The bad vibes came back as I groped my way along the path. Uneasy unlivable country. But the night air was soft on my skin and sweet to breathe and the sky was true Caribbean, soft blackness, fur soft, with more diamond starlight than anywhere I know in the world and I told myself to buck up, nothing could be too wrong in such a beautiful place. Next morning the sun shone on sea and mountains and I leapt like a kudu downhill to finish departure chores. Skidding on a stone, I wrenched my ankle and hopped and limped into town, thinking this was a bruise that would soon cure itself. And so arrived in Jacmel with optimism and a badly swollen ankle.
At first sight, Jacmel charmed. What I saw was an unpaved street running back from the cliff that edged the bay. The far view was glinting blue water; the near view was wooden houses, two stories high, with balconies and long windows (tropical French) and pillars and fretwork. They were painted strawberry pink, lemon yellow, white with green trimmings, pretty as a picture. Opposite the row of houses, a sort of village green was shaded by big feathery trees, flamboyante and jacaranda, and huge mangoes and others, perhaps Indian laurel. Lovely, I thought, what luck. I presented myself with winning smiles at the Pension Croft, middle house in the row, white with green trim, the only hotel. Madame Croft received me icily in the ground floor dining-room. She was an ornate coal-black lady with a mountainous involved hair-do over mean eyes. She did not bother to answer and I stood there, weight on my operational foot, wondering if this was a bad morning or if she was always rude to guests. How was I to know that my skin color revolted Madame Croft? Her skin didn't matter a hoot to me, though her manner did.
I had not thought of Haiti in terms of color. Probably I knew it was a black republic. Good. No concern of mine. Most of the people in this part of the world were black or coppery brown or a mixture; non-white, anyway. Mexican Indians, whom I knew best, were one of the main reasons I loved living in Mexico. I had traveled a lot in the Caribbean and found the islanders specially kind and agreeable. Why should Haiti be different?
A maid, giggling from nerves, showed me my room. A corridor ran the length of the floor, doors opened on both sides to cubicles whose thin wood walls did not meet the ceiling. Primitive air conditioning. A window at either end of the corridor let in scant air and light. My cubicle had no window, a weak bulb on a cord from the ceiling, a bowl and pitcher, an iron cot, wobbly table and chair and a rope nailed to the wall for hanging clothes. I wanted to lie down but the sheets gave off a daunting sour smell, so I sat on the chair, my foot on the cot, listening to a man who yawned and spat, yawned and spat. And listened to the school next door where lessons had resumed. For four hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, little Haitians kneeled on their school benches and shouted in unison whatever they were learning. ‘Deux fois deux font quatre, trois fois deux font six.‘ In due course I heard geography—les grands fleuves du monde sont—French kings and spelling. If it stunned my mind, what did it do to theirs?
Come lunch-time, I limped downstairs to the soiled table-cloths and the flies. The dining-room was a bare white room with seven or eight tables, opening to the street and the village green. I was given a table stuck off in a corner. Nearby tables had been pulled away so that I sat in a cordon sanitaire of space. No one looked at me directly; sly glances took me in; no one answered my bonjour then, or ever after spoke to me. With prickly intuition, I knew that the whispering and bursts of laughter had to do with me. The food was inedible, tasting of garlic and sugar.
At stressful moments in travel, I try to console myself with worse moments elsewhere. Is this as ghastly as The Light of Shaokwan? Not quite, cheer up, it isn't raining, the weather is perfect, you can lie under a tree; for clearly, walking was a thing of the past.
My search for a tree out of sight of the Pension Croft led me dose to a small shoebox-shaped building of cream-colored stucco with a sign: Bibliothèque. A public library in Jacmel seemed a miracle, as did Monsieur Réné the librarian and his assistant Mademoiselle Annette, a girl so silent that she became invisible. Monsieur Réné was small, thin, brown not coal black, with receding greying hair, glasses and a proper dark suit. He smiled at me so that I wanted to kiss him and blubber thanks but instead told him that I was a writer with no place to write and could I work in the library. Monsieur Réné fluttered with enthusiasm; he had never met a writer; he would gladly give me an empty room in the back.
By way of confirming what I guessed, I asked Monsieur Réné if there was any other foreigner here. Such as a foreigner washed ashore from a wreck with permament brain damage, or a criminal foreigner hiding from the cops of three countries. Monsieur Réné was puzzled by my question. No, he said, we are all Haitians. Foreigners never come here; our village offers no distractions. I saw it, then. I was the only Negro in Jacmel. And, furthermore, a Negro who had gate-crashed an exclusive white club, the Pension Croft. The Pension Croft, I lied, was very nice but a bit noisy; could I rent a quieter room in someone's house? Monsieur Réné was amazed. The houses were filled with large families, nobody would wish to take in a guest. Not surprising. Few white families would welcome an unknown black visitor. I dared not ask, so soon, about transport back to Port-au-Prince, but when I did Monsieur Réné had no ideas; he never went himself; his car was not strong enough and Port-au-Prince seemed too far, too strange; no one from Jacmel went there.
Beyond the main library with its two rows of bookshelves, Monsieur Réné ushered me into an oversized empty closet. They found a table and chair, the window was luxury, the silence blessed. Since I hadn't brought anything with me, might I just sit here? Monsieur Réné hurried to find a writing-pad and two pencils and left on tiptoe so that creation could begin. I wrote on the pad ‘Self pity, that way madness lies,’ then stretched out on the clean floor, to rest my ankle. Monsieur Réné knocked and entered before I could scramble up. In this position, he saw what ailed me, was full of sympathy and insisted on driving me to the clinic.
The clinic has vanished from memory but I remember the smiling doctor, a slightly larger edition of Monsieur Réné, in a white coat. He produced an enormous syringe, suitable for a horse, and a gigantic thick needle, about six inches long. I was paralyzed by my new role, lonely Negro scared to offend white authority. With terror, I let that kind dangerous doctor plunge the needle into my hot puffed ankle and force in what seemed a pint of liquid. Novocaine, said the doctor, all goes well now. Monsieur Réné drove me back to the Pension Croft.
By four that afternoon, my left foot and ankle resembled elephantiasis and the pain was torture. I clamped the pillow over my face and groaned aloud; through the pillow I heard myself making animal noises. I wept torrents. I couldn't stop and was frightened to be so helpless among enemies: shivering, sweating, sniveling, half crazy. Madame Croft told a maid to inquire why the white-Negro was being a nuisance. Madame Croft appeared in the doorway to check for herself. She stared at me with glacial contempt, but did send up pitcher after pitcher of boiling water. For the next three hours I soaked my elephantine extremity in the washbowl and was finally beyond the howling stage. Madame Croft sent up greasy soup. I slept despite the cot smell and grueling sounds from other rooms.
Suffering is supposed to ennoble; not me, it stupefies me. I could have saved myself by ordering a bottle of rum and getting sodden drunk, and then another bottle, though first finding a telephone to call the U.S. Consulate in Port-au-Prince and demand evacuation on medical grounds. I thought drink was for pleasure among friends and never turned to consulates in an hour of need. In growing misery, I clung to one plan: survive until I could walk, then dump my suitcase and proceed on foot, hippety-hop over the mountains, to an airplane and flight from this doom island.
When I could return to the library, I did not report that the nice doctor had just about finished me but Monsieur Réné saw that I was barely mobile and brought me a cane. My creeping along with a cane, sneaker on right foot, cut-open bedroom slipper on left foot, added to my repellent skin color, made me an irresistible target. When cla
sses ended at noon the homing schoolchildren picked up stones and cheerfully stoned me. They were behind me and I didn't know what the yelling and laughing was about until a stone hit me. I thought this an accident and turned to smile forgiveness, only to see a bunch of pretty little kids, dressed in those French-style black school smocks, jumping up and down and aiming more stones. Which hit me. ‘Blanc! Blanc!’ they shouted, meaning ‘Nigger! Nigger! The stones weren't large, nor were the kids; I wasn't hurt. I was an old lame Negro, chivvied and harassed by white kids, and I burned with outrage. And with hatred for those adults on the street who watched, smiling approval.
There was nothing to do except retreat to the library, where again I suppressed the news of the day. The silent retreat shamed me. Shame was hardest to bear. I could see it would take a while to get used to humiliation. If anyone ever got used to it?
My unborn novel was by now a sad joke. All day, I sat on the hard library chair, resting my foot on an orange crate, and read and brooded. From whenever ideas first reach a child's mind, I had been indoctrinated by my parents’ words and deeds never to condemn by race, creed, color or even nationality. The history of our time gave that early teaching the force of moral law; I refer, above all, to the Nazis. But there was still plenty of repression in the world, by race, creed and color, and I was wholeheartedly against it. Yet here I sat, in racist Jacmel, grinding my teeth in a fury of counter-racism. I wondered whether I was ruined for life and would become a disgrace to my parents, loathing blacks.
It is hard to believe that, in 1952, there were only two places on earth where blacks could not be insulted or mistreated simply because of their color: Haiti and Liberia. The Caribbean colonies were intact though certainly benign by 1952, but the African colonies were far from guaranteed humane and insult was automatic: no dogs or natives allowed. The American South practiced apartheid, discrimination and segregation, and deprived Negroes of the basic right to vote. Ugly and violent white racism: and the Civil Rights Act, which finally outlawed all this, was twelve years away. South Africa made customary apartheid into the law of the land, in 1948. But Haiti had been a sovereign state for just short of one hundred and fifty years. No living Haitian ever suffered here from white racism.
Hold on. Error. For twenty years, from 1915 until 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt recalled them, the U.S. Marines were overlords of Haiti. They had been sent for allegedly humanitarian reasons, to quell disorder in Haiti; this action was justified by the Monroe Doctrine (the time-honored precursor of the Brezhnev Doctrine). Ordinary Haitians resented the Marines who treated them like American Negroes. No Negroes were then accepted in the Marine Corps. But surely the Marines hadn't troubled remote little Jacmel? There is a sort of folk knowledge that drifts and stays in the air. Could I have been reaping what the Marines sowed: anger, revenge, insult for injury? Americans tend to forget, or never knew, how often our government through our soldiery has interfered in the domestic affairs of others in the Caribbean area; and certainly we ignore the after-effects, lingering on in collective memory.
Haiti baffled me then and baffles me now, decades later. It is, I think, the most beautiful country in the Caribbean. It has a marvelous healthy climate, fertile soil, plenty of water, some mineral resources, possible hydro-electric power, a surrounding sea full of fish. With responsible government, education, public health care, Haiti could long since have become happy and prosperous. It has never been happy, though, as a slave-owning French colony called Saint Domingue, for well over a hundred years it made French investors and local landowners rich. Saint Domingue was notorious for brutality to slaves, which means something in view of contemporary standards. Slaves were worked to death, with all the attendant punishments and degradations. Ten laboring years was average life expectancy. Saint Domingue was really an eighteenth-century forerunner of Nazi concentration camps. Half a million slaves finally rebelled in the bloodiest uprising of the slave world, fought French soldiers with raging bravery for three years, and won their freedom. It is a colossal story of will and courage. After the United States, Haiti was the second independent nation in the New World. Since 1804, Haiti has been misruled by Haitians.
Misrule is nothing new anywhere at any time. Perhaps Haiti never had a hope, poisoned from the beginning by its terrible past. There is something in this, looking around the world today. The worse the early oppression, the worse oppression continues, like battered babies maturing into baby batterers. It is rubbish to pretend, as the Reagan administration does, that communism alone assures misrule. Consider capitalist states in Central and South America, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines, most of Africa from north to south. Zaire is a model of rapacious corruption; as the Congo, it had a famously nasty rapacious past. Can the relentless siege mentality of the Afrikaners in South Africa be traced back to the Boer War? The rulers in the Kremlin are more understandable as lineal descendants of the Tsars; too bad they weren't all brought up in Sweden. How long does it take a people to outgrow and reject inherited misrule? However long, they have to do it themselves if they can.
Toussaint l'Ouverture, the hero slave leader, might have been the founding father Haiti needed, but he died in a French prison. Two self-styled Emperors, engrossed in their imperial life style, were followed by a turnover of greedy presidents, grabbing power by palace putsch, rigged elections, assassinations. The procession of presidents ended fatally in 1957 with Papa Doc Duvalier who locked his people in a sinister police state, ruling by terror through thugs in sunglasses, the Tonton Macoutes, by torture, murder and the ominous use of Voodoo. Now Papa Doc's heir, Baby Doc, upholds the family tradition. Maybe the Duvaliers, Presidents-for-Life, have founded a dynasty and can give Haiti another hundred years of slavery.
After one hundred and seventy-nine years of home-grown misrule to date, Haiti is among the world's least developed countries, economically and socially. Haiti ranks 122. Only thirteen countries, mostly new African states, are more deprived. (The U.S. ranks 7, Britain ranks 16.) These statistics are not a comment on style of government but on the material conditions, within each state, of the mass of the governed. In the western hemisphere, Haiti has the lowest per capita income; the fewest schools, teachers and literates; the fewest hospitals and doctors; the highest infant mortality; the lowest life expectancy. Misrule is an ongoing (as they say) fact from Haiti south, and can be measured in the same terms. (El Salvador 84, Guatemala 85, etc; but Cuba 36, far ahead of all countries in the Caribbean, in Central and South America with only Argentina, 37, a close rival. What do we make of that?) Haiti's sorry distinction is to be bottom of the bottom class in an area where public welfare is not the most urgent priority of government and poverty ranges from heavy to crushing.
People often say, with pride, “I'm not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.” Politics is the business of governing and nobody can escape being governed, for better or worse. In the few fortunate societies where voting is free and honest, most people take the weird view that politics is a horse race—you bet on a winner or loser every so often, if you can bestir yourself; but politics is not a personal concern. Politics is everything—from clean drinking water through the preservation of forests, whales, British Leyland to nuclear weapons and the disposal thereof. If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.
The unlucky ignorant people of Haiti never understood that they had to take an interest in politics while they still had the chance. I think their brains were fuddled by three hundred years of Voodoo. They were too busy propitiating a gang of demented malevolent gods to notice that men, not gods, were running their country and themselves into the ground. If they know now, it is late. Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.
While I was brooding on my chair one morning, Monsieur Réné appeared with a book. He said it was the onl
y book in English in the library, where I was always the only customer. No one could read English but perhaps it would interest me. The book was E. M. Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy. A miracle of the highest order. Oh, that beautiful book! It shines with reason, mercy, honor, good will and wit; and is written in those water-smooth sentences that one wants to stroke for the pleasure of feeling them. No longer isolated, I had Mr. Forster's mind for company. When I finished the book, I wrote pages to Mr. Forster, like a letter in a bottle, telling him that he was a light in the darkness and a moral example to mankind. I resolved to reform. I would not disgrace my parents or Mr. Forster; no goddamned black racists were going to make a racist of me.
During these month-long days, I observed the weather but took no joy from it, though it was joyful. The sky went up in pale to darker translucent layers of blue, the air smelled of flowers and sea and sun, so delicious you could taste it. The Caribbean, my favorite sea, stretched out like a great smooth sapphire carpet with wind moving gently under it. I hungered for the sea and one afternoon nerved myself to chance the path down the cliff. With a dress over my bathing-suit, a towel around my neck, the usual footwear and cane, I made my way slowly to the beach. The sand was golden, empty and lovely; no boats, no people and no sign of there having been either.
I chucked my stuff and got into the sea like a crab, using my arms. Freedom returned; I could move. I swam far out in the silky water and floated, rejoicing. Jacmel washed off me, body and soul. Unable to sing, a felt lack, I made shouting noises of delight. Every day, until I had two sound legs, I would bring bread and papaya, the only edible pension food, to the glorious beach and swim and sunbathe. Happiness was possible, even in Jacmel.
The View from the Ground Page 38
