The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  Marcel took his place in the shade, removing his paraphernalia from his briefcase. He placed a thunderstone—a pierre tonnerre—in an enamel dish and covered it with a magical potion. Thunderstones are sacred to the vodounist, forged as they are by Sobo and Shango, the spirits of thunder and lightning. The spirit hurls a lightning bolt to the earth, striking a rock outcropping and casting the stone to the valley floor. There it must lie for a year and a day before the houngan may touch it. Despite the divine origins, thunderstones are not uncommon in Haiti; Westerners think of them as pre-Columbian axe heads and attribute their origins to the Arawakan Indians.

  Marcel struck a match to the dish, and the potion exploded in flames. Dipping his right hand into it, he set his own skin on fire with the alcohol, then passed the flame to each of us, slapping the joints of our arms and rubbing our flesh vigorously. He then tied satin scarves around our faces to ensure that we did not inhale the dust of the poison. As a final protective measure, he coated all exposed skin with an aromatic oily emulsion.

  Earlier in the morning I had watched Jean ease his thick fingers into the coffin, inch his way along the corpse of the child, and close his hand like a vise on the skull. It had collapsed, releasing a chemical scent, foul and repulsive. With great trepidation he had lifted the shattered remains out of the impromptu grave and carefully placed them in a jar. Now, with equal concern, his hand dripping with oil, he took them from the jar and placed them on the ground beside the grill. From his sack he methodically removed the other ingredients. The first two I didn’t know—two freshly killed lizards, iridescent and blue. Then he removed the carcass of a large toad that I had seen among other ingredients pinned to the clothesline; dried and flattened it was hardly identifiable, but from its size and a few things he said about it, it had to be Bufo marinus, a native of the American tropics, quite common and certainly toxic. Wrapped to the toad’s leg was the shriveled remains of what Jean called a sea snake; it looked like some kind of polychaete worm. The toad and the sea worm had apparently been prepared in a particular way: the toad had been placed with the worm in a sealed container overnight before being killed. Jean said that this enraged the toad, increasing the power of its poison. This made sense, for Bufo marinus has large glands on the back of its head that secrete some two dozen potent chemicals, a production that increases when it is threatened or irritated.

  The plants were easier to identify. One was a species of Albizzia known in Haiti as tcha-tcha, and planted as a shade tree throughout the country. The other was pois gratter, the itching pea, a species of Mucuna that has extremely nasty urticating hairs on its seed pod, hairs that can make you feel that you have slivers of glass under your skin. Jean placed several fruits of both species directly into the mortar. I knew little of the chemistry of these species, but was intrigued that they were both legumes, a family that includes many species with toxic properties. The final ingredients to come out of the bag were a pair of marine fish, one quite innocuous-looking, and the other obviously a puffer fish, not unlike one I had seen on the wall of Marcel’s bagi.

  My attention was diverted by the young assistant, who had taken a metal grater and begun to grind the tip of a human tibia, collecting the shavings in a small tin cup. Jean meanwhile had placed the fresh and dried animals on the grill and was roasting them to an oily consistency before transferring them to the mortar. The bones of the child stayed on the grill until burned almost to charcoal. Then they too were placed into the mortar. By the time all the ingredients were ready to be crushed, the smoke that rose from the vessel was a corrosive yellow.

  I glanced at Marcel, somewhat confused by his role. He never touched the poison nor any of the ingredients. He lay back in the shade, occasionally shouting instructions, his mind attentive and his eyes scanning the trail, watching for intruders. One time two young children came by, and he jumped up to chase them away, shouting insults and threats. Yet the entire time we were in that scrubland there was a family tending its fields on a nearby slope watching our every activity. Marcel even exchanged words with them occasionally, shouting across the narrow valley. He seemed to be maintaining a pretense of secrecy while remaining on constant display, and quite proud of it. Herein I realized lay the essence of his ambiguous position. Like the sorcerers in Africa he was despised by all upstanding members of the community, yet at a more profound level his presence was tolerated because it was critical to the balance of social and spiritual life. The bokor and all his apparently maleficent activities were accepted because they are somehow essential.

  But what was Marcel? A bokor, a malevolent sorcerer; or a houngan, a benevolent priest and healer? Beauvoir had pointed out the fallacy of any such distinction. Marcel, of course, was both, yet himself neither evil nor good. As bokor he might serve the darkness, as a houngan the side of light. And like all of us he was capable of serving both. The vodoun religion had explicitly recognized this dichotomy, and had in fact institutionalized it. This was why Marcel’s presence was critical. Without his spiritual direction our activities had a completely ambivalent potential for good or evil. It was he who was ultimately responsible.

  There seemed little doubt which force Marcel now chose to embrace. It had not been his desire to go into the graveyard, it had been mine. I had commissioned the poison, for which the bones were necessary. That night—and now in this barren land where creepers wove nets over stones, where plants had leaves that breathed by night and collapsed to the touch—it was Marcel who assured our safety. And so he as houngan had no contact with the poison. Such a destructive force had to be prepared by Jean, who was neither an apprentice nor an assistant but rather a physical support. When the BBC and others described Marcel Pierre as the incarnation of evil, they had missed the point completely.

  These intuitions of mine became even stronger when Marcel began to sing. By now Jean was pounding the ingredients in the mortar, and the steady thud of the pestle laid down Marcel’s rhythm. Then the young assistant took up a pair of ordinary stones, struck them together, and we had percussion. Then Rachel joined in—for she knew all the songs—and her soft voice rose highest, flowing back and forth, teasing in its beauty. Marcel’s entire body melted into the rhythm, and it seemed that at any moment he might become possessed. His broad smile, his radiant participation in the songs—here in the middle of making this poison—it was his joy, this pure unadulterated joy that made me think that somehow this could not be evil.

  Just as the poison neared completion, as Jean sifted the residue from the mortar, a quite accidental exchange took place that in the end seemed to have a profound impact on Marcel. I say accidental, though in truth I was becoming skeptical of things accidental, of chance and coincidence. In Haiti nothing seemed to happen as it should, but little occurred by chance.

  At any rate, I was wearing a knife on my belt, and Marcel asked if he could have it. The knife was important to me—I had traded for it some years before at the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Apurimac in Peru. I told Marcel that it was my most valued possession and impossible to part with, that it had been given to me following the completion of one of my people’s most important rituals. This was untrue, but the impetus of the lie carried me into a true account in which the knife was promptly forgotten.

  First I tried to share with him a new notion of space. I spoke of mountainous valleys near my home in northern Canada, valleys larger than all of Haiti and totally uninhabited. I described moving through lands where space yielded in every direction to the infinite. I spoke of tundra vegetation at one’s feet, a cornucopia of color and sound, of whistles and birdcalls, of rust and ginger splashed onto a canvas that stretched to the horizon—and there, forests of mountains wrapped in icefields, seething masses of rock and ice in an ocean of clouds. I explained that between these two extremes, the minute flora and the gargantuan mountains, there was a complete dearth of man-sized objects. I tried to make Marcel envision a land where men were insignificant. It was perhaps the most difficult thing for him to unde
rstand. Then I spoke of temperatures, of lakes solid with ice, of damp clothing left out overnight and cracking the next morning like a stick. I described hunting animals, moose and caribou, speaking of the number of pounds of meat that each yielded. I spoke of wolves and bears, myths and legends passed on to me by the old hunting guides. Then I told him of the vision quest.

  I explained how as a younger man I had been instructed to climb the highest peak in the valley, while the old Gitksan Indian waited below. I tried to carry Marcel up that mountain, describing in great detail the route, the steep scree and the ledges alive with goat, the dizzying exposures and the whirling landscapes of waterfalls and rock, spruce forests, and glaciers. I had him build with me, stone by stone, a rock cairn. I had him watch me as I sat alone on the summit, without food or water, until the animal came, what kind of animal I could never say. That animal arrives, I told Marcel, not by chance but because it was fated to become one’s protector—a spiritual guardian that might be called upon five or six times over the course of my lifetime. And so I explained to Marcel that I had my animal, and that was the reason I was not afraid of him. That was why I feared no man.

  Once this came clear to Marcel, he became visibly excited. Quite by chance the vision quest I had experienced bore striking parallels to fundamental features of vodoun initiation. The hounsis canzo, or initiate, enters a week of seclusion in which he or she suffers a particular diet and rigorous prescribed activities, all supervised by an elder. At the end of a week the individual receives a spiritual name and enters the path of the loa, the divine horsemen. And so I finally made sense to Marcel. Later that day Rachel overheard him explaining to several of his people that this blanc was unlike the others because he had been initiated. It seemed a ridiculous way to go about things, he had told them, but that was the way people acted in the impossible land of Canada.

  A pair of Marcel’s women lounged on the front steps of the Eagle Bar. His was an ugly trade, made worse by the innocence of the women at midday—their hair bound in curlers, their nails gleaming in fresh reds and purples—yet there remained something guiltless about Marcel’s establishment. One sensed that the Haitian men with their astonishing collection of wives, mistresses, and mamans petites had no shortage of outlets for their desire. They came to Marcel’s out of curiosity, sometimes to slake their flesh but most often just to gather. Behind the facade of bar and brothel the place had the atmosphere of a neighborhood club, informal and intimate.

  Inside the bar Marcel and I celebrated our newfound trust by sharing a plate of rice and beans. Gleefully he explained in minute detail how he had bluffed me, recounting like a master storyteller each moment of our first encounter. He also instructed me in the application of the poison. As Kline had suggested, it could be spread in the form of a cross on the threshold of the victim’s doorway. But Marcel also said that it could be placed inside someone’s shoe, or down his or her back. This was the first indication that the poison might be applied directly to the intended victim. It made sense, of course, given my suspicion that there was no way any poison could get through the callused feet of a Haitian peasant. Moreover, placed on the ground at the entrance of the hut, it would presumably affect everyone who stepped on it, not just the intended victim.

  With my confidence in Marcel reasonably established, my attention turned to the reputed antidote. Kline had mentioned several reports suggesting that a chemical antidote was administered to the zombi victim in the graveyard at the time of his resurrection. When I brought up the subject with Marcel, he remained equivocal. It was strictly the power of the bokor that revived the dormant zombi, he claimed. With two assistants the bokor would enter the cemetery, approach the grave, and call out the victim’s name. The zombi would come out of the ground unaided, be promptly beaten and bound, then led away into the night. His description coincided closely with the account of Clairvius Narcisse. Marcel went on to indicate that there was, however, a preparation that if used properly completely counteracted the effects of the poison. When I asked if he would be able to prepare it for us, he looked momentarily bewildered. Naturally, he replied, one would never make the poison without making the antidote. Marcel glanced toward Rachel as if I were the stupidest man alive.

  That afternoon Jean dug up the young girl once more. After carefully placing the jars of poison in the coffin, he covered it over and retired to a corner of the hounfour. His work was momentarily finished. The poison would remain with the corpse for three days. Not surprisingly, it was Marcel, not Jean, who then mixed the ingredients of the antidote. He began by placing in a different and larger mortar several handfuls of dried or fresh leaves of six plants: aloe (Aloe vera), guaiac (Guaiacum officinale), cèdre (Cedrela odorata), bois ca-ca (Capparis cynophyllophora), bois chandelle (Amyris maritima) and cadavre gâté (Capparis sp.). This plant material was ground with a quarter-ounce of rock salt, then added to an enamel basin containing ten crushed mothballs, a cup of seawater, several ounces of clairin or cane alcohol, a bottle of perfume, and a quarter-liter of a solution purchased from the local apothecary and known as magie noire—black magic. Additional ingredients included ground human bones, shavings from a mule’s tibia and a dog’s skull, various colored and magically named talcs, ground match heads and sulphur powder. It was straightforward procedure, devoid of ritual or danger. The end product was a green liquid with a strong ammonia scent, similar to the substance that Marcel had been rubbing on us all along.

  Below ground in the open court of the hounfour rested the child with the glass jars of poison cradled in her lap. Above ground one of the assistants placed lit candles at either end of the buried coffin, then traced in cornmeal a cabalistic design that bound the child’s new grave to the altar of the bagi. On the surface of the court he traced a second coffin and dissected it into fourths by drawing a cross. In each quadrant he drew the symbol of a spirit of the dead. Marcel poured the antidote into a rum bottle and placed it upright over the grave, its base buried in the earth, its mouth pointing to the sky.

  Curiously, while the poison contained many ingredients with known pharmacological activity, the antidote was decidedly uninteresting from a chemical point of view. Most of the ingredients were either chemically inert or used in insufficient quantity. More importantly, the way that the antidote was applied strongly suggested that it had little to do with the actual raising of a zombi. It was only once somebody knew that he or she had become a victim of the poison that the antidote was administered, and it was applied simply as a topical rub. The antidote wasn’t intended to revive the victim from the dead; it merely prevented him or her from ultimately succumbing to the poison. And it did so according to a particular timetable. If a victim knew that he or she had been exposed to the poison no longer than fifteen days, they could simply administer the antidote. If, however, one had been subjected to the poison for more than fifteen days, the antidote had to be augmented by an elaborate ceremony in which the victim was symbolically buried alive. In other words, for severe cases it was not the antidote but a body of ritual and belief that was responsible for survival. A pharmacologically active antidote might still be discovered, but it was certainly not the one concocted by Marcel Pierre. Nor did he deny this. For him, the antidote was the power of his own magic.

  Interpreting this new information made clearer what a vodounist considers to be a poison. Kline, the BBC, and others had obviously taken reports of an antidote too literally, assuming that it had to be a substance used to resurrect the zombi from apparent death. Such straightforward cause and effect, which I had tried to answer with the Calabar hypothesis, had seemed reasonable. It was logical and linear—just what the Haitian spirit realm is not. Out of curiosity I asked Marcel to name the greatest poison. There was no doubt, he replied, that far more deadly than the preparation we had made, more dangerous than even human remains, was a simple lime, properly prepared by the bokor. According to Marcel, and many other houngan I later asked, if a bokor cuts a lime transversely while it is still on the tree,
the half that remains on the limb overnight becomes the most virulent of poisons. The other half taken into the temple becomes its equally potent antidote. The lesson was clear. The lime that is left on the tree remains in the realm of nature—uncivilized, threatening, poisonous. The other half, taken into the abode of the religious sanctuary, is tamed and humanized, and thus becomes profoundly curative. Apparently just as man himself has an ambivalent potential for good or evil, so do objects; in the case of the lime it is the intervention of man alone that may release its latent promise. For the vodounist there seem to be no absolutes. Only the houngan embodies all the cosmic forces and maintains their balance. So it was man who ruled the Haitian worldview, and it was the power of man that treated the poison victim. Similarly, I concluded, it would be man and not a poison that created a zombi.

  Having tracked down the poison and its supposed antidote, I had very little time left before I was due back in Cambridge. But in those last days a curious event took place. At the time it seemed significant.

  One afternoon in Saint Marc Max Beauvoir and I were approached by two men in peculiar uniforms and flat hats like those worn by the U.S. Marines when they occupied Haiti in the early years of this century. The men were members of a paramilitary cavalry group from the town of Desdunnes in the Artibonite Valley. This reputedly placed them as descendants of the legendary highwaymen who, dressed in loincloths and brandishing swords that deflected bullets, terrorized the caravans during the French colonial era. Much later during the American occupation, many of the men of Desdunnes joined the cako, the resistance fighters who waged guerrilla war from sanctuaries deep in the mountains of northern Haiti. Belief still has it that the leader of the U.S. Marine command was zombified by the cako. Today the residents of Desdunnes remain among the most fiercely independent people of Haiti.