less interesting items include President Estim's Parker fountain pen; General Nord-Alexis' bread-knife; the bronze feet of Katherine Dunham donated by Miss Dunham; and a handsome bronze bell bearing the provoca- 112 The Story of the Black Republic tive label in English: BELL OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE IN THAT COUNTRY. The Centre d'Art, on the Rue de la Revolution, the street above the Rue Hammerton Killick, is open to visitors mornings and after- noons and sells paintings, painted boxes, ceramics and sculpture. The trial murals of 1949 and the current exhibits are worth seeing. The Foyer des Arts Plastiques, on a corner of the southern extrem- ity of the Boulevard Truman, contains exhibitions of current work by such of its popular painters as C6dor, Exum6, Lapierre and Ver- gin. The pictures are for sale. The Museum of the Haitian People and the Museum of Fine Arts are also on the Boulevard Truman, adjoining each other at the end of a shallow reflecting pool with ornamental figures in plaster by Jason Seley. The former contains some interesting exhibits of folk- craft, once well displayed but now in a sad state of preservation. The latter does not contain a single first-rate picture or sculpture. (The finest art collection in Haiti is Bishop VoegelTs.) The Agricultural College at Damiens, also open to visitors on week- days, is divided into the school proper (15 professors and 40 stu- dents) ; an agricultural extension service; laboratories for experi- mentation with plants and seeds; a herd of 30 cows which provide some of the milk for the city; and a library of 8000 volumes. The Barbancourt Distillery, behind the above and surrounded by its own cane fields, will impress visitors with the up-to-dateness of its American machinery and the spotlessness of its huge French vats. 500,000 bottles of the famous rum are produced and botded here annually by Jean Gard^re & Cie. Drinks are on the house. HASCO's Sugar Mill, described in Chapter IV, is well worth visit- ing. So efficient is this plant that the cane wastage provides the fuel for the furnaces, and even the ash is used as fertilizer. The French Institute maintains a permanent staff of six professors who also teach at the University. Founded as a result of an agree- ment signed in 1945 between Haiti and France, it is influential through the lectures, social affairs and field trips it conducts. Haitian-American Institute (unlike the French Institute, which is generously supported by its government and whose position of leadership is talcen for granted by the itite) has to sell itself, figura- tively and literally. It offers courses in English for adults, a film and record library, and a social-cultural program. It has managed to hold its head above water solely through the character and enter- prise of an able series of Directors who have been sympathetic to wti and well-liked by the Haitians. 113 HAITI: The American Club, on the P6tion-Ville Road behind the Ameri- can Embassy Residence, has a swimming pool, tennis courts and the only golf course in Haiti. The policy of its hundred-odd long- term-resident members neither to legally exclude Haitians nor to encourage their joining has not tended the make them (or their country) popular with the sensitive elite. The Cercle Bellevue, closer to Port-au-Prince on the same side of the same road, is an exclusive elite club whose hospitality to foreign- ers is most generous. It has two floodlit clay courts, a swimming pool and a handsome modern clubhouse designed by Camille Tes- serot. Kurt Fisher Museum (private, by arrangement with Kurt Fisher) is on the Avenue Charles Sumner above the Ode'ide school. This collection, richer in pre-Columbian treasures than the national mu- seums and in Haitian books than the National Library, is organized, safeguarded and displayed with typical Germanic thoroughness by its scholarly owner. PTION-VILLE ; KENSCOFF, PINE FOREST, LAKE SAUMATRE, LEOGANE From Port-au-Prince every part of Haiti is accessible in a day if a day is taken to have 24 hours, and you enjoy killing yourself. But three excursions from the capital can be accomplished without hardship in much less than the time between dawn and dusk, and are so thoroughly worth the slight strain on the car which is in- volved as to come within range of a description of Port-au-Prince itself. The first, easiest, and most rewarding, is the trip mentioned in the Introduction to Furcy via Petion-Ville and Kenscoff. 1500 feet above the city, and pleasant the year round, P6tion-Ville is the home par excellence of the elite. It is reached by taking the Rue Dantes Destouches (also called Rue Pav6e), a street that crosses the Grand Rue two blocks south of Rue Roux and that passes the Ca- thedral St.-Trinite on the left and the Champ de Mars on the right Then it becomes the Avenue John Brown, or Lalue, or simply the Petion-Ville Road. It is narrow and it has many blind curves. It is crowded with passenger station-wagons (cawtionettes) whose driv- ers are almost always in a high state of excitement, pressing the horn more frequently than the foot-brake. All night long market-women, their heads loaded with vegetables and fruit, file down one side of the road in order to be in town for the dawn market; what little sleep they get they take like refugees on the pavements under the 114 The Story of the Black Republic Rue du Quai's arcades. And most of the afternoon the other side of the road is choked with the same (but wearier) women starting the long, long tramp homeward. This is the valley called Canape- Verte and it lives up to its name. Two spectacular homes rise above the many villas on the right, the lower belonging to Ars&ne Magloire, the President's brother and chief aide, the higher, on a peak of its own, to Horace Ashton, formerly of the American Embassy staff. The residence of the American Ambassador is on a steep bluff to the left as one ascends but only the driveway is visible from the road. The luxu- rious mansion of Marcaisse Prosper, powerful chief of the capital police, tops another eminence on the same side, where also are found the driveways to such luxury hotels as the Beau Site, the Belle Creole and El Rancho. The square at Potion- Ville, aristocratic with cypresses, is flanked by a church on the left and the Cabane Choucoune night- club and Hotel Choucoune on the right. At its end is the local head- quarters of the Garde d'Haiti and the offices of HABANEX, the banana trust. Leaving the far end of the square, the street to the left crosses a small bridge and winds on up the steep hill to the Pi- cardie Restaurant, Ibo L616 Hotel and the Hotel Damballah. The street to the right is the paved and poinsettia-lined highway to Kenscoff. 3000 feet above Port-au-Prince and fifteen minutes from P6- tion-Ville, a right turn off this highway leads to Boutilliers, where the restaurant "Le Perchoir" affords the view of the city, the bay and the plain already described. It is intended that this road, which was started in 1948, will eventually gird the slopes of Morne 1'Ho- pital as far as Carrefour. Why it was not built a few feet higher, with a view from the ridge or both slopes, is one of the unanswer- able Haitian puzzles. Two thousand feet higher still on the main highway is Kens- coff, and another thousand beyond that (6000 feet) Furcy. The legend is that these two towns were named after French counts who owned estates there in colonial times and who used to meet at the "Rendezvous'* for protection against the marrow on the long ride down to Port-au-Prince. Kenscoff today is an &ite summer-resort and Furcy is rapidly becoming one. At present the projected moun- tain road to Jacmel is completed to only a mile or so beyond Furcy and its termination provides a most spectacular view of the moun- tain wilderness beyond. This region is known as Fond de Trou Cou-cou, Across its rich red-earth ravines to cloud-capped La Selle, HAITI: Haiti's highest peak, floats the mystery of a world at work and^at peace. The wild, high, heart-rending strains of a coumbite song rise from time to time out of the smoky vastness, seeming to come from a race untouchable, integrated with itself and God. A somewhat longer but equally rewarding drive has as its ob- jective the Foret des Pins which covers the lower slopes of La Selle and Morne des Commissaires, and where in the winter the tempera- ture falls as low as 32% covering the chrysanthemums and wild strawberries with frost. From Croix des Missions on the main Cap Haitien highway a right turn leads through Croix des Bouquets and Gantier in the Cul-de-Sac to Fond Parisien where the road divides. First follow the left fork along the southern shore of tang Sau- matre. This 4O-square-mile lake shows by the shells and coral on its beaches how recently it has risen from the sea. It lies in a sparsely inhabited desert region; it is brackish, but not too brackish, I have been told, for extensive irrigation. At present it supports only a few small fish, ducks and egrets, and crocodiles up to fourteen feet in length. The beaches are pebbly, but the swimming is good, and the sailing, if the lake had a single sailboat, would be magnificent. Just beyond the Garde d'Haiti post of Malepas lies the Dominican bor- der, and indeed the high buildings of Jimani can be glimpsed from the tip of the lake. Returning to Fond Parisien and continuing along the south fork, the main road mounts constantly, and deteriorates as it mounts. The valley of Fond Verettes is a lush oasis between the desert and the pines. A village called Refuge marks the top eleva- tion, and Savanne Zombi, a few miles beyond, the red-clay vege- table country along the slopes that descend to the Caribbean. Fur- ther than Savanne Zombi the road is impassable without 4-wheel drive. Saltrou, well-named, is its terminus on the south shore. But anywhere between Verettes and Refuge is the loveliest spot for a picnic in Haiti because it is almost the only place where the popula- tion is sufficiently sparse or occupied with its own business to let you eat without feeling a little guilty. It is also one of the few places where you will be almost certain to hear the musicien, the smallest, rarest and most elusive of songsters whose voice sounds like a chord played on three silver flutes. The third and shortest (in time) of the recommended excur- sions from Port-au-Prince follows the southern highway through Carrefour and Gressier to Leogane. Just beyond the first of these towns is a stretch of coast (Mariani, Mre-Frapp6) where sea-bath- ing and coral-reef exploration are possible though rapidly the ac~ 116 The Story of the Black Republic cessible spots are being staked out as private cabanas by the fiite. Beyond Leogane a few miles is the village of Carrefour Dufort where on Easter Sunday all the Ra-Ra bands of Haiti (or so it seems) gather to really whoop it up; the street is crowded and noisy enough then to make Times Square on New Year's Eve seem like a Sunday School picnic. Through and on out of the town of L6o- gane itself a narrow but passable track leads from the far-right cor- ner of the Cathedral square two miles to Qa-Ira. A handsome bronze bell hanging outside the chapel of this tiny fishing village bears the inscription IOANNES SPECHT ROTTERDAM 1754. Hug- ging the ^ beach to the right it is possible to drive past Leo- gane's "airport" on which goats graze to a tiny black-sand beach amid mangroves where a thriving local boat-building industry is to be seen. Excellent fat langoustes may be bought here for $i the pair, but if you buy fish be sure the bones aren't blue: water with iron in it can give one a bad case of ptomaine poisoning. a Ira cannot be called a fine beach, or even a good place to bathe, but it has somethingjust what, the reader will discover for himself. ISLAND-HOPPING A round trip of the Bay of Port-au-Prince if you are lucky enough to have a boat, or find one willing to take you would in- clude stops at Sand Cay, Cabrit, the Arcadins and La Gonave. Sand Cay, also called "Iroquois," is a coral reef with a sandy bottom varying in depth from two to six feet, five miles out in the bay from the main wharf of the capital. Presently shiploads of stone are being transported there for the purpose of building a bath- ing pavilion and bar. The bathing is good, and safe. Through gog- gles a fine view can be had of the coral formations and small fish. The large fish have long since sought less populated places. An- other series of reefs, the Pelicans, lie to the north of Sand Cay. One of them, called Black Angel on U. S. Hydrographic Office Chart 2656, has a depth of only three feet and a truly spectacular display of the principal corals, elkhorn (white) and brain (yellow), with purple and crimson gorgonias waving between them. Approaching the north shore of the Bay, Ile-i-Cabrits (Goats' Island; it is called Carenage on the charts and most maps) emerges into view. It is separated from the coast (near Sources Puantes on the main Port-au-Prince-Cap Hai'tien highway) by a channel less than a half-mile wide and navigable for ships drawing no more 7 HAITI: than twelve feet. 1 Cabrits has no fresh water, little vegetation be- sides cactus, and no life but the lizard and the humming-bird. It has several good beaches, however, and (though combed and re-combed by amateur archeologists) a wealth of pottery and figurines left there by the Arawaks who must have used it as a burial ground. The three uninhabited Arcadin Islands lie midway in the chan- nel between the north shore of the Bay and Gonave Island, twenty- five miles northwest of Port-au-Prince. The central island, bare and shaped like a bone, carries an automatic lighthouse visible for nine miles. The northernmost and smallest is round and wooded and surrounded by viscious reefs. The southern island is also wooded but is accessible to sailing craft. It has fine beaches of sugary coral sand and is used as a temporary base by fishermen out for conch. Mounted in turquoise, armored by the shark, Collared in coral to the ocean's bed, Each holds the secret in its perfect park Of harmony: uninhabited. 2 Gonave Island is the size of Martinique or a third the size of Long Island. It rises to 2500 feet along its central spine which, re- sembling in one place a recumbent dog, is called Mon Chien Con- tent. There are no roads. The peasant population is estimated to be 10,000. Many of these isolated Haitians are engaged in fishing and most of the villages are on the coast. On the heights are a few springs, one waterfall, and many caves, but there are very few trees left on La Gonave and most of the island is barren. Gonave made the news in the 2o's when an ex-Marine Sergeant named Faustin Wirkus published his memoires covering the time when he was in charge of the big island and its ^^