Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Alan left for Haiti on December 10 on the SS Pastores with 155 pounds of luggage, arriving in Port-au-Prince on the fourteenth, and he was happy to have Zora guide him in getting settled. With the government wary of American tourists who might be writers or filmmakers, for the first few weeks he had to be careful and count on the kindness of influential locals, who themselves were involved in a folkloric and ethnographic reaction against the imposed culture of the invaders by preserving and understanding local culture. Zora introduced him to Rulx Léon, director of the National Health Service, who promised to set up meetings with the president of Haiti and others so that he could be granted permission to move freely around the country. To defuse suspicions that he was there to study Vodou music, Alan let it be known that he was interested in all kinds of Haitian music, and soon was taken by some local intellectuals to the house of pianist-composer Ludovic Lamothe, the best-known classical musician in Haiti, who played for them pieces he had composed that reinterpreted local Carnival music in European forms, much the way Louis Moreau Gottschalk had done with New Orleans folk music.

  Alan felt uneasy about being introduced to Haiti by its bourgeoisie, given that the gap between the upper class and the peasants was so pronounced. He began to resent their supercilious and distorted view of folk culture and was even becoming disillusioned with Zora, who he felt was spending too much time with the elites and not enough living with the folk: “She had become the toast of the Haitian army.”

  “Zora is hard enough to fathom by herself,” he wrote Elizabeth, “and as uncertain and potentially violent as she can be.”

  At first I was completely dependent on her and on top of that I was afraid she was falling in love with me. Nothing has happened so far and now I have made some friends on my own and am not so completely dependent on her as I was at first. But God I’ll be glad when I breathe my last breath of Port-au-Prince air and get out into the country where there is a little more physical danger involved, but where the issue is simpler—do the people trust and like you or not?

  A few days later Zora left for the island of Gonâve to spend Christmas, where she discovered that White King Wirkus was a fake, and then went on to Archahaie, which she had heard was the center of Vodou in Haiti. In March she took a break from fieldwork and returned to New York to visit with friends and work on a novel.

  Now left completely on his own, Alan hired an interpreter, guide, and cook named Revolie Polines, who had been working for the Americans before they left. By the end of their first day together, Alan was calling him in his field notes his mentor, professor, and master. Lomax’s five dollars a day was expected to cover Polines’s pay and provide for both of their expenses—food, transportation, housing, and medicine. For anything else—batteries, rental of musical instruments, refreshments, and pay for performers or for the right to photograph Haitians—he had to submit a request to the library, and by the end of the first week he was beginning to worry about how he could get by on so little money.

  One of the first things he and Revolie did was to stop by a concert of a military band in Port-au-Prince on the Champ de Mars, but they soon grew bored and left for the outskirts of the city and found themselves immersed in a rich sonic world:

  Five or six radios going very loud. The further west we got the poorer the houses, the ragged [sic] the people, until at last we went in between some little shacks to my man Polines’ present domicile with his cousins, exchanged courtesies with two slim and handsome Negro women with red head-rags and then the drum pulled us deeper into the moonlight behind the house ... to a little thatched shed set up on poles, open on all sides where, by the leaping flame of a little kerosene lamp ... the tambours were speaking and the vagabonds and whores were dancing.

  We had not walked twenty yards when we came around the corner of a shanty and saw four couples dancing a slow one-step in the alley-way between a high candelabra cactus fence and the house. Hanging from the fence was an old bicycle tire, burning slow and orange, throwing a golden flame across the dancers and the wall of the shanty. I wish I could tell how beautiful this scene was, how melancholy, how restrained and graceful. The music was click, chatter, tinkle and deep-throbbing thump-thump.

  They had wandered into a yard where Ago’s Bal Band was playing a wider range of music than Alan had ever expected to find in rural Haiti: “marches, blues, meringues, bals,” even one piece in Spanish. When he wrote his first report back to Strunk at the library, he described this band:

  This country is, so far as my experience goes, the richest folk-song field I know. The drumming is intricate and sophisticated. Last night I listened for an hour to one of the native orchestra[s], composed of a pair of bones, a three string guitar, a pair of Cuban cha-chas (or gourds), and a manoumba (a peculiar bass instrument)—a rectangular box, with a circular opening in the side across which are ranged in an iron bar eight inch-wide iron tongues (an octave of them I think) with one hand and beats the box with the other—; each of the instruments had a distinct rhythm which fitted into the rhythmic pattern of the whole, the guitar played the melody and the manoumbas the bass, and the four players sang. It was deliciously lovely.

  The dancers to this music moved with angularity and flexibility, and with such sudden shifts of attitude that they seemed to him to turn themselves into cubist sculptures. Alan had seen expressive black dancers in the rural South of the United States, but this was something altogether different: the movement of their hips, their pelvic thrusts and undulating arms responding to the multiple meters of the rhythm, songs that openly expressed sexuality, the casual, rough unison of the women’s voices rising over the hand drums. In only a few days he had come to experience firsthand the sharp demarcation between the Haitian élite and the masse, between the rich and the poor, between those who spoke French and those who spoke Créole, between Catholics and vodouistes.

  Just after Christmas, Alan traveled ten miles or so northeast of Port-au-Prince to Port Beudet, a small village on the Haitian American Sugar Company’s plantation, on the rich land of the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, to seek an audience with Doc Reiser. Other writers before Lomax mentioned Reiser with gratitude, sometimes exaggerating his importance by calling him a doctor or a psychiatrist, perhaps even alluding to his anomalous connection to Vodou, but never in any revealing detail. Alan, on the other hand, took extensive notes at their first meeting, fearing that if he waited until he knew more he would be too overwhelmed to write it. His first sight of the village was recorded in his notebook:

  The banana and cane plantations are orderly jungles. Something about the banana grove makes it the most tropical thing I have ever seen. Something completely foreign about it to the very nature of this temperate zone. Something exaggerated about the size of its great knife-like leaves—a huge palm with forty feet of its bole buried out of sight in the earth....

  The [mental] institution is inconspicuous among the ear-like banana leaves—a lot of low-lying green and white sheds.... Here are two hundred twenty inmates and their chatter never ceases—it is like New York without the subway or the excuse to stay awake ... this world is awake at all hours.

  Reiser told him that he had been raised on a farm in Utah, in a family of musicians, and he himself sang and played guitar. He joined the navy, married, and became involved with a famous movie star, he said, which led to his divorce. (Alan noted to himself that this particular detail seemed a little incredible.) After wandering the seas for years, he was transferred by the navy to Haiti, where he at last felt at home and found his calling. He discovered that he had the gift of divining patients’ illnesses simply by looking at them. Next, he learned that he was psychic and was able to see the future. Such feats spread his reputation across Haiti, and as word reached the houngans, the Voudun priests, they began to seek him out and eventually initiated him. It was a short step to adapting his abilities to possessional states, where under the influences of one or the other of the most extreme of Voudun deities he performed extravagantly. Reiser narrated
his account as a grim parade of ghostly patients passed them by, some moaning or weeping, some bent over or walking on their knees, one pretending to read an American magazine, another begging to go home to give birth to her baby. Alan ended his handwritten notes by saying, “I am so nervous I can scarcely write as this scrawl witnesses.”

  The phantasmagoria that was Haiti had begun to take hold of his imagination, his senses bombarded by the dizzying mix of poverty, sounds, color, smells, and the ravages of malaria that a few years later would be called surreal by André Breton, the father of surrealism, when he visited the island. Alan observed that

  everything is so new here. Food, temperament, culture, landscape, climate. I listen and look, myself enervated in five or six hours and add to that the laziest air in the world inviting to repose and you have the sum of my problems and a perfect excuse for not writing.... God knows I have enough work to try to figure these people out. My former experiences as a collector were mere child’s play; here I am up against something.... I have to learn diplomacy, how to collect, how to handle a servant, how to beat the tambour, how to dance, how to bargain, how to lie, how to run the new recorder, how to take notes, how to budget and keep accounts, all on top of my personal problems, which have formerly kept me completely occupied. And, God, this world is beautiful, beautiful and strange.

  There was the language problem:

  This land is literally all folklore, and what’s not such is more interesting than the other. People tell me things I want to hear all day long in a language that they all say is very simple but is the most difficult thing I have struck yet. It is a sort of short-hand French. An idea of it in English—“m da flo I nt gay wn own—my dear fellow I want to go down town”—only backwards. My French is very infantile and I have to translate from Creole to French and then to English. Of course, there is one consolation. After one overcomes the first area of difficulty, and where I wallow now, the rest is easy. The language is non-inflective, the grammar is simple though subtle, but the subtleties are “English” enough so that they are not literally impossible. It is twice as hard for me as Spanish, especially because I can’t just sit by and absorb but have to talk English and find out what people mean all the time. You can imagine the problems uncountable in transcribing singing in this Patois. One has to invent orthography as one goes along.

  The two languages, as he said, were products of the class structure, in which the schools ignored Créole, the Haitian constitution forbade Vodou, and the peasant associations (such as the cooperative work groups and savings societies) were ignored by the bankers. In a very long letter Alan wrote to Charles Seeger, he managed to express what was different about folklore collecting in a society like Haiti:

  This is the first place I have ever visited where there were two classes, each of which had its language and its culture, completely separated and distinct. The working class, the peasants who sit flat on their buttocks upon the soil, so to speak, are all informants, so far as the folklorist is concerned, especially if he has a lot of radical notions about folklore not being old, necessarily, or cut to fit any special pattern, or the sole possession of a few adepts, but the property of whatever person it has by the tongue. That makes every single peasant I meet here an informant and most of the population is peasant. So I have been buried, snowed under. I wish I had the virtue of the single-track mind, but I am interested in everything I hear.

  A novice at Créole, with no help from reference books, the names of dozens of Vodou deities buzzing all around him and subtle interpenetrations of Catholic and Vodou doctrine a theologian’s nightmare, he wrote Melville Herskovits for help on what to record, and the professor obliged, also sending him his own notes on Vodou religion.

  Whatever the delays he ran into in Haiti and his cultural confusions, by halfway through January Alan had succeeded in recording Vodou songs and drummers, string bands, dance bands, Catholic and Vodou services and prayers (the first recordings ever done in a hounfort, the site of Vodou services), and the compositions of M. Lamothe, so many recordings that he had used up most of the blank discs he had brought with him and was waiting impatiently for a new batch to arrive from Washington.

  Alan and Revolie set out by bus January 20 to Les Cayes, a city on the south coast of Haiti, where, Alan had been assured, the inhabitants were ruled by “strange gods,” if not by devils. It was a venture worth writing about, and as it turned out it would be the only thing he’d ever publish from his Haitian trip. In “Haitian Journey,” an impressionistic account for the Southwest Review, he described the passengers on the bus, dockworkers loading coffee and singing work songs, and horseback rides to various towns, and told about riddles, game songs, folktales, Mardi Gras songs, and tales of zombies. The article ends at the point where he and Revolie go on to the town of Plaisance, where they recorded RaRa bands that were rehearsing for Holy Week. The sound of drums rippled from one hilltop to another, family and religious bands roamed the streets, bamboo horns called vacines hocketed together, the leaders of these groups wearing feathers and wildly quilted suits, twirling batons, and wearing dark glasses. And through it all Alan and Revolie witnessed the counterpoint of the ravages of malaria.

  Before he left New York, Alan had asked Elizabeth Harold to join him in Haiti, where they would be married. It was a romantic gesture, and one that also avoided his having to invite his father to a wedding to which he strongly objected. Yet Alan fretted, because he did not know until late January whether Elizabeth would actually be coming, and once she did arrive in early February they had to halt their nuptial plans when they discovered that neither one of them was of legal age for marriage in Haiti and therefore required parental consent. Haitian law also required that banns be publicly announced two weeks in advance. Alan was forced to turn to John for help, though he had yet to tell him that he planned to be married:

  I am in a rather desperate mess and you are the only person in the world who can help me out of it. You, or perhaps an expert forger. The situation is as follows. (1) As you know by now—and only an unexpected unrolling of the yarn of fate prevented me from being the first to tell you—Elizabeth is on her way here and we will shortly be married. I was never certain before last night, when her letter came, that she would come at all although I had asked her repeatedly.... I had not had time to prepare in advance; or to tell you, myself, as I certainly wanted to. However, I have been so unhappy away from her and I love her so completely and entirely, and am so much more alive and happy when she is near that the temporary embarrassment doesn’t count. That largely arises out of the complexities of the Haitian code of civil marriages which calls me still a minor at 22 and demands the consent of my father before it will consent to say its magic formula over me. Therefore, please, if you love me, send me airmail a statement of your consent, affirmed by a notary and along with this a copy of my birth certificate from Seton, very official. I know you don’t approve of my marrying but please give me a charitable lift out of the hole into which this legal technicality has thrown me.... This is a hard letter to write and I can tell you I’ve spent a good many hours of agony over it in this strange country. And it took all my nerve to carry me over for a while. But now all I feel is joy in the knowledge that I will see Elizabeth in a few hours and that, whatever happens, we will win through. Please send me your love and your blessing and your official consent.

  They were married on February 23, following Alan’s plea to Estenio Vincent, the Haitian president, to waive the banns. (“I come to you with an unusual request, the granting of which will both facilitate a scientific work, important to Haiti, and make possible the happiness of myself and my fiancée.”)

  Living in a hut with a thatched roof, awakened in each other’s arms by roosters and song, they were at work all their waking hours, often from seven o’clock to three in the morning, eating peasant food, tramping up creek beds and climbing mountain roads, sometimes riding in an old borrowed car painted yellow with scarlet trim (“It was like a great, square-cu
t, tropical fowl, a fantastic bird with an olive green beak and a black toupee, and it was named Fleur d’Innocence”). Elizabeth (whom Alan now called “Chavella” or “che’ Neg’ ”) learned the rituals and deities, the two of them standing on the edge of the Vodou services, watching the houngan prepare a verver (a ground painting done with a mixture of ashes and cornmeal) appropriate to the deity addressed in the service, swept up by the music of the drums and voices that accompanied this work, leading to dances of possession where priest or priestess and supplicants are addressed by the sacred. At one point, Alan and Elizabeth let themselves be buried in a grave for a few moments as part of a ritual to protect them from harm. Once they were dug up, they were taken to a grove of trees where a houngan captured a tarantula and fed it. Now, they were assured, nothing and no one but God himself could kill them.

  Just before Elizabeth arrived Alan had contracted intestinal malaria and was unable to eat or drink much for a few weeks. He was drained of strength for the bulk of the rest of his time in Haiti, and when Elizabeth became sick too, their work began to suffer from lack of money and the authority that money and vitality buy in a poor country: