The Serpent and the Rainbow

1 The Jaguar

MY FIRST MEETING with the man who would send me on my quest for the Haitian zombi poison occurred on a damp miserable winter’s day in late February 1974. I was sitting with my roommate David in a café on a corner of Harvard Square. David was a mountain boy from the West, one generation removed from the family cattle ranch, and just about as rough-cut and restless as Harvard could tolerate. My home was on the rain coast of British Columbia. Both of us had come East to study anthropology, but after two years we had grown tired of just reading about Indians.

A map of the world covered most of one wall of the café, and as I huddled over a cup of coffee I noticed David staring at it intently. He glanced at me, then back at the map, then again at me, only this time with a grin that splayed his beard from ear to ear. Lifting his arm toward the map, he dropped his finger on a piece of land that cut into Hudson’s Bay well beyond the Arctic Circle. I looked over at him and felt my own arm rise until it landed me in the middle of the upper Amazon.

David left Cambridge later that week and within a month had moved into an Eskimo settlement on the shore of Rankin Inlet. It would be many months before I saw him again.

For myself, having decided to go to the Amazon, there was only one man to see. Professor Richard Evans Schultes was an almost mythic figure on the campus at that time, and like many other students both within and outside the Department of Anthropology I had a respect for him that bordered on veneration. The last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition, he was for us a hero in a time of few heroes, a man who, having taken a single semester’s leave to collect medicinal plants in the northwest Amazon, had disappeared into the rain forest for twelve years.

Later that same afternoon, I slipped quietly onto the fourth floor of Harvard’s Botanical Museum. On first sight the Spartan furnishings were disappointing, the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly. Then I discovered the laboratory. Most biological labs are sterile places, forests of tubes and flashing lights with preserved specimens issuing smells that could make a fresh flower wilt. This place was extraordinary. Against one wall beside a panoply of Amazonian dance masks was a rack of blowguns and spears. In glass-covered oak cabinets were laid out elegant displays of the world’s most common narcotic plants. Bark cloth covered another wall. Scattered about the large room were plant products of every conceivable shape and form—vials of essential oils, specimens of Para rubber, narcotic lianas and fish poisons, mahogany carvings, fiber mats and ropes and dozens of hand-blown glass jars with pickled fruits from the Pacific, fruits that looked like stars. Then I noticed the photographs. In one Schultes stood in a long line of Indian men, his chest decorated with intricate motifs and his gaunt frame wrapped in a grass skirt and draped in bark cloth. In another he was alone, perched like a raptor on the edge of a sandstone massif, peering into a sea of forest. A third captured him against the backdrop of a raging cataract in soiled khakis with a pistol strapped to his waist as he knelt to scrutinize a petroglyph. They were like images out of dreams, difficult to reconcile with the scholarly figure who quietly walked into the laboratory in front of me.

“Yes?” he inquired in a resonant Bostonian accent. Face to face with a legend, I stumbled. Nervously and in a single breath I told him my name, that I came from British Columbia, that I had saved some money working in a logging camp, and that I wanted to go to the Amazon to collect plants. At that time I knew little about the Amazon and less about plants. I expected him to quiz me. Instead, after gazing for a long time across the room, he peered back at me through his antiquated bifocals, across the stacks and stacks of plant specimens that littered the table between us, and said very simply, “So you want to go to South America and collect plants. When would you like to leave?”

I returned two weeks later for a final meeting, at which time Professor Schultes drew out a series of maps and outlined a number of possible expeditions. Aside from that he offered only two pieces of advice. There was no point buying a heavy pair of boots, he said, because what few snakes I was apt to find generally bite at the neck; a pith helmet, however, was indispensable. Then he suggested enthusiastically that I not return from the Amazon without experimenting with ayahuasca, the vision vine, one of the most potent of hallucinogenic plants. I left his office with the distinct feeling that I was to be very much on my own. A fortnight later I left Cambridge for Colombia without a pith helmet, but with two letters of introduction to a botanical garden in Medellin and enough money to last a year, if spent carefully. I had absolutely no plans, and no perception at the time that my whimsical decision in the café at Harvard Square would mark a major divide in my life.

Three months to the day after leaving Boston, I sat in a dismal cantina in northern Colombia facing an eccentric geographer, an old friend of Professor Schultes’s. A week before he had asked me to join him and a British journalist on a walk across “a few miles” of swamp in the northwestern corner of the country. The journalist was Sebastian Snow, an English aristocrat who, having just walked from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, now intended to walk to Alaska. The few miles of swamp referred to was the Darien Gap, 250 roadless miles of rain forest that separated Colombia from Panama. Two years previously a British army platoon led by one of Sebastian’s schoolboy friends had traversed the Darien Gap and, despite radio communication, had suffered several casualties, including two unpublicized deaths. Now the intrepid journalist wanted to prove that a small party unencumbered with military gear could do what Snow’s schoolmate’s military unit could not—traverse the gap safely.

Unfortunately, it was the height of the rainy season, the worst time of year to attempt such an expedition. By then I had some experience in the rain forest, and when Snow discovered I was a British subject he assumed that I would accompany him all the way. The geographer, on Snow’s instructions, was offering me the position of guide and interpreter. Considering that I had never been anywhere near the Darien Gap, I found the offer curious. Nevertheless I accepted, and gave the assignment little thought until the night before we were to depart, when in the clapboard town at the end of the last road before the rain forest an old peasant woman approached me on the street and offered an unsolicited appraisal of my situation. My hair was blond, she said, my skin golden, and my eyes the color of the sea. Before I had a chance to savor the compliment she added that it was too bad that all these features would be yellow by the time I reached Panama. That same night, to make matters worse, the geographer, who knew the region far better than I, somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the expedition.

The first days were among the worst, for we had to traverse the vast swamps east of the Rio Atrato, and with the river in flood this meant walking for kilometers at a time in water to our chests. Once across the Atrato, however, conditions improved, and without much difficulty we moved from one Choco or Kuna Indian village to the next, soliciting new guides and obtaining provisions as we went along. Our serious problems began when we reached the small town of Yavisa, a miserable hovel that masquerades as the capital of Darien Province, but is in fact nothing more than a catch basin for all the misfits exiled from each of the flanking nations.

In those days the Guardia Civil of Panama had explicit instructions to harass foreigners, and we were the only gringos the Yavisa post was likely to see for some time. We came expected. Already at a border post two days west of the frontier an unctuous guard had stolen our only compass; now at the headquarters we were accused of smuggling marijuana, an accusation which, however absurd, gave them the excuse to confiscate our gear. Sebastian became violent and did his best to prove his maxim that if one yells loudly enough in English, any “foreigner” will understand. This they did not find amusing. Things went from bad to worse when the sergeant, detailed to rummage through our gear, discovered Sebastian’s money. The mood of the commandant changed immediately, and with a smile like an open lariat he suggested that we enjoy the town and return to speak with him in the evening.

We had been walking for two weeks and had hoped to rest in Yavisa for a few days, but our plan changed with a warning we received that afternoon. After leaving the guardhouse I paddled upriver to an Australian mission post we had heard of, hoping to borrow a compass and perhaps some charts, for the next section of forest was uninhabited. One of the missionaries met me at the dock and acted as if he knew me well. Then, soberly, he explained that according to some of the Kuna at the mission, agents of the commandant intended to intercept our party in the forest and kill us for our money. The missionary, who had lived in the region for some years, took the rumor seriously and urged us to leave as soon as possible. I returned immediately to the jail, discreetly retrieved a few critical items, and then, abandoning the rest of our gear, told the commandant that we had decided to spend a few days at the mission before continuing upriver.

Instead, equipped with two rifles borrowed from the mission, and accompanied by three Kuna guides, we left Yavisa the next day before dawn, downriver.

Our problems began immediately. On the chance that we were being followed, the Kuna led us first up a stone creek bed and then, entering the forest, they deliberately described the most circuitous route possible. Sebastian stumbled, badly twisting an ankle. That first night out we discovered what it meant to sleep on the forest floor at the height of the rainy season. In a vain attempt to keep warm, the three Kuna and I huddled together, taking turns in the middle. Nobody slept. By the end of the second day I had begun to suspect that our riverine Kuna were less than familiar with the forest hinterland, and after three days I realized they were completely disoriented.

Our destination was a construction camp at Santa Fe, which in those years marked the eastern limit of the right-of-way of the Pan-American Highway. A passage that should have taken two days at most stretched on to seven.

When one is lost it is not the absolute number of days that is important, it is the vast uncertainty that consumes every moment. With the rifles we had food, but it never seemed enough, and with the rains each afternoon and night we found little rest. Yet we still had to walk long hours each day through the rain forest, and when one is stripped of all that protects one from nature, the rain forest is an awesome place. Sebastian’s injury had not improved, and though he walked courageously he nevertheless slowed our progress. The heat and incessant life seemed to close in, exquisitely beautiful creatures became a plague, and even the shadows of the vegetation, the infinite forms, shapes and textures, became threatening. In the damp evenings, sitting awake for long hours while the torrential rains turned the earth to mud, I began to feel like a crystal of sugar on the tongue of a beast, impatiently awaiting dissolution.

The worst moment came on the morning of the seventh day. An hour from our previous night’s camp, we stumbled upon the first person we had seen since leaving Yavisa, a solitary and slightly mad woodsman who had carved a clearing from the forest and begun to plant a garden. When we asked the direction to Santa Fe, he looked surprised and, unable to suppress his laughter, he pointed to a barely discernible trail. At a fast pace, he told us, there was a chance that we could arrive in another two weeks. His news was so devastating that it was simply impossible to acknowledge. We had no food left, were physically and mentally exhausted, and had only enough ammunition left to hunt for two or three days. Yet we had no choice but to continue, and without a word passing between us we began to walk, myself in front with one of the rifles, then Sebastian, followed by the three Kuna. We kept a fast pace until the forest again held us tangibly, drawing us on into a hallucinatory passage devoid of will or desire. Into that trance, not twenty meters before me, leapt a black jaguar. It paused for an instant, then turned away and took several strides toward what would turn out to be the direction to Santa Fe, before springing like a shadow into the vegetation. No one else saw it, but for me it was life itself and, I believe, a portent, for it turned out that Santa Fe was not two weeks away, but rather a mere two days. That very evening, we found a track that led to the right-of-way of the highway. It had all been a test of will, and as we burst into the full sunlight after so many days in the shade, Sebastian turned to me, placed his arms about my etiolated body, and said simply that God works in mysterious ways. That evening we made camp by a clear stream and broiled a wild turkey that one of the Kuna had shot, and later we slept in the open under a sky full of stars. For our first night since leaving Yavisa, it did not rain.

The next morning I arose early, certain that I could reach Santa Fe in a single day. With my belly finally full and the weight of uncertainty lifted from my mind, I basked in the freedom of the open road and felt an exhilaration I had never known before. My pace increased and I left the others far behind. The road at first was no more than a track that curved hypnotically over and around every contour of the land. Several miles on, however, it rose slowly to the crest of a ridge, and suddenly from the rise I could see the right-of-way of the Pan-American Highway, a cleared and flattened corridor a hundred meters wide that reached to the horizon. Like a deer on the edge of a clearing, I instinctively fell back, momentarily confounded by so much space. Then I started to walk slowly, tentatively. My senses, which had never been so keen, took in every pulse and movement. No one was behind me, and no one in front, and the forest was reduced to the distant walls of a canyon. Never again would I sense such freedom; I was twenty and felt as if I had reached the heart of where I had dreamed to be.

Before I had left Boston that spring I had advised myself in the frontispiece of my journal to “risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.” Now it seemed I had found the means, and my chance meeting with the jaguar remained with me, an affirmation of nature’s benevolence. After the Darien Gap I began to look upon Professor Schultes’s assignments as koans, enigmatic challenges guaranteed to propel me into places beyond my imaginings. I accepted them easily, reflexively—as a plant takes water. Thus, in time, the Darien expedition was reduced to but an episode in an ethnobotanical apprenticeship that eventually took me throughout much of western South America. I earned my degree in anthropology in 1977 and, following a two-year hiatus from the tropics in northern Canada, returned to Harvard as one of Professor Schultes’s graduate students.

Schultes was far more than a catalyst of adventures. His guidance and example gave our expeditions form and substance, while ethnobotany remained the metaphor that lent them utility. He had spent thirteen years in the Amazon because he believed that the Indian knowledge of medicinal plants could offer vital new drugs for the entire world. Forty-five years ago, for example, he had been one of a handful of plant explorers to note the peculiar properties of curare, the Amazonian arrow and dart poisons. Struck by a poison dart, a monkey high in the forest canopy rapidly loses all muscular control and collapses to the forest floor; often it is the fall, not the toxin, that actually kills. Chemical analysis of these arrow poisons yielded D-tubocurarine, a powerful muscle relaxant once used in conjunction with various anesthetics in virtually all surgery. The several species that yielded curare were but a few of the eighteen hundred plants of medical potential identified by Schultes in the northwest Amazon alone. He knew that thousands more remained, elsewhere in the Amazon and around the world. It was to find these that he sent us out. And it was in this spirit that he brought me to the most important assignment of my career.

Late on a Monday afternoon early in 1982 I received a call from Schultes’s secretary. I was teaching an undergraduate course with him that semester and expected a discussion of the progress of the class. As I entered his office the venetian blinds were down, and he greeted me without looking up from his desk.

“I’ve got something for you. Could be intriguing.” He handed me the New York address of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of psychopharmacology—the study of the actions of drugs on the mind. It had been Kline who with a handful of others in the 1950s rose to challenge orthodox Freudian psychiatry by suggesting that at least some mental disorders reflected chemical imbalances that could be rectified by drugs. His research led to the development of reserpine, a valuable tranquilizer derived from the Indian snakeroot, a plant that had been used in Vedic medicine for thousands of years. As a direct result of Kline’s work, the number of patients at American psychiatric institutions had declined from over half a million in the 1950s to some 120,000 today. The accomplishment had proved a two-edged sword, however, and had made Kline a controversial figure. At least one science reporter had referred to the bag ladies of New York as Kline’s babies.

Schultes moved away from his desk to take a call. When he was finished he asked me if I would be able to leave within a fortnight for the Caribbean country of Haiti.

2 “The Frontier of Death”

TWO NIGHTS LATER I was met at the front door of an East Side Manhattan apartment by a tall, strikingly handsome woman whose long hair was pulled up over her head in the manner of a Renoir model.

We shook hands. “Mr. Davis? I’m Marna Anderson, Nate Kline’s daughter. Do come in.” She turned abruptly and led me through a corridor of clinical whiteness into a large room crowded with color. Approaching me from the head of an immense refectory table was a short man in a white linen suit and an antique vest of silk brocade.

“You must be Wade Davis. Nate Kline. I’m glad you could make it.”

There were perhaps nine people in the room, and though Kline made the obligatory introductions, it was in a manner so perfunctory as to let me know that none of them mattered. He lingered only when we reached an elderly man, sitting narrow and stiff in a corner of the room.

“I’d like you to meet one of my oldest colleagues, Professor Heinz Lehman. Heinz is the former head of psychiatry and psychopharmacology at McGill.”

“Ah, Mr. Davis,” Lehman said softly, “I am delighted that you have joined our little venture.”

“I don’t know that I have.”

“Yes, well, let us wait and see.”

Kline directed me to a sofa where three pleasant but nondescript women sat sipping cocktails, their attentions scattered. A few moments passed in gossip, and then they began to question me about my life with an enthusiasm that made me uncomfortable. As soon as I had a chance I got up and began to circulate, making my way toward the bar, where I poured myself a drink. The room was filled with art—Haitian paintings, antique games and puzzles, a Persian chest with gilt decorations, a small forest of naive early American weather vanes, iron horses poised in flight.

The lights of the city drew me out onto the balcony. Low clouds swept through the high corridors of darkness slowly dissolving the summits of the skyscrapers, and from far below came the sound of tires running over glistening pavement. Looking back through the window, I saw Kline moving vigorously about the room, ushering the last of his dinner guests to the door. His movements seemed ostentatiously virile, reminding me of the kind of elderly man who might ask you in public to place your hand on his chest to measure the strength of his heart. He seemed ill cast as a doctor, exhibiting a vanity more likely in a poet. Lehman, on the other hand—tall, thin, and frail—appeared born to be a psychiatrist, and I couldn’t help wondering what vocation he would have pursued had he lived in an earlier age, before men were prepared to yield their feelings to analysis.

Marna joined her father at the door of the apartment, linking her arm lightly in his as they said goodnight to their guests. One sensed immediately the bond between them, how they chose to act as one person, so that his glance became her gesture, which beckoned me in from the balcony.

Emptied of the other guests, the room strangely came to life. Lehman, visibly more at ease, moved to its center. He fixed me with a smile.

“Let me relieve you of any further suspense, Mr. Davis. We understand from Professor Schultes that you are attracted to unusual places. We propose to send you to the frontier of death. If what we are about to tell you is true, as we believe it is, it means that there are men and women dwelling in the continuous present, where the past is dead and the future consists of fear and impossible desires.”

I glanced at him skeptically, and then at Kline, who picked up from Lehman automatically.

“The first problem is to know when the dead are truly dead.” Kline paused, regarding me deliberately. “Diagnosing death is an age-old problem. Petrarch was nearly buried alive. It haunted the Romans. The writings of Pliny the Elder are full of reports of men rescued at the last minute from the pyre. Eventually to prevent such mishaps the emperor had to fix by law the interval between apparent death and burial at eight days.”

“Perhaps we should do the same,” interjected Lehman. “Recall the Sheffield case?”

Kline nodded, and turned back to me. “Not fifteen years ago English doctors experimenting with a portable cardiograph at the Sheffield mortuary detected signs of life in a young woman certified dead from a drug overdose.”

Lehman added with a smile, “There was an even more sensational case here in New York around the same time. A postmortem operation at the city morgue was disrupted just as the first cut was being made. The patient leapt up and seized the doctor by the throat, who promptly died of shock.”

I looked across the table at the two of them, trying to conceal a faint premonition of horror. They were both old, their voices hard and clinical. It was as if the imminent presence of death had so saturated their minds at this late point of their lives that they looked upon it as a source of amusement. I had to remind myself that these men were professionals who had earned some of the highest awards of American science.

“By definition death is the permanent cessation of vital functions.” Kline leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands and smiling. “But what constitutes cessation, and how is one to recognize the function in question?”

“Breathing, pulse, body temperature, stiffness … whatever,” I answered somewhat awkwardly, still uncertain what they were getting at.

“You can’t always tell. Breathing can occur with such gentle movements of the diaphragm as to be imperceptible. Besides, the absence of respiration may represent a suspension, not a cessation. As for body temperature, people are pulled out of frozen lakes and snowfields all the time.”

“The eyes of the dead tell you nothing,” added Lehman. “The muscles of the iris continue to contract for hours after death. Skin color can be useful….”

“Hardly in this case,” Kline interrupted, glancing at Lehman. “The pallor of death only shows up in light-skinned individuals. As for heartbeat, any drug that induces hypotension can result in an unreadable pulse. In fact, deep narcosis can manifest every symptom of death: shallow imperceptible breathing, a slow and weakened pulse, a dramatic decrease in body temperature, complete immobility.”

Kline poured himself a brandy. “‘No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest.’ Friar Laurence to Juliet, gentlemen. Perhaps our most famous reference to drug-induced suspended animation.”

“In fact,” Lehman concluded, “there are only two means of ascertaining death. One is by no means infallible and involves a brain scan and cardiogram. That requires expensive machinery. The other, and the only one that is certain, is putrefaction. And that requires time.”

Kline left the room and returned with a document which he presented to me. It was a death certificate in French of one Clairvius Narcisse. It was dated 1962.

“Our problem,” Kline explained, “is that this Narcisse is now very much alive and resettled in his village in the Artibonite Valley in central Haiti. He and his family claim he was the victim of a voodoo cult and that immediately following his burial he was taken from his grave as a zombi.”

“A zombi. …” A dozen conventional questions came to mind, but I said nothing more.

“The living dead,” Kline continued. “Voodooists believe that their sorcerers have the power to raise innocent individuals from their graves to sell them as slaves. It is to prevent such a fate that family members may kill the body of the dead a second time, sometimes plunging a knife into the heart of the cadaver, sometimes severing the head in the coffin.”

I looked at Kline, then back to Lehman, trying to measure their expressions. They appeared altogether complementary. Kline spoke in visions, in ideas that spun to the edge of reality. Lehman held the reins and balanced the conversation with reason. This made it that much more impressive when he too began to speak of zombis.

“The Narcisse case is not the first to come to our attention. A former student of mine, Lamarque Douyon, is currently the director of the Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurologie in Port-au-Prince. Since 1961, in collaboration with Dr. Douyon, we have been systematically investigating all accounts of zombification. For years we found nothing to them. Then came our breakthrough, in 1979, when our attention was drawn to a series of most singular cases, of which this Narcisse was only one.”

The latest, according to Lehman, was a woman, Natagette Joseph, aged about sixty, who was supposedly killed over a land dispute in 1966. In 1980 she was recognized wandering about her home village by the police officer who, fourteen years before, in the absence of a doctor, had pronounced her dead.

Another was a younger woman named Francina Illeus but called “Ti Femme,” who was pronounced dead at the age of thirty on February 23, 1976. Before her death she had suffered digestive problems and had been taken to the Saint Michel de l’Attalaye Hospital. Several days after her release she died at home, and her death was verified by a local magistrate. In this case a jealous husband was said to have been responsible. There had been two notable features of Francina’s case—her mother found her three years later, recognizing her by a childhood scar she bore on her temple; and later, when her grave was exhumed, her coffin was found to be full of rocks.

Then, in late 1980, Haitian radio reported the discovery near the north coast of the country of a peculiar group of individuals, found wandering aimlessly in what appeared to be a psychotic state. The local peasants identified them as zombis and reported the matter to the local authorities, whereupon the unfortunate party was taken to Cap Haitian, Haiti’s second city, and placed under the charge of the military commandant. Aided in part by an extensive media campaign, the army had managed to return most of the reputed zombis to their home villages, far from where the group had been found.

“These three instances,” Lehman remarked, “while curious, were still no more substantial than many others that had periodically surfaced in the Haitian press.”

“What made the Narcisse case unique,” said Kline, “was the fact that he happened to die at an American-directed philanthropic institution which, among its many features, keeps precise and accurate records.” Thus Kline began to describe the extraordinary case of Clairvius Narcisse.

In the spring of 1962, a Haitian peasant aged about forty approached the emergency entrance of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Deschapelles in the Artibonite Valley. He was admitted under the name Clairvius Narcisse at 9:45 P.M. on April 30, complaining of fever, body ache, and general malaise; he had also begun to spit blood. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and at 1:15 P.M. on May 2 he was pronounced dead by two attendant physicians, one of them an American. His sister Angelina Narcisse was present at his bedside and immediately notified the family. Shortly after Narcisse’s demise an elder sister, Marie Claire, arrived and witnessed the body, affixing her thumbprint to the official death certificate. The body was placed in cold storage for twenty hours, then taken for burial. At 10:00 A.M., May 3, 1962, Clairvius Narcisse was buried in a small cemetery north of his village of l’Estère, and ten days later a heavy concrete memorial slab was placed over the grave by his family.

In 1980, eighteen years later, a man walked into the l’Estère marketplace and approached Angelina Narcisse. He introduced himself by a boyhood nickname of the deceased brother, a name that only intimate family members knew and that had not been used since the siblings were children. The man claimed to be Clairvius and stated that he had been made a zombi by his brother because of a land dispute. In Haiti, the official Napoleonic code states that land must be divided among male offspring. According to Narcisse, he had refused to sell off his part of the inheritance, and his brother had, in a fit of anger, contracted out his zombification. Immediately following his resurrection from the grave he was beaten and bound, then led away by a team of men to the north of the country where, for two years, he worked as a slave with other zombis. Eventually the zombi master was killed and the zombis, free from whatever force kept them bound to him, dispersed. Narcisse spent the next sixteen years wandering about the country, fearful of the vengeful brother. It was only after hearing of his brother’s death that he dared return to his village.

The Narcisse case generated considerable publicity within Haiti and drew the attention of the BBC, which arrived in 1981 to film a short documentary based on his story. Douyon, meanwhile, had considered various ways to test the truth of Narcisse’s claim. To exhume the grave would have proved little. If the man was an impostor, he or his conspirators could well have removed the bones. On the other hand, had Narcisse actually been taken from the grave as a zombi, those responsible might have substituted another body, by then impossible to identify. Instead, working directly with family members, Douyon designed a series of detailed questions concerning Narcisse’s childhood-questions that not even a close boyhood friend could have answered. These the man claiming to be Narcisse answered correctly. And over two hundred residents of l’Estère were certain that Narcisse had returned to the living. By the time the BBC arrived Douyon himself was convinced. To close the circle, the BBC took a copy of the death certificate to Scotland Yard, and there specialists verified that the fingerprint belonged to the sister, Marie Claire.

It was several moments before I could accept the seriousness of their conclusion. I stood up and moved, escaping the white whorls of cigarette smoke, anxious to shake loose a dozen thoughts and questions.

“How do you know this isn’t an elaborate fraud?”

“Perpetrated by whom and for what end?” Kline replied. “In Haiti a zombi is a complete outcast. Would a leper stand upon Hyde Park Corner and boast of his disease?”

“So you are saying that this Narcisse was buried alive.”

“Yes, unless you believe in magic.”

“What about oxygen in the coffin?”

“His survival would have depended on his level of metabolic activity. There is a medically documented case of an Indian fakir consciously reducing his oxygen consumption and surviving ten hours in an airtight box hardly larger than a coffin.”

“It is worth pointing out,” interjected Lehman, “that damage due to oxygen deprivation would be progressive.”

“In what sense?”

“If certain brain cells are without oxygen for even a few seconds they die and can never recover their function, for as I probably don’t have to tell you, there is no regeneration of brain tissue. The more primitive parts of the brain, those that control vital functions, can endure greater abuse. Under certain circumstances the individual may lose personality, or that part of the brain that deals with thought and voluntary movement, and yet survive as a vegetable because the vital centers are intact.”

“Precisely the Haitian definition of a zombi,” noted Kline. “A body without character, without will.”

Still incredulous, I turned to Kline.

“Are you suggesting that brain damage creates a zombi?”

“Not at all, at least not directly. After all, Narcisse was pronounced dead. There must be a material explanation, and we think it is a drug.”

Finally I knew what they wanted from me.

“I first came across rumors of a zombi poison some thirty years ago,” said Kline. “During my first years in Haiti I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a sample. I did meet an old voodoo priest who assured me that the poison was sprinkled across the threshold of the intended victim’s doorway and absorbed through the skin of the feet. He claimed that at the resurrection ceremony the victim was administered a second drug as an antidote. Now both the BBC and Douyon have sent us very similar reports.”

“Douyon brought us a sample of a reputed zombi poison some months ago,” said Lehman. “We tested it on rats but it proved to be completely inert. However, a brown powder given to us recently by one of the correspondents of the BBC may be of greater interest. We prepared an emulsion and applied it to the abdomen of rhesus monkeys; it caused a pronounced reduction in activity. We have absolutely no idea what the powder was made from.”

Lehman’s grave dark face had changed; it was luminous, trembling. I found his excitement contagious. Yes, it was completely conceivable that a drug might exist which, if administered in proper dosage, would lower the metabolic state of the victim to such a level that he would be considered dead. In fact, however, the victim would remain alive, and an antidote properly administered could then restore him at the appropriate time. The medical potential of such a drug could be enormous … as Kline obviously appreciated.

“Take surgery,” he said. “Someone is about to have an operation. What do they want to be sure of?” Before I could reply, he said, “Their surgeon? They want to know that the surgeon is qualified, but the truth is that most surgery is absolutely routine. The real liability, the hidden danger that kills hundreds of patients every year, no one even thinks about.”

Lehman was restless, anxious to finish Kline’s thought, but Kline went on. “Anesthesia. Every time someone goes under, it is an experiment in applied pharmacology. The anesthesiologist has his formulae and his preferred chemicals, but he combines them on the spot, depending on the type of operation and the condition of the patient. Each case is unique and experimental.”

“And hazardous,” Lehman added. Kline held his empty brandy glass to the light.

“We cloak all uncomfortable truths in euphemism,” Kline said, moving back to the table toward me. “General anesthesia is essential, often unavoidable, always dangerous. That makes everyone, especially the physicians, uncomfortable. Hence we joke about getting knocked out, as if it were a straightforward procedure. Well, I suppose it is. Bringing someone back undamaged, however, is not.”

Kline paused. “If we could find a new drug which made the patient utterly insensible to pain, and paralyzed, and another which harmlessly returned him to normal consciousness, it could revolutionize modern surgery.”

It was my turn to interrupt. “And make somebody a lot of money.”

“For the sake of medical science,” Lehman insisted. “That’s why it behooves us to investigate all reports of potential anesthetic agents. We must have a close look at this reputed zombi poison, if it exists.”

Kline moved across the room like a man at odds with something more than himself. “Anesthesis is only the beginning. NASA once asked me to consider the possible application of psychoactive drugs in the space program. They would never admit it, but basically they were concerned with how they were going to keep the restless astronauts occupied during extended interplanetary missions. This zombi poison could provide a fascinating model for experiments in artificial hibernation.”

Lehman looked at Kline impatiently. “What we want from you, Mr. Davis, is the formula of the poison.” The bluntness of his statement, however expected, pushed me back from the table, and I turned my back on them both, stepping toward a sliding glass door, until I felt myself caught like a fly in the cross mesh of their gaze.

I turned back to them. “What about contacts?”

“We will be touch with Douyon. And perhaps you should call the BBC and speak with their correspondent.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all we know.”

“And my expenses?”

“We have a small fund put aside. Just send us the bills.”

There was nothing more to ask. They were like two major currents, Kline torrid and surging, Lehman passive and subdued; they had come together, determined to act. My assignment as outlined succinctly by Kline was to travel to Haiti, find the voodoo sorcerers responsible, and obtain samples of the poison and antidote, observing their preparation and if possible documenting their use.

As I went out the apartment door, Kline handed me a sealed manila envelope, and it was then I realized that they had assumed all along that I would take the assignment. I didn’t look back, even as I heard their voices continuing behind me.

Kline’s daughter Marna caught up with me in the lobby. It was late, and I walked her back to her Sixty-ninth Street studio. Outside on the streets a thin drizzle had turned the pavement to pools of yellow light. The storm had passed and the city once again carried its own sounds. Marna hadn’t said anything during the meeting, and she didn’t speak now. I asked her about a photograph I had noticed in the apartment, of a frail white-haired man sitting at a desk, reaching a hand across a pair of ivory-handled revolvers.

“François Duvalier. Eugene Smith took it when he and my father were in Haiti.”

“Your father knew Papa Doc?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“When they set up that institute where Douyon has the zombis. The one named after him.”

“After Duvalier?”

“No,” she said with a laugh, “my father. He’s been going to Haiti for twenty-five years.”

“I know. Ever go with him?”

“Yes, all the time, but …”

“Like it?”

“Sure, it’s wonderful. But listen, you ought to understand something. He really believes zombis exist.”

“You don’t.”

“That’s not the point.”

Outside her apartment house, an empty cab approached and I hailed it. We said goodnight. It was hours past the last air shuttle, so I directed the cabbie to Grand Central Station and waited for the night train to Boston. Once on board, I opened the envelope that Kline had given me. Besides money and an airplane ticket there was one Polaroid photograph, a dull image of a poor black peasant, whom a note identified as Clairvius Narcisse. I found myself cradling his face in my hand, astonished how a mere photograph could make the exotic seem intimate. I still held it as the train pulled out, and then finally I glanced at the airline ticket. I had one week to try to piece together a biological explanation that would fit the limited data.

3 The Calabar Hypothesis

I ENJOY TRAINS, and in South America whenever possible I rode them, sitting on the open ends, savoring the waves of tropical scents that the passage of the train whipped into an irresistible melange. By comparison to those creaking Latin caravans, so alive in human sweat and wet wool, smelling of a dozen species of crushed flowers, American trains are sadly sterile, with a heavy atmosphere that makes the air taste used. Still, the rhythm of the rails is always seductive, and the passing frames race by like so many childhood fantasies, alive in color and light.

But leaving New York, it was not to the train that I owed my strange sense of release. I questioned my reflection in the train window, puzzled by a range of inexpressible feelings and ideas. “The frontier of death”—it was that phrase of Lehman’s that haunted me most, pulling me back from the borders of sleep, leaving me alone in an empty train car measuring the passing night by the periodic shuffling of the conductor’s feet.

Kline and Lehman. I weighed their words, groping for hidden meanings or clues, but kept returning to the bare facts of the case. These did not tell me much, but they were enough to get started, and, moreover, they mercifully grounded my imagination.

A poison sprinkled across a threshold was presumably absorbed through the feet. If true, this implied that its principal chemical constituents had to be topically active. From descriptions of the wandering zombis, it appeared likely that the drug induced a prolonged psychotic state, while the initial dose had to be capable of causing a deathlike stupor. Since in all likelihood the poison was organically derived, its source had to be a plant or animal currently found in Haiti. Finally, whatever this substance might prove to be, it had to be extraordinarily potent.

Knowing very little about animal venoms, I reviewed the toxic and psychoactive plants I had become familiar with during my six-year association with the Botanical Museum. I thought of plants that could kill, and others that could lead one past the edge of consciousness. There was only one that even nominally met the criteria of the zombi poison. It was also the one plant that during all my investigations, and through all my travels, I had dared not imbibe—a hallucinogenic plant so dangerous that even Schultes, for all his stoic experimentation, had never sampled. It is a plant that has been called the drug of choice of poisoners, criminals, and black magicians throughout the world. Its name is datura, “the holy flower of the North Star.”

My tired thoughts broke into fragments that landed on a distant night, cold and clear as glass, in the high Andes of Peru. A brown dusty trail curved past agave swollen in bud and rose to an open veranda flanked on three sides by the adobe walls of the farmhouse. Against one wall sat the patient, alone and strangely solemn. He had been a prosperous fisherman a season ago, before the currents shifted and the warm tropical waters came south to strangle the sea life of the entire coast. As if conforming to some bitter law of physics, his personal life had mimicked the natural disorder: his child had taken ill, and then his wife fled with a lover. In the wake of these events the poor man disappeared from his village, only to reappear a month later, a simulacrum of death, naked and quite insane.

For two weeks the curandero had sought in vain to divine the source of such misfortune. With his inherent eye for the sacred he had laid out the power objects of his altar—stone crystals, jaguar teeth, murex shells, whale bones, and ancient huacas that rose methodically to touch an arc of colonial swords impaling the earth. In nocturnal ceremonies he and the patient had together inhaled a decoction of alcohol and tobacco from scallop shells carefully balanced beneath each nostril. Invoking the names of Atahualpa and all the ancient Peruvian kings, the spirits of the mountains and the holy herbs, they had imbibed achuma, the sacred cactus of the four winds. The curandero’s son had led the madman on mule on a slow passage high into the mountains to bathe in their spiritual source, the lakes of Las Huaringas. All to no avail. The visions had come, only weak and incomprehensible, and even the pilgrimage to the healing waters had done little to free the deranged man from his stubborn misery.

It was left for the curandero to work alone, to seek a solution in a stronger source, in some supernatural realm that might break a normal man. It was a solitary task, and leaving his patient sitting alone, he slipped away, walking with a stoop, sheltered by a worn poncho and an enormous hat that covered all of his face save his chin, which protruded like the toe of an old boot. He would engage a different set of visions—confusing, disorienting, unpleasant—and he would approach them not as a man of knowledge who might interpret and manipulate his spirit world, but rather as a supplicant who in just touching the realm of madness unleashed by the plant might attain revelation. It was a frightful prospect to relinquish all control, to lose all sense of time and space and memory. But he had no choice, and he approached his task with resignation, like the bearer of an incurable disease.

He retreated into a small stone hut, sealed by a broken door that turned his movements into vertical slices of light. I peered through these cracks at his shadowy figure moving in purposeful, increasingly smaller circles, the way a dog does before it beds down for the night. Once on the ground, he removed his hat, revealing a vaguely distorted face—distended blue-black lips and an elephantine nose that drooped precariously toward his mouth. The flesh had collapsed on his cheekbones, his eyes were lost in shadow. He sat quietly, accepting but not acknowledging the ministrations of his assistant, who carefully arranged a bed, a large basin of water, and a small enamel bowl of dark liquid. The assistant came out and took his place discreetly to one side of the door. He beckoned me to join him, and I moved close. We remained still, peering into the dark room, our breathing silenced by the light wind falling on the tin roof.

The curandero clasped the enamel bowl as a rural priest might hold a chalice, with his whole hands, firmly and without grace. Nodding first to the four corners of the hut, he drank slowly, deliberately, wincing slightly only once before draining the vessel. Then he sat profoundly still, with the calm that invariably follows such irrevocable acts.

The potion took effect quickly. Within half an hour he had sunk into a heavy stupor, his eyes fixed vacantly on the ground, his mouth sealed shut, his face suddenly bloated and red. His nostrils flared, and several minutes later his eyes began to roll, foam issued from his mouth, and his entire body shook with horrible convulsions. He plunged deeper and deeper into delirium, breathing spasmodically, kneading the earth with his long bony fingers like a cat exploring for fissures that might release him from his madness. Agonizing screams sliced into the night. He attempted to stand, only to fall and lie flat on the ground, thrashing the air with his arms. Suddenly he lunged for the basin of water, like a man whose skin is aflame or whose throat is parched. Then with a final anguished spasm, he collapsed and lay still.

This was cimora, the tree of the evil eagle, the closest botanical relative of datura.

The pale lavender light of dawn shone through the opaque membrane of the train window, a mirage of life, and finally, the slow scuffle of feet in South Station led me out into the morning light and onto the streets of Boston.

The city was just coming awake, and I felt far too agitated to sleep. I got to the Botanical Museum by the time it opened and had to wade through a horde of schoolchildren being dragged by a schoolmaster to the exhibits before I could climb the iron staircase and finally reach the private library on the upper floor.

The air was musty, the usual reassuring scent. From behind the oak cabinet that held the ancient folios and the original editions of Linnaeus, I extracted some leather-bound monographs, seeking impatiently that first clue that might solidify my intuitions. I found it in an old brown-paged catalog written some forty years ago. Datura did grow in Haiti, three species, all of them introduced from the Old World. I scanned the list of common names, names that frequently reflect popular applications of the plant. One of the species was Datura stramonium. To the Haitians this was concombre zombi— the zombi’s cucumber! With a quiet sense of satisfaction I retreated to my favorite chair, and within minutes fell fast asleep.

•

A key touched the outer lock. Professor Schultes walked in, his arm cradling several volumes.

“Don’t you usually sleep in your office?” he asked wryly. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I briefed him on the zombi investigation.

Schultes shared my instincts for datura, and together we spent the morning building the case.

There was no question that species of datura are topically active. Sorcerers among the Yaqui Indians of northern Mexico anoint their genitals, legs, and feet with a salve based on crushed datura leaves and thus experience the sensation of flight. Schultes felt that quite possibly the Yaqui had acquired this practice from the Spaniards, for throughout medieval Europe witches commonly rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments made from belladonna, mandrake, and henbane, all relatives of datura. In fact, much of the behavior associated with the witches is as readily attributable to these drugs as to any spiritual communion with the diabolic. A particularly efficient means of self-administering the drug for women is through the moist tissues of the vagina; the witch’s broomstick or staff was considered a most effective applicator. (Our own popular image of the haggard woman on a broomstick comes from the medieval belief that witches rode their staffs each midnight to the sabbat, the orgiastic assembly of demons and sorcerers. In fact, it now appears that their journey was not through space, but across the hallucinatory landscape of their minds.)

That the plant is capable of inducing stupor is suggested in the origins of the name itself, which is derived from the dhatureas, bands of thieves in ancient India that used it to drug their intended victims. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese explorer Christoval Acosta found that Hindu prostitutes were so adept at using the seeds of the plant that they gave it in doses corresponding to the number of hours they wished their poor victims to remain unconscious. A later traveler to the Indies, Johann Albert de Mandelslo, noted in the mid-seventeenth century that the women, closely watched by their husbands yet tormented by their passion for the novel Europeans, drugged their mates with datura and then “prosecuted their delights, even in the presence of their husbands,” who sat utterly stupefied with their eyes wide open. A more macabre use was recorded from the New World, where the Chibcha Indians of highland Colombia administered a close relative of datura to the wives and slaves of dead kings, before burying them alive with their deceased masters.

The pharmacological evidence was solid. Datura was topically active, and in relatively modest dosage induced maddening hallucinations and delusions, followed by confusion, disorientation, and amnesia. Excessive doses resulted in stupor and death.

Yet I had another intuitive reason to implicate datura in the zombi phenomenon. Among many Amerindian groups, life is conceptually divided into stages beginning with birth and progressing through initiation, marriage, and finally death. The transition from one stage to the next is often marked by important ritualistic activity. When I had first heard Kline and Lehman describe Narcisse’s account of his resurrection from the grave, it had struck me as a kind of passage rite—a perverse inversion of the natural process of life and death. Perhaps more than any other drug, datura is associated with such transitional moments of passage, of initiation and death. The Luisena Indians of southern California, for example, felt that all youths had to undergo datura narcosis during their puberty rites in order to become men. The Algonquin and other tribes of northeastern North America also employed datura, calling it wysoccan. At puberty, adolescent males were confined in special longhouses and for two or three weeks ate nothing but the drug. During the course of their extended intoxication, the youths forgot what it was to be a boy and learned what it meant to be a man. In South America the Jivaro, or Shuar—the famed headhunters of eastern Ecuador—give a potion called maikua to young boys when at the age of six they must seek their souls. If the boy is fortunate, his soul will appear to him in the form of a large pair of creatures, often animals such as jaguars or anacondas. Later the soul will enter the body.

For many Indian tribes datura is closely associated with death. In parts of highland Peru it is called huaca, the Quechua name for grave, because of the belief that those intoxicated with the plant are able to divine the location of the tombs of their ancestors. The Zuni of the American Southwest chew datura during rain ceremonies, often placing the powdered roots in their eyes as they beseech the spirits of the dead to intercede with the gods for rain. Perhaps more than any other clue, it was this connection between datura and the forces of death and darkness that had offered the first indication of the makeup of the zombi poison.

Our attention naturally focused on Datura stramonium, the species known in Haiti as the zombi’s cucumber. Although this plant appears to have been native to Asia, its value as a drug was such that it was widely dispersed throughout Europe and Africa long before the time of Columbus. Because Schultes knew of no reports of the indigenous use of this species by Caribbean Indians, and because of the African origins of the Haitian, I was particularly curious about its distribution in West Africa.

Later that day, it came as no surprise to read that many tribes made use of Datura stramonium. The Hausas of Nigeria used the seeds to heighten the intoxication of ritual beverages. It was given to Fulani youths to excite them in the sharo contest, the ordeal of manhood. Witch doctors in Togo administered a drink of its leaves and the root of a potent fish poison (Lonchocarpus capassa) to disputants who appeared before them for a settlement. In many parts of West Africa the use of Datura stramonium in criminal poisonings still takes a unique form: women breed beetles and feed them on a species of the plant, and in turn use the feces to kill unfaithful lovers.

If the poison originated in Africa, it was reasonable to assume that the antidote that Kline had referred to would be found there as well. It was therefore with some satisfaction that I discovered that the recognized medical antidote for datura poisoning is derived from a West African plant. The substance is physostigmine, a drug first isolated from the Calabar bean (Physostigmine venenosum), a climbing liana that grows in swampy coastal areas of West Africa from Sierra Leone south and east as far as the Cameroons. It is especially well known on the Calabar coast near the Gulf of Guinea at the mouth of the Niger River, precisely the region from which many of the forefathers of the Haitian people embarked as slaves for the plantations of the New World.

A brief sojourn in the ethnographic literature revealed that the eighteenth-century French plantation owners of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, chose their slaves with some care. The carnage on the plantations was horrendous, and as they found it cheaper to bring in adult Africans than to raise slaves from birth, prodigious numbers had to be imported. In a mere twelve years, for example, between 1779 and 1790, the slave ships that plied the coast of Africa from Sierra Leone to Mozambique unloaded close to four hundred thousand slaves in Saint Domingue. Although these unfortunate individuals came from virtually every corner of the continent, the plantation owners clearly had certain preferences. The Senegalese were highly regarded for their superior morality and taciturn character—an ironic assessment for the slavers to make—whereas the people from Sierra Leone and the Ivory and Gold Coasts were considered a stubborn group likely to revolt and desert. The Ibos of the southern Slave Coast of what is now Nigeria worked well but were prone to suicide. The people from the Congo and Angola were highly regarded, and large numbers of them were imported. But it was the peoples bought along the Slave Coast that were preferred above all others, and much of the European slave trade concentrated there. Such was the scale of the trade that in the Kingdom of Dahomey it became a national industry, with the economy of the entire country based on annual expeditions against neighboring peoples. Many of the captured victims—Nagos, Mahis, and Aradas of the western Yoruba, among others—were taken down the Niger, and there they fell into the hands of a notorious and opportunistic tribe of traders, the Efik of Old Calabar.

Originally fishermen, the Efik were ideally situated near the estuary of the Niger River to take advantage of the bitter competition for slaves. The prevailing winds and currents forced all ships returning to Europe or the Americas from the Ivory and Gold Coasts to pass eastward toward the Slave Coast and close to the shores of Efik lands. As avaricious middlemen soon equipped with European arms, the Efik came to control the entire trade with the hinterland; their name, in fact, is derived from an Ibibio-Efik word meaning “oppress,” a name received from those neighboring tribes on the lower Calabar and Cross rivers whom the Efik prevented from establishing direct contact with the white traders.

The Efik were no more cooperative with the Europeans. They demanded lines of credit and were regularly entrusted with trade items—salt, cotton cloth, iron, brass, and copper valued in the thousands of pounds sterling. In addition to exchanging goods for slaves, the Europeans had to pay a duty for the privilege of trading with the Efik chiefs. Though some of the slave ships anchored off the coast for up to a year, no European was ever permitted to touch the shore; they could only wait, sometimes for months, to pick up their cargo.

Apparently each major Efik settlement was ruled outwardly by an obong, or chief, who enforced laws, mediated in disputes, and led the armed forces in times of war. Besides this secular authority, however, there was a second and perhaps more powerful social and political force, a secret society called the Egbo, or leopard society. The Egbo was a male hierarchical association consisting of several ranks, each of which had a distinctive costume. Although the Egbo and the secular authority were institutionally separate, in practice powerful individuals of the tribe sat in council for both groups. Fear of the clandestine and mysterious Egbo was often exploited by members of the secret society themselves, and the obong invariably ranked high in the society.

Under a secret council of community elders that constituted the supreme judicial authority, the leopard society promulgated and enforced laws, judged important cases, recovered debts, and protected the property of its members. It enforced its laws with a broad range of sanctions. It could impose fines, prevent an individual from trading, impound property, and arrest, detain, or incarcerate offenders. Serious cases resulted in execution, by either decapitation or fatal mutilation—the victim was tied to a tree with his lower jaw sliced off.

The tribunal of the secret society determined guilt or innocence by a judgment of a most singular form. The accused was made to drink a toxic potion made from eight seeds of the Calabar bean, ground and mixed in water. In such a dose, physostigmine acts as a powerful sedative of the spinal cord, and causes progressively ascending paralysis from the feet to the waist, and eventual collapse of all muscular control, leading to death by asphyxiation. The defendant, after swallowing the poison, was ordered to stand still before a judicial gathering until the effects of the poison became noticeable. Then he was ordered to walk toward a line drawn on the ground ten feet away. If the accused was lucky enough to vomit and regurgitate the poison, he was judged innocent and allowed to depart unharmed. If he did not vomit, yet managed to reach the line, he was also deemed innocent, and quickly given a concoction of excrement mixed with water which had been used to wash the external genitalia of a female.

Most often, however, given the toxicity of the Calabar bean, the accused died a ghastly death. The body was racked with terrible convulsions, mucus flowed from the nose, the mouth shook horribly. If a person died from the ordeal, the executioner gouged out his eyes and cast the naked body into the forest.

At any one time during the later years of the slave trade, the Efik lands were crowded with newly acquired slaves, most of them thoroughly demoralized. To keep order and discipline, the Efik depended on the agents and executioners of the Egbo. During the weeks and sometimes months that the slaves were held awaiting shipment to the Americas, they must have heard of the gruesome ordeal of the Calabar bean, and many may have undergone the judgment themselves.

Here was an exciting possibility. Datura was a violently psychoactive plant well known and widely used in Africa as a stuporific poison by at least some of the peoples that had been exported to Haiti. The Calabar bean, which yields the recognized medical antidote for datura poisoning, came from the same region, and knowledge of its toxicity would almost certainly have passed across the Atlantic. African species of datura were apparently common throughout contemporary Haiti. The Calabar bean, though unreported from Haiti, has a hard outer seed coat and could have easily survived the transoceanic passage, and like datura it could have been later sown deliberately or accidentally, in the fertile soils of Saint Domingue.

Thus after a day in the library I had something concrete, a hypothesis that, however tenuous, at least fitted the sparse facts of the case. Knowledge of the pharmacological properties of these two toxic African plants presumably traveled across the Atlantic with the slaves to Saint Domingue. Then, adapted to fit new needs, or perhaps conserved as adjuncts to ancient magical practices, they provided the material basis upon which the contemporary belief in zombis was founded. My Calabar hypothesis was only conjecture, but at least it was a beginning, a skeletal framework on which other ideas and new information could be draped, until a solution to this extraordinary mystery took form.

The hypothesis was simple and elegant but, as it would turn out, quite wrong. Yet in pursuing it I had unwittingly uncovered a sociological connection that would eventually prove a key to the entire zombi phenomenon—the secret societies of the Efik.

4 White Darkness and the Living Dead

I TRAVELED to Haiti in April 1982, armed only with my tentative hypothesis, Kline’s introduction to Lamarque Douyon, the Port-au-Prince psychiatrist who had in his clinic Clairvius Narcisse, and two names I received from the BBC in London: Max Beauvoir, described as a sophisticated member of the Haitian intellectual elite and a noted authority on the vodoun religion; and Marcel Pierre, the vodoun priest, or houngan, from whom the BBC had obtained their sample of the reputed poison, a man one of their correspondents had labeled the “incarnation of evil.”

As my plane approached Haiti, it was not hard to understand why Columbus had responded as he had when asked by Isabella to describe the island of Hispaniola. He had taken the nearest piece of paper, crumpled it in his hand, and thrown it on the table. “That,” he had said, “is Hispaniola.”

Columbus had come to Haiti by way of the island of San Salvador, his first landfall in the Americas, where the natives had told enticing tales of a mountainous island where the rivers ran yellow with soft stones. The admiral found his gold, but more excitedly he discovered a tropical paradise. In rapture he wrote back to his queen that nowhere under the sun were there lands of such fertility, so void of pestilence, where the rivers were countless and the trees reached into the heavens. The native Arawaks he praised as generous and good, and he beseeched her to take them under her protection. This she did. The Spaniards introduced all the elements of sixteenth-century civilization, and as a result within fifteen years the native population was reduced from approximately half a million to sixty thousand. European rapacity carved away the forest as well, and with the disappearance of the rich stands of lignum vitae and mahogany, rosewood, and pine, the delicate tropical soils turned to dust and blackened the rivers. Now, looking out of the plane at the barren slopes and the dry, desolate landscape, I saw the European arrival on that island four hundred years before like the coming of a plague of locusts.

The capital city of Port-au-Prince lies prostrate across a low, hot tropical plain at the head of a bay flanked on both sides by soaring mountains. Behind these mountains rise others, creating an illusion of space that absorbs Haiti’s multitudes and softens the country’s harshest statistic: a land mass of only ten thousand square miles inhabited by six million people. Port-au-Prince is a sprawling muddle of a city, on first encounter a carnival of civic chaos. A waterfront shantytown damp with laundry. Half-finished, leprous public monuments. Streets lined with flamboyant and the stench of fish and sweat, excrement and ash. Dazzling government buildings and a presidential palace so white that it doesn’t seem real. There are the cries and moans of the marketplace, the din of untuned engines, the reek of diesel fumes. It presents all the squalor and grace of any Third World capital, yet as I drove into the city for the first time, I noticed something else. The people on the street didn’t walk; they flowed, exuding pride. Physically they were beautiful. They seemed gay, careless, jaunty. Washed clean by the afternoon rain, the whole city had a rakish charm. And it wasn’t just how things appeared, it was something in the air, something electric—a raw elemental energy I had never felt elsewhere in the Americas. Yet while I sensed this feeling immediately, and remained aware of it constantly during all the months I was to spend in the country, I would not understand it for some time. That first day coming in from the airport, however, I did receive a clue—a sight I would see many times again in Haiti. There in the late afternoon sun was a single individual, quite sane and very happy, standing alone, dancing with his own shadow.

I checked into the Hotel Ollofson, a filigree mansion draped in bougainvillea and saturated with the air of that long-forgotten era when the United States occupied Haiti. Leaving my bags at the desk, I left immediately for the home of Max Beauvoir, in Mariani, south of the capital beyond a frenetic thoroughfare known as the Carrefour Road. All the traffic that drains the hinterland to the south passes here, but it is less a route than a happening, a condensation in a few kilometers of all the life and drama of the city. My driver treated it as a free-for-all, flying recklessly past stevedores bent double beneath loads of ice and charcoal, fish and furniture. From every direction kaleidoscopic “tap taps,” the Haitian buses, overflowing with nattering passengers and their goods, careened on and off the roadway in search of still more cargo. In front of shops, bossy marchand ladies flaunted their wares, artisans carved shoes out of tires, or forged carriage parts from iron bars. And everywhere Dominican girls in tight-fitting rayon hung heavy in doorways lined with caladium. It is a dirty, lively, gaudy boulevard where the roadside houses climb atop one another vying for the attention of those passing by.

Just beyond a cemetery of whitewashed tombs, the road bursts into the open, and for the first time since entering the Carrefour one senses the sea at hand. About three kilometers beyond, where the nose of the mountain touches the water, my driver turned into a grove of trees.

A porter met me at the gate, and I followed him through a marvelous garden toward a small outbuilding on the edge of the property. There, among a dusty collection of amulets and African art, Max Beauvoir awaited me. He was immediately impressive—tall, debonaire in dress and manner, and handsome. Fluent in several languages, he questioned me at length about my previous work, my academic background, and my intentions in Haiti. In turn, I offered my initial hypothesis concerning the use of poisons in the creation of zombis.

“And should you find these zombis? Will you not laugh at their misery?”

“I can’t say. Maybe, just as I laugh at my own.”

He smiled. “Spoken like a Haitian. Yes, we do laugh at our misfortune, but we reserve that right for ourselves.” He hesitated, pulling deeply on a cigarette. “I am afraid you shall be looking for this poison for some time, Mr. Davis. It is not a poison that makes a zombi, it is the bokor.”

“The bokor?”

“The priest who serves with the left hand,” he said cryptically. “But that is a false distinction.” He paused. “In a way, we are all bokors, we houngan. The houngan must know evil to combat it, the bokor must embrace good in order to subvert it. It is all one. The bokor who knows the magic can make anyone a zombi—a Haitian living abroad, a foreigner. Likewise, I can treat a victim, should I choose. It is our force, and our greatest defense. But this talk is in vain. This is a land where things are not the way they seem.”

Beauvoir led me back to my car, exchanging pleasantries but offering neither comment nor information related to my assignment. Instead, having revealed to me that he was a vodoun priest, a houngan, he asked me to return that night to witness his vodoun ceremony. The land we stood on was his hounfour—his temple, a sanctuary, and shrine.

Max Beauvoir held a commercial vodoun ceremony every night. Anyone was invited, and there was a ten-dollar charge for tourists that supported his family and the thirty or more people who worked for him. I arrived around ten and was taken into the peristyle, the roofed court of the hounfour, and was led around a semicircle of tables to the one where Beauvoir sat at the head. A waiter brought me a drink. Beauvoir invited me to scan the assembly of visitors, an eclectic gathering that included some French sailors, several groups of Haitians, an anthropology professor from Milan who had visited earlier in the day, a pair of journalists, and a party of American missionaries. There was the sound of a rattle, and Beauvoir directed my attention to the rear of the temple.

A white-robed girl—one of the hounsis, or initiates in the temple—came out of the darkness into the peristyle, spun in two directions, then placed a candle on the ground and lit it. The mambo, or vodoun priestess, repeated her motion bearing a clay jar, then carefully traced a cabalistic design on the earth, using cornmeal taken from the jar. This, Beauvoir explained, was a vévé, the symbol of the loa, or spirit, being invoked. The mambo next presented a container of water to the cardinal points, then poured libations to the centerpost of the peristyle, the axis along which the spirits were to enter. Further libations were offered to each of the three drums and the entrance of the temple. Then, with a flourish, the mambo led the initiates into the peristyle and around the centerpost, the poteau mitan, in a counterclockwise direction until they knelt as one before the houngan. Bearing a rattle, or asson, Beauvoir led the prayer, an elaborate litany that invoked in hierarchical order the spirits of the vodoun pantheon. He recited in an ancient ritual language whose sounds evoked all the mysteries of an ancient tradition.

Then the drums started, first the penetrating staccato cry of the cata, the smallest, whipped by a pair of long thin sticks. The rolling rhythm of the second, the seconde, followed, and then came the sound of thunder rising, as if the belly of the earth were about to burst. This was the maman, largest of the three. Each drum had its own rhythm, its own pitch, yet there was a stunning unity to their sound that swept over the senses. The mambo’s voice sliced through the night, and against the rising chords of her invocation the drummers beat a continuous battery of sound, a resonance so powerful and directed it had the very palm trees above swaying in sympathy.

The initiates responded, swinging about the peristyle as one body linked by a single pulse. Each hounsis remained anonymous, focused inward and turned away from the audience toward the poteau mitan and the drums. Their dance was not a ritual of poised grace, of allegory; it was a frontal assault on the forces of nature. Physically, it was a dance of shoulders and arms, of feet flat on the ground repeating deceptively simple steps over and over. But it was also a dance of purpose and resolution, of solidity and permanence.

For forty minutes the dance went on, and then it happened. The maman broke—fled from the fixed rhythm of the other two drums, then rushed back with a highly syncopated, broken counterpoint. The effect was one of excruciating emptiness, a moment of hopeless vulnerability. An initiate froze. The drum pounded relentlessly, deep solid blows that seemed to strike directly to the woman’s spine. She cringed with each beat. Then, with one foot fixed to the earth like a root, she began to spin in a spasmodic pirouette, out of which she soon broke to hurtle about the peristyle, stumbling, falling, grasping, thrashing the air with her arms, momentarily regaining her center only to be driven on by the incessant beat. And upon this wave of sound, the spirit arrived. The woman’s violence ceased; slowly she lifted her face to the sky. She had been mounted by the divine horseman; she had become the spirit. The loa, the spirit that the ceremony had been invoking, had arrived.

Never in the course of my travels in the Amazon had I witnessed a phenomenon as raw or powerful as the spectacle of vodoun possession that followed. The initiate, a diminutive woman, tore about the peristyle, lifting large men off the ground to swing them about like children. She grabbed a glass and tore into it with her teeth, swallowing small bits and spitting the rest onto the ground. At one point the mambo brought her a live dove; this the hounsis sacrificed by breaking its wings, then tearing the neck apart with her teeth. Apparently the spirits could be greedy, for soon two other hounsis were possessed, and for an extraordinary thirty minutes the peristyle was utter pandemonium, with the mambo racing about, spraying rum and libations of water and clairin, directing the spirits with the rhythm of her asson. The drums beat ceaselessly. Then, as suddenly as the spirits had arrived, they left, and one by one the hounsis that had been possessed collapsed deep within themselves. As the others carried their exhausted bodies back into the temple, I glanced at Beauvoir, and then back across the tables of guests. Some began nervously to applaud, others looked confused and uncertain.

It was only the beginning of an extraordinary night. More was to follow, Beauvoir explained. What we had just seen were the rites of Rada, derived almost directly from the services of the deities of Dahomey. In Haiti, the Rada have come to represent the emotional stability and warmth of Africa, the hearth of the nation. Customarily in the Port-au-Prince region they are followed by those of a new nation of spirits, forged directly in the steel and blood of the colonial era. These are the Petro, and they reflect all the rage, violence and delirium that threw off the shackles of slavery. The drums, dancing, and rhythm of their beat are completely distinct. Whereas the Rada drumming and dancing are on beat, the Petro are offbeat, sharp, and unforgiving, like the crack of a rawhide whip.

The spirits arrived again, only this time riding a fire burning at the base of the poteau mitan. The hounsis was mounted violently—her entire body shaking, her muscles flexed—and a single spasm wriggled up her spine. She knelt before the fire, calling out in some ancient tongue. Then she stood up and began to whirl, describing smaller and smaller circles that carried her like a top around the poteau mitan and dropped her, still spinning, onto the fire. She remained there for an impossibly long time, and then in a single bound that sent embers and ash throughout the peristyle, she leapt away. Landing squarely on both feet, she stared back at the fire and screeched like a raven. Then she embraced the coals. She grabbed a burning faggot with each hand, slapped them together, and released one. The other she began to lick, with broad lascivious strokes of her tongue, and then she ate the fire, taking a red-hot coal the size of a small apple between her lips. Then, once more she began to spin. She went around the poteau mitan three times until finally she collapsed into the arms of the mambo. The ember was still in her mouth.

After the ceremony ended, a number of the audience came over to speak with Beauvoir, but I was drawn toward the fire at the foot of the poteau mitan. I felt its heat. I teased an ember out of the flames, and lifted it between two pieces of kindling.

“It surprises you.”

I turned to the voice and found one of the hounsis, her white dress still wet with sweat.

“Yes, it is amazing.”

“The loa are strong. Fire cannot harm them.”

With that, she excused herself and moved toward Beauvoir’s table. Then I realized she had spoken perfect English. This was Rachel Beauvoir. She was sixteen, and she walked as if her dancing never stopped.

It seemed like days later when I returned to the Ollofson that evening. The hotel appeared to have shifted its mood yet again. In the daylight when I had arrived it was a white palace, fragile and pretty, a gingerbread fantasy of turrets and towers, cupolas and wooden minarets decorated in lace, which paint alone kept from collapsing into the sea. By late afternoon it had fallen into desuetude, its beams swollen by the moist heat, its atmosphere dense from the impending storm. Later, in the wake of the deluge that tumbled every day like an avalanche onto the tropical plain of the city, the building’s facade washed clean, it glowed again with warmth and beauty in the soft air of dusk. Now, by night and a shrouded moon, it had grown morbid, abandoned, overgrown, staring out over the city with shuttered windows, its gates bound by lianas, its gardens unkempt and wild.

I sat on the veranda, too restless to sleep, attempting to make sense out of what I had seen at Beauvoir’s. There was no escaping the fact that a woman in an apparent state of trance had carried a burning coal in her mouth for three minutes with impunity. Perhaps even more impressive, she did it every night on schedule. I thought of other societies where believers affirm their faith by exposing themselves to fire. In São Paulo, Brazil, hundreds of Japanese celebrate the Buddha’s birthday by walking across beds of coals, the temperature of which has been measured at 650 degrees Fahrenheit. In Greece, tourists regularly watch the firewalkers at the village of Ayia Eleni, acolytes who believe that the presence of Saint Constantine protects them. The same sort of thing goes on in Singapore and throughout the Far East. Western scientists have gone to almost absurd lengths to explain such feats. Generally they invoke the “Leidenfrost point,” citing the effect that makes drops of water dance on a skillet. This theory suggests that just as heat vaporizes the bottom of the water droplet as it approaches the skillet, a thin protective layer of vapor is formed between the burning rocks, for example, and the firewalkers’ feet. I had to smile as I recalled this explanation. To my mind it begged the question entirely. After all, a water droplet on a skillet is not a foot on a red-hot coal, nor lips wrapped about an ember. I still burn my wet tongue if I place the lit end of a cigarette on it. And my own experience in Indian sweat lodges, where the temperatures may reach the boiling point, had taught me that only concentration and the guidance of the medicine man allowed one to endure such a test. Now, after what I had seen at Beauvoir’s, any explanation that did not take into account the play of mind and consciousness, belief and faith, seemed hollow. The woman had clearly entered some kind of spirit realm. But what impressed me the most was the ease with which she did so. I had no experience or knowledge that would allow me either to rationalize or to escape what I had seen.

“And you, mon cher, what are you here for?” The words startled me, and I turned to face a narrow man dressed in fine linen, perched on the edge of the hotel veranda like a shorebird. In his right hand spun an ebony cane inlaid with silver.

“A journalist, no doubt. And which of the many faces of this land shall you see? Shall you see the misery, the suffering, and call it the truth?”

He took three slow steps across the veranda and dropped gracefully into a wicker chair, crossing his legs as he sat. Above him the slow whirl of a wooden fan paced his practiced words like a metronome. He seemed fraudulent, yet I was drawn to him as one is to a caricature. He turned despondent.

“My country, my beautiful country, is run by fools. Watch them descend from the heights in their silver cars, hands clasped to teak steering wheels. Mon cher, they smile like satyrs that have deflowered a nation.”

He spoke almost like a drunkard, yet his eyes were clear.

“Perhaps you shall know the other Haiti, if you can bear it. We are a nation of three—the rich, the poor, and myself. We have all forgotten how to weep. Our wretched past is forgotten as a foul dream, an awkward interlude.”

I stood up to leave.

“I see I frighten you. My deepest apologies.”

I bade the stranger goodnight and crossed the veranda toward my room. He watched me in a faded mirror.

I awakened early the next day and decided to drive north to the town of Saint Marc to look up Marcel Pierre, the houngan who had provided the BBC with its sample of the reputed zombi poison. Beauvoir called me before I could leave, and when I told him my plans he suggested that I take his daughter Rachel with me as an interpreter.

I was waiting on the veranda of the Ollofson when they arrived. Rachel wore a cotton dress, and as they walked up the alabaster steps of the hotel, the patterns ran together like a watercolor.

The trip up the coast was unlike any other drive I had taken in the Americas. It began by the docks, where the black shanties face the cruise ships, and men with legs like anvils drag rickety carts laden with bloody cowhides. Passing out of the city through the lush canefields of the Cul de Sac Plain, it reached the slopes of the Chaine de Matheux and turned back to the sea. Further on, among the wattle-and-daub houses thatched in palm, the concrete ancestral tombs, and the long lines of sleek bodies and bicycles by the roadside, one sensed Africa at hand. All the produce of this surprisingly abundant land is carried on the head—baskets of eggplant and greens, bundles of firewood, tables, a coffin, a single piece of cane, sacks of charcoal, buckets of water, and countless unidentifiable drab bundles. Everything large or small is carried atop out of habit as much as necessity, like a delightful but defiant challenge to the laws of gravity. By the roadside in the shaded tunnel formed by planted neem trees, the passages of rural life come on theatrical display.

I felt lucky to have Rachel with me. Like a child set loose in a carnival, she delighted in the landscape and took pleasure in pointing out things I could not have seen, let alone understood—all the incidental visual anecdotes that for her somehow formed a whole. Yet she herself seemed such a mix of lives. The night before I had sat at the peristyle transfixed by the magic of her and the other hounsis; now as we spoke—and we did continuously—I realized that she was also a high school senior, and an American one at that. Rachel, in fact, had been born in the United States and had spent the first ten years of her life in Massachusetts. Her family, once back in Haiti, and with an eye to her future university education, had enrolled her in the private school run for all the English-speaking children of the foreign diplomatic community. Hence, as we traveled north to try to obtain a poison from Marcel Pierre, our conversation ran from zombis to high school yearbooks, proms, college admission boards, and back to the loa. I don’t know if she noticed how strange it all seemed to me. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked at one point.

“Mainly, I’m an ethnobotanist.”

“What’s that?”

“Somewhere between an anthropologist and a biologist. We try to find new medicine from plants.”

“Have you found any?”

“No.” I laughed.

“I’d like to study anthropology, or literature. But I think I like anthropology better.”

“So do I. You get tired of just books.”

“I already am.” She was looking out the windshield watching the slopes of the mountains that loomed above the coastal road. “Somewhere around here a friend of my father saw a ball of fire come out a cave,” she said.

Saint Marc was still. In the white heat of midday, not even a dog ventured forth. The pallid luster of haze shimmered at the ends of long dusty streets. Buildings of brick and wood, ravaged by time, stood braced by the surrounding hills, scabrous and stripped of vegetation, and mile after mile of featureless hills rose to distant mountains trapped by the horizon.

Rachel’s aunt had been the mayor of Saint Marc, but we didn’t need her help to locate Marcel Pierre. He was well known. A mechanic pointed out a bar and dry goods store at the northern end of town in an area known as the Wasp’s Gate. Marcel Pierre owned the Eagle Bar, as the place was called. Behind it he had built his hounfour.

In the shadowy doorway of the bar a Dominican woman leaned on a Wurlitzer, apparently inured to the raucous music that even at this time of day poured from the machine. Rachel greeted her. The woman motioned us to a table on the porch, then turned and left, trailing the sour scent of cheap perfume. The music was unbearable, we agreed, and we got up to venture inside. The rear of the bar was divided into a number of dark and dingy cubicles, each no longer than the straw mat on its floor, each with a crudely drawn number on its door. A single unshaded light bulb hung from the ceiling. I imagined the place by night, a small labyrinth of cells, each inhabited by a soft, pliant body.

A young boy appeared, and after a brief exchange with Rachel he led us out the back of the bar, past a number of small houses, and through a gate of rusted tin that marked the entrance of the hounfour. He knocked three times. Marcel Pierre emerged from his temple with a woman. She was short and languid. He was tall, with muscles that moved at bone level, and below his flat face, hidden by dark glasses, his thorax stood out in bold relief. He wore red, and a golf cap bearing the emblem of a manufacturer of insecticides.

As we had agreed on the drive, Rachel introduced me as a representative of powerful interests in New York who were willing to pay generously for his services provided no questions were asked and my instructions were followed precisely. He was not impressed. He fixed us with a long disconcerting stare, and when he began to speak he held his head stiffly as if conversing through an imaginary intermediary. He seemed uncommonly calm, and it soon became clear that his only concern was money—how much and how soon.

I asked to see a sample of the reputed zombi poison, and he led us into his bagi, the inner sanctum of the temple. An altar piled deep with artifacts took up most of the room. Displayed prominently among the brilliantly colored powders, the rum and wine bottles, the playing cards, feathers, heads, and Roman Catholic lithographs, were a doll’s head and three skulls, one of them dog and two human. On the wall was a swollen carcass of a puffer fish, a sisal whip, and a staff decorated with horizontal bands of light and dark wood. Marcel reached into the pile on the altar and brought out a plastic bag containing a white aspirin bottle. From a ketchup bottle he poured an oily emulsion onto his hands and rubbed all exposed parts of his body, then instructed us to do the same. The potion smelled of ammonia and formaldehyde. Next, having wrapped a red cloth around his nose and mouth, he carefully opened the bottle. Inside was a coarse, light brown powder. Marcel stood back from the altar, and placidly lifted the red cloth from the left side of his face to reveal a mottled scar. This, he suggested, was proof of the powder’s efficacy.

The negotiations began. He presented me with what amounted to a grocery list—so much for the zombi, so much for the poison, so much to dig up the necessary bones in the cemetery, so much for all three. His brusque offer, void of mystique, left me neither hopeful nor suspicious. By now, after but forty-eight hours in Haiti, I was becoming aware that in this surrealistic country anything might be possible. I merely insisted on certain conditions. I would pay him the negotiated price for the poison provided that I would be able to observe the entire process and collect raw samples of each ingredient. He hesitated, but then agreed. I told him that within twenty-four hours I would let him know if we needed any of his other services.

That evening when I was back with Rachel at the Peristyle de Mariani, I discussed Marcel’s various propositions at some length with her father, Max. He assured me that an individual made into a zombi could be readily treated by a houngan. His confidence combined with my own skepticism that zombis even existed persuaded me to push Marcel Pierre as far as he would go. I would have a look at his poison, and if it was promising, other possibilities might follow.

We returned early the next morning, and Marcel Pierre took us to the local military post to request permission to enter the graveyard to dig up bones. This was denied, not for ethical reasons but because I had failed to obtain the necessary papers from the capital. Marcel suggested to me that we forget about obtaining fresh material from the cemetery and instead use some bones he had on hand at his temple. I agreed, and the three of us spent the rest of the morning assembling the various ingredients of the reputed poison. From an old apothecary we bought several packets of brightly colored talc—magical potions with such exotic names as “break wings,” “cut water,” “respect the crossroads.” Then we drove north to a barren scrubland to gather leaves. We were back at the hounfour that afternoon, and beneath the thatch shelter of his peristyle Marcel Pierre prepared his zombi poison. He first ground the leaves in a mortar, then grated a human skull, adding the shavings to the mortar along with the miscellaneous packets of talc. It seemed a desultory process, his moving from task to task laboriously like an insect, drooping his shoulder with each step. It was near the end of the afternoon when he handed me a dark green powder, finely sifted and sealed in a glass jar.

Rachel cracked open the tin cap of a rum bottle, tipping it lightly to the ground three times to feed the loa. Marcel nodded approvingly. In between long swigs of rum I mentioned to Marcel that I planned to test the poison on an enemy I had, a white foreigner living in the capital, and that I would be certain to let him know the results. I thanked him profusely and paid him the substantial sum I had promised, plus a sizable bonus. I left his hounfour certain that he knew how to make the zombi poison. I was equally convinced that what he had made me was worthless.

When we drove up to the house at Mariani late that night, four men were waiting for us. Max Beauvoir introduced me but not them, saying simply that they wanted to know what I was doing in Haiti. Opening my pack, I laid Marcel Pierre’s prepared poison on the table. One who seemed to be their leader, a short, gruff man with an enormous belly, took the poison, poured it into the palm of his hand, and stirred it with his index finger. Turning to Beauvoir, he said, “This is too light to be anything.” Max laughed, and the others joined in. The four stayed long enough to have a drink and then left without waiting to see the ceremony.

“Who were they?” I asked Max as soon as they were gone.

“Important men.”

“Houngan?”

He nodded.

I spent the next several days in the south looking for plantings of datura and the Calabar bean. All the species of datura that had been reported in Haiti were feral and quite weedy, and I had expected to find them growing in disturbed sites almost anywhere. Curiously, after walking the hills along the road over the mountains toward the southern port of Jacmel, and the barren fields along the east coast as far as Anse-à-Veau, I found but a single specimen—a scandent shrub of Datura metel, at a house site in a small coastal village, planted, I was told, as a remedy for asthma. As for the Calabar bean, I was equally disappointed. Having combed a number of low swampy habitats, and having perused the dusty herbarium at the Ministry of Agriculture, I found no evidence that the plant had become naturalized in Haiti.

But then, out with Max Beauvoir in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, I did find a species of the tree datura of the genus Brugmansia, planted as an ornamental. These are short, gnarly trees, almost invariably covered by large pendulous trumpet-shaped flowers. Though quite distinct in appearance from the spindly datura shrubs, they share the same active chemical principles and are equally toxic if ingested. This, in fact, was the same species used by the curanderos of northern Peru, the one known as cimora. I knew that the tree daturas were native to South America and had only recently been introduced into Haiti, but I was uncertain whether its special properties had been identified by the Haitian peasants. Apparently they had, for no sooner had I begun to collect specimens than a small rancorous group of hill peasants gathered, demanding to know why I was cutting that particular tree. But as soon as Beauvoir said a few words, their demeanor changed dramatically. They approached me expectantly, and a couple of young boys clambered up the trees for flowers. I turned to Beauvoir for an explanation.

“I told them that you are Grans Bwa, the spirit of the woods.” He indicated an old woman, gnawing on a small pipe. “She has asked that you bathe them with herbs. I explained that we have no time. She argues that at least you must bathe the children. But come, I told her perhaps another time.”

At that, I gathered my specimens and started down the hill toward the road. By then the ground at the base of the tree was blanketed with blossoms and the people had started to sing:

Leaves in the woods, call me

Oh, leaves in the woods, call me

Leaves in the woods, call me

Ever since I was small, I have danced.

Intrigued by the unexpected scarcity of datura in the fields of the south, I decided it was time to look up the last of my three leads on this increasingly enigmatic assignment. On a sultry afternoon when the capital smelled of spice, I contacted Lamarque Douyon, the psychiatrist who had been working with Clairvius Narcisse.

A secretary showed me into a stark office dominated by a massive mahogany desk and two photographs, each hung on a turquoise wall in frames that matched the desktop. One was a poster-sized presidential portrait of Dr. François Duvalier, a fixture that in most Haitian government offices has long since been replaced by a likeness of his son. The smaller photograph showed a young, almost unrecognizable Nathan Kline in a crewcut and horned-rimmed glasses. On another wall hung a plaque acknowledging the contributions of the American research institutions that had helped finance the initial construction of the clinic in 1959, and a second plaque thanking the foreign pharmaceutical companies for their contributions of free drugs for the first two years of operation. Beneath the barred windows stood a shock therapy unit, so archaic that it evoked a perverse nostalgia. The entire room was a freeze frame of the late fifties, the only time when research funds had flowed. Since then, not even the furnishings had changed.

Lamarque Douyon impressed me as a benign, soft-spoken man hampered not only by lack of funding but by the difficulties of reconciling his Western scientific training with the unique rhythms of his own culture and its thoroughly African foundations. He is a physician who straddles two very different worlds. As Haiti’s leading psychiatrist and the director of its only psychiatric institute, he remains accountable to a peer group of foreign scientists; yet as a clinician he treads through an utterly non-Western landscape where European notions of mental health lose their relevance.

Douyon’s scientific interest in the zombi phenomenon dates to a series of experiments he conducted in the late 1950s while completing his psychiatric residency at McGill University. That was the heyday of the early psychopharmacological research. Psychiatrists, having discovered that certain mental disorders could be successfully treated with drugs, were actively experimenting with a number of potent psychotropic substances on human subjects under controlled circumstances. What Douyon observed during some of these experiments reminded him of accounts of zombis he had heard as a child; he recalled as well the prevalent belief among many Haitians that zombis were created by a poison that brought on a semblance of death from which the victim would eventually recover. By the time he returned to Haiti in 1961 to take his position as director of the Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurologie, he, like Kline, was convinced that such a poison existed.

“Zombis cannot be the living dead,” he told me. “Death is not merely the loss of bodily function, it is the material decay of the cells and tissues. One does not wake up the dead. However, those who have been drugged may revive.”

“This zombi preparation, Dr. Douyon, do you have any idea what it contains?”

“Snakes, tarantulas, most anything that crawls.” He hesitated. “Or leaps—they say there is always a large toad. Human bones … but they go into everything.”

“Do you know the species of toad?”

“No, but I don’t think … there is a plant that grows here. We call it the concombre zombi, the zombi’s cucumber.”

“Oh, you mean datura.” I shared with him my thoughts about the Calabar bean.

He told me that he had never heard of the plant in Haiti and returned to the subject of datura. “When I was at McGill, my advisor suggested that I test a number of plants commonly associated with the zombi folklore. We fed a preparation of datura leaves to mice and induced a catatonic state for three hours. Unfortunately these experiments stopped when Professor Cameron left the institute.”

“Was that Ewen Cameron?”

“Yes, you know of him?”

“By reputation.” But I knew nothing of this connection. The late Ewen Cameron had been the director of the Allan Institution in Montreal during what Kline liked to refer to as the dark ages of psychiatry. Between 1957 and 1960 he conducted psychic driving and brainwashing experiments, funded partially by the CIA. He was notorious for combining LSD with massive doses of electroshock therapy in his studies of schizophrenia. After he left the institution, the subsequent director promptly banned all of Cameron’s therapeutic techniques.

“Datura must be the principal ingredient in the poison,” Douyon continued. “It is a powder that is placed in the form of a cross on the ground or across the threshold of a doorway. The peasants say that the victim succumbs just by walking over the cross.”

“How much of this powder?”

“Very little, no more than a spoonful.”

“Just on the bare ground?”

“The toxins must be absorbed through the feet,” he concluded.

This I had trouble with. In East Africa certain tribes surreptitiously administer poisons by coating spiny fruits and placing them along footpaths. Datura is topically active, but without at least this type of mechanical aid it was difficult to imagine it or any substance passing through the callused feet of a peasant. It was also unclear how the poisoner, who was supposed simply to sprinkle the powder on the threshold of a hut, might ensure that only the intended victim suffered. I was curious whether Douyon had attempted to contact individuals responsible for making the zombi poison.

“I know a bokor in Saint Marc,” he replied, “who supplied me with a vial of the poison, a white powder.”

“Marcel Pierre?”

“You know him?” He seemed surprised.

“I got his name from the BBC. I was with him several days ago. Was that the white powder that you sent as a sample to Kline?”

“We had no facilities here to test it. Kline never sent me any results.”

“There weren’t any, at least nothing positive.”

Douyon was disappointed, until I mentioned that the preparation obtained by the BBC had shown some biological activity.

“Did they get it from Marcel Pierre?” he asked. I nodded and he looked away. “Strange man, this Pierre. Did he tell you how many he has killed?”

“No.”

Douyon frowned. “These people are criminals,” he said. “It is always dangerous.” He told me how he had once taken a foreign film crew to a cemetery in the town of Desdunnes to attempt to document a zombi being taken from the ground. They had been met at the entrance to the graveyard by an armed band of peasants who destroyed their cameras and placed them in jail overnight. He had never tried it again.

Douyon rose and started out to take a call. Before leaving he passed me a paper from a folder on his desk. It was a copy of a legal document, Article 249 of the Haitian penal code, that referred specifically to the zombi poison, prohibiting the use of any substance that induced a lethargic coma indistinguishable from death. It indicated that should a victim of such poisons be buried, the act would be considered murder no matter what the final result. The Haitian government apparently recognized the existence of the poison with some assurance. I had a look at several other papers in the folder. One was Clairvius Narcisse’s medical dossier from the time of his death at the Schweitzer Hospital. I noted his symptoms: pulmonary edema leading to acute respiratory difficulties, rapid loss of weight, hypothermia, uremia, and hypertension.

I was not sure what to make of Douyon. On the one hand I had nothing but respect for his tenacious efforts, which after close to twenty frustrating years had finally yielded the provocative cases of Narcisse and Francina Illeus. Yet his pursuit of the reputed zombi poison had been less successful, and he seemed uncertain whether its formula would ever be discovered. He remained convinced that the active ingredient was datura, the same logical choice I had made when formulating my Calabar hypothesis. Yet despite his years of research, the only evidence that implicated datura was the fact that the plant was called the zombi’s cucumber. The experiments he had conducted at McGill years before meant very little; any number of plant extracts injected into mice might induce a catatonic stupor. Datura might still be the prime candidate, but after more than twenty years Douyon had done little to test his hypothesis. He had yet to obtain a documented preparation of the poison.

There was another problem. As a Western psychiatrist he had redefined a zombi as a man or woman who—having been poisoned, buried alive, and resuscitated—manifested a certain set of symtoms. Yet the measure of a victim’s psychiatric condition could never explain why an individual had become a victim in the first place. For example, in psychiatric terms, a zombi might be called a catatonic schizophrenic; both conditions are characterized by incoherence and catalepsy with alternate moments of stupor and activity. But catatonic schizophrenia as a syndrome exists worldwide and may result from a number of different processes that severely disrupt mental stability—including, perhaps, zombification. Certainly, if Narcisse’s testimony was to be believed, we were talking about an extraordinary phenomenon that actually caused an individual to be buried alive. Such a traumatic experience might readily drive one mad. But a zombi represented far more than a set of symptoms; if true, zombification was a social process unique to a particular cultural reality. There had to be men and women actually creating this poison, deciding how, when, and to whom it should be administered, and completing the act by distributing and caring for the victims. Above all, if zombis actually existed, there had to be a reason, an explanation rooted in the structure and beliefs of the Haitian peasant society. Rather than seeking the cause and purpose of zombification within that traditional society, Douyon assumed zombification to be a random criminal activity and limited his efforts to observing and treating its effects. One point he had made about Francina Illeus’s case had been particularly curious. When he attempted to return her to her home village, the family had refused to accept her. Douyon had explained that the people could not afford to feed an unproductive person. Yet in the short while that I had been in Haiti, I had already seen evidence that the elderly and infirm were well cared for by their families. I had an intuitive feeling that in her village, Francina represented far more than an extra mouth to feed.

A steel door opened behind me, and I heard the shuffling of bare feet on concrete. Douyon returned, trailed by a nurse and two patients. One of them I recognized.

When representatives of two completely different realities meet, words like normal become relative. I was in no position to judge if Clairvius Narcisse had been permanently affected by his ordeal. Physically he appeared fit. He spoke slowly but clearly. When questioned about his experience, he repeated basically the same account that I had heard from Nathan Kline. But he added certain extraordinary details. A scar he bore on his right cheek just to the edge of his mouth had been caused by a nail driven through his coffin. Quite incredibly, he recalled remaining conscious throughout his ordeal, and although completely immobilized, he had heard his sister weeping by his deathbed. He remembered his doctor pronouncing him dead. Both at and after his burial, his overall sensation was that of floating above the grave. This was his soul, he claimed, ready to travel on a journey that would be curtailed by the arrival of the bokor and his assistants. He could not remember how long he had been in the grave by the time they arrived. He suggested three days. They called his name and the ground opened. He heard drums, a pounding, a vibration, and then the bokor singing. He could barely see. They grabbed him, and began to beat him with a sisal whip. They tied him with rope and wrapped his body in black cloth. Bound and gagged, he was led away on foot by two men. For half the night they walked north until their party was met by another, which took custody of Narcisse. Traveling by night and hiding out by day, Narcisse was passed from one team to the next until he reached the sugar plantation that would be his home for two years.

Douyon lit a menthol cigarette for the second patient. She held it aimlessly, letting the ash grow until it dropped onto her lap. This was Francina Illeus, or “Ti Femme,” as she was known. In April 1979 peasants from the Baptist mission at Passereine had noticed her wandering about the market at Ennery, had recognized her as a zombi, and reported her presence to the American in charge of the mission, Jay Ausherman. Ausherman traveled to Ennery and found an emaciated Francina squatting in the market with her hands crossed like kindling before her face. Three years before, she had been pronounced dead after a short illness. The judge at Ennery, uncertain of what to do with someone who was legally dead, willingly granted custody to Ausherman, who in turn passed her over to Douyon for psychiatric care. At that time she was malnourished, mute, and negativistic. For three years Douyon had attempted through hypnosis and narcosis to speed her recovery. He believed that there had been improvement. Still, her mental faculties were marginal. Her eyes remained blank, and every gesture was swollen with effort. She spoke now, but softly in a high thin voice and only when prodded gently by Douyon. There was little spontaneous emotion, and when she left the room she walked as if on the bottom of the sea, her body bearing the weight of all the oceans.

5 A Lesson in History

IN THAT FIRST WEEK in Haiti, and for several days that followed, I often spent mornings wandering restlessly between my room and the veranda of the hotel, picking up a pen only to drop it, a book only to leave it open on a table. I lied to tourists about who I was. After twelve days I still had nothing. Marcel Pierre’s powder was clearly fraudulent. For now, there was little more to be learned at Douyon’s clinic. The nation baffled me. Stunned by her multitudes, awed by her mysteries, dumbfounded by her contradictions, I paced. Only at dawn, when from sheer exhaustion or moved by the splendor of the city basking in such soft light, was I still. Sometimes with my eyes closed, and the silence broken only by the odd bird, I would hear whispered messages of the land that intuitively I understood, if only for a moment. Eventually I came to respect those moments, for the cycle of logical questions was getting me nowhere.

That was why I welcomed Max Beauvoir’s suggestion that I forget about zombis and go with him to gather some leaves for his treatments. It is difficult and perhaps unimportant to capture the flavor of those outings, clouded as they now are by nostalgia. We took in the land, traveling its length, speaking constantly of its strengths, its weaknesses, its history, more often than not becoming lost in our thoughts and forgetting the purpose for which we had set out. Max Beauvoir placed the country before me like a gift. Images survive: streetside herbalists sheltered by ragged bits of awning, naked men in rice paddies, a string of peasants on a mountain trail, the angelic faces of their children, black as shadows. The days were fleeting and had a way of running into the night, and sometimes the singing never stopped and the drums called out painfully until one did not know which would be worse, to have them continue for another instant, or to have them stop. In the end, what emerged from these travels was a lesson in history, a lesson that served as a key to the symbols of the land.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century the French colony of Saint Domingue was the envy of all Europe. A mere thirty-six thousand whites and an equal number of free mulattos dominated a slave force of almost half a million and generated two-thirds of France’s overseas trade—a productivity that easily surpassed that of the newly formed United States and actually outranked the total annual output of all the Spanish Indies combined. In the one year 1789 the exports of cotton and indigo, coffee, cacao, tobacco, hides, and sugar filled the holds of over four thousand ships. In France no fewer than five million of the twenty-seven million citizens of the ancien régime depended economically on this trade. It was a staggering concentration of wealth, and it readily cast Saint Domingue as the jewel of the French empire and the most coveted colony of the age.

In 1791, two years after the French Revolution, the colony was shaken and then utterly destroyed by the only successful slave revolt in history. The war lasted twelve years, as the ex-slaves were called on to defeat the greatest powers of Europe. They faced first the remaining troops of the French monarchy, then a force of French republicans, before driving off first a Spanish and then a British invasion. In December of 1801, two years before the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon at the height of his power dispatched the largest expedition ever to have sailed from France. Its mission was to take control of the Mississippi, hem in the expanding United States, and reestablish the French empire in what had become British North America. En route to Louisiana, it was ordered to pass by Saint Domingue and quell the slave revolt. The first wave of the invading force consisted of twenty thousand veteran troops under Bonaparte’s ablest officers commanded by his own brother-in-law, Leclerc. So vast was the flotilla of support vessels that when it arrived in Haitian waters, the leaders of the revolt momentarily despaired, convinced that all of France had appeared to overwhelm them.

Leclerc never did reach Louisiana. Within a year he was dead, and of the thirty-four thousand troops eventually to land with him, a mere two thousand exhausted men remained in service. Following Leclerc’s death, French command passed to the infamous Rochambeau, who immediately declared a war of extermination. Common prisoners were put to the torch; rebel generals were chained to rocks and allowed to starve. The wife and children of one prominent rebel were drowned before his eyes while French sailors nailed a pair of epaulettes into his naked shoulders. Fifteen hundred dogs were imported from Jamaica and taught to devour black prisoners in obscene public events housed in hastily built amphitheaters in Port-au-Prince. Yet despite this explicit policy of torture and murder, Rochambeau failed. A reinforcement of twenty thousand men simply added to the casualty figures. At the end of November 1803, the French, having lost over sixty thousand veteran troops, finally evacuated Saint Domingue.

That the revolutionary slaves of Saint Domingue defeated one of the finest armies of Europe is a historical fact that, though often overlooked, has never been denied. How they did it, however, has usually been misinterpreted. There are two common explanations. One invokes the scourge of yellow fever and implies that the white troops did not die at the hand of the blacks but from the wretched conditions of the tropical lands. Although without doubt many soldiers did succumb to fever, the supposition is contradicted by two facts. For one, European armies had been triumphant in many parts of the world plagued by endemic fevers and pestilence. Secondly, in Haiti the fevers arrived with the regularity of the seasons and did not begin until the onset of the rains in April. Yet the French forces led by Leclerc landed in February of 1802 and before the beginning of the season of fever had suffered ten thousand casualties.

The second explanation for the European defeat refers to fanatic and insensate hordes of blacks rising as a single body to overwhelm the more “rational” white troops. It is true that in the early days of the revolt the slaves fought with few resources and extraordinary courage. Accounts of the time report that they went into battle armed only with knives and picks, sticks tipped in iron, and that they charged bayonets and cannon led by the passionate belief that the spirits would protect them, and their deaths, if realized, would lead them back to Guinée, the African homeland. Yet their fanaticism sprung not only from spiritual conviction but from a very human and fundamental awareness of their circumstances. In victory lay freedom, in capture awaited torture, in defeat stalked death. Moreover, after the initial spasm of revolt, the actual number of slaves who took part in the fighting was not that high. The largest of the rebel armies never contained more than eighteen thousand men. As in every revolutionary era, the struggle was carried by relatively few of those afflicted by the tyranny. The European forces suffered from fever, but they were defeated by men—not marauding hordes but relatively small, well-disciplined, and highly motivated rebel armies led by men of some military genius.

If the historians have clouded the character of the struggle, they have also inaccurately idealized the revolutionary leaders—Toussaint L’Ouverture, Christophe, and Dessalines, in particular—disguising their ambitions in lofty libertarian visions that they most certainly did not have. The primary interest of the French in the immediate wake of the uprising was the maintenance of an agrarian economy devoted to the production of export crops. How this was accomplished was of little concern. Once they realized that the restoration of slavery was not possible, and before Napoleon arose to attempt to storm the island by force, the French ministers devised an alternative system whereby freed slaves as sharecroppers would be forged into a new form of indentured labor. The plantations would essentially remain intact. Lacking the military presence to enforce this scheme, the French turned to the leaders of the revolutionary armies and found willing collaborators, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, who became a major figure in the restoration of French authority on the island. The French, however, made a critical error in assuming that this co-opted leadership would submit to the whims of Paris. On the contrary, the black leadership did what they had always planned to do. They secured for themselves positions at the top of a new social order.

Toussaint L’Ouverture had no intentions of overseeing the dismantling of the colonial plantations. In the abstract he was committed to the freedom of the people, but in practice he believed that the only way to maintain the country’s prosperity and the free status of the citizens was through agricultural production. One of the most persistent myths about the Haitian revolution is the belief that the original plantations, having been destroyed in the initial uprising, never attained their former prosperity; the tacit assumption being that in the wake of the revolt the blacks who took over were incapable of governing. This is historically untrue. Within eighteen months of attaining power Toussaint L’Ouverture had restored agricultural production to two-thirds of what it had been at the height of the French colony. Had the French bourgeoisie been willing to share power with the revolutionary elite, it is possible that an export economy might have been maintained for some time. It was destined to collapse, however, not because of the lack of interest or inability of the new elite, nor even because of the chaos unleashed by Leclerc’s invasion. Its eventual demise was assured by an expedient policy begun by the French long before the revolution in 1791.

The French plantation owners, faced with the difficulty of feeding close to half a million slaves, had granted provisional plots of land so that the slaves might produce their own food. The slaves were not only encouraged to cultivate their plots, they were allowed to sell their surplus, and as a result a vast internal marketing system developed even before the revolution. Thus the plantation owners in a calculated gesture had inadvertently sown the seeds of an agrarian peasantry. Yet another lingering myth concerning the revolution asserts that once the slaves were liberated from the plantations it was virtually impossible to entice them back onto the land. In fact, in the wake of the revolt, the majority of the ex-slaves went directly to the land, and energetically produced the staple foodstuffs that the internal market of the country demanded. Reading popular accounts of the twelve-year revolutionary war, one would assume that the entire population had scavenged for its sustenance. On the contrary, they were eating yams, beans, and plantains grown and sold by the majority of ex-slaves who cultivated their lands as freemen. The problem of the revolutionary elite was not to get the people back to the land, it was to get them from their own lands back to the plantations.

An independent peasantry was the last thing the black military leaders wanted. Jean-Jacques Dessalines maintained a dream of an export economy based on chain-gang labor up until his assassination in 1806. Henri Christophe, who ruled the northern half of the country until 1820, was temporarily successful, using measures every bit as harsh as those of the colonial era. For ten years he was able to produce export crops that allowed him to build an opulent palace and support a lavish court. Yet eventually his people revolted, and with his death in 1820, there disappeared the last serious attempt to create a plantation-based economy.

What emerged in the early years of independence was a country internally vigorous but externally quiescent. Productivity of export crops declined completely. At the height of the colony, over 163 million pounds of sugar were exported annually; by 1825, total exports measured two thousand pounds, and some sugar was actually imported from Cuba. Foreigners considered the economy to be dead, and again cited the inability of blacks to organize themselves. What these statistics in fact indicated was the unwillingness of a free peasantry to submit to an economic system that depended on their labor to produce export crops that would only profit a small number of the elite. The Haitian economy had not disappeared, it had simply changed. With negligible export earnings, the central government soon went broke. As early as 1820, then President Boyer was forced to pay his army with land grants. Thus unleashing the common soldier onto the land, he dealt the final blow to any lingering dreams of reestablishing the plantations. Recognizing that no income was going to accrue from nonexistent export commodities, he began to tax the emerging structures of the peasant economy. In placing a tax on rural marketplaces, for example, he generated revenue, but more importantly from a historical perspective, he legitimized the institution itself. Then, unable to impose taxes or rents on the lands that the peasants had already taken as their own, he did the only thing that could raise income. He began officially to sell them the land. It was an extraordinary admission on the part of the central government that the peasants were in firm control of the countryside. The ex-slaves had moved onto the land, and nothing was going to pry them off it. The central government acquiesced and did what it could to generate at least some revenue from a situation that was totally beyond its control.

Yet who were these peasants who had so decisively rooted themselves to the land? Some perhaps were the descendants of the first slaves to arrive with the Spanish as early as 1510, but the majority had actually been born in Africa. Between 1775 and the outbreak of the revolution in 1791, the colony had expanded as never before. Production of cotton and coffee, for example, increased 50 percent in a mere six years, and to fuel such growth the slave population had been almost doubled. Yet because of the wretched conditions on the plantations at least seventeen thousand slaves died each year, while the birthrate remained an insignificant one percent. Hence, during the last fourteen years of undisturbed rule the French imported no fewer than 375,000 Africans. In other words, the germ of the modern Haitian peasantry quite literally sprouted in Africa.

The revolutionary slaves who settled the tortuous recesses of a mountainous island came from many parts of the ancient continent, and represented many distinct cultural traditions. Among them were artisans and musicians, herbalists, carvers, metalworkers, boatbuilders, farmers, drum makers, sorcerers, and warriors. There were men of royal blood, and others who had been born into slavery in Africa. In common was their experience with a heinous economic system that had ripped them away from their material world, but critically they also shared an oral tradition that was unassailable—a rich repository of religious belief, knowledge of music, dance, medicine, agriculture, and patterns of social organization that they carried with them into every remote valley. The evolution of these various traditions, their fusions and transformations, was deeply affected by a blanket of isolation that fell upon the country in the early years of the nineteenth century.

The nation that emerged from the revolutionary era was a pariah in the eyes of the international community. With the exception of Liberia, which was a limp creation of the United States, Haiti ranked as the only independent black republic for a hundred years. Its very existence was a constant thorn in the side of an imperialistic age. The Haitian government irritated the European powers by actively supporting revolutionary struggles that vowed to eliminate slavery. Simon Bolívar, for example, was both sheltered there and funded before he liberated Venezuela and the other Spanish colonies. In a more symbolic gesture, the government purchased shipments of slaves en route to the United States only to grant them freedom. Moreover, Haiti defied international commercial interests by prohibiting any foreigner from owning land or property within the country. By no means did this law bring trade to a standstill, but it dramatically modified its nature. In a century wherein European capital moved into virtually all regions of the world, Haiti remained relatively immune. Even the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church was checked. The clergy, which had never had a particularly strong presence in colonial days, lost virtually all influence after the revolution. In fact, for the first half-century of Haiti’s independence, there was an official schism between the country and the Vatican. Roman Catholicism remained the official religion of the emerging political and economic elite, but during the seminal years of the nation, the church had practically no presence in the countryside.

Within Haiti, isolation of a different form occurred. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the colonial infrastructure of roads decayed and was not replaced, the physical gap between town and country widened. This, in turn, sharpened an emerging cultural hiatus between two radically different segments of Haitian society, the rural peasants and the urban elite. The former, of course, were ex-slaves; the latter, in part, descendants of a special class of free mulattos that during the colonial era had enjoyed both great wealth and all the rights of French citizens, including the ignoble privilege of owning slaves. During the early years of the independence, the obvious differences between these two groups crystallized into a profound separation that went far deeper than mere class lines. They became more like two different worlds, coexisting within a single country.

The urban elite, though proudly Haitian, turned to Europe for cultural and spiritual inspiration. They spoke French, professed faith in the Roman Catholic church, and were well educated. Their women wore the latest Parisian fashions, and their men naturally formed the chromatic screen through which European and American commercial interests siphoned what they could of the nation’s wealth. Their young men frequently traveled abroad, for both higher training and amusement, invariably returning to fill all business and professional positions, as well as governmental and military offices. There they promulgated the official laws of the land, all of which were again based on French precedent and the Napoleonic Code. By all foreign standards, it was this small circle of friends and extended families—for the elite never numbered more than 5 percent of the population—that controlled much of the political and economic power of the nation.

In the hinterland, however, the ex-slaves created an utterly different society based not on European models, but on their own ancestral traditions. It was not, strictly speaking, an African society. Inevitably European influences were felt, and only very rarely did pure strains of specific African cultures survive or dominate. What evolved, rather, was a uniquely Haitian amalgam forged predominantly from African traits culled from many parts of that continent. Typically, its members thought of themselves less as descendants of particular tribes or kingdoms than as “ti guinin”—Children of Guinée, of Africa, the ancient homeland, a place that slowly drifted from history into the realm of myth. And, in time, what had been the collective memory of an entire disenfranchised people become the ethos of new generations, and the foundation of a distinct and persistent culture.

Today evidence of the African heritage is everywhere in rural Haiti. In the fields, long lines of men wield hoes to the rhythm of small drums, and just beyond them sit steaming pots of millet and yams ready for the harvest feast. In a roadside settlement, or lakou, near the center of the compound, a wizened old man holds court. Markets sprout up at every crossroads, and like magnets they pull the women out of the hills; one sees their narrow traffic on the trails, the billowy walk of girls beneath baskets of rice, the silhouette of a stubborn matron dragging a half-dozen donkeys laden with eggplant. There are sounds as well. The echo of distant songs, the din of the market, and the cadence of the language itself—Creole—each word truncated to fit the meter of West African speech. Each of these disparate images, of course, translates into a theme: the value of collective labor, communal land holdings, the authority of the patriarch, the dominant role of women in the market economy. And these themes, in turn, are clues to a complex social world.

Yet images alone cannot begin to express the cohesion of the peasant society; this, like a psychic education, must come in symbols, in invisible tones sensed and felt as much as observed. For in this country of survivors and spirits, the living and the dead, it is religion that provides the essential bond. Vodoun is not an isolated cult; it is a complex mystical worldview, a system of beliefs concerning the relationship between man, nature, and the supernatural forces of the universe. It fuses the unknown to the known, creates order out of chaos, renders the mysterious intelligible. Vodoun cannot be abstracted from the day-to-day lives of the believers. In Haiti, as in Africa, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane, between the material and the spiritual. Every dance, every song, every action is but a particle of the whole, each gesture a prayer for the survival of the entire community.

The pillar of this community is the houngan. Unlike the Roman Catholic priest, the houngan does not control access to the spirit realm. Vodoun is a quintessentially democratic faith. Each believer not only has direct contact with the spirits, he actually receives them into his body. As the Haitians say, the Catholic goes to church to speak about God, the vodounist dances in the hounfour to become God. Nevertheless, the houngan’s role is vital. As a theologian he is called upon to interpret a complex body of belief, reading the power in leaves and the meaning in stones. Yet vodoun not only embodies a set of spiritual concepts, it prescribes a way of life, a philosophy and a code of ethics that regulate social behavior. As surely as one refers to Christian or Buddhist society, one may speak of vodoun society, and within that world one finds completeness: art and music, education based on the oral transmission of songs and folklore, a complex system of medicine, and a system of justice based on indigenous principles of conduct and morality. The houngan as de facto leader of this society is at once psychologist, physician, diviner, musician, and spiritual healer. As a moral and religious leader, it is he who must skillfully balance the forces of the universe and guide the play of the winds.

Within the vodoun society, there are no accidents. It is a closed system of belief in which no event has a life of its own. It was within this society that Clairvius Narcisse and Ti Femme became zombis.

“Look into the sky and what do you see?” Rachel asked, staring far into the darkness. There was a small cooking fire between us, and in the flamelit smoke her face softened, her skin flushed in copper.

“Stars, sometimes.”

“When I was small my father took me to a planetarium in New York. You have millions of stars, and your astronomers have even more.” She stood up and walked slowly into the shadow, her words falling away like sparks into the night.

“Look into this sky. We have only a few, and when the clouds come in even fewer. But behind our stars, we see God. Behind yours, you just see more stars.”

Her words saddened me unexpectedly, exposing as they did the gap that lay between me and her people. I gazed down the slope and across the crowded valley alive with twinkling fires, and followed the movements of a torch beam as it climbed erratically toward the crest of a draw. I remembered a recent day when her father and I had been out walking. We had come to a height of land where we could look across a scorched valley stripped to the bone, with haze rising off hot white stones and a few gnarly native trees among the ubiquitous thornscrub and neem. Max Beauvoir had taken a deep breath as if the very sight of such a landscape might bring tears to his eyes—and it probably could have. He had waxed eloquent as if words alone might have squeezed beauty out of that wretched sight, from the wasteland created by years of neglect. It had been extraordinary. I could only think of locusts, he of angels, yet who was the wiser?

Like all contented men, Max Beauvoir had by middle age found his rest. It had not come easily. The son of a bourgeois physician, he had left Haiti as a youth on a remarkable odyssey that led him from the streets of New York to the Sorbonne in Paris and finally to the court of the king of Dahomey. After fifteen years abroad he returned to Haiti, a chemical engineer intent on growing sisal, from which he would extract cortisone. His plantings were barely established when his work was interrupted by the death of a grandfather, a houngan, who from his deathbed instructed Max to take on the mantle of the religious tradition. Soon after, his commercial venture abandoned, Max Beauvoir began a second journey. For five years he crisscrossed Haiti observing the traditional rites, partaking in the pilgrimages and listening to the houngans. Finally, for a spiritual parent he chose an old man from the south and joined the community of his hounfour, eventually becoming initiated as a houngan himself. Into that world he led his wife, a lovely French painter, and perhaps more reluctantly their two daughters. The young girls were teased by their classmates because of their father’s beliefs. At first they had been ashamed, but as they grew older it became their greatest source of pride.

“My father’s great-grandfather had green eyes,” Rachel said, returning to the fire, “and a gold watch. He came from the east, on horseback and with everything he owned stuffed into a calabash that hung around his neck. He could take that watch—it had a mirror on the inside—and just by opening it and staring into the mirror, he would disappear.” She glanced at me, as if uncertain whether I would believe the story.

“He wandered all over the country and finally settled in Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. He became really important.”

“Aided no doubt by his watch,” I teased.

“Perhaps.” She smiled. “He was a great houngan. He lived for many years, but he knew when he was going to die. Just before, he gave away everything he owned and called together all the family. They found him beneath a great mapou tree, and one by one he called for his grandchildren, including Max’s father. He said something to each one and then he just left.”

“Where to?”

“No one knows. He placed a few things in a saddlebag, and rode away. They say towards the Dominican Republic.”

“That was the end?”

“Yes. Can you imagine? No one ever knew his birthplace or where he died.”

I looked across the fire at her but said nothing. For weeks the two of us had been as blind accomplices inadvertently placed on the same trail pursuing different goals. I was chasing an elusive phenomenon that I scarcely believed in; she sought a sense of place. For she was young, and whether she knew it or not she was torn between two worlds, that of her lineage, which she bore like a weight, and everything that awaited out there beyond the ocean. One knew just by looking at her that she would have to go sometime. She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience. At the same time I was drawn to warn her somehow, for hers was a beauty that filled one with a premonition that it could easily become the target of destructive forces. Yet you could not feel sorry for her; her pride forbade it. And moreover, nothing evil had yet befallen her; she lived with the brash confidence of a person who has never lost.

The dusty road to Savanne Carée passes through the old market center of Ennery, with its cobbles and thick-walled caserne and forlorn statue of Toussaint L’Ouverture, then runs along the Rivière Sorcier, crisscrossing a number of affluents before climbing into a high, rolling landscape dappled with mango trees. It is rich land with clusters of white houses, orchards swollen in fruit, and fallow slopes camouflaged by thick grass. Millet grows to the edge of the valley where the fields become broken, and the skirt of the mountain rises to steep cliffs draped in cascading remnants of native vegetation. In the hedgerows there are even wild things, and overhead the odd raptor scrapes the sky. After the barren lands to the west around Gonaives, there is an innocence to such abundance. Yet somewhere in this picturesque valley Ti Femme squandered her birthright and was made a zombi.

Just beyond a crossroads littered with the remnants of the morning market, Rachel and I noticed a young lad prostrate on the stony ground, relaxed as a lizard. He must have seen us at the same time. He leapt to his feet and in an instant was joined by another. As we came nearer, I saw that the first was a small wisp of a boy, with electric eyes and the large head and long limbs typical of many peasant youths. This was Oris. The other was René, and he was younger and clearly subordinate. From that moment on we were four.

“Of course, I know her. The one that passed beneath the ground,” Oris said to Rachel as we made our way along the narrow trail. “She’s the one who died, but her breath of life didn’t leave, it stayed here,” he added, pointing to his armpit.

“They buried her?”

“Naturally, and then at night the person who killed her went to get her.” René was running up and down the trail like a rabbit anxious not to miss anything. Every so often his excitement overflowed in laughter, gay and sparkling.

“Who did this to her?”

“We don’t know,” René said, glancing ahead toward his friend.

“Her aunt,” Oris said matter-of-factly. “Then they put her to work cleaning cornmeal. That’s all she was good for.”

“And the bokor?”

“You can’t know. To find out you’d have to know who killed her.”

“I thought you said the aunt.”

“She had many aunts, and some have died. Besides, nobody cared anyway.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rachel paused, squatting by the side of the trail, her skirt spread out from her waist like a tent. Oris swaggered by her unabashed. A market woman with a healthy corpulence and a lugubrious air was walking up the trail toward us, and Oris didn’t say anything until she had passed.

“Ti Femme was mean. She was doing everything she shouldn’t have done. And she didn’t like people.”

“Why? What did she do?” Rachel asked.

“Well, for example, you don’t do anything and she stands up and swears at you. She swore at people for no reason. But here they kill people for almost nothing,” Oris said casually. “It’s just like the woman in the elections,” he continued, referring to the recent political campaign for the National Assembly. “We didn’t like her. She was ill behaved and had meetings and swore at the children. So we got her. I, myself, voted five times for the doctor. He promised to bring the president’s wife to our lakou.”

We followed our insouciant guides into a dense canebrake and then made our way slowly until reaching a narrow path that pointed to a small house perched on a high mound of earth. In the shade of its porch two men were pounding grain in a mortar, the rhythmic movement of the pestles fluid and powerful. Oris nodded to Rachel, then he and his companion backed away and the reeds closed behind them.

“Honneur!” Rachel called out as we approached. The men glanced up, and one of them sent a young child scurrying into the house. They continued to look at us for a while, then returned to their work. It was a crude welcome, far below the standards of peasant etiquette. We waited beneath a tree laden with green oranges until a frail old woman appeared. She was the mother of Ti Femme, and her name was Mercilia. We gave her ours, and she invited us into the front chamber of her home, where we shared cigarettes and coffee. After several minutes of perfunctory chatter, we came to the point of our visit.

“The girl died by God’s will,” Mercilia said, “and was revived by God’s will. We know nothing of these things. They are wrong to say someone killed her. She died, she just died.”

“Yes, that is what we have heard. And she had been quite ill, I suppose.”

“For months, fever and a pressure from beneath her heart. She was a good girl, everyone liked her. They all came to the funeral. There were two wakes.” She nodded confidentially toward Rachel. “The coffin didn’t come, and then it rained.”

Rachel cast a perplexed glance my way, then turned quickly back to Mercilia. “Where was she when she died?”

“Right here in the house of her birth. In the night. They buried her at daybreak. I went to the grave three days after.” She was rocking slowly on the edge of her chair. “Ti Femme never said anything about passing through the earth, only that she heard people say she was dead like she was dreaming and she couldn’t do anything. When I went I didn’t know she wasn’t there.”

“Where is she now?” Rachel asked.

“With the state, in the clinic. If I could, I would have her here, but my husband is dead and Ti Femme has no one and is a child. When they found her, she couldn’t even bathe or comb her own hair.”

The door creaked open revealing a pod of children eavesdropping. Mercilia shooed them away. A pair of chickens slipped past her legs and sped into the room, clucking and pecking the cement floor out of habit. Rachel and I stood up to leave.

“There was not a single person who didn’t like her,” Mercilia volunteered, as she took a little money from my hand. “She never had arguments with anyone.”

As expected, our talkative guides were waiting for us just beyond the canebrake. Oris was stretched out in the shade of a mombin batard tree, resting on one elbow and gnawing on a stick of sugarcane.

“Well?” he asked with puckish confidence.

“Well what?” Rachel replied, laughing.

The walk back to our jeep was uneventful, and once we had dispatched the two lads at the marketplace Rachel turned to me.

“It’s odd, you know. A wake is always held at night, and if there were two the body must have been waiting around for what, thirty-six hours?”

“At least.”

“Wouldn’t the family have noticed that it hadn’t begun to decompose?”

“You’d assume so.” I thought for a minute. “What do you make of the boy’s story.”

“I’m not sure. But there is a friend of my father’s on the coast who trades here, and she would know.”

The sun was just going down when we reached the outskirts of Gonaives and pulled up to a dusty compound enclosed by a tall blue-and-green wall decorated with a great naive painting of a mermaid.

“It’s a nightclub sometimes,” Rachel explained. “Clermezine is the mermaid, it’s one of her spirits. She’s a great serviteur.” Rachel said something to one of the idlers hanging around the entrance. He slipped inside and returned in a moment followed by a young woman. Rachel kissed her gently on both cheeks, and we followed her past a concrete dance floor and a broken-down bandstand to the inner courtyard. To one side some kind of noisy cabal was under way, presided over by a most extraordinary woman. When she stood up to receive us she was as regal and imposing as a queen. Rachel disappeared beneath a heap of endearments, and before we had a chance to find the places made for us in the small circle of chairs, a tray of steaming thick coffee arrived.

Within a few moments a great whirlwind of voices enveloped us. I had no idea what was going on. The woman in charge seemed in deadly earnest, and one of the men grew steadily angrier, but Rachel was beside herself with laughter. From what I later gathered the man had been entrusted with some task, which he had failed to carry out. The woman suggested that if he let her down again, “there won’t be a shovel small enough to pick up your pieces.” He in turn threatened to send a loup garou, a werewolf, her way. She countered by saying that she could fly faster than anything he could come up with, especially if, like him, it was hindered “by those things that hang between your legs.” This nattering salacious humor continued for some time, until finally the woman bellowed a few harsh words that cut him off immediately.

The subject of Ti Femme set her off again. She explained that Ti Femme used to come down to Gonaives to buy cornmeal, which she then sold at a profit in Ennery and Savanne Carée. She called her maloktcho, a Creole invective that translates poorly as “crude, uncivilized, raw.” Like young Oris, she said that Ti Femme was rude and always swore at people. She was also dishonest.

“If you went to buy from her, and what she was selling was worth five gourdes, she’d say seven, then six, and you’d say five and she’d take it. But when she had measured it out, she’d hand it to you and say six. That’s why they killed her.”

“Some say her family was behind it.”

“I tell you it was in the market. Everyone hated her. If you left your money out, she’d take it. She was a thief.”

“It could have been anyone, then?”

“All of them! No one person could afford to kill her.”

The next morning we passed by the Baptist mission at Passereine, intending to speak with Jay Ausherman, the American woman who had cared for Ti Femme just after she was found in the Ennery marketplace in 1979. The missionary was out of the country, but as we drove away I noticed a robust, balding man sitting alone on the steps of the cinderblock church. His was not a face readily forgotten. As we soon discovered, Clairvius Narcisse had been living off and on at the mission since being discharged from the psychiatric institute.

In this, the first of a number of informal interviews that took place away from Douyon’s clinic, Narcisse spoke more easily about his ordeal. He had been a very strong man, and almost never sick, he claimed, and he hadn’t suspected anything. There had been a dispute with one of his brothers, a bokor who coveted a piece of land that Narcisse had been cultivating, and only now did he fully understand what had occurred. His brother passed the magic to him on a Sunday. Tuesday he had been in Gonaives, feeling weak and nauseated. By the time he entered the hospital late that day, he was coughing and having difficulty breathing. By noon the next day, he was dying.

“What was this poison they passed onto you?” Rachel interrupted.

“There was no poison,” he replied, “otherwise my bones would have rotted under the earth. The bokor sent for my soul. That’s how it was done.”

“In the basin?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s full of water, but they prick your skin and call the spirit and the water changes into blood.”

Narcisse explained that he had been sold to a bokor named Josef Jean who held him captive at a plantation near Ravine-Trompette, a small village in the north close to Pilate, not far from Cap Haitien. Together with many other zombis, he had toiled as a field hand from sunrise to sunset, pausing only for the one meal they received each day. The food was normal peasant fare, with the one restriction that salt was strictly prohibited. He remembered being aware of his predicament, of missing his family and friends and his land, of wanting to return. But his life had the quality of a strange dream, with events, objects, and perceptions interacting in slow motion, and with everything completely out of his control. In fact, there was no control at all. Decision had no meaning, and conscious action was an impossibility.

His freedom had come about quite by chance. One of the captives had refused to eat for several days and was beaten repeatedly for insubordination. In the midst of one such beating, the zombi got hold of a hoe and in a fit of rage killed the bokor. With the death of the master, the zombis dispersed, some eventually returning to their villages scattered across the northern plain. Only two of them were from the middle of the country—Narcisse and one other, who curiously enough came from Ennery. After being set free, Narcisse remained in the north for several years, until moving south to Saint Michel de l’Attalaye, where he settled for eight years. Although fear of his brother kept him from returning to his village, he did attempt to establish contact with his family. His many letters, however, went unanswered. Finally, when he heard that the brother responsible for his ordeal had died, he returned to l’Estère. His arrival, not surprisingly, had shocked the community. In truth, he confessed, he had not been well received. The villagers had taunted him, and such was the commotion that the government authorities deemed his life in danger and placed him in jail for his own protection. It was at that point that he had come under the care of Dr. Lamarque Douyon. To this day, he returns to l’Estère only for brief visits. His time is spent either at Douyon’s private clinic in the capital or in the refuge of the Baptist mission.

“They called my name three times,” Narcisse told us later that afternoon as he sat in the cemetery at Benetier. Upon our approaching the cemetery, it had taken Narcisse several minutes by the side of the road to become oriented. Then with little hesitation he had woven his way through the crowded tombs of cracked concrete until he reached his own. Scarcely visible, etched into the surface of the cement, was an epitaph written some twenty years before: “Ici Repose Clairvius Narcisse.”

“Even as they cast the dirt on my coffin, I was not there. My flesh was there,” he said, pointing to the ground, “but I floated here, moving wherever. I could hear everything that happened. Then they came. They had my soul, they called me, casting it into the ground.” Narcisse looked up from the ground. At the edge of the cemetery a pair of thin gravediggers stood as still and attentive as gazelles. Narcisse felt the weight of their recognition.

“Are they afraid of you?” Rachel asked.

“No,” he replied, “only if I was creating problems, then I’d have problems myself.” He didn’t say anything more for several minutes. The late afternoon light illuminated his face but left a conspicuous dark spot over the deep scar in his right cheek. It was there, he had mentioned earlier, that the nail of the coffin had pierced his flesh.

“They thought I was a bourreau [an executioner], so after they passed the bottle, they bound my arms to my sides.”

“Did you have the force to resist?”

As if he hadn’t heard me, Narcisse went on, “Then I was taken for eight days of judgment.”

“By whom?” Rachel asked excitedly, “where did it take place?”

Again Narcisse ignored the question, and began to make his way out of the graveyard. He paused momentarily by a large erect tomb, and then continued to the road. As we reached the jeep, he turned to us both and said very quietly. “They are the masters of the country, and they do as they please.”

“The only tribunal that my brother knew was the cemetery.” Angelina Narcisse sat back in her chair, her legs wide apart. The morning sun had conquered the clouds and driven us into the shadows of the thatch shelter. Between the thin rafters ran long strings displaying dozens of photographs of President Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife. Michelle Duvalier’s face stood out, polished and quite lovely. Between the photographs were small Haitian flags, red and black, the same colors as Angelina’s long dress. All around us the houses of the lakou stood as one, fused like stones encased in dry clay. In one corner iron rods had been set into the earth, at their base a pile of black coals. Once while out with Beauvoir I saw a possessed man implant such a rod in the ground, his bare hands wrapped around the iron, its tip red-hot, his face indifferent.

“Unless, of course, it was a tribunal at night, in which case nobody should know of it. So we don’t know of it.”

In a harsh voice, Angelina laid out her version of her brother’s case. Long before the death of their parents, Clairvius had been involved in innumerable disputes with his various brothers. Land was often an issue, but there were others. Clairvius had done well financially, but showed no willingness to spread his earnings through his family. Once, for example, his brother Magrim sought a twenty-dollar loan, which Clairvius refused categorically. An intense argument had followed, which had culminated in Magrim striking Clairvius in the leg with a log, while Clairvius responded by hurling stones. Both of them had ended up in jail.

Apparently Clairvius had antagonized not only his family. He had compromised innumerable women, scattering children to all corners of the Artibonite Valley. None of these he accepted responsibility for, nor had he built houses for the various mothers. As a result he had approached middle age with few financial burdens, which freed him to advance further than his more responsible peers. He placed a tin roof on his house, for example, before anyone else in the lakou. Clairvius had profited at the expense of the community, and in all likelihood, suggested Angelina, it was one of the aggrieved members, probably a mistress, that had sold him to a bokor.

“But we know nothing of poisons in our family,” she concluded. “My brother was sick for a year. It was not a disease from God, and there was no poison, or he would still be in the ground.”

Whatever the cause of her brother’s demise, the family lost no time taking over his fields, which Angelina and another sister still work today. Although Clairvius has made a claim in the national courts for his land, his sisters have absolutely no intention of releasing anything to him. As far as they are concerned Clairvius remains a dead man, a spirit that should never have returned to the village. In fact, the first member of the family to recognize him when he appeared in the l’Estère market in 1980 had sent for Angelina, and then told Clairvius to go away. Another sister arrived from the lakou and offered Clairvius money, but also ordered him to leave the village. By then a great crowd had gathered, and the police arrived to take Clairvius Narcisse to the protection of the government jail.

Death in a family should be like a stone cast into a lake; it makes a brief hole, but the waves of sorrow reach to the edge of the bloodline. In the case of Clairvius Narcisse, however, the stone slipped into the water without leaving a trace. Not long after leaving the family lakou, we discovered why. In the searing midday sun, we pulled off the road to offer a ride to a solitary peasant burdened by a ponderous load. Quite by chance he was a cousin of Clairvius, and with little difficulty Rachel persuaded him that we knew more than we did.

“Of course it was someone in the family, that is certain,” the man told us. “But you’ll never know what he did unless you can speak with the one who judged him.”

“But the houngan said that the tribunal was never summoned,” Rachel replied, leading him on deliberately.

“There must be a tribunal in a case like that,” the cousin insisted. “They must call the dead. Otherwise they cannot set the trap.”

“To take his soul?” I asked, remembering what Clairvius had told us at the mission.

“They must.”

“His sister said the bokor passed a coup l’aire,” Rachel said.

“No. They wanted the body for work. Only a coup poudre could bring him down.”

“Coup poudre?” I looked toward Rachel.

“A magical powder,” she explained.

The cousin was uncertain what was in it. A large lizard called the agamonty perhaps, and apparently two toads, the crapaud bouga, and another called the crapaud de mer, the sea toad.

“Where is the poison placed?”

“There is no poison,” he answered. “Narcisse came out of the ground. A poison would have left him where he lay.” The cousin looked perplexed, and suddenly I understood and felt terribly foolish. I had been asking for a poison, but what I called a poison they called a trap or a coup poudre. For them what created a zombi was not a drug but a magical act.

It was two in the morning before the other guests left the Peristyle de Mariani, and Rachel went inside, leaving her father and me alone on the terrace. In the wake of the ceremony and the ebullient conversation that invariably followed, there was a welcome stillness that allowed one to notice things, like the fragrance of the lemon trees, or the high whistle of the fruit bats.

“You are not in your plate tonight,” Max said, drawing me back into his own realm of words. A bat swept beneath the roof of the peristyle and in an instant was gone.

“Perhaps,” I said offhandedly.

“Do you want a drink?”

“If you do. Rum on ice.”

“How’s the work?”

“It goes. Rachel didn’t tell you?”

“Some of it. They seem to be quite a pair.”

“Ti Femme?”

“And the other one.”

“Max, somebody has it all wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ti Femme wasn’t innocent. People hated her. And Narcisse’s own sister tried to throw him out of the village, after not having seen him for eighteen years.”

“Probably she was afraid of him.”

“How can you be afraid of something that has no will?”

Beauvoir had started to laugh, but what I said stopped him. His face turned like a mask into a different pose.

“And how,” I continued, “can a being without will deliberately choose to kill someone? That, according to Narcisse, is how they gained their freedom. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I don’t believe he was an innocent victim. Neither of them. Narcisse said there was a judgment, so did his cousin.”

Beauvoir didn’t say anything for several minutes, and when he did there was an unfamiliar edge to his voice. “You spoke to his sisters?”

“Just the tall one, Angelina. We saw the others some time ago.”

“What did you make of her?”

“Powerful, totally in charge. No love lost for her brother.”

“Nothing peculiar? Think about it.”

“No.” I paused for some time. “Except, I suppose, when I asked to photograph the family.”

“And?”

“She was the only one to change her dress.”

“So you did notice.”

“Yes, but I don’t …”

“She is a queen, and you surprised her.” I began to interrupt again, but he didn’t let me. He lifted his drink and the light caught the edge of the glass.

“To understand Haiti,” he said, “you must think of a glass of water. You cannot avoid touching the glass, but it is just a means of support. It is the water that slakes your thirst and it is the water, not the glass, that keeps you alive.

“In Haiti the glass consists of the Roman Catholic church, the government, the National Police and army, the French language, and a set of laws invented in Paris. Yet when you think of it, over ninety percent of the people do not understand, let alone read, French. Roman Catholicism may be the official religion, but as we say the nation is eighty-five percent Catholic and one hundred and ten percent vodoun. Supposedly we have Western medicine, but in a country of over six million, there are but five hundred physicians, and only a handful of these practice outside of the capital.

“No, from the outside Haiti may appear to be like any other forlorn child of the Third World struggling hopelessly to become a modern Western nation. But as you have seen, this is just a veneer. In the belly of the nation there is something else going on. Clairvius Narcisse was not made a zombi by some random, criminal act. He told you he was judged. He spoke about the masters of the land. Here he did not lie. They exist, and these are the ones you must seek, for your answers will only be found in the councils of the secret society.”

6 Everything Is Poison, Nothing Is Poison

I COULD SEE THE horizon stained by the sea, and the first shafts of light to the east. The air was cool and serene. It was a special time when the city shifted its mood, when the people emerged as the night angels fled, and the light made the buildings blush.

I still didn’t know his name, nor did I want to. He had a way of appearing at the strangest moments, always in linen, the same black cane in his hand, a jester’s baton, tapping the alabaster steps of the hotel.

“Ah, my young friend, you do not sleep.”

“Not tonight. I am just in.”

“And how fares your hunt?” I had told him nothing of my work. “I see by your expression. A shame. Mine, too, I’m afraid. A sordid commerce, trading one’s dollars for dreams. You could do better among the women of the Carrefour Road.”

His thin fingers plucked a tired rose from his lapel and discarded it on the table beside me. Once I had seen him in the bar of the hotel passing out copies of an article about himself in an American midwestern newspaper. It was ironic to see someone who exuded such self-importance striving so obviously for notoriety. Like the entire nation he was hungry for recognition. Yet it was he who, one afternoon with the heat rising off the veranda, had told me, “The world is not after Haiti as so many of us feel. The cold truth is the world’s indifference, and if there is one thing a Haitian hates it is to be inconsequential. It does not matter what is said about you, as long as you are the subject of conversation. Perhaps at some international soiree idle chatter passes to Haiti, but I doubt it.” One wanted to avoid him, yet in a country where the truth is taken so lightly, casually, he was irresistible.

When he was gone I moved to the edge of the veranda and looked out over the city. It was hard to believe that in a few hours the heat and glare of the sun would be difficult to bear.

Marcel Pierre was the only person I knew capable of making the zombi poison. In the three weeks since we had left his hounfour I had not, as promised, tested his preparation on an enemy. I had, however, learned something about the man. According to a number of informants Marcel Pierre was an early and loyal follower of François Duvalier, and a notorious member of the Ton Ton Macoute, the rural militia that Duvalier established to safeguard his regime. Apparently during the terrible days of the early 1960s, when to consolidate his revolution Duvalier killed hundreds of the mulatto elite, Marcel had used his authority to extort information from the traditional houngan. Although many of the houngan were themselves members of the Ton Ton Macoute, few could match Marcel Pierre’s ruthlessness. In exchange for protection from his gang, they reluctantly took him into their fold and shared certain secrets. Eventually Marcel’s abuses became intolerable, and he himself fell victim and was severely poisoned. Though he barely survived, the poison left him permanently scarred. Now close to twenty years later, his reputation was mixed. Some said he had repented and become a legitimately initiated houngan; others described him as a houngan macoute, a charlatan who lacks true spiritual knowledge. Still others, perhaps the majority, dismissed him as a lowly malfacteur, an evildoer, just as the BBC had done.

Though Marcel and his followers had a reputation for selling the powders, it had been immediately apparent to me that the preparation he had made me was fraudulent. The plants used belonged to botanical families known to have little phytochemical significance. And then there was his attitude. He had prepared the reputed poison in the presence of young children and in the immediate vicinity of the living quarters of the houngan. This was most suspicious. Biodynamic plant preparations, be they poisons or hallucinogens, are inherently subversive—the poisons because they kill surreptitiously and the hallucinogens because they expose the frail, ambivalent position of man, perpetually on the cusp between nature, society, and the spirit world. When the shamans in the Amazon prepare and imbibe their potent hallucinogens, they usually leave the village and take their patients with them. Similarly the curare, or arrow poison preparations, are often made in the forest. Haiti is not the Amazon, but I was certain that Marcel Pierre, whatever his reputation, would not make such a deadly, topically active poison so close to his temple and the homes of his people. That would make no sense. Yet if Marcel knew the correct formula, how were we to persuade him to give it to us?

I did have one advantage. Other investigators had assumed that the formula of the zombi poison had to be an esoteric secret. I wasn’t so sure, and anyway I had come not to believe in secrets. For years in the Amazon I had sought information that though not explicitly termed secret was nevertheless closely guarded by Indian peoples. In my experience, success depended less on the inherent status of the information than on the relationship one managed to establish with a knowledgeable informant. Every society has codes and rules, but individuals within a society bend them with zeal. Secrecy may be a rule, but gossip, after all, is the international language.

The purpose of secrets is to protect a society’s interests from threatening outsiders. If a relationship can be established that renders one no longer a threat, the need for the protective veil vanishes. Sometimes such a relationship can take months to establish. Once I spent two seasons attempting to record some tribal myths from an old Tsimshian Indian in northern Canada. I had completely given up, concluding, as he had implied, that the tradition had been lost. Then one day, simply as a gesture, I shot and butchered a moose for him for his winter meat. Bringing game to an elder is a traditional sign of respect, and with my action I had, quite by chance, come to ask my question in the correct manner. That night I began to record a full cycle of tribal myths.

While trust naturally grows slowly, very often a relationship pivots about a single moment, at which time one can proceed only by instinct and inspiration. Andrew Weil, also an ethnobotanist and writer, told me a story from his time among the Yaqui, a notoriously tough and belligerent tribe of northern Mexico. The Yaqui dances are horrendous ordeals, with the endurance of the participants tested by a week of nonstop line dancing. Andrew is one of the few whites to have been invited to participate. The first time he went he was approached by a tough, extremely proud, and apparently antagonistic Yaqui. They squared off, and the Indian pounded his enormous chest as he bellowed “Soy Indio”—“I am an Indio.” Indio in Spanish is pejorative, so the fellow was essentially saying, “I’m a spick and what are you going to do about it?” Andrew, who happens to be Jewish, suddenly smashed his own chest and yelled “Soy Judeo.” Then the Yaqui answered with “I’m a filthy Indio,” and Andrew countered with “I’m a greedy Jew,” and so it went until the two of them had exhausted every conceivable derogatory phrase. Then suddenly they collapsed in laughter, and for the rest of the festival Andrew had this man for his companion and mentor. The point is, the Yaqui had in some sense to display his “Yaqui-ness” to the visiting white, and by returning his own ethnic bravado, exposing its foolishness, Andrew had cleverly deflected a potentially nasty situation and established a true bond.

My challenge, of course, would be to establish a similar bond with Marcel Pierre.

The bar was deserted, but when Max Beauvoir and I entered the hounfour there were three of them, sitting with their backs to the ochre walls of the bagi. Marcel still hid most of his face, offering only the same cold plastic stare. I greeted him. He made a place for me beside him, near a table.

“Well,” he said.

“It didn’t work,” I told him. Beauvoir lit a cigarette and repeated my words in a low voice. I added, “Ten days I waited and nothing happened.”

Marcel showed disbelief.

“Your poison is useless,” I said. Then I looked around him at his two companions and asked why they bothered to hang out with a charlatan. One of them made a move toward me. Beauvoir ordered him to sit.

Marcel flushed, and then for the first time the words poured out of him. He called me a liar in a dozen ways before moving indignantly into the bagi. Beauvoir dismissed the onlookers. Marcel came back with a bag containing the same white aspirin bottle he had shown us the first day. As he crossed in front of me I grabbed the bag from his hand, tore off the top of the bottle, and, with my hands above his line of sight, pretended to pour the brown powder onto my hand. It did not touch my skin, but Marcel was certain that it had. I pretended to examine the poison and then to return it to the bottle. I replaced the top and, as I passed it back to him, cleaned my left hand on the leg of my trousers.

“Sawdust,” I said contemptuously.

Marcel fell back, momentarily silent. Flies like huge particles of dust danced up and down a shaft of light that cut across his face. Looking first at me and then at Beauvoir, he said simply, “He is a dead man.”

I got to my feet slowly. “Tell me, then, when will I die?”

Marcel sensed his advantage. “A day, a week, a month, a year. You shall die from handling that powder.”

I drew a breath and felt the hot air sink into my chest. I could only maintain the ruse. “So what are you trying to tell me? Everyone must die sometime.”

For the first time, Marcel laughed, revealing a row of perfect teeth. Looking toward Beauvoir he said, “This white of yours is a brave man,” and after a pause, “but he is also very stupid.” Only later would I discover that the small white jar contained the real poison.

Moments later the subject of money rekindled Marcel’s fury. It was one thing to question the quality of his preparations, it was quite another to demand the return of money that he had already spent. By now several of his women had slipped back into the hounfour. This time when he flew into the bagi, it was with a small black vial that he returned. He placed it delicately, almost reverently, on the table between us. Rage still marked his face, and rivulets of sweat ran across his hairless brow.

“Blanc,” he yelled, “you and your kind come a thousand miles to get my poison. Now you tell me my powder is not good. Why do you waste my time? Why do you insult us?” He paced and slashed the air with his arms. His women formed a cordon around him. Then he stopped.

“If you do not think I make good poison,” he said, gesturing toward the table, “drink this and I promise you will not walk out of here alive.”

The circle of faces challenged me. Beauvoir could do nothing. Marcel came so close I could feel his breath, smell it like a buzzard’s. The silence was unbearable, yet only I could break it.

“Marcel,” I said finally, assuming a conciliatory tone, “it is not a question of whether or not you can make good poison. I know that you can. That is why I came a thousand miles to get it. All I am telling you is that what you made me is worthless.” I stood up and moved away from the table, rubbing my face with my hands. “You may think that the money I paid you is a lot, but for me it was nothing, for it wasn’t my money. To my backers it was so little money that they will not even notice that it’s gone. But if you send me back to New York with that useless powder, you will lose the potential to make thousands and thousands of dollars from us in the future.”

They seemed stunned. There was a quiver. Then everybody stiffened and held their breath for a silent minute. Some perhaps thought of the money, others may have weighed the insult. Marcel said nothing.

“So you think about that,” I said, “and I will be back in the morning.” At that Max Beauvoir and I walked out of the hounfour, slowly pushing our way through Marcel’s women like men fording a river.

The next morning Marcel greeted Rachel and me at the entrance to his hounfour and invited us into the bagi. It was a small chamber—I could touch a wall in every direction. The air smelled of old newspapers, candle smoke, and earth. Marcel flung open the shutter of the single window, and a shaft of limpid light fell on the altar, turning the colored bottles into jewels. Then he knelt, working a toothpick busily along his gleaming jaw. From beside the altar he lifted a rum bottle and held it to the light. He passed it to me, his gesture a challenge. The bottle was filled with seeds, wood, and other organic debris. The smell was acrid, like rotting garlic. There is an adage in Haiti that warns one never to partake of an open bottle in an unknown temple. I took a drink.

Marcel began to laugh and turned to Rachel incredulously. “How did he know there was nothing in it?”

“He didn’t,” she replied.

Now Marcel was dumbfounded. “Why is this blanc not afraid of me?”

“Because he is afraid of no man,” she said flatly. I glanced at her. Though a lie, it was the perfect answer.

At that moment my relationship with Marcel Pierre changed. As we quit the temple I noticed what would turn out to be ingredients of the proper zombi poison drying on the clothesline. Just before we reached our jeep, Marcel mentioned something to Rachel. She turned to me uneasily. “He wants you to return tonight alone. He says it is time to get the poison.”

There was no moon, and the clouds blocked the stars. A tremendous thunderstorm had cracked open the dusk sky. Now, shortly after midnight, by the roadside several miles north of Saint Marc, the dark clouds remained menacingly on the horizon.

There were five of us—Marcel, myself, his assistant Jean, and two of his women. We left the road on foot and followed a narrow trail that crisscrossed up an eroded draw, weaving through spindly, brittle vegetation. Here, it was pitch-dark. There was one flashlight, but its fading light was of little use. Marcel carried it in front, stumbling and laughing in a morbid glee thoroughly seeped in rum. Behind him came Matilde, her long white dress running behind her in waves as she walked. I followed, and the other woman, Marie, took my hand. It wasn’t very helpful, for in the darkness she was as clumsy as I, yet I appreciated the human contact. Jean was the last, and he seemed to have night vision. He moved slowly, steadily up the draw, his senses keen, taking in every sound or movement. Slung over his shoulder were a shovel and a pick.

On a dry knoll, with the hills all around like a finely placed shroud, the air tasted damp and decayed. The rain was coming. Sheet lightning flashed in bursts of distant light that revealed shadows on Marcel’s face. In his dark glasses, worn by night as well as day, I saw reflections of the two women—Marie in red, Matilde in white, her dark skin glowing out of all that white cloth. Far below, the headlights of passing cars and trucks skimmed the roofs of the hamlet. The people there were asleep, while we were about to steal one of their dead.

The tomb was unmarked, just a slight rise in the soil. Jean slipped away to contact a confederate he had in the community. We waited, staying low, our arms linked gently. The silence strained my ears. I felt a flush of fever and fought off the spasms. Jean returned after twenty minutes, panting, his eyes shining, his lips preserving silence. Marcel handed him a couple of cigarettes, and Jean carried them into the shadows to the confederate. When Jean struck a match, the bold light momentarily flooded their faces.

The shovel didn’t dig, it scraped the compacted soil from the grave. The pick broke it off in lumps. Deeper and deeper, and from behind the muffled laughter of the women, like the distant cackle of ravens on the coast at the end of day. From the grave the strong, distinct smell of moist earth.

I held the torch and followed the progress in its narrow beam of light. Some four feet down, the blade of the shovel tore into the reed mat that lined the recesses of the tomb. Beneath the mat were several layers of cotton cloth, the brilliant colors scarcely faded. Then came the hollow thud of steel upon a wooden casket. Jean stopped to cover his face with a red cloth and rub a liniment on all exposed parts of his body. We did the same. Marcel came forward and had us inhale a viscid potion that smelled of ammonia. Cautiously Jean scraped the loose dirt from around the coffin. Leaning as far away from the grave as possible, he reached one arm into the ground and with the pick attempted to pry the coffin from the base of the tomb. The coffin splintered. He stopped, and dug some more with the spade. Finally he crept into the grave, tied a rope to one end of the coffin and hoisted it out of the ground.

It was short, a mere three feet long. Jean cracked the edge of a narrow plank. It took some time for my eyes to grow accustomed to the color of dust and death. Then I felt the horror. I saw a small shrunken head, lips drawn back over tiny yellow teeth, eyes squinting in toward each other. It was a child, a baby girl, her bonnet intact, stiff and gray-brown. As Jean and Marcel carefully placed a large hemp sack over the coffin, I wandered from coffin to tomb. Like a wound, the gaping hole drew me back in strange fascination. Matilde stayed close beside me, stopping me once to wipe my damp brow with the fringe of her skirt. I was dismayed. Bodies decompse rapidly in such a climate: this child could not have been in the grave a month. Jean lifted the coffin onto his head and began to walk down the draw. The others went with him. I came last, following the sugary movements of a whore’s hips.

No one paid much attention to us as we unloaded the coffin in front of the Eagle Bar. A few clients leaned over the concrete railing, but the music covered our voices. Jean took the coffin out of the back of the jeep and carried it around to Marcel’s bagi. Marcel ordered soft drinks. I bought a couple bottles of rum. I had a few drinks with him, and as I left, I heard Jean working the shovel behind me, burying the coffin in the court of the hounfour. There it would remain until I returned.

Thus we had collected the first and, according to Marcel, most important ingredient of the zombi poison.

I drove south swiftly, my headlights stripping off the final layers of the Haitian night. Beneath the steep slopes that reach the sea near Carrius, with daybreak coming, the pastel sky brightened and luminous clouds revealed great gaps in the sky. Streamers of brilliant light backlit the mountains. Impulsively I made for the sea. Along a pure and virgin shoreline, I felt an irresistible desire to bathe. I shed my clothes on a beach above a fishing village and waded out into the chilling waters. Shapes began to emerge with the dawn—across the water, the shimmering reflections of distant coral atolls, and south along the beach, toward the settlement, the glistening black bodies, piratelike, shouting morning songs. I was glad to be cold. Then I felt the warm breeze fall off the land and caress my cheek. I remembered something the stranger at the Ollofson had said: “Haiti will teach you that good and evil are one. We never confuse them, nor do we keep them apart.”

Three days later Marcel led Rachel and me up a broken tract, past a wattle-and-daub house where an ancient woman lived alone, to a draw that opened on a grim wash studded with cacti and brush. Jean was with us, and he and one other assistant carried a metal grill, a cloth sack, and a mortar and pestle. Marcel had a vinyl briefcase, splitting at the seam. We stopped when we reached a small flat, partially shaded by a massive stand of caotchu, a wretched succulent with contorted limbs and a viral look. Like everything else in this wasteland, it was sharp and pointed and had sap that burned.

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 understand. 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.

The two men had heard that Beauvoir had influence in the capital, and they wanted to know if he might be able to arrange for them to demonstrate their horsemanship for the president. They offered to put on a private demonstration for Beauvoir the following week in Desdunnes.

The day before I was scheduled to leave Haiti, Max Beauvoir, Rachel, and I arrived in Desdunnes, finding more than fifty mounted men waiting beside their commander’s house. By American standards the horses were small, but all appeared well trained, and the men put on an impressive display. At midmorning, as the horsemen broke off and gathered by the plaza to drink with us and the commander, I happened to mention that I enjoyed horses. The commander took that casual comment as a signal that I wanted to ride with his group. Within minutes I was atop an exhausted horse. The commander asked Beauvoir if they ought to lead the horse by the halter, but by then a couple of the men and I were trotting out of the plaza. Then, as they realized I could indeed ride, the men broke into a gallop, and those on foot began to shout, “Savandier.” At that point, as I would later learn, the commander turned to Beauvoir and said, “A man who rides like that was born on the savanna. So, my friend, you come to have a look at us, and you bring your own rider.” Then after a pause he went on, “Let’s have a look at him. We have a horse that doesn’t dance, but it does run.”

We tethered our horses, and after a few drinks the rhythm of the afternoon set in. We had been sitting for about an hour when two men returned with a fresh brown mare.

The town was by then in a frenzy. It was Easter, and the Rara bands had swarmed out of the temples to celebrate the end of Lent. Their processions wove through the streets, swirling past one another, invading gardens and homes, absorbing idlers and growing longer and longer tails of dancers. From a distance they could be taken as hallucinations, except for the music—a single four-note song. The bass line came from four long bamboo tubes. Tin cans transformed into trumpets and trombones created a glittering horn section; rubber hose transformed into tubas created another. Percussion in the hands of a Haitian is anything that knocks—two sticks, a hubcap, a hammer-and-leaf spring from a truck.

The bandleader was a malevolent jester, somewhat androgynous. The others in the lead looked like the Queen of Hearts, only more lascivious, in long satin dresses sporting lewd bustlines. All of them were men. Sweeping across the head of the procession was a menacing figure, wielding a sisal whip, flailing at the crowd. But it was a symbolic display, and no one was hurt. Nevertheless Rara remains somehow intimidating and subversive. It is an amazing sexual inversion and an extraordinary triumph of the spirit. No wonder that by political decree the bands are permanently forbidden from entering the major cities.

So, with a gallery of dusty-faced peasants interwoven by the brilliant, swirling colors of the Rara bands, I got onto the horse. Two men on foot released the halter, and four others on horseback led me out of the plaza to the main entrance of town. As our trot broke into a canter, two of the other horsemen fell back. Then we began to run, and I found myself with the remaining horseman in an unanticipated contest. His challenge thinly disguised, he led me on a wide circuit about town, past the thatched huts and across the crowded plazas. At one point when I veered onto the wrong trail, the horseman paused and turned back to me, laughing. Then, as I drew abreast again, he loosened his rein and let out a great howl. The race was on in earnest. Women grabbed their children or chased away the chickens, and the town’s main thoroughfare became a storm of dust. As we circled the mapou tree in the central plaza, my horse entered the lead. The peasants began to shout, “Blanc, blanc” as froth from the neck of my horse struck my face.

Although I crossed the line a few paces ahead of my companion, it clearly mattered less who won than that the race had actually taken place. With obvious delight the commander took my reins as I dismounted, then led me into the courtyard of his house. Surrounded by the rest of his horsemen, we posed for the local photographer. Finally he led me into the house to join the Beauvoirs for lunch.

Only later would Max Beauvoir tell me that the commander was a president of a secret society, that I was now considered a member of his horse troop, and that the meal had been prepared and served by three queens of the secret society.

That afternoon we left Desdunnes and continued north to an important ceremonial center in the Artibonite Valley. There, once again by chance, I came across an important clue, yet it was a discovery that, like so many made during this first phase of my investigation, only deepened the mystery. At dusk, in the fields behind this most sacred of sites, I stumbled upon an entire field of planted datura. The next day I left Haiti and returned to the United States.