A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  As the money destined for public works passed into private possession, the condition of the towns rapidly deteriorated. There was little sanitation. It was maintained that the harbour of Port-au-Prince could be smelled seven miles out to sea. When a revolution raged, the aspirant to the presidency would order his troops: Mes enfants, pillez en bon ordre. (‘My children, maintain your discipline while you are plundering.’) The men in the country did not dare to come into town for fear of being conscripted into the army. The women who brought their produce into market were robbed by soldiers. The hills were infested by brigands.

  Spencer St John’s book was unpopular in Haiti, but not for the reasons that would be immediately supposed. The Haitians did not mind being told that their officials were corrupt, their towns filthy and their army inefficient. But they did object very strongly to being told that they were cannibals, addicted to the practice of black magic, and that recently born children were sacrificed at their masses. There are several references to this in Spencer St John’s book. His revelations come under two headings: ‘Obeah’, which is necromancy, and ‘voodoo’, which is a form of religion. The existence of Obeah in the Antilles has never been questioned, and its cult was more widely spread in Haiti, where the Catholic influence was less. The word ‘zombie’ is found only in Haiti. It refers to the belief that dead men could be raised from their graves, animated by spirits, and employed as labourers. This kind of labourer was described as a zombie, and there was at one time a clause in the Haitian law forbidding the employment of dead men in the fields. The appellation is now given to a vague, purposeless human being who moves in a kind of trance, drained of vitality. The Haitians themselves clearly believed in zombies and in witch doctors, and there was no one to interfere with them in the practice of their craft.

  Voodoo is very different, and if it is difficult for a white man to speak of Obeah with authority it is quite impossible for him to speak of voodoo. It has been written of since the first African slaves landed in the New World. Labat spells it’ Vaudoux’. ‘The name Vaudoux,’ Peytraud says, ‘is applied by the Africans to a supernatural being whom they identify with a grass snake whose wishes are interpreted by a high priest or priestess. The slaves invoke him constantly, begging him to guide their master’s spirit. Their services become bacchanalian; inspired by alcohol they tremble, quiver, bite each other, lose all self-control.’ During these dances they recite the famous refrain of the cult of Vaudoux. ‘Eh, eh, Bomba, Heu, Heu.’ They had another refrain which said, ‘We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess. Let us die rather than renounce this vow.’

  It is two and a half centuries since Labat was a witness of the Vaudoux dance, and we have learned little more about it in those two and a half centuries than Labat has to tell us. We know, as he did, that it was a religious dance and that it was more moderate in its effects than the Danse à don Pèdre, which produced a kind of epilepsy among the participants and was forbidden on most estates. Before the French Revolution, when the slaves were closely supervised, the rites of Vaudoux can only have been practised with caution and in secrecy. After the withdrawal of the French, when there was no need for secrecy, any ritual may have been accepted in the dark masses in the hills. We cannot know. We shall never know. But it is interesting that the Haitians themselves should have been so indignant at these revelations and were so anxious to rebut them.

  In 1927 a similar effect was achieved by William Seabrook’s The Magic Island; its references to cannibalism and voodoo festivals were the subject of vehement protests. For a time, writers as a race were most unwelcome, and any visitor arriving with a typewriter was closely watched.

  Thirty years earlier, Hesketh Pritchard had a similar experience. ‘There is one thing common to the whole country,’ he wrote, ‘of which every Haitian denies the existence. Vaudoux is the one thing which they declare they have not. They tell you there is no snake worship (I am speaking of the higher classes) within the bounds of the Republic. But when you betray certain knowledge of the subject they admit that though sacrifices and savage dances may take place in other departments, no such things are known in the one in which you at the moment find yourself.’

  Hesketh Pritchard visited Haiti at the turn of the century, and a book called Where Black Rules White was the result, Pritchard’s name is little, if at all, known today, though he created the fictional character on which the Douglas Fairbanks Zorro and Son of Zorro films was built. But he was a man of considerable gifts; he had travelled widely, he was a soldier with much foreign service, he was a first-class cricketer who played as a fast bowler for Hampshire and The Gentlemen. In 1909 he represented the Authors against the Publishers in a one-day match at Lord’s. The Publishers objected to the opposition of a player of such quality, but there were few members of the Authors’ side so fully entitled to a place on the qualification of literary merit. He was a sound writer, who did his writing before the vogue of sensational journalism, and he is one of the most valuable witnesses that we have to that period of Haitian history.

  He wrote at length on Vaudoux. He considered that it was so inextricably woven in with every side of the Haitian’s life, his politics, his religion, his outlook upon the world, his social and family relations, his prejudices and peculiarities, that he cannot be judged apart from it’. He considered that the official Roman Catholicism of the island was no more than a thin veneer. At this time the Vaudoux priests were known as papalois, the priestesses as mamalois, a corruption of Papa le roi and Mama le roi. The priests and priestesses lived mainly in the mountains. The services took place at night and under conditions of pseudo-secrecy. A serpent kept in a box was the symbol of the deity. There were dancing, sacrificing, incantations, and at the end wild dancing by the mamaloi; exactly as it was in Labat’s day.

  Labat, however, does not refer to the sacrificial side of the ceremony, and it may be presumed that this side could only be conducted with the greatest secrecy in plantation days, that it was a clandestine cult only emerging into the open in Haiti when French dominance was removed. It is extremely doubtful whether today it exists anywhere else in the West Indies, and presumably even in Haiti it has ‘gone underground’.

  According to Hesketh Pritchard, there were two sects of Vaudoux; one which sacrificed only fruit, white cocks and white goats; the other at which the blood of a black goat was the prelude to the sacrifice of the ‘goat without horns’ - the human child. White was the colour of the former ceremony, red of the latter. Pritchard was the witness of a ceremony where the flags and handkerchiefs were red and white; the cocks sacrificed were black and white, which suggested to him that this particular service combined the ritual of the two cults.

  Very few white men can have seen a Vaudoux ceremony. Most accounts come, as this present one does, at second or third hand. And it is probable that many of the descriptions of such ceremonies are based on Pritchard’s account. He does not say in which town he saw it, though he states that in the south the cult was stronger than in the north and that it was strongest in Jacmel. He was told that he must visit after nightfall one of the poorer sections of the town, and then shortly before midnight he would hear the beating of a drum. He stresses the peculiarities of the drum that summons the faithful to their worship. It was four feet high, made out of some jointed wood like bamboo; it was as wide as a man’s trunk. Black coatskin was pegged across the top.

  Since the publication of Where Black Rules White this style of drum has been made familiar to the western world by jazz orchestras, but it is the special peculiarity of the Vaudoux drum, or rather of the Vaudoux drummer, that while the rhythm can be clearly heard a mile away, near at hand it is indistinct and low. It can thus warn the initiate from a long way off, but it can confuse the uninitiated. Pritchard said that he found it extremely difficult to follow the dull throb of the drum at close quarters. Its muffled and mysterious beat had for him a thrilling quality.

  On this particular occasion he followed the sound of the drum throug
h a succession of mean streets. The town was under martial law, and a sentry challenged him, but he bribed his way till he reached the place that his informant had instructed him to seek.

  There was a large crowd outside the house, peering through its windows. A large Negro with a cocomacaque stood at the door. Pritchard eventually secured admission. He found himself in a dark, shuttered room. A song was being chanted. He could not tell how many people were inside; it was very hot. A candle was lit and the song ceased suddenly. Some two hundred people were crowded into two small rooms; some stood against the walls, others squatted on their haunches. The walls were incongruously decorated with prints from Parisian newspapers and a photograph of the German Emperor. A narrow passage had been left across the unboarded floor. Every glistening face was turned toward the mamaloi.

  The singing began again; it was led by a vast, gross creature wearing a voluminous white and purple cotton dress. She held a live cock in her hands. She swayed as she sang; the congregation swayed in time with her. The chant was insistent, monotonous; the drum drove it into the brain like blows. The mamaloi was dancing now between the knees of the worshippers. She was small-faced, snub-nosed, middle-aged. She had a white robe, gold beads and a red sash. More candles were lit. They were set in pots decorated with pink melon flowers; the feast was spread upon the floor; beans, rice, water melons; bottles of wine and rum. Every so often the mamaloi would sprinkle the feast with water. Each time she did, the pitch of the song rose. Its dirge-like quality persisted. Then, suddenly, it loudened. The steps of the mamaloi grew tigerish; her eyes dilated; she cleared her throat and spat. There was the clink of metal.

  The papaloi was a small, dirty old man. He crouched at the side. The mamaloi seized the cock from the fat leader of the chant. Her dancing grew more frenzied; as she whirled to the insistent, maddening drumming, she laid the cock upon the heads of the worshippers. Her face was contorted. Her dancing grew faster, faster; she straightened her arm; there was a flapping of wings, a snowstorm of feathers, and the cock was headless. Her frenzy mounted. She pressed the neck of the carcass to her mouth. She stopped, motionless. Slowly she withdrew her hand from her stained lips and teeth. Then, screaming, she began to run up and down, till she fell in a trance, the cock still in her hand.

  The ceremony was now under way. Six more cocks were sacrificed; fetishes were produced, wooden images, stones and bones; the blood of one of the cocks was set apart in a basin, which the mamaloi took outside and sprinkled over the doors and gates. On her return, with the blood that remained, she made the sign of the cross on the foreheads of the congregation.

  Soon the dancing became universal; the noise was deafening; the heat grew heavier. The feasting and revelry would continue, so Pritchard had been informed, for two days more. He had had enough. He did not give himself the chance of seeing whether the programme included the sacrifice of ‘the goat without horns’. Many similar descriptions have appeared during the last sixty years, but Hesketh Pritchard’s was the first, and it is authentic.

  The snake used in these ceremonies was generally the macajuel, a harmless animal like the boa. Pritchard, in a remote part of the country, found a peasant with a snake of this kind. He offered five dollars for it, but his offer was refused.

  The power of the papaloi in Haiti was very strong. Not only was he a high priest, but a physician. He was an expert poisoner, but he also had the remedy for the poisons that he administered. The populace was in his power. His influence in the army was great. The Obeah man in the British and the French islands was and is very strong. But he is not nearly as powerful as was the Vaudoux papaloi, because he has not the backing of religion, of snake worship. Obeah is an affair of charms, of love-potions, of the laying on of curses. It is a nuisance, but not more than that.

  The last chapter of Where Black Rules White is called ‘Can the Negro rule himself?’ It is a question that has perplexed Europe and the United States from the time of emancipation until today; and the importance of Haiti lies in the partial answer that it offers to that question.

  Pritchard liked the Haitians. He found them kindly, hospitable, good-hearted, song-loving and cheerful. He found them ignorant, lazy and superstitious, disastrously addicted to the consequences of serpent worship. But he could only find one answer to the question in terms of Haiti. The Haitians had the most fertile and beautiful of the Caribbean islands; they inherited a made country; they had the advantages of the Code Napoléon as a model for their legislation; they were given the best of opportunities in a prosperous territory. Yet, after a hundred years, government had degenerated into a farce; houses and plantations had been reclaimed by the forest; there was no stability, no security for the individual. At the turn of the century it appeared to Hesketh Pritchard that Bryan Edwards’ prophecy had been fulfilled.

  15 The Century’s Close

  Gently, imperceptibly, the nineteenth century neared its close. In contrast with the high drama of the preceding three hundred years, there had been, since Waterloo, for the majority of the sugar islands, a bloodless period of decline, in some areas a period of decay. But others had the promise of rebirth. The sun had shone, the rain had fallen, hurricanes had blown, houses had shivered under the impact of earthquakes. Little by little, one by one, the islands licked their wounds, recovered their composure and began to prepare themselves for the place that they would eventually occupy in the world of trade. The phrase ‘rich as a Creole’ belonged now to the past, yet in recompense a man could sleep at night without fear of being woken before dawn, to face the cutlasses of a slave revolt or the musketry of an invasion. One by one the various islands adjusted themselves to their changed allegiance; St Lucia and Grenada realized that they were British; Martinique and Guadeloupe were at peace in their return to France; Dominica, housing the Caribs, her peasantry speaking patois, was still a little puzzled, uncertain whether she belonged to the Leewards or the Windwards, wondering, with the high mountains of French islands to the north and south, whether in fact she could ever belong to anyone except herself; St Vincent, the long conflict with the Caribs ended, was entering into competition with the brother and sister islands that had a start on her. She had two particular products that encouraged her to be optimistic, arrowroot and sea island cotton.

  To the north, the Danish islands of St Croix, St Thomas and St John were slipping from the fortunate position that Labat had noted. Steam had taken the place of sail. It was no longer so important to meet the trade winds first, and what was the use of being a neutral when there was little likelihood of another war? The residents, on the whole, regretted that they had not been taken over by the United States after the Civil War. They hoped that another opportunity would arise.

  To no island had the century brought greater changes than it had to Trinidad. At the close of the eighteenth century, Trinidad had been one of the most neglected possessions in the Spanish empire; now, although the Caribbean was the least cherished section of Britain’s expanding economy, it was rapidly becoming one of the most important islands in the area, and by the introduction of indented East Indian labour it had acquired an atmosphere and population very different from those of the other islands.

  Holland had turned her attention to her East Indian possessions, to Java and Sumatra; she had little time to devote to the interests of Saba, Curaçao, Aruba, St Eustatius and half of St Martin. Curaçao was no longer important as an entrepôt for illicit trade; its only value lay in the liqueur made from its oranges, whose peels were originally dried in the sun and soaked in Jamaican rum, and later were shipped to Holland, unsoaked, for treatment there. Saba was described by Labat as a natural and impregnable fortress. It has no foreshore, no flat cultivated land at the mountain’s base. It is an extinct volcano, and the Sabans have perched themselves round the lip of the crater. There are many uninhabited islands, and it must be assumed that the only reason why a settlement was made here was because Saba presented complete immunity at a time when wars were constant. In those days, the sett
lements round the crater could be reached only by a single passage cut in the stone, too narrow to admit more than one person at a time. The Sabans heaped stones over the passes in such a way that by the pulling of a string an avalanche could be catapulted on to an invader. Saba was able to survive and build up its own personal way of living, while its richer neighbours were the victims of attack and siege and plunder.

  In Labat’s day, Saba was inhabited by forty to fifty settlers and some hundred and fifty Negro slaves. The plantations were small and well cultivated, the whitewashed houses pretty and well furnished, the settlers living, as it were, in a large club and frequently entertaining one another. Labat was received, he said, very kindly. The principal trade in his day was in boots and shoes.

  It is a curious community that has grown up there; one of its most surprising features being the lack of intermarriage between the descendants of the original settlers and the original slaves. Sabans are pure African or pure European. The two races live on terms of the greatest amity, dividing the co-operative duties of administration, but inhabiting different sections of the island. The Africans live inside the crater, in the section that is known as The Bottom, although it is eight hundred feet above sea level, because they prefer the warmth there, while the whites have perched themselves on the outer and exposed edges. Another curiosity of Saba is that, in spite of its being a Dutch island, scarcely one of its families has any links with the Netherlands, and the purest English in the Caribbean is spoken there. Saba is a social and architectural curiosity, with its houses on the windward side built so close together and on so steep a slope that it has been said that you step from the front door of one house on to the roof of the one below. That is an exaggeration, but it gives an idea of what the village looks like. Curious though Saba is, its possession is not a responsibility that has seriously disturbed the colonial administrators at The Hague.