The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  A legless man, smiling and propped on a trolley, greeted us with a message. I followed Rachel around the corner by the theater and up a side street to the home of the ex-police chief, where we paused long enough to pick up yet another message that led us first back to the waterfront and finally to the outskirts of the city to the Clermezine nightclub. There Herard’s wife Hélène received us warmly, and while we waited for her husband she treated us to an exhilarating account of the day’s activities in the market. As we sat in the darkness with the cloying richness of her perfume mixing with the damp yet wholesome air, she spun a story of immense bathos, an agony of linked phrases repeated over and over so that the thrill of her experience might last forever, even though nothing had really happened and by tomorrow all would be forgotten. It was a typical, however extraordinary, performance, one that might have gone on for hours had it not been interrupted by the arrival of Herard. Though it had been well over a year since we last saw each other, we met as friends do after a passage of days. Herard deflected my enthusiastic greeting, and after I had quickly exhausted a few trivial bits of news, I realized that it was silence more than words that would define our relationship. In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

  Still, I had come back, and I sensed that this meant something to him. But in the murky light his moonlike face remained more inscrutable than ever, his presence conveying the self-assurance of a man fully capable of mixing stars with sand, of carrying lightning in a pocket. From far to the west came the rumbling of thunder, and closer the sound of wind stiffly clicking the leaves of the almond trees that grew over the compound. And then his familiar rasping laughter, signaling his approval of the gifts I had brought. The last time I had seen him I had told him of an interim assignment I was planning into the Amazon, and I had asked him what he wanted from the other side of the water. “Something mystical,” was his reply. It was a tall order coming from him, but one that I had tried to fill by bringing him an ocelot pelt and some vertebrae of a large boa constrictor.

  “Did you eat the meat?” he asked as Rachel and I slowly unfolded the pelt.

  “They say it is forbidden,” I answered honestly.

  “The whites say this?”

  “No, the Indians.”

  “Good. You see,” he said, turning to Rachel, “it is as I told your father. Someone of such wildness learns nothing from his elders. So he goes to the wild places to be among the leaves. Now he appears again among the living because leaves are not enough.”

  I followed his logic only enough to see that Herard had found a comfortable image for me, untrue but meaningful for him. Since I fitted none of his categories and defied his common image of foreigners, he had forged a new category, a composite not unlike a collage he might have made up of scattered impressions cut from a dozen grade B movies. The jungles, the Amazonian myths and tribes I had spoken of, the animals I had described, some photographs I had shown him: in the end I was something wild, not a white, and that was all there was to it.

  “But that’s not why he is here,” Rachel said. “He has come back because we have come together, because …”

  Herard lifted his hands before his face, then rose painfully to his feet muttering an undercurrent of groans and unintelligible words.

  “Your father has told me,” he said finally. “Rachel, do you think this is a game? Bizango is diabolic. It is not what you think.”

  “But there are those who say the Bizango rite is life itself.”

  Herard had not expected such a prompt and audacious reply from the Rachel he had known, and for a quick moment a look of baffled vexation came over him. “They can say what they want. The ritual speaks the truth. Listen to the songs. What do they say? None of them says ‘give me life.’ And when they put the money in the coffin, what do they sing? ‘This money is for the djab,’ the devil, or ‘Woman, you have two children, if I take one you’d better not yell or I’ll eat you up!’ The songs have only one message—Kill! Kill! Kill!” Rachel began to say something, but Herard was not to be interrupted. “To do a good service in the Bizango you must do it in a human skull. And it can’t be a skull from beneath the earth, it must be a skull they prepare. Their chalice is a human skull. What does this tell you, child?”

  “It is something that must be done.” Rachel was unrelenting, her voice untouched by fear.

  “Then let me tell you what will happen. When an outsider intrudes on the society, when he tries to enter the Bizango, he receives a coup l’aire or a coup poudre. Do you want to see beasts fly? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, if you are lucky they shall only frighten you and tie you to the poteau mitan while twenty Shanpwel with knives dance around you. On the side they’ll have a pot of oil, with cooking meat floating on the surface. Only they’ll have a finger in it, and you will not know if the meat comes from your mother. Then they judge you, and you pray that the president says you’re innocent.”

  “But we shall be.”

  He grabbed my hand, holding it close to his face until I could feel his breath. “Not him!” he snorted.

  “No Haitian reads the color of a man’s skin.”

  “Girl, stop this foolishness. The Americans stole the country once. In the days of the Father they tried to take it again. No foreigner walks under the cover of the night.”

  “Unless you take us.”

  “Never. Rachel, your days are young, and Wade must still serve the loa. Bizango is djab, it is evil, and you must not begin it.”

  “We only want to see what they do.”

  Herard said nothing. He was a man long unaccustomed to argument. Usually when others had finished talking, he would declare his will in a few flat phrases and wait calmly for obedience. But tonight, oddly, Rachel had the last word.

  Our disappointment in Herard Simon’s rebuff aside, we soon found, to my surprise if not Rachel’s, Haitians who were more than willing to speak about the Bizango or Shanpwel, terms that many used interchangeably. Within a matter of days of our visit to Herard, Rachel and I had heard people accuse the secret societies of just about every conceivable amoral activity from eating children to transforming innocent victims into pigs. From everything we could gather the public face of the Bizango was still as nefarious as anything that had been reported in the popular or academic literature. It was therefore with special interest that we listened to the account told us by a young man from the coastal settlement of Archaie, a fellow named Isnard who was twenty-five when he entered the Bizango in 1980.

  Since his youth Isnard had been warned against going out at night, but one evening when he again heard the drums of the society, and while his mother thought he was asleep, he slipped out of the lakou and followed the sound to a not-distant compound. At the gate he was met by a sentinel, who turned out to be a friend, and while they were speaking a man identified as the president of the local society came out to share a drink with the sentinel. The president, also a friend, invited Isnard to enter. That night two societies were meeting, and the bourreau, or executioner, of the visiting society was an enemy of Isnard’s. Immediately he gave the order for Isnard to be “caught.” A call went out for the members to form a line. Isnard did what he could to mimic the others, but he knew none of the society’s ritualistic gestures, nor any of the songs, and with the society members clad in brilliant red-and-black robes he stood out like a sore thumb. In his own words he had yet “to take off his skin to put on the other.”

  The drums began, and the singing rose. The tension around him built terribly until a horrible face running with tears and blood cried out the lyrics that Isnard knew were meant for him: “That big, big goat in the middle of our house, the smart one is the one I want to catch.” Our friend held his breath until his lungs hurt. He thought he was lost, and it was then that his genie came, not exactly possessing him but giving him the strength and mystical agility he ne
eded. Just before they threw the first trap, the lights died and Isnard leapt out of line. They missed, striking instead the one standing next to where he had been. They tried again, and then again, until no fewer than ten members were caught by the trap. When the society leaders finally realized that this young man could not be caught, they sent three officials—the first queen, second queen, and the flag queen—to arrest him. Blindfolded, Isnard was taken before the cross of Baron Samedi to plead his case. Mercifully, the baron acknowledged his innocence, for at that very instant the song came into his mouth:

  Cross of Jubilee, Cross of Jubilee

  I am innocent!

  Impressed by such an endorsement, the Bizango leaders took immediate steps to make Isnard a member of the society, and that night his initiation began. They taught him what he needed to know, so that now he could walk into any society gathering in the land.

  Once initiated, however, Isnard discovered that the Bizango was unlike anything he had been told as a child. Rather than something evil, he found it a place of security and support. Whereas his mother had described the nocturnal forays of the societies as criminal and predatory, Isnard came to realize that the victims taken at night are not the innocent, but those who have done something wrong. As he put it, “In my village you kill yourself. People don’t kill you.” Those who must be out on the streets after midnight and who happen to encounter a Bizango band need only kneel in respect and cover their heads and eyes to be left alone.

  Isnard also learned that he could appeal to the society in time of need. Should a sudden illness afflict a member of his family, the society would lend money to cover the medical bills. A member who got in trouble with the police, if innocent, could count on the Bizango leaders to use their contacts to set him free. Perhaps most importantly, Isnard found that the society could protect him from the capricious actions of his enemies. If, for example, someone should spread a rumor that cost you your job, by the code of the society you had the right to seek retribution. Again in Isnard’s own words, “If your mouth stops me from living, if you oppose yourself to my eating, I oppose myself to your living.” To exercise that right, a member need only contact the emperor—the founding president—and offer to “sell” the enemy to the society. The emperor, if he believed the case warranted a judgment, would dispatch an escort to bring both the plaintiff and the accused before the society. From what Isnard explained, however, it was not the flesh of the two that was presented but rather their ti bon ange, and though the experience would be remembered as a dream, their physical bodies would never have left their beds. This magical feat was accomplished by the escort—not a man, but the mystical force of the Bizango society. It cast a spell that caused the two adversaries to fall ill, and then just as death came near, it took the ti bon ange of each one. If your force was strong, if innocence was upon you, death was not possible, but the ti bon ange that was judged guilty would never return, and the corps cadavre of the individual would be discovered the next day in bed with the string of life cut. Selling an enemy to the society, however, was never done casually, for if the accused was deemed innocent at the tribunal, it would be the plaintiff who would be guilty, guilty of spreading a falsehood, and it would be he who was punished.

  These revelations of Isnard, particularly the notion of “selling someone to the society,” brought together the two separate but obviously related sides of the mystery. On the one hand there was the case of Clairvius Narcisse—his reference to “the masters of the land,” a secret tribunal that had judged him, and a powder that had allowed him to pass through the earth. On the other stood the Bizango and their provocative but tentative link to the secret societies of West Africa, their knowledge of poisons, their use of tribunals and judicial process, their pervasive influence on community life. Our conversations with Isnard cast an image of the Bizango quite different from the popular stereotype, and at odds with Herard’s dark picture of a wholly malevolent organization. Just how much of what Isnard told us was true we had no way of telling, but given his longtime friendship with the Beauvoirs we were encouraged to pursue our quest with him. As a youth Isnard had lived for some time with Max and his family, so we had this connection as a key to his confidence. Over the next ten days or so we met frequently both at his home and in the privacy of the Peristyle de Mariani. Our relationship with him blossomed, and he had managed to get us invited to a Bizango ceremony to take place the following week in Archaie when we received a summons from Herard Simon.

  Herard wasn’t on the corner by the theater as expected, and so while we waited Rachel and I took in the last few minutes of that week’s movie, which turned out to be an unimaginably poor print of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The soundtrack was unintelligible, and as a result the movie became as much as anything a Rorschach test measuring the sensibilities of the audience. The climactic scene when the spirits shoot out of the ark and the flesh of the Nazi melts down was simply too much for many of the viewers. Pandemonium gripped the theater. Amid shouts of “Loup garou”—the werewolf—someone screamed a warning to pregnant women, and another cautioned all of us to tie ribbons around our left arm. It was a scene beyond anything in the picture itself. As the film ended the madness poured onto the street, and amid the shouts and laughter we barely heard Herard’s harsh whistle. He had been in the theater the entire time, had in fact loved the movie, particularly the moment when the hero was trapped with the snakes in the Egyptian crypt.

  “Someone born with a serpent’s blood could do it,” he assured us. “Otherwise it had to be a mystical thing.” Herard explained that if you emptied your mind of all worries and made space you could shelter the spiritual allies that might allow a man to do the sorts of things that went on in the film.

  “Only a fool,” he added pointedly, his lips parting in the faint semblance of a smile, “would attempt to dance alone in the jaw of a lion.”

  Herard, of course, was aware of our recent activities in Archaie, our conversations with Isnard, even the invitation we had received to attend a Bizango ceremony the following week. I stepped away from his gratuitous, thinly veiled advice to join a small knot of moviegoers relieving themselves against the whitewashed wall of the theater.

  “What kind of blanc pisses in the alley?” Herard called out as I came back to his crumbling jeep. “Mes amis, I can see it now. Once again my house is to become a resort of malfacteurs!” Trailing that laugh of his behind him, Herard stepped out of the small circle of light coming from the theater and without word or gesture led us away.

  He carried a wooden sword as a staff, and his unwieldy pace took us from the center of town into a maze of narrow paths bordered by small houses of caked mud. It was getting late now, too late for most Haitians to be out. There was little movement, and with the blackout no light save that of the moon and the fitful glow of the odd lamp carelessly left burning. But the maze was alive with sounds—soft voices, babies crying, and the creaking of gates broken at the hinges. As we walked along, my imagination probed the darkness trying to pick out the meaning in the lives of these people living beneath thatch, surviving on the produce of gardens covered by crusted earth. From overhead came the slow drift of sweet ocean wind, sibilant among the fronds of the palm trees, and from the path the profane scent of man—squalid waste and rotting fruit, the corpse of a mule quivering with rats.

  “Honneur!”

  Herard had paused before a tall gate and rapped three times with his staff. No answer. He knocked again, repeating the customary salutation. There was some movement behind the gate but still no response. Finally, a lone woman’s voice came out to interrogate the darkness. Herard named a man living on the other side of the compound and instructed her to go get him. When she refused, Herard’s tongue lashed out, and the quiet alleyway exploded with all the intensity of an unbalanced dogfight. “Woman, guard your mouth!” Herard bellowed. “Do you want a coup l’aire? Shall I enter and shut your teeth? Shall I sow salt in every crease in your decayed skin?”

  Another
voice suddenly, and then the stiff click of the steel latch and the livid face of an old man, wild and ragged, poked out past the edge of the gate. When the door swung open and the woman saw whom she had been yelling at, she could not have appeared more frightened if confronted by a viper.

  Herard gently ignored her remorse and motioned us to follow him through the tall gate into a compound set about with many huts. The living quarters were cloaked in darkness, but to one side separated by a small planting of bananas was a large tonnelle, the thatched canopy of a temple. Between the slats of bamboo that walled the temple we could see the flicker of lamplights, and numerous people passing silently before them. A man sat alone on a stool at the door of the enclosure, his hands clasping a tin cup. Just as we stepped beyond the flapping leaves of the plantains, whistles pierced the black air, and from the shadows a small group of men appeared, stepped several paces toward us, and then, seeing Herard, greeted him politely before slipping away.

  More than two dozen faces met us as we stepped across the threshold. At first obviously startled, within moments they had fallen back within themselves, feigning a polite indifference. One row of benches and another of cane-backed chairs stretched along a wall of the enclosure, and three vacant places appeared directly before the poteau mitan in the front row of chairs. Herard told us to sit, then slipped out the back door of the tonnelle. Within moments a matronly woman trailing the sweet pungent scent of a Haitian kitchen—bay and basil, peppercorns and peanut oil—appeared with thimbles of tnick syrupy coffee. Across from us two young men were setting up a battery of drums; they cast furtive glances at Rachel as she cracked open a bottle of rum, tipped it three times toward the poteau mitan, and took a drink. A murmur of approval ran along the benches behind her.