The Serpent and the Rainbow

9 In Summer the Pilgrims Walk

“EVEN AS YOU SEE ME, I passed beneath the earth,” Marcel confided as we shared another drink in his small bedroom at the Eagle Bar. “It was the same powder that I gave you. It can cause one hundred and one ailments. Mine was a disease of heat. I sweated even in the ocean. It cooked my blood until my veins ran dry, and then it stole the breath from my lungs.” He was describing for me his own exposure to the poison.

There was some kind of disturbance in one of the rooms, and Marcel got up from the bed and slipped back into the bar. His place looked good. There was a new sign out front and a fresh coat of paint on most of the rooms. Rachel reached forward to fill my glass.

“Some party,” I said. The rum warmed my tongue and the back of my throat. Both of us were still damp with sweat. Marcel had been happy that we had come to see him as soon as I returned to Haiti, and when he’d found out that the powder had worked his excitement had spilled over into a celebration. One of his women had unlocked the Wurlitzer, and the place had become pretty wild. Marcel and Rachel had danced a mad salsa while I’d been swung around by the women and some of the men, and with the pounding jukebox and the sweltering summer heat, sweat had soon greased the concrete floor. Now things had settled down, but there was still a licentious air to the place, stronger than usual.

“Is it strange to be back?” Rachel asked me.

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s difficult to say. Sometimes when you travel a lot, the landscapes pile up so fast that you lose all sense of place.”

“And faces?”

“Yes.”

Rachel started fooling with the heel of one of the cheap shoes she always wore. “You know they say Marcel paid fifteen thousand dollars to get cured,” she said.

“Where’d he get that kind of money?”

“There used to be money. He worked the docks. Some kind of racket with the tourist boats. Marcel was a big Ton Ton and he had some position in the port.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Then he went too far. Too many beatings, too many in jail.”

“Where’d you pick up all this?”

“My uncle, mostly. He was the prefect.”

“I see.”

“Nobody thought that he’d live. They passed the powder, and for three days they thought he was dead. There was even a wake. His face was all bloated, and his belly swelled up, and my uncle said that if you pricked his skin, you didn’t find blood, you got water.”

Marcel returned bearing a noxious-looking bottle containing a thick, viscid liquid. “You see,” he said, “it still lives. This was my blood. When they sent the powder all the animals came into me and laid eggs. A cockroach came from my nose, and I passed two lizards from behind.”

“There was nothing you could do?”

“No. If your force is strong you can resist a coup l’aire, but the powder is different. If you’re wrong it gets you, if you’re right it gets you.”

“But how can they direct it at you alone?”

“The bones. It’s only the soul from the graveyard that has that power. That’s why the bones are so dangerous.”

“But you survived.”

“I passed through the hands of thirteen houngan. They drained all the bad blood from my foot. I am still not well. Look at my face. I live only because of the strength of the spirit that calls for me.”

Marcel recounted how there had been many treatments, but only the last had saved him. It had been administered by a mambo, a priestess in the Artibonite. On the critical night she bound his jaw, placed cotton in the nostrils, and dressed him in the clothing of the dead. His feet were tied, as were his hands, and he was laid in a narrow trough dug into the ground of the hounfour. A white sheet covered his entire body. A pierre tonnerre and the skulls of a human and a dog were placed on top of the sheet, the sucker of a banana plant beside him. Seven candles cradled in orange peels surrounded the “grave,” and calabashes rested by his head, on his abdomen, and at his feet. These three offerings, Marcel suggested, represented the sacred concepts of the crossroad, the cemetery, and Grans Bwa, the spirit of the forest. The mambo straddled the grave, and in a high-pitched wail she invoked Guede, the spirit of the dead. She took a living chicken and passed it slowly over his body, then broke each of the bird’s limbs to extract the death spirit from the corresponding limbs of the patient. Next she took the head of the chicken in her mouth and bit it off that she might touch Marcel with its blood. Marcel then felt the contents of the calabashes massaged into his skin, water splashed on his face, and hot oil and wax from the lamps applied to his chest. He heard the crack of the breaking water jar, and felt the pieces of hardened clay fall into the grave. Finally, still lying immobile in the ground, he counted seven handfuls of earth taken from the crossroads, the cemetery, and the forest landing on his shroud. The mambo’s sharp cry ordered him from the ground, and as the others hurriedly pushed in the loose dirt, two men tore Marcel from the grave. He was anointed again in blood, and spent the night in the sanctity of the temple.

“The blood bought back my life,” Marcel concluded. “The banana never grew.”

“But who did this to you?” I asked.

“I had enemies. One always does when one advances.”

“The secret society?”

“No.” He glanced toward Rachel. “The people.”

“But you were judged.”

“Yes. No. In principle, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate. It is the houngan’s secret.”

I enjoyed seeing Marcel again, and his own story had been an unexpected revelation, but I didn’t plan on doing any more business with him, at least not right away. There were several things on my mind when I returned that July, following my two months back in the States. My sponsors wanted more collections of the poison. Kline, in particular, was worried that Marcel Pierre, prodded by my brash tactics, might simply have rounded up the half-dozen most toxic ingredients at hand and improvised a preparation. I didn’t share his doubts, for not only did I trust Marcel and find our evidence convincing, I also noted that the principal ingredients in his powder were the same as those in the “trap” that had brought down Clairvius Narcisse, according to his cousin. Besides, the pharmacological point had been reasonably established in lab tests.

Nevertheless, I did recognize the need for more samples. But while my backers still sought evidence of a single chemical that might explain zombification, I had become more and more impressed by a people who shared no such obsession with rational causality. I wanted to know the magic; I wanted to know what it meant, especially to its victims. And if the poison explained how a person might succumb, I now wanted to know why that person was chosen.

My first new lead came forty-eight hours after my visit to the Eagle Bar—through a contact in the capital provided by one of Max Beauvoir’s employees, a Jacques Belfort. Beauvoir had never actually hired Jacques. Several years ago he just turned up at the gate of the Peristyle de Mariani, and it happened that Beauvoir had an errand to run. Jacques offered to do it, then he returned and did another. Gradually, errand by errand, he worked his way into the life of the hounfour. Now he appeared each morning at eight, not to set about any prescribed work, but to wait for special opportunities, knowing he could get anything done. Jacques has many wives, and one of them was from Petite Rivière de Nippes, a small fishing village in the south. There, Jacques told me, she knew a mambo who might be able to put us in touch with the ones who could make the powders, both the poison and the reputed antidote, and to whom she would be prepared to take us.

The mambo lived some distance from the coast, on a small knoll rising out of a sad landscape: fields of stones, barren trees and bushes that served for neither grazing nor firewood. It was another of Haiti’s many faces, a place to find hunger.

The hounfour was deserted save for two patients awaiting treatment, and an old woman who was caring for them. Sheltered from the sun by a grass mat sat a beautiful girl, with deep almond eyes and eyelashes thick as fleece. She was dying from tuberculosis. Beside her was a small boy. The joints of mother and son stuck out like knots. Lying across from them near the entrance to the bagi was a middle-aged man whose lower leg was infected with elephantiasis.

Despite their obvious suffering, there was nothing forlorn about these people. The man laughed and welcomed us buoyantly, and the old woman, having made us comfortable in the shade, hurried to her hearth to bring coffee. The stricken man, as if embarrassed by the lack of preparation, hobbled forward and offered a share of his plate of food. I accepted and ate slowly, deliberately, hoping that he would sense my gratitude. There was so much I wanted to say, but out of respect I simply passed the plate on. It was not surprising to see such sickness in the hounfour, which is, after all, a center of healing. But to encounter such generosity and kindness in the midst of such scarcity was to realize the full measure of the Haitian peasant.

We remained with them for much of the afternoon. The mambo never showed up, but Jacques had unlimited patience, and his wife kept busy spreading the news of the capital. Some time around four, Mme. Jacques ran dry and suggested we return to Petite Rivière de Nippes and look up the mambo’s son, a houngan with the name of LaBonté, “kindness.” We found his hounfour without difficulty, and settled in for another long wait. Finally, well after dusk, LaBonté appeared and led us into the outer room of his temple, a small chamber with a single dusty bulb hanging from a cracked ceiling. He claimed to know nothing about zombi powders but offered instead a wide range of benevolent preparations that would increase our love, wealth, and fertility.

Rachel was adamant. “No. It is only one that we want.”

LaBonté countered by suggesting that we purchase a charm, which might accomplish whatever it was we needed the powder for. Throughout this rambling conversation, Jacques stood quietly by the door in his polished shoes and pressed linen, continually wiping his brow and chest with his handkerchief. His wife sat beside him, scrutinizing LaBonté. Suddenly she stepped between him and Rachel.

“Listen,” she said impatiently, “it’s simple. The blanc wants to kill someone. If you can’t give it to him, we’ll go somewhere else.” She turned abruptly, took Rachel by the arm, and made for the door. LaBonté got there ahead of her.

“Something might be arranged,” he said quietly. “But I will have to speak with some people. Come back tomorrow.”

The jeep broke down the next day, so we were delayed a day getting back to the fishing village. The hounfour was empty, and it was an hour before we located LaBonté. His welcome marked by suspicion, he called for three associates.

“You were told to be here yesterday,” he began once we were all together. “You best remember one thing. We can be as sweet as honey, or as bitter as bile. That said, we may begin the business.” It was an unexpected and, for a Haitian, uncharacteristic concern with punctuality.

To prove the efficacy of their poison, one of his associates, named Obin, offered to test a prepared sample on a chicken. An amusing interlude followed as we tried to locate a chicken healthy enough for the test. Mme. Jacques categorically refused the first four, claiming that a gust of wind would blow any one of them over. Finally, she accepted a young robust rooster.

LaBonté maneuvered Rachel and me into the inner sanctum of the temple. There were no windows; the only light was a narrow beam of sun that pierced the thatch roof. One by one the others came, passing briefly through the light and disappearing into the dark. The last figure closed the door behind him and took his place in our midst. A match was struck and the flame reached forward to light first one, then two more candles. Their soft glow revealed the points of a cross, beyond which sat the houngan. LaBonté lifted his hands to the altar and began a prayer for our protection. One of the men passed around a basin containing a pungent solution and instructed us to rub the potion into our skin. Once LaBonté was satisfied that we were safe, Obin sprinkled a small amount of the poison in a corner of the chamber. LaBonté lifted a clay jar of water from his altar and told me to pour a portion of it down the rooster’s throat. Moments later, Obin took the bird from my lap, placed it on top of the poison, and covered both with a rice sack.

From an obscure corner two voices, one gruff and the other strangely sensual, joined in a sonorous chant that filled the chamber. Beside me, the man who had passed the basin started to grate a human tibia. Sweat came to his brow, moistening the satin kerchief wrapped around his head as he too began to sing:

Make the magic Papa Ogoun, Oh!

Make the magic Gran Chemin, Ogoun,

That which I see, I can’t talk about.

Let me go,

Let me go, people!

Let me go.

Rather than die unhappy,

I’d rather die a young man.

Let me go.

I am Criminel,

I won’t eat people anymore.

The country has changed

Criminel says

I won’t eat people anymore.

With the blessing of the songs and his asson, LaBonté selected and sanctified the bottle that would hold the vital potion that would protect me when I administered the poison. I named my intended victim, and he whispered it to the bottle. A machete cracked three times against a stone. Obin pulled four feathers from the rooster’s wing and instructed me to tie them in the shape of a cross while invoking their blessing for my proposed work. The machete rang out once more. Obin led me to the cross, instructing me to make a small offering. I placed a few coins on the ground. Then, as I knelt, he inverted a bottle of clairin, causing it to bubble in a peculiar manner—a certain sign, I was told, that my desires would be fulfilled. A match dropped into the bottle exploded into flames, which for an instant illuminated the entire enclosure.

Mme. Jacques accompanied one of the men as they took the rooster to the seat to bathe its left foot. As soon as they returned, Obin threw sulphur powder into a flame, casting sparks with tails of acrid smoke that shot to all corners of the room. Then he released the rooster.

Meanwhile, the man in the satin kerchief had ground up the wood of cadavre gâté, one of the most important of vodoun’s healing trees, and mixed the dust with bits of decayed matter from a human cadaver, including the shavings of the leg bone. LaBonté placed this powder in my protection bottle, adding white sugar, basil leaves, seven drops of rum, seven drops of clairin, and a small amount of cornmeal. Then he rasped a human skull and added other materials provided by one of the men, who lived by the cemetery. LaBonté handed me three candles, three powders, and a packet of gunpowder. He told me to knead the powders into the soft wax before braiding the candles into one. A third time the blade of the machete fell on the stone, harder now, and the edge of the blade scattered sparks.

The spirits answered, mounting first the man with the kerchief, then Obin and LaBonté. LaBonté filled my protection bottle and held it to my lips, piously encouraging me to drink and breathe. This I did. The spirit led me and my companions out of the bagi, into another room where he ordered us to undress. One by one, beginning with myself, we were bathed. The spirit bound my head in red cloth, and as I stood naked in a large basin of herbs and oils he cleansed my skin, with broad soothing strokes, using the rooster as a sponge. The energy of the bird would pass to me, he promised, and by the end of the bath it would lose the breath of life. Rachel followed me into the basin, and then Jacques, and by the time Mme. Jacques was clean, the rooster lay on the ground, flaccid and quite dead.

“It is good,” Mme. Jacques said. “In Port-au-Prince the basin is terrible. Here you smell of beauty, even though you are about to kill.”

Now that we were safe, the spirit directed us back into the bagi for the preparation of the actual poison. There was a new song invoking Simbi, the patron of the powders.

Simbi en Deux Eau

Why don’t people like me?

Because my magical force is dangerous.

Simbi en Deux Eau

Why can’t they stand me?

Because my magical force is dangerous.

They like my magical force in order to fly the Secret Society.

They like my magical force in order to be able

To walk in the middle of the night.

There were four ingredients: one was a mixture of four samples of colored talc, another was the ground skins of a frog, the third was gunpowder, and the fourth was a mixture of talc and the dust ground from the dried gall bladders of a mule and a man. There was no fish, and no toad.

I glanced quickly toward the others, first Rachel, then Jacques. Both sat still and unchanged, but Mme. Jacques had shed her years like water. Her dress fell away from one shoulder, and she had crossed her legs so that a bare foot rested high on her thigh. From a wiry, grim peasant woman, she had become sultry and seductive. Her lips squeezed a cigarette, but it was the wrong way around—the lit end sizzled on top of her tongue.

Her husband caught my stare. “There is no problem,” he confided. “Often when she is taken by the spirit she rubs the juice of the chile pepper on her vagina. Listen!”

The body that had been Mme. Jacques was singing. “We are assembling, we are near the basin, we are going to work. We don’t know how it will be but we shall do the work.” The linked phrases of this high, plaintive wail merged with the rattle and whistle and bells in an ominous cacophony unlike any sound I had heard in a vodoun hounfour.

Then, speaking with a voice that was not hers, she demanded a second poison. Without argument one of the men brought forth a small leather pouch and emptied the contents into a mortar.

“These are the skins of the white frog,” the spirit intoned. “The belly of your victim will swell, and let them cut into it, it will bleed a river of water.”

I lifted one of the skins from the mortar and held it close to the candle. Even I could recognize it as that of the common hyla tree frog. Small glands beneath its skin secrete a compound that while irritating is hardly toxic.

To administer the poison, I was told, it was critical for both my own safety and the success of the work that I follow instructions precisely. On the night of the deed, I was to light the braided candle and hold it up before the evening star and wait until the sky darkened. To cast the death spirit, I would first have to beseech the star saying:

By the power of Saint Star,

Walk, Find

Sleep without eating.

Then, having saluted a complex sequence of stars, I was to place the burning candle in one of two holes dug beneath my victim’s door. Next, I was to drink from my protection bottle to imbibe the power of the cemetery. To set the trap I had merely to sprinkle the powder over the buried candle, staying carefully upwind while I whispered the name of my intended victim. Once the fated individual crossed over the poison, death would be imminent. As a final precaution, the spirit warned me to sleep with the cross of feathers beneath my pillow. That way the power of this ceremony could continue to shield me. With these final words, the spirit left.

“With this your enemy will fall,” Obin assured me as we were about to leave the hounfour. In his hand he held a small jar that contained the second preparation.

“And to make him rise again?” I asked, still clinging to the notion of an antidote.

“That is another magic. For what you have there is no treatment. It kills too completely.”

“And the other powder?” Mme. Jacques asked Obin.

“It’s the same,” he said. “With these you will kill. Is that not what you want?”

“There’s more.”

“What you have been given is explosive. Both powders shall leave your enemy but one ark, the earth that shall take him.”

“I want his body,” I said.

“For that you must return.”

“When?”

“When he is dead and you are ready.”

It was dusk and a young moon hung over the sea, but it was still hot. Jacques cracked open a bottle of rum, and we drank as we walked away. For a while no one spoke. Our clothes clung to our skin, and we smelled of the market—a combination of sweat, jasmine, and rotting fruit. The fishermen were out, two rows along the shore, and we watched the coils grow at their feet as they hauled in the ends of the great semicircles of net, which closed on piles of flotsam.

“Of course,” Mme. Jacques explained once we had reached the jeep, “there are dozens of powders. They walk in different ways. Some kill slowly, some give pain, others are silent.”

“And the ones we bought?”

“They carbonize. But it is the magic that makes you the master.”

“What of the others?”

“It is easier. In food. Or they prick the skin with a thorn. Sometimes they place glass in the mortar. It is a matter of power. If you want to learn the powders, you best walk at night.” Mme. Jacques accepted the bottle of rum. “But now,” she said, “you have known the face of the convoi. The society has touched you.”

“How does she know these things?” Rachel teased, wrapping her arms around Jacques’s neck.

“Oh!” he cried, gagging on a swallow of rum and collapsing into uproarious laughter. “How might she know! They call her Shanpwel. Those men are her cousins. Obin is the president. She is the queen!”

Two men were waiting for me at Beauvoir’s that evening. One was the chief of police of a city in the north. The other I could have recognized by sound alone—by the peal of throaty laughter filtered through a thousand cigarettes until it had the edge of a rasp. He was the same man who had been waiting for us, with three others, on the night of my second day in Haiti, when we returned from Marcel Pierre’s with the bogus preparation. Then he had poured the sample onto his hand derisively. This time I learned his name—Herard Simon. He was equally blunt now.

There were at least four preparations that could be used to make zombis, and for the proper amount of money I could obtain them all. It was a substantial sum. I called New York from Max Beauvoir’s phone and received instructions to buy one powder, and if it worked on laboratory monkeys, I could return to purchase the others. I returned to Simon and halved the price. He agreed, and I gave him a deposit. He told me to meet him in the north in three days, then he left.

Our meeting had lasted scarcely longer than the time of my long-distance call, but my impression of Herard Simon carried well into the night, until it kept me from sleep. Outwardly, he seemed calm, almost sluggish, for long ago, the angles of his body had disappeared beneath a mountain of flesh. But like the Buddha he resembled, his corpulence had a purpose; beneath it there was something at once terribly wise and terribly savage, like the soul of a man who has been forced to kill. Nobody told me until much later, but already that night I knew: in meeting Herard Simon, I had met the source.

“It was hard-hit,” Rachel said. Her words took in all the confusion of dust and rubble that was Gonaives. The power was out, and in the darkness the city looked unnatural, its buildings half-abandoned, yet its streets alive with people. In the market the drifters and sellers huddled around small fires, their children in clumps. Everyone seemed to be living outside, like survivors camped atop a ruin.

“They closed the port,” Rachel said.

“When the road went through?”

“Before. Duvalier wanted everything in the capital.”

“So all the business left?”

She nodded. “Turn here,” she said suddenly, and we veered onto a gravel road riddled with potholes. “It used to be in Gonaives that if you were black, the mulattos wouldn’t sit beside you.”

“Duvalier changed that?”

“The revolution did. Now there’s hardly any mulattos left here.”

“That’s convenient,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing. Say, have we been here before?”

“You don’t remember?”

Then I did. Even in the darkness you couldn’t miss the mermaid swimming along that blue-and-green wall. The woman who ran the Clermezine nightclub, and who had expressed such a low opinion of Ti Femme, was the wife of Herard Simon.

I swung abruptly into the short drive, and for an instant the beam of the headlights froze the same amorphous group of idlers against the gate of the compound.

“Hélène’s away on pilgrimage, but Herard’s probably here.” Rachel started to say something to the men sitting around, but then stopped, hesitated, and, grabbing her cigarettes, stepped out of the jeep. She drew several of the youth toward her, and then quite deliberately asked one of them for a light.

Once back in the jeep, she said, “He’s not in. They say he had business.”

“Where would that be?”

“Anywhere. Maybe in town. Sometimes he hangs out by the waterfront. What shall we do?”

“Wait.”

I pushed open the door, propped a foot on a hinge, and settled back. Some of the youths gathered around. You could tell they were thirsty, so we shared what was left of the rum. It was good to watch the bottle pass around. That’s a special thing about Haiti—everyone loves to drink, but you never see anyone drunk.

We chatted away for a while, but gradually they drifted back to the gate, finished with us and ready to sink back into their nightly routine.

“Strange,” Rachel said once we were alone. “Did you notice the one on the left, the one that lit my cigarette?”

“You recognized him?”

“Not at first. Then I remembered. He was in L’Estère with Narcisse’s sister. I’m certain.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He’s from here. The question is, what was he doing there?”

It was about nine when a slim figure slipped up to the side of the jeep and startled Rachel. Without identifying himself, he said quietly, “The commandant is waiting at his place.” Then he walked away.

“The commandant?” I asked as we pulled out of the drive.

“Everyone calls him that. He used to be head of the militia, the VSN.” She used the official acronym for the Ton Ton Macoute.

“Of Gonaives?”

“No, all the Artibonite.”

“When was that?”

“Right at the beginning. He’s retired now, but he still runs things. My father says that his people have been watching us since you arrived.”

Herard Simon didn’t have a lot to say. He sat alone, on the porch of a simple dwelling, absentmindedly brushing the flies away from his face. We shook hands at my initiative. Sometimes, when strangers meet because they must and nothing is said, the silence is honest. But here it wasn’t. It was a statement of his authority, and I had to struggle against an urge to crack it. When he finally spoke, it was with a voice that placed a shell of double meaning on every word.

“What do you care of zombis?”

“I’m curious.”

“Curious? You pay all this money because you’re curious?”

“Someone else pays.”

“The juifs [Jews]. Of course, you are not one of them. They send you because they won’t do the work. And who will make the money?”

“From what we have arranged, it seems that you will,” I said, ignoring his swipe at Kline and my other backers. It went on like this for some time, he asking all the questions, baiting me with his knowledge of my past.

“The blancs are blind,” he said, “except for zombis. You see them everywhere.”

“Zombis are a door to other knowledge,” I said.

“To death and death alone!” he exclaimed in a suddenly strident voice. “Vodoun is vodoun, zombis are zombis.” His calm returned just as quickly. “So,” he said, “you have seen Narcisse.”

“Yes, and his family too.”

“Well?”

“He lives.”

“Yes, one who comes from the ground can be quite normal. But tell me, blanc, if you were a woman, would you ask him to dance?” That cracked him up, and once again I heard that rasping laugh.

“They say he’s got a lawyer, and he’s trying to get back his land to work it again.” This made him laugh again, even harder. “This man Narcisse is half-intelligent. As if he can get protection in the capital from his own people.” He turned to Rachel. “Beauvoir! This is enough. Bring yourself and this blanc malfacteur back in the morning. Then we will begin the work.”

That night, while Rachel and the others at the nightclub slept, I lay in bed struggling for an answer that would explain it all. It hadn’t surprised or worried me that Herard Simon knew so much about our activities; they hadn’t been secret, and there were any number of obvious sources of information. What concerned me was the man himself. I couldn’t let him be. And I had barely met him, that was the extraordinary thing. He had that kind of presence, a charisma hot to the touch. There was something frightening about him, a latent violence that was both ancient and tribal. It seemed as if he bore within him the exploding energy of an entire race; as if his skin, stretched so thin over his massive body, lay ready to split, to release some great catastrophe of the human spirit. He exuded power. I felt it that night, as I had when we first met, and I would experience it again the following morning.

The party from Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite arrived just before noon, but the reputation of their region preceded them. Among other things, I had been told that there was scarcely a bone left in their public cemetery. They were five. The two riding in the cab of the pickup, one wearing an army uniform, had the bearing of officials. The three in the back had the look of mountain peasants. The scalp of one of these was dotted with furry patches—an occupational hazard, I was told, of the malfacteur, the one who grinds the powders.

Herard Simon directed us into the outer chamber of his hounfour. The negotiations were layered with go-betweens, but with no introductions. Herard spoke first, with a few measured words that seemed to secure each person to his will, establishing himself as the principal broker, and then said little. The military official hovered somewhat paternalistically over the peasants, but they spoke for themselves, in a heavily accented Creole that betrayed their roots deep in the mountains. They had a zombi, they claimed, and they also offered to prepare a sample of the poison. The discussion flared with proposal and counterproposal, while their hairless leader tossed off figures in great flurries of bravado, as if the mere mention of such astronomical sums might, like a charm, make them come true. His two partners clearly enjoyed the whole business; they rose up and down on their haunches, urging him on. When I sliced the price, they reacted with pious indignation.

Throughout all this Herard Simon sat silently near the wall, leaning forward on a wooden chair, resting his weight on his knees, virtually immobile. A menthol cigarette burned in his motionless right hand. His very indifference kept command of the conversation. Finally, perhaps tiring of the inconclusive banter, he lifted both his arms and turned to the soldier.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“They have it with them.”

“Then bring it forward. Perhaps a zombi will loosen the blanc’s purse.”

The one in uniform said something to the leader of the peasants. He started to argue, but stopped and, reaching into a dusty bag, pulled out a small ceramic jar wrapped in a red satin cloth. Herard started to laugh, but his laughter had the edge of anger.

“Fools!” he cried. “Not that. They want the flesh.”

The significance of his words was lost for the moment in the blur of his rage. Scattering invectives, he banished all of us from the hounfour. The peasants fled, the officials foundered, and with total contempt Herard made his way back across the courtyard to his house.

He was laughing more jovially by the time we caught up with him. “Imagine, blanc,” he said to me, “they brought you a zombi astral because they didn’t think you’d be able to get a zombi of the flesh through immigration!”

“Wait a minute …” I started to say.

The expression on Herard’s face told me he was surrounded by idiots and I was one of them. “Three days,” he answered, “return in three days.” Again I started to say something, but his thick fingers passed once before his face to cut me off.

Two types of zombis, I thought. That changed everything.

In the summer in Haiti the spirits walk, and the people go with them. For weeks in July the roads come alive with pilgrims, and we followed them.

Leaving Gonaives, Rachel and I drove north across the mountains to the lush coastal plain, calling first at the sacred spring and mudbaths of Saint Jacques, and then moving on to the village of Limonade and the festival of Saint Anne. Here they had gathered, literally thousands of them dressed in the bright clothes and colors of the spirits, fused in hallucinatory waves that flowed across the plaza.

The seething edge of the throng enveloped us even as we stepped from the jeep. We were carried, flesh to flesh, by the collective whim of the crowd. It was like being pushed through the stuffed belly of a beast, and soon we were ploughing through the throng to the nearest refuge, the stone steps of the church standing firm like a jetty above the madness.

Our senses numbed, we entered the church and were well inside the nave before we realized what was going on. It was the Mass of the Invalids, and at our feet lay the most diseased and wretched human display imaginable. Lepers without faces, victims of elephantiasis with limbs the size of tree trunks; dozens and dozens of dying people, collected from the length and breadth of the country to seek alms and redemption at the altar of this church. It was a scene of such singular horror, we could think only of escape.

Rachel stepped ahead of me toward an open door, and then gasped. There in the shadow of a cross, her head covered by a black shawl, was a single woman, and draped across her legs was her daughter, a teenage girl whose shattered legs crossed like sticks. Her skin was jet black and her head a grotesque melon, so swollen with disease that you could see the individual follicles of hair. It was a sight so terrible that we could not pass. We turned back to wade through the brown-frocked beggars carpeting the front of the church, and as we passed they tugged at our clothes. There was nothing for them, and the real horror of the moment was less their condition than our fear.

Then, on the steps of the church, the scene turned into an epiphany. A healthy peasant woman, dressed in the bright-blue-and-red solid block colors of Ogoun, the spirit of fire and war, swirled through the beggars possessed by her spirit. Over her shoulder was slung a brilliant red bag filled with dry kernels of golden corn. She twirled and pranced in divine grace, and with one arm stretching out like the neck of a swan she placed a small pile of corn into each of the begging bowls. When she was finished, her bag empty, she spun around to the delight of all and with a great cry flung herself from the steps of the church. Rachel and I watched her flow into the crowd. Wherever she went the people backed away, that Ogoun might have space to spin. Our eyes followed her until she was gone, and then without speaking we dropped back into the crowd.

Our travels during the rest of that awesome day took us back across the plain to the old colonial capital of Cap Haitien, a gentle place whose warm texture belies a bloody history. At a house built on a ruin with material taken from the sea, we rang the bell of Richard Salisbury, known throughout Haiti as the British consul.

Salisbury, from what I had been told, had an enthusiastic interest in vodoun, and we hoped that he might provide some information concerning the time Narcisse had spent in Cap Haitien immediately following his release. At first there was no response, but after a second ring, the shutters of a second-floor window flung open, and the hot afternoon sun fell harshly on the etiolated body of a middle-aged man. He had just woken up.

Salisbury received us on his veranda in the shadow of an enormous Union Jack. With his handlebar moustache, peppermint complexion, and extended belly wrapped carelessly in a silk smoking jacket, he was a character straight out of Somerset Maugham. As it turned out, his knowledge of vodoun was superficial, and in fact he had nothing to do with the British government. An accountant whose meager investments in a local sugar mill had, until recently, allowed him to live royally in Haiti, he was less a diplomat than a metaphor for the demise of the empire. Salisbury now faced a major personal crisis, and we, unfortunately, were in a position to hear all about it. Corrupt partners and a depressed international market had bankrupted the mill, and he had no choice but to return to England. There he would face the life of any other middle-class accountant, riding the subway to a repetitive, meaningless job. Returning was the last thing he wanted to do, and now given the opportunity he turned to Rachel and asked quite desperately for advice. The sight of this grown man, this European whose attributes were a bit of capital and the false status once afforded to the color of his skin, beseeching a young Haitian girl, walked the fine line between comedy and tragedy.

Close to dusk, we managed to extract ourselves from the problems of Richard Salisbury and made for a coastal beach just east of the city. There beneath the palms, with the sun turning copper, we finally rested. The day had started off in the house of Herard Simon in a confrontation with the poison makers, had led to the mudbaths of Saint Jacques and the horror of Saint Anne, and then to the anachronistic Richard Salisbury. Now it ended on a pristine, tranquil Caribbean beach. I looked past the trees and heard the shrill, incoherent cry of the gulls as they swept and snapped in the waves. Down the shore there was a pair of cormorants, pelicans too. The luxury of wild things, lush and unreasonable. And in the water, Rachel, swimming like a dolphin.

Three days later, as previously arranged, we met again with Herard Simon in Gonaives. He was where he could be found every night, near the waterfront by a dilapidated movie house, his finger on the pulse of the street. His greeting this time was surprisingly cordial. Apparently my status had shifted somewhat—in what direction, I was not certain—for in place of the anonymity of “blanc” he now addressed me as his “petit malfacteur,” his little evildoer. Herard began by emphasizing that as a houngan he had no interest in zombis; they were nothing, he insisted, compared to the profound lessons of the vodoun religion. For business reasons, however, he had made the necessary arrangements. On the morrow, he promised, one of his contacts would begin to prepare the zombi powder.

“And malfacteur,” he said just before we left him, “with what I give you your monkey will go down, it will not come up, and it will never again wag its tail.”

It took a full week to make the poison.

First Herard, as houngan, prepared the antidote, which, not surprisingly, contained a plethora of ingredients, none of which had significant pharmacological activity. It consisted of a handful of bayahond leaves (Prosopis juliflora), three branches of ave (Petiveria alliacea), clairin, ammonia, and three ritualistically prepared lemons. As in the case of the reputed antidote prepared by Marcel Pierre, there was no evidence that it could chemically counteract the effects of any poison.

The actual poison did have potent constituents, and critically the ingredients overlapped in significant ways with those used at Saint Marc. Herard’s man distinguished three stages or degrees to the preparation. During the first a snake and the bouga toad (Bufo marinus) were buried together in a jar until “they died from rage.” Then ground millipeds and tarantulas were mixed with four plant products—the seeds of tcha-tcha (Albizzia lebbeck), the same leguminous species added by Marcel Pierre; the seeds of consigne (Trichilia hirta), a tree in the mahogany family with no well-known active constituents; the leaves of pomme cajou, the common cashew (Anacardium occidentale); and bresillet (Comocladia glabra). The last two plants are members of the poison ivy family, and both, especially bresillet, can cause severe and dangerous dermatitis.

These ingredients, once ground to powder, were placed in the jar and left below ground for two days. Then, at the second degree, two botanically unidentified plants known locally as tremblador and desmembre were added. For the third and final degree, four other plants capable of causing severe topical irritations were mixed in. Two were members of the stinging nettle family, maman guêpes (Urera baccifera) and mashasha (Dalechampia scandens). The hollow hairs on the surface of these plants act as small hypodermic syringes and inject a chemical similar to formic acid, the compound responsible for the pain of ant bites. A third plant was Dieffenbachia seguine, the common “dumbcane” of Jamaica. In its tissues are calcium oxalate needles that act like small pieces of glass. The English name derives from the nineteenth-century practice of forcing recalcitrant slaves to eat the leaves; the needles, by irritating the larynx, cause local swelling, making breathing difficult and speaking impossible. The fourth plant, bwa piné (Zanthoxylum matinicense), was added because of its sharp spines.

The addition of these irritant plants recalled Marcel Pierre’s use of Mucuna pruriens, the itching pea. It was of interest that several of these additives could produce such severe irritation that the victim, in scratching himself, might quite readily induce self-inflicted wounds. I knew from the results of the laboratory experiments in New York that the powder, though topically active, was particularly effective if applied where the skin had been broken. Mme. Jacques had suggested that ground glass might be used. And of course I had reason to believe that when the powder was administered the skin of the victim was quite deliberately broken. It had been stated that the powder might be applied more than once, so it was possible that the irritant plants directly increased susceptibility to subsequent doses.

It was the list of animals added at the third degree that gave me the greatest sense of satisfaction. Tarantulas of two species were ground with the skins of the white tree frog (Osteopilus dominicencis). Other ingredients included another bouga toad and not one but four species of puffer fish (Sphoeroides testudineus, S. spengleri, Diodon hystrix, D. holacanthus). Thus, in common with the poison prepared by Marcel Pierre, we had the toad, the puffers, including the sea toad, and the seeds of Albizzia lebbeck.

Over the course of that week our relationship with Herard Simon warmed considerably. There was no one dramatic turning point, as there had been in the case of Marcel Pierre; Herard was far too clever and wary for that. Rather, it was a number of small incidental things that he appreciated—the fact that we drank from his well, that we shared his plate, that we curled up beside him on the stony ground.

For one reason or another, in time, he chose to loose three critical pieces of information. First, he gave me the names of four preparations used to create zombis—Tombé Levé, Retiré Bon Ange, Tué, and Levé— and though he refused to describe the specific formulae, he did offer the facts that one killed immediately, another made the skin rot, and a third caused the victim to waste away slowly. He also commented that these virulent preparations had one ingredient in common—the crapaud de mer, the most toxic of the puffers found in Haitian waters.

Secondly, Herard told me that the best powders were made during the hot months of the summer, and were then stored and distributed throughout the year. At the same time, he cautioned that some of these were excessively “explosive,” that they killed too completely. From the research I had done in Cambridge I knew that levels of tetrodotoxin within the puffer fish are not consistent. They vary not only according to sex, geographical locality, and the time of the year, but from individual to individual within a single population. A puffer from Brazilian waters, Tetrodon psittacus, for example, is only poisonous in June and July. Among Japanese species toxicity begins to increase in December and reaches a peak in May or June. The species used in the zombi preparations show a similar pattern—Sphoeroides testudineus, the sea toad, is most toxic in June, precisely the time when Herard said the poison was strongest.

Finally, Herard told us that when the zombi is taken from the grave it is force-fed a paste, with a second dose administered the next day when the victim reaches its place of confinement. The ingredients of the paste were three: sweet potato, cane syrup, and, of all things, Datura stramonium.

It was a startling piece of information. Since the beginning of the investigation, the role of this potent psychoactive plant, so suggestively named the zombi’s cucumber in Creole, had eluded me. Now a dozen incongruous facts crystallized into an idea. So far the search for a medical antidote for the zombi poison had turned up nothing of pharmacological interest. Each zombi powder had its locally recognized “antidote,” but in each case the ingredients were either inert or were used in insufficient concentration. Moreover, there was no consistency in either their constituents or the means of preparation between the various localities. Now, with Herard’s revelation, I had reason to believe that if there was an actual antidote, it was the zombi’s cucumber!

Tetrodotoxin is a most peculiar molecule. No one is exactly sure where it originated. Generally, such specialized compounds pop up just once over the course of evolution, and as a result are only found in closely related organisms, derived presumably from a common ancestor. For the longest time, tetrodotoxin appeared to be isolated to a single family of fish. Then, to the surprise of biologists, it turned up in an amphibian, the California newt, a totally unrelated creature. Subsequent research found it in the goby fish from Taiwan, atelopid frogs from Costa Rica, and the blue-ringed octopus from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Such an erratic distribution suggested to some scientists that the toxin originated lower in the food chain, perhaps in a small marine organism.

Within the puffer fish themselves, toxicity is correlated with the reproductive cycle and is higher in females, but the remarkable variability in toxin levels among separate populations of the same species has prompted similar suggestions that the concentration of the toxin may be linked to food habits. Puffer fish grown in culture, for example, do not develop tetrodotoxins, and it is possible that the puffer fish, in addition to synthesizing tetrodotoxins, may serve as transvectors of either tetrodotoxin or ciguatoxin, a different chemical that originates in a dinoflagellate and causes paralytic shellfish poisonings. The symptoms of ciguatera poisoning are similar to those of tetrodotoxin and include tingling sensations, malaise, nausea, and digestive distress, with death resulting from respiratory paralysis.

In Australia, still today as throughout their history, the aborigines have a very strange plant, actually a tree, that they call ngmoo. They carve holes in its trunk and fill them with water, and within a day have an interesting beverage that produces a mild stupor. The branches and leaves, they have also learned, when placed in standing water quite effectively intoxicate eels, forcing them to surface where they can be killed. Knowledge of the remarkable properties of this plant found its way north to New Caledonia. There the native inhabitants discovered that the leaves could be used to make an effective antidote to ciguatera poisoning, an observation that modern science has confirmed. The plant is Duboisia myoporoides, and like many members of the potato family it has a number of potent chemicals including nicotine, atropine, and scopolamine. There is no known medical antidote for tetrodotoxin, but in the laboratory it has been shown that, as in the case of ciguatera poisonings, atropine relieves certain symptoms.

Datura stramonium, like its relative from New Caledonia, contains atropine and scopolamine, and hence could be serving as an effective but unrecognized counteragent to the zombi poison.

The investigation had come full circle. Ironically, the plant I had originally suspected to be the source of the drug that allowed an individual to be buried alive turned out to be, if anything, a possible antidote, which, at the same time, was instrumental in actually creating and maintaining the zombi state. For if tetrodotoxin provided the physiological template upon which cultural beliefs and fears could go to work, datura promised to amplify those mental processes a thousand times. Alone, its intoxication has been characterized as an induced state of psychotic delirium, marked by disorientation, pronounced confusion, and complete amnesia. Administered to an individual who has already suffered the effects of the tetrodotoxin, who has already passed through the ground, the devastating psychological results are difficult to imagine. For it is in the course of that intoxication that the zombi is baptized with a new name, and led away to be socialized into a new existence.

Further evidence of the makeup of the zombi poison came two days later south of the capital near the town of Leogane. Several weeks previously we had established contact with a houngan named Domingue. His son, named Napoléon, was a well-known malfacteur, and he had a message for me at Beauvoir’s. My meeting with Napoléon was brief, but it yielded two poisons of note. The most toxic, by Napoléon’s account, was made from human remains alone. It consisted of a ground leg bone, forearm and skull, mixed with dried and pulverized bits of dried cadaver, and it was the first and only poison I encountered administered in the reputedly most traditional way. Having rubbed one’s hands with the protective lotion—again a mixture of lemons, ammonia, and clairin—the killer sprinkled the powder in the form of a cross on the ground, while naming the intended victim. The recipient need only walk over that cross to be seized with violent convulsions. If the powder was placed in the victim’s food, the action would be immediate and permanent.

The second preparation was a more familiar mixture of insects, reptiles, centipedes, and tarantulas. In place of the bouga toad, two locally recognized varieties of the tree frog were added. Napoléon also included the sea toad, the crapaud de mer. The onset of the poison was characterized by the feeling of ants crawling beneath the skin, precisely the way that Narcisse had described his first sensations. Besides evidence of yet another preparation based on the puffer fish, Napoléon gave further indication of the importance of correct dosage. He mentioned that the animal powder was most effective if ingested by the victim, and he cautioned that his two preparations should never be mixed. Together they would act too explosively; the victim would be too dead and would never rise again.

I left Leogane confirmed in my conclusion that tetrodotoxin was the pharmacological basis of the zombi poison, a conviction that was reinforced by subsequent collections at various localities along the coast of Haiti. Finally I felt I could let the issue of the poison rest. It was time to move on to other matters that had claimed my interest since returning to Haiti.

Herard Simon called early the next day and insisted on seeing Rachel and me immediately. We left that afternoon, picked him up in Gonaives, and drove directly to Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Arriving at the army caserne by dusk, we followed Herard past the sentry and into the private quarters of the commander. After sending the commander on an errand, Herard asked his orderly to bring us food and a bottle of rum. Then we waited. Past a broken shutter, the rain poured down, and inside a long row of cells I could just make out the prisoners clinging to the bars, trying to keep their feet out of the water.

Herard is not a man who likes questions. I tried three. I asked first about the astral zombi that had been brought by the mountain peasants.

“In that bottle was the soul of a human being,” Herard replied, “the control of which is an ominous power. It is a ghost, or like a dream; it wanders at the command of the one who possesses it. It was a zombi astral captured from the victim by the magic of the bokor.”

“What about the poison you gave me?”

“A poison kills. You put it in food. I gave you no poison.”

“But the powder?”

“Yes. Powder is powder, poison is poison. The powder is the support of the magic. Only the truly great work magic alone. Small people pretend, but watch and you’ll see the hand of powder. There are some, and I know them, who can stand in front of an army and throw a spell on anyone.”

“To steal the soul?”

“What else? If you want the flesh to work, you can’t fool with a little powder dust on the ground. You take a bamboo tube and blow it all over him and you rub it into the skin. Only then shall the zombi cadavre rise.”

With the realization that there were two kinds of zombis and two means of creating them, many of my loose ends came together. Clearly what LaBonté and Obin had offered was a powder that, embued with sorcery and triggered by a magical act on my part, would kill my enemy. That was what Mme. Jacques had been telling me—“the magic makes you the master.” It was, in effect, voodoo death, the Haitian equivalent of the aboriginal practice of pointing the bone. It would not have been particularly effective within the mindset of my society, but that wasn’t their problem, it was mine.

There was another possibility. If your spiritual force was strong, Marcel Pierre had told us, you could resist a spell, but the powder promised to get you anyway. Mme. Jacques mentioned powders that were rubbed into the skin or placed in wounds; she had talked of glass ground in the mortar, of the skin ripped by a thorn. These had to be the pharmacologically active powders that allowed the zombi to rise. It was what Narcisse had said. On the Sunday before his death, they took him before the basin and pricked his skin, and the water turned to blood! Herard was right. If you wanted a zombi of the flesh to rise, a little powder sprinkled on the ground would never do!

My third question was interrupted by the arrival of the president of the local secret society. At that point the army commander, who had returned while I had been questioning Herard, was reduced to serving us rum and food. Herard discussed the possibility of obtaining a zombi cadavre for medical study. It was not until the middle of the night that we finally agreed on a price. Herard arranged to meet again with the president and his people the next afternoon. As we drove out of town, I attempted to arrange a time to meet the following day.

“No. No,” Herard laughed, “we don’t return tomorrow. I just wanted to measure their force.”

“But how will they bear the insult?” I asked, recalling the somewhat ominous warning of LaBonté at Petite Rivière de Nippes. “Are not the societies everywhere?”

“Yes, they are powerful,” he agreed. “That’s why you had to come here with someone who is stronger. I, too, represent a secret society. Mine is a society of one!”

Then, as if to emphasize that there were limits to even his own authority, he warned me that around Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite anything could happen. The road forked and he pointed to the shadows.

“Be especially careful at the crossroads. Never leave your car after dark. They move by night.”

As we approached Gonaives, I felt compelled to ask a final question, the one that I myself would be asked so often. Why was he giving me all this information? He laughed, but did not respond until we reached his house. Then, just as he left the jeep, he looked back at me.

“Mon petit malfacteur, you are not a fool, but you still do not understand. You may gather your powders; in fact, I will give you all the powders you want. You will meet zombis, you may see zombis come from the earth, you will even think that you understand zombis. But you will never make a zombi, nor will you leave here with the magic.

“Someday when you stop asking all these questions, you will begin to see. Only then will you begin to know vodoun, and only then will you step into the path of the loa.”

For all his gruff manner, Herard had provided more information concerning the poison than anyone else; yet of all my contacts in Haiti, he had, expressed the most disdain for such powders, and the least interest in zombis. He was a deeply religious man, a theologian really. Sometimes when Herard said things I had no idea what he meant; at other moments his words seemed like a beacon. It was time I tried to understand the spirit world of his people.

10 The Serpent and the Rainbow

ON JULY 16, 1843, and then again on the same day in 1881, the Virgin Mary appeared on the top of a palm tree near the village of Ville Bonheur in the rugged mountains of central Haiti. She said the world was going to end. This was most convenient for the Roman Catholic church, for the palm tree grew not far from the base of a cliff where the La Tombe River dissolves into mist, a waterfall named Saut d’Eau that had been a sacred vodoun pilgrimage site for a good many years. The Catholic priests, then as always anxious to purge the nation of what they considered a pagan cult, took immediate advantage of their good fortune. A chapel and shrine were erected, the legitimacy of the apparition was verified by church authorities, and thenceforth the miraculous event was commemorated annually with a full day of religious celebrations. But a strange twist was soon added to the saga. With increasing frequency, the officiating priests found small plates of food placed alongside the votive candles at the Virgin’s shrine. Once they realized what was going on, their initial enthusiasm faded rapidly. Rather than their co-opting a traditional vodoun pilgrimage, quite the opposite had taken place. For the peasants, the apparition of the Virgin Mary was none other than Erzulie Freda, the goddess of love, and her presence was less a miracle than an expected blessing that only added to the reputation of the sacred waterfall.

The Virgin next appeared during the American occupation, and by then the clergy was prepared. A local priest dismissed the apparition as idle superstition and called upon a Marine captain stationed in the region to help suppress the worship. The Marine complied, ordering a Haitian sergeant to shoot into the blinding light. As he did so, the vision moved to another palm, and then another, until the exasperated priest ordered the trees cut down. The vision rose above the canopy, and as the last of the palms fell, it changed into a pigeon. For a moment the priest was satisfied, but just as he turned to leave word came that his house had burned down, destroying all his possessions. This calamity was only the beginning for him; within a week the priest lay dead, the victim of a paralytic stroke. The American was similarly punished, and the Haitian sergeant went insane and was found sometime later wandering alone in a forest near the village. From what the townspeople say the pigeon remained close to Ville Bonheur for several days and then flew to Saut d’Eau, where it disappeared into the iridescent mist.

The waterfall at Saut d’Eau carves a deep hidden basin from a limestone escarpment, and by the time I arrived shortly after midnight the entire vault was bathed in the soft glow of a thousand candles. Already in the depths where no moonlight could fall, huddled together, or darting in and out of the water, singing the vodoun songs or serving the many altars, were dozens and dozens of pilgrims. On all sides, people saturated with a lifetime of heat shivered and trembled, drawing in their hands against their naked skin. High above on the trail along which I had passed, other seekers had abandoned themselves to their goal and drifted along the horizon with the motion of night clouds. Overhead, beyond the crown of the towering mapou tree that hovered over the basin, the branches of heaven spread and the stars scattered as thick as blossoms in the northern spring.

Vodoun is not an animistic religion, Max Beauvoir had told me. The believer does not endow natural objects with souls; they serve the loa, which by definition are the multiple expressions of God. There is Agwe, the spiritual sovereign of the sea, and there is Ogoun, the spirit of fire and the metallurgical elements. But there is also Erzulie, the goddess of love; Guede, the spirit of the dead; Legba, the spirit of communication between all spheres. The vodounist, in fact, honors hundreds of loa because he so sincerely recognizes all life, all material objects, and even abstract processes as the sacred expressions of God. Though God is the supreme force at the apex of the pantheon, he is distant, and it is with the loa that the Haitian interacts on a daily basis.

The spirits live beneath the great water sharing their time between Haiti and the mythic homeland of Guinée. But they often choose to reside in places of great natural beauty. They rise from the bottom of the sea, inhabit the rich plains, and clamber down the rocky trails from the summits of the mountains. They dwell in the center of stones, the dampness of caves, the depth of sunken wells. The believer is drawn to these places as we are drawn to cathedrals. We do not worship the buildings; we go there to be in the presence of God. That is the spirit of the pilgrimage.

Having bathed in the falls, I made my way to the mapou, and there among the buttresses and serpentine roots found shelter from the cold, damp wind. The roar of the water dominated all other sounds, but before long it fell away, leaving a welcome cushion of silence, the hollow tone one imagines deaf people hear all the time.

There were two snakes, I was warned, one green and one black, that lived at the base of the tree. If so, they left me alone. From the edge of a fitful sleep, I sensed only the thick hide of the mapou on either side of my face, and beneath my hands the texture of root bark. I knew every structure within that tree, each vessel, each pore and trichome, the placement of each stamen, and the pathways of every drop of green blood. In botanical studies I had watched it dissected into a thousand or more parts until each one lay isolated, a separate hypothetical event, simple enough to be explained according to the rules of my training. This was the legacy of my science. Each of us chipping away at the world, doing our bit. But what was I to make of Loco, the spirit of vegetation, the one that gives the healing power to leaves? This was his home, and it seemed to me strangely alive and different suddenly, not a series of components but a single living entity, animated by faith.

I caught a fingernail in the bark, and it sent chills up my back. I sat up abruptly. At my feet and all around the tree the pilgrims curled up like sheepdogs, their bones stiff and soaked in darkness. Around me in the crotch of other roots, I saw the faint glimmers of other penitents placing candles at altars that weren’t there when I lay down. Hands reached forward, pressing soft wax into a fissure in the smooth bark. The flames flickered and spat smoke and kept going out. Below us all, the sheer power of the falling water.

I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn’t even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn’t have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologists different peoples develop it in different ways, and the distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something our ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The vodoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what’s more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coincidence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the vodounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What’s more, for most of us our basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition. Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.

It was a lovely morning. The summit of the waterfall caught the first light, and as the earth moved the tips of the forest trees at the base of the ravine turned to copper. Birds spun in waves across the valley; scents too, from stoked fires, even through the mist and growing sounds, herbs and sweet woods burning in the limpid light of dawn. On all sides, like flowers, the pilgrims broke from sleep to take small drops of the sun. From the shadows I too emerged, only into a peculiar and wonderful anonymity that I had not known in Haiti up to now. In part it was my own exhaustion, but mostly it was the power of the place and the sheer exuberance of the people; for once a solitary and bedraggled blanc was of little interest. Asking no questions, having no past, I simply wandered, a silent witness to a sacred event unlike anything I had ever known.

All morning the trail descending to the falls quivered with the mirage of pilgrims coming and going on foot. There was no order or routine to their arrival, but it was a constant stream—as many as fifteen thousand over the course of the three-day celebration—and the basin nestled into the side of the mountain swelled like a festive carnival tent to absorb everyone. It was to be a morning of joy; one saw it on the faces of the elfin children, the young city dandies leaping over the rocks like cats, the ragged peasants laughing derisively at a fat, preposterous government official. But for the sincere it was also a moment of purification and healing, one chance each year to partake of the power of the water, to bathe and drink, and to bottle a small sample of the cold, thin blood of the divine. Already on the long, stony trail that had brought them from Ville Bonheur they had paused at least once at the tree of Legba, the guardian of the crossroads, to light a candle to invoke his support. Now before entering the water, they gathered all around the periphery of the basin where the herbalists had set up their dusty stations, displaying sooty boxes, hunks of root, loose bags of mombin leaves, and tubs of water and herbs. Houngan and mambo spoke of magic done with dew, and tied brightly colored strings to barren young women, or around the plump bellies of matrons who, in time, would dangle the strings from wax stuck to the surface of the mapou, consecrated for the blessings of the gods. In the base of one of the buttresses, a young boy hung his head as he waited to be anointed by the mambo. To one side, a houngan massaged the breast of an old woman. Scattered among the long rows of holy men and women were the hawkers pitching food for the sacrifices, tin medallions, icons, and candles. A young operator content with his gods pulled out a game-board and dice and set up shop.

One needed only to touch the water to feel its grace, and for some it was enough to dip in the shallow silvery pools, leaving their offerings of corn and rice and cassava in small piles. But most went directly to the cascades, women and men, old and young, baring their breasts and scrambling up the wet slippery bedrock that rose in a series of steps toward the base of the highest falls. At the lip of the escarpment the river forked twice, sending not one but three waterfalls plunging over a hundred feet. What was not lost in mist struck the rocks with tremendous force, dividing again into many smaller shoots, and each one of them in turn became a sanctuary for the pilgrims. The women removed their soiled clothes, casting them to the water, and stood, arms outstretched, beseeching the spirits. Their prayers were lost to the thunderous roar of the falls, the piercing shouts, and the screams of flocks of children. Everything stood in flux. No edge and no separation—the sounds and sights, the passions, the lush soaring vegetation, primeval and rare. Young men stood directly beneath the head of the falls; the force tore off the rest of their clothes and battered their numb bodies against the rocks, but still their hands clung.

“Ayida Wedo!” someone called, his shout a whisper. It was true. Mist fell over the basin, and the water splintered the sunlight, leaving a rainbow arched across the entire face of the waterfall. It was the goddess of many colors, delicate and ephemeral, come to rejoice with her mate. Ayida Wedo the Rainbow and Damballah the Serpent, the father of the falling waters and the reservoir of all spiritual wisdom. Just to bathe in the cold, thin waters was to open oneself to Damballah, and already at the base of the waterfall, in the shadow of the rainbow, there were as many as a hundred pilgrims, mounted by the spirit, slithering across the wet rocks.

In the beginning, it is said, there was only the Great Serpent, whose seven thousand coils lay beneath the earth, holding it in place that it might not fall into the abysmal sea. In time, the Serpent began to move, unleashing its undulating flesh, which rose slowly into a great spiral that enveloped the Universe. In the heavens, it released stars and all the celestial bodies; on earth, it brought forth Creation, winding its way through the molten slopes to carve rivers, which like veins became the channels through which flowed the essence of all life. In the searing heat it forged metals, and rising again into the sky it cast lightning bolts to the earth that gave birth to the sacred stones. Then it lay along the path of the sun and partook of its nature.

Within its layered skin, the Serpent retained the spring of eternal life, and from the zenith it let go the waters that filled the rivers upon which the people would nurse. As the water struck the earth, the Rainbow arose, and the Serpent took her as his wife. Their love entwined them in a cosmic helix that arched across the heavens. In time their fusion gave birth to the spirit that animates blood. Women learned to filter this divine substance through their breasts to produce milk, just as men passed it through their testes to create semen. The Serpent and the Rainbow instructed women to remember these blessings once each month, and they taught men to damn the flow so that the belly might swell and bring forth new life. Then, as a final gift, they taught the people to partake of the blood as a sacrament, that they might become the spirit and embrace the wisdom of the Serpent.

For the nonbeliever, there is something profoundly disturbing about spirit possession. Its power is raw, immediate, and undeniably real, devastating in a way to those of us who do not know our gods. To witness sane and in every regard respectable individuals experiencing direct rapport with the divine fills one with either fear, which finds its natural outlet in disbelief, or deep envy. The psychologists who have attempted to understand possession from a scientific perspective have tended to fall into the former category, and perhaps because of this they have come up with some bewildering conclusions, derived in part from quite unwarranted assumptions. For one, because the mystical frame of reference of the vodounist involves issues that cannot be approached by their calculus—the existence or nonexistence of spirits, for example—the actual beliefs of the individual experiencing possession are dismissed as externalities. To the believer, the dissociation of personality that characterizes possession is the hand of divine grace; to the psychologist it is but a symptom of an “overwhelming psychic disruption.” One prominent Haitian physician, acknowledging that possession occurs under strict parameters of ritual, nevertheless concluded that it was the result of “widespread pathology in the countryside which far from being the result of individual or social experience was related to the genetic character of the Haitian people,” a racial psychosis, as he put it elsewhere, of a people “living on nerves.” Even individuals otherwise sympathetic to vodoun have made extraordinary statements. Dr. Jean Price-Mars, one of the early intellectual champions of the religion, considered possession a behavior of “psychically disequilibrated persons with a mytho-maniacal constitution”; mythomaniacal being defined as “a conscious pathological tendency towards lying and the creation of imaginary fables.”

These wordy explanations ring most hollow when they are applied to certain irrefutable physical attributes of the possessed. While recognizing, for example, the ability of the believer to place with impunity his or her hands into boiling water, another respected Haitian medical authority noted that “primitives submit coldly to surgical operations without anesthesia that would plunge us into the most terrifying shock.” Rather tentatively he added that in asylums patients had been known to burn themselves and not notice even as the flesh fell away. What this well-meaning physician failed to note, among other things, was the perennial observation that the flesh of the possessed is not harmed.

What is potentially destructive in these psychological interpretations is their inherent assumption that possession is abnormal behavior, a premise that anthropologists, to their credit, have irrefutably debunked. One ethnological survey of some 488 societies around the world identified possession of some form in 360, and possession marked by trance was present in over half the total sample (including, incidentally, our own). From the Delphic oracles of ancient Greece to the shaman of northern Eurasia, possession by a spirit has been accepted as a normal phenomenon that occurs when and where appropriate, and usually within the context of religious worship. Yet even the conclusions of the anthropologists amount to observations, not explanations. They have accurately characterized the phenomenon as involving some kind of separation, transformation, and reintegration of diverse aspects of the human psyche. And, to be sure, they have been correct in noting that to some extent spirit possession is a culturally learned and reinforced response that has a therapeutic value as a spiritual catharsis.

Yet the central and disturbing questions remain. Why is it, for example, that the one possessed by the spirit in vodoun experiences total amnesia, yet still manifests the predictable and often complex behavior of the particular loa? For in Haiti, there is seldom any disagreement over the identities of the spirits. Legba is a weak old man, hobbling painfully and leaning on his crutch. Erzulie Freda is a queen, hopelessly demanding and vain. Ogoun has the warrior’s passion for fire and steel, usually brandishes a machete, and often handles glowing embers. And why is it that when Ogoun does pass the flames, the one possessed is not harmed? It was upon these unanswered questions that my logic wavered. There may, in fact, be a natural explanation for these extraordinary abilities, but if so it lies in regions of consciousness and mind/body interactions that Western psychiatry and medicine have scarcely begun to fathom. In the absence of a scientific explanation, and in the face of our own certain ignorance, it seems foolish to disregard the opinions of those who know possession best.

For most of the day, I sat near the base of the mapou. After weeks of constant travel and intermittent tension, it was good for once to remain still and simply watch, for I knew that things were about to change. Before long I was due to return to New York to report to Kline, and I didn’t know when, if ever, I would come back to Haiti. Evidently Kline was satisfied with the increased samples and now was most anxious to begin further laboratory investigations. From his perspective the initial phase of the project was complete: a pharmacologically active substance had been identified, which he could promote as the material basis of the zombi phenomenon. All that remained to accomplish as far as he was concerned was the documentation and medical study of a victim as it came out of the ground.

As yet another piece of evidence, the possibility of observing a legitimate graveyard ceremony intrigued me as much as anyone, and already I had begun to make discreet inquiries on Kline’s behalf. But from the start it struck me as something of a digression. The chances of success were slim, the risks were great, and moreover, even if the obvious ethical and practical difficulties could be surmounted, it would bring us no closer to what I saw as the core of the mystery. The evidence surrounding the case of Clairvius Narcisse was more than sufficient to crack the mirror of disbelief. Now for the first time the most important questions could be considered, and none of these could be answered by running all over Haiti looking for other zombis. We had the formula of the powder, and with the information provided by Herard Simon had been able to clear up a critical problem concerning the administration of the drug. From the disparate facts garnered from various informants, there was little doubt that Narcisse had suffered a form of voodoo death. But I still had not penetrated the belief system to know what the magic was, or what it had meant to Clairvius Narcisse.

The frontier of death. In Lehman’s first words to me he had identified the critical issue. A zombi sits on the cusp of death, and for all peoples death is the first teacher, the first pain, the edge beyond which life as we know it ends and wonder begins. Death’s essence is the severance from the mortal body of some elusive life-giving principle, and how a culture comes to understand or at least tolerate this inexorable separation to a great extent defines its mystical worldview. If zombis exist, the beliefs that mediate the phenomenon must be rooted in the very heart of the Haitian being. And to try to reach those places, to isolate the germ of the Haitian people, there was no better means than to spend a night and a day at Saut d’Eau filling my eyes with wonder, and listening to the words of the houngan.

For the Haitian, the ease with which the individual walks in and out of his spirit world is but a consequence of the remarkable dialogue that exists between man and the loa. The spirits are powerful and if offended can do great harm, but they are also predictable and if propitiated will gratefully provide all the benefits of health, fertility, and prosperity. But just as man must honor the spirits, so the loa are dependent on man, for the human body is their receptacle. Usually they arrive during a religious ceremony, ascending up the axis of the poteau mitan, called forth by the rhythm of the drums or the vibration of a bell. Once mounted, the person loses all consciousness and sense of self; he or she becomes the spirit, taking on its persona and powers. That, of course, is why the body of the possessed cannot be harmed.

But the human form is by no means just an empty vessel for the gods. Rather it is the critical and single locus where a number of sacred forces may converge, and within the overall vodoun quest for unity it is the fulcrum upon which harmony and balance may be finally achieved. The players in this drama are the basic components of man: the z’étoile, the gros bon ange, the ti bon ange, the n’âme, and the corps cadavre. The latter is the body itself, the flesh and the blood. The n’âme is the spirit of the flesh that allows each cell of the body to function. It is the residual presence of the n’âme, for example, that gives form to the corpse long after the clinical death of the body. The n’âme is a gift from God, which upon the death of the corps cadavre begins to pass slowly into the organisms of the soil; the gradual decomposition of the corpse is the result of this slow transferral of energy, a process that takes eighteen months to complete. Because of this, no coffin may be disturbed until it has been in the ground for that period of time.

The z’étoile is the one spiritual component that resides not in the body but in the sky. It is the individual’s star of destiny, and is viewed as a calabash that carries one’s hope and all the many ordered events for the next life of the soul, a blueprint that will be a function of the course of the previous lifetime. If the shooting star is bright, so shall be the future of the individual.

The two aspects of the vodoun soul, the ti bon ange and the gros bon ange, are best explained by a metaphor commonly used by the Haitians themselves. Sometimes when one stands in the late afternoon light the body casts a double shadow, a dark core and then a lighter penumbra, faint like the halo that sometimes surrounds the full moon. This ephemeral fringe is the ti bon ange—the “little good angel”—while the image at the center is the gros bon ange, the “big good angel.” The latter is the life force that all sentient beings share; it enters the individual at conception and functions only to keep the body alive. At clinical death, it returns immediately to God and once again becomes part of the great reservoir of energy that supports all life. But if the gros bon ange is undifferentiated energy, the ti bon ange is that part of the soul directly associated with the individual. As the gros bon ange provides each person with the power to act, it is the ti bon ange that molds the individual sentiments within each act. It is one’s aura, and the source of all personality, character, and willpower.

As the essence of one’s individuality, the ti bon ange is the logical target of sorcery, a danger that is compounded by the ease and frequency with which it dissociates from the body. It is the ti bon ange, for example, that travels during sleep to experience dreams. Similarly, the brief sensation of emptiness that immediately follows a sudden scare is due to its temporary flight. And predictably it is the ti bon ange that is displaced during possession when the believer takes on the persona of the loa.

At the same time, because it is the ti bon ange that experiences life, it represents a precious accumulation of knowledge that must not be squandered or lost. If and only if it is protected from sorcery and permitted to complete its proper cycle, the ti bon ange may be salvaged upon the death of the individual and its legacy preserved. Only in this way may the wisdom of past lives be marshaled to serve the pressing needs of the living. A great deal of ritual effort, therefore, must be expended to secure its safe and effortless metamorphosis. At initiation, for example, the ti bon ange may be extracted from the body and housed in a canari, a clay jar that is placed in the inner sanctum of the hounfour. In this way the ti bon ange may continue to animate the living while remaining directly within the protective custody of the houngan. Yet even here there are no guarantees. Though it is difficult to kill the one whose ti bon ange has been placed in a canari, if the magic used against the individual is strong enough, the resulting misery may be so great that he will ask the houngan to release the soul that he might end his ordeal. And even if the individual does survive life, he is still at risk in death, for with the demise of the corps cadavre the houngan must break the canari so that the ti bon ange may return to hover about the body for seven days. Then, since the vodounist does not believe in the physical resurrection of the body, the soul must be definitively separated from the flesh, and this takes place during the Dessounin, which is the major death ritual. Throughout this period the ti bon ange is extremely vulnerable, and it is not until it is liberated from the flesh to descend below the dark abysmal waters that it is relatively safe.

The ti bon ange remains below in the world of Les Invisibles for one day and one year and then, in one of the most important of vodoun ceremonies—the Wété Mo Nan Dlo—it is reclaimed by the living and given new form. In place of the body that has decayed, the soul, now regarded as an “esprit,” is deposited in another clay jar called a govi. To the Haitian this reclamation of the dead is not an isolated sentimental act; on the contrary, it is considered as fundamental and inescapable as birth itself. One emerges from the womb an animal, the spiritual birth at initiation makes one human, but it is this final reemergence that marks one’s birth as divine essence. The spirits in the govi are fed and clothed and then released to the forest to dwell in trees and grottos, where they wait to be reborn. After the last of sixteen incarnations, the esprit goes to Damballah Wedo, where it becomes undifferentiated as part of the Djo, the cosmic breath that envelops the universe.

This lengthy passage of the ti bon ange corresponds to the metamorphosis of the individual human into pure spiritual energy. Hence, with the successive passing of generations, the individual identified with the esprit in the govi is transformed from the ancestor of a particular lineage into the generalized ancestor of all mankind. Yet even this pure spiritual energy must be made to serve, and for it to function it must become manifest. Thus from the ancestral pool there emerge archetypes, and these are the loa. It is, of course, possession, the return of the spirits to the body of man, that completes the sacred cycle: from man to ancestor, ancestor to cosmic principle, principle to personage, and personage returning to displace the identity of man. Hence, while the vodounist serves his gods, he also gives birth to them, and this is something that is never forgotten; as much as the spirit is the source of the flesh, so the flesh gives rise to the spirit. In place of opposition between the two, there is mutual dependence. Thus the regular arrival of the divine is not considered miraculous, but rather inevitable.

Within this cosmic exchange, perhaps man’s most critical contribution is the preservation of his own equilibrium, for without it the receptacle of the gods is placed in danger. The ideal form of man, therefore, is one of coherence, wherein all the sacred components of the individual find their proper place. The maintenance or restoration of this balance is the duty of the houngan, and it accounts for his unique role as healer. In our secular society, life and death are defined in strictly clinical terms by physicians, with the fate of the spirit being relegated to the domain of religious specialists who, significantly, have nothing to say about the physical well-being of the living. In vodoun society, the physician is also the priest, for the condition of the spirit is as important as—and in fact, determines—the physical state of the body. Good or bad health results not from the presence or absence of pathogens but from the proper or improper balance of the individual. Sickness is disruption, imbalance, and the manifestation of malevolent forces in the flesh. Health is a state of harmony, and for the vodounist it is something holy, like a perfect service for the gods.

As a result, vodoun medicine acts on two quite different levels. There is an entire range of relatively minor ailments that are treated symptomatically much as we would, only with medicinal plants and folk preparations, many of which are pharmacologically active. A basic knowledge of the leaves in such profane treatments is part of the traditional education of virtually every rural Haitian, and though there are respected specialists known as dokte feuilles— leaf doctors—their expertise is considered mundane. Much more serious are the troubles that arise when the harmony of the spiritual components is broken. Here it is the source of the disorder, not its particular manifestation, that must be treated, and that responsibility falls strictly within the domain of the houngan. Since disharmony will affect all aspects of the individual’s life, problems brought to the houngan include both psychological and physical ailments, as well as other troubles such as chronic bad luck, marital difficulties, or financial problems. Each case is treated as unique. As a form of medicine, it does not ignore the existence of pathogens, it simply comments that the pathogens are present in the environment at all times, and it asks why certain individuals succumb when they do.

To restore the patient’s health may involve a number of techniques. At the material level these include herbal baths and massage, physical isolation of the patient in the hounfour, administration of medicinal plant potions, and perhaps most importantly, a sacrifice, that the patient may return to the earth a gift of life’s vital energy. But it is intervention on the spiritual plane that ultimately determines the patient’s fate, and for this the houngan is but a servant of the loa. The spirit is called into the head of either the houngan or an assistant, and like an oracle the physical body of man dispenses the knowledge of the gods.

Inevitably, there are times when the forces arrayed against the individual are simply too powerful. If disharmony at the core of man results in sickness, the irrevocable separation of the spiritual components will bring death. But death, like life, stretches far beyond the temporal limits of the body. Life begins not at physical conception but at an earlier moment when God first decides that a person should exist. Death is not defined just by the passing of the flesh, but as the moment when all the spiritual components find their proper destination. Thus the vodoun adept, believing in the immortality of the spirit, fears death not for its finality but because it is a critical and dangerous passage during which the five vital aspects of man dissociate, leaving the ti bon ange, in particular, vulnerable to capture by the sorcerer.

But the death of the body brings other equally pressing concerns, for there are two possible causes of death, and the implications are profoundly different. Rarely, as in the case of an old man passing away in his sleep, a death may be considered natural, a call from God (mort bon Dieu) and beyond the influence of man. Unnatural deaths include all those we might label as “before one’s time,” and more often than not these result from the intervention of sorcery. And by vodoun definition, anyone who suffers an unnatural magical death may be raised as a zombi. At times it may be in the interest of the bokor to cause the unnatural death, and there are countless ways of doing so. But causing the unnatural death does not create a zombi; it just makes the victim immediately susceptible. Once this is understood, it becomes apparent that our entire investigation was based on an unwarranted assumption.

Since we knew that the zombi powders could pharmacologically induce a state of apparent death, we had all assumed that the bokors recognized an explicit cause-effect relationship between the powder and the resurrection from the grave. Clearly, I now realized, the vodounist did not necessarily consider it such a linear process. For them the creation of a zombi involved two only indirectly related events: the unnatural death and the graveyard ceremony. According to their beliefs, the powders just kill, and as in the case of any unnatural death the victim of the powder may be raised as a zombi. It is not the antidote or a powder that creates a zombi; it is the magical force of the bokor. That was why Herard Simon could rest assured that I would never understand zombis. I did not know the magic, and he himself did not know, nor did he believe that anyone would share those mysteries with me.

For the vodounist, then, zombis are created by sorcery, and it is the belief in the magic that makes the relatives of the dead concerned. For good reasons, they go to great efforts to ensure that the dead are truly dead, or at least protected from such a horrible fate. This is why the body may be killed again, with a knife through the heart or by decapitation. And this explains why seeds may be placed in the coffin so that whoever appears to take the body will be obliged to count them, a task that will take him perilously into the dawn.

To create a zombi, the bokor must capture the ti bon ange of the intended victim, a magical act that may be accomplished in a variety of ways. A particularly powerful bokor, for example, may through his spells gain control of the ti bon ange of a sailor who dies at sea or of a Haitian who is killed in a foreign land. Alternatively, the bokor may capture the ti bon ange of the living and hence indirectly cause the unnatural death: the individual, left without intelligence or will, slowly perishes. One way of thus capturing the ti bon ange is to spread poisons in the form of a cross on the threshold of the victim’s doorway. The magical skill of the bokor guarantees that only the victim will suffer. This, of course, was the service that LaBonté and Obin had offered me at Petite Rivière de Nippes. Yet a third means of gaining control of the ti bon ange is to capture it immediately following the death of the corps cadavre during the seven days that it hovers around the corpse. Hence the bokor may or may not be responsible for the unnatural death of the victim, and the ti bon ange may be captured by magic before or after the death of the corps cadavre.

Whatever the circumstances, the capture of the ti bon ange effects a split in the spiritual components of the victim and creates not one but two complementary kinds of zombis. That is what Herard had shown me. The spirit zombi, or the zombi of the ti bon ange alone, is carefully stored in a jar and may later be magically transmuted into insects, animals, or humans in order to accomplish the particular work of the bokor. The remaining spiritual components of man, the n’âme, the gros bon ange, and the z’étoile, together form the zombi cadavre, the zombi of the flesh.

Now the resurrection of the zombi cadavre in the graveyard requires a particularly sophisticated knowledge of magic. Above all, the bokor must prevent the transformations of the various spiritual components that would normally occur at the death of the body. First the ti bon ange—which may float above the body like a phosphorescent shadow—must be captured and prevented from reentering the victim. One way to assure this is to beat the victim violently, as occurred with Narcisse. Secondly, the gros bon ange must be prevented from returning to its source. Thirdly, the n’âme must be retained to keep the flesh from decaying. The zombi cadavre with its gros bon ange and n’âme can function; however, separated from the ti bon ange, the body is but an empty vessel, subject to the direction of the bokor or whoever maintains control of the zombi ti bon ange, Herard’s zombi astral. It is the notion of alien, malevolent forces thus taking control of the individual that is so terrifying to the vodounist. In Haiti, the fear is not of being harmed by zombis; it is fear of becoming one. The zombi cadavre, then, is a body without a complete soul, matter without morality.

In the end, the solution to this aspect of the zombi mystery had a certain elegance. For the vodounist the creation of a zombi is essentially a magical process. However, the bokor in creating a zombi cadavre may cause the prerequisite unnatural death not by capturing the ti bon ange of the living but by means of a slow-acting poison that is applied directly to the intended victim. Rubbed into a wound or inhaled, the poison kills the corps cadavre slowly, efficiently, and discreetly. That poison contains tetrodotoxin, which acts to lower dramatically the metabolic rate of the victim almost to the point of clinical death. Pronounced dead by attending physicians, and considered materially dead by family members and even by the bokor himself, the victim is in fact buried alive. Undoubtedly in many instances the victim does die either from the poison itself or by suffocation in the coffin. The widespread belief in the reality of zombis in Haiti, however, is based on those cases in which the victim receives the correct dose of the poison, wakes up in the coffin, and is taken from the grave by the bokor. The victim, affected by the drug, traumatized by the set and setting of the total experience, is bound and led before a cross to be baptized with a new name. After the baptism, or sometimes the next day, he or she is made to eat a paste containing a strong dose of a potent psychoactive drug, the zombi’s cucumber, which brings on a state of disorientation and amnesia. During the course of that intoxication, the zombi is taken away into the night.

There remained one haunting question. If the formula of the poison and the sorcerer’s spell explained how a zombi succumbed, it said nothing about why he was chosen. Many, including those who had formulated Haiti’s national laws, had concluded that zombification was a random criminal activity, yet another symptom of a conspiracy of fear that was presumed to be the common plight of the peasant. But the longer I remained in Haiti, and the more I learned of the vodoun society, the more impressed I was by its internal cohesion. Sorcery was certainly a potent force to be dealt with, but to a great extent it had been institutionalized as a critical component of the worldview. To ask why there is sorcery in Haiti is to ask why there is evil in the world, and the answer, if there is one, is the same as that provided by all the great religions: evil is the mirror of good, the necessary complement that completes the whole of creation. The Haitians as much as any people are conscious of this sacred balance.

So the suggestion that zombification was a haphazard phenomenon ran in the face of my data. In obtaining the various preparations, I had come into direct contact with a number of secret societies, and in certain instances it had been their leaders who controlled the powder. There was strong circumstantial evidence that both Narcisse and Ti Femme had been exceedingly unpopular in their respective communities, and I had it from a number of sources that zombification was a process that included some kind of judgment before a tribunal. Max Beauvoir had gone so far as to suggest that the answer to the mystery lay within the councils of the secret societies. But what did this mean? In my search for the poison, instinct unfettered by bias had served me well, but as I probed deeper my intuitions were increasingly clouded by my ignorance. The secret societies—who were these groups, what was the nature of their organization, and how did they relate to the other national authorities? It was with the desire to explore these questions, as much as on account of Kline’s summons, that I returned to America. I would have to go back in time to the beginning and the harsh days of the French colony.

11 Tell My Horse

IT HAPPENED on a plantation near Limbé in the year 1740. At first even the man himself did not notice the iron rollers of the cane press flush crimson with his own blood. By the time the child’s scream alerted the driver to slice the leather traces connecting the horse to the shaft of the mill, the arm was crushed to the shoulder, and the blood mixed freely with the sweet sap of the cane. Pain was not new to the slave, and what he felt now was numbed by the rage of an intolerable impotence. His free hand flailed at the press, and with all the force of his sinuous body he pulled back, reversing the rollers, withdrawing fragments of his mangled arm. Delirium took him, leading him back on a hallucinatory passage to the land of his birth, to the Kingdoms of Fula and Mandingo, to the great cities of Guinea, the fortresses and vast markets that drew traders from an entire continent and beyond, the temples that made a mockery of the paltry buildings in which the French worshipped their feeble god. He never noticed the rope tourniquet placed around his shoulder to seal the flow of blood, nor did he hear the call for the machete that would complete the crude work of the press. He felt only the beginnings of the sound, of a single syllable rising from the base of his bloodstained legs, recoiling through the hollow of his gut until what left his lips was no longer his. It was the wrathful call of crystallized hatred, a cry of vengeance, not for himself, but for an entire people stolen from Africa and dragged in chains to the Americas to work land stolen from the Indians.

François Macandal should have died, but the Mandingue slave was no ordinary man. Even before the accident he was a leader among the slaves of the northern district around Limbé. By day, they had watched him endure the cruelties of the overseers with indifference, his bloodshot eyes casting scorn at the whips of knotted cord, or the stretched and dried penis of a bull. By night he had calmed the people with his eloquence, spinning tales of Guinée that had emboldened even the most dispirited of men. When he spoke people considered it an honor to sit by his side, and as he slept the women vied for the chance to share his bed, for his dreams were revelations that allowed him and those by him to see into the future. But it was the fearless way Macandal endured the accident in the mill that confirmed what the people had always suspected. Only the whites could fail to note that Macandal was immortal, an envoy of the gods who would never be vanquished.

The accident freed Macandal to wander. No longer fit to work in the fields, he was made a herder and sent out each daybreak to drive the cattle into their mountain pastures. No one knew what he did during the long hours away from the plantation. Some said he discovered the magic in plants, foraging for leaves that mimicked the herbs he had known in Africa. Others said he sought out the old masters who dwelled in caves, whose footsteps alone caused the earth to tremble. Only one thing was certain. Macandal in his wanderings was not alone, for the mountains around Limbé were one of the refuges of the thousands of Africans who had fled the plantations, runaway slaves with a price on their heads and known to the French as Maroons.

Bloated by wealth unlike anything seen since the early days of the conquest, the colonial planters of Saint Domingue made an institution of cruelty. Field hands caught eating cane were forced to wear tin muzzles while they worked. Runaways had their hamstrings sliced. Brandings, indiscriminate floggings, rape, and killings were a matter of course, and for the slightest infraction a man was hung from a nail driven through his ear. Slaves like cane were grist for the mill, and the death toll in some years rose as high as eighteen thousand. The documented excesses of certain owners almost defy belief. One slave was kept in chains for twenty-five years. A notorious planter was known always to carry a hammer and nails just to be prepared to hang from the trees the severed ears of those he punished. Other common tortures included spraying the flesh with boiling cane syrup, sewing the lips together with brass wire, castration and sexual mutilation of both men and women, live burial, binding men—their skin glazed with molasses—across the paths of ants, enclosing people in barrels with inward protruding nails, and stuffing the anus with gunpowder which was then ignited, a practice common enough to give rise to the colloquial expression “blasting a black’s ass.” So systemic was the abuse of the slaves that it supported a profession of executioners whose fees were regulated by law. The charge to burn a man alive, for example, was set at sixty French pounds. A hanging was only thirty, and for a mere five pounds you could have a slave branded and his ears cut off.

Such savagery was the rule, not the exception, and the fact that first the Indians and then thousands of indentured whites—petty thieves, convicts, or simply urban poor kidnapped in the port cities of Europe—had toiled in servitude before them did little to still the rage of the Africans. Forced labor was the foundation of an economic system that knew no color boundaries; like an open sore the plantations grew upon the Caribbean, and when the Indians died, and the supply of white trash failed to meet demand, the merchants tapped deeper into Africa, drawing away men and women not because they were black, but because they were cheap, limitless in number, and better. European class societies whose elite thought nothing of hanging an English child for petty theft, or packing indentured workers, white or black, like herring into the festering holds of ships, cared less about the origins of their laborers than the production of their labor. Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. In the first days of colonialism, when the merchants sailed away from the insular world of Europe, the color of the worker’s skin meant no more to them than it did to the kings of Africa, rulers who lorded over thousands of their own slaves, and who for a suitable profit were more than willing to pass them along. Of course, all of this mattered little to the men and women unloaded into bondage in Saint Domingue. For them the enemy had a face, and there was no doubt as to its color.

Confronted by unrelenting intimidation and torture, the options of the slaves were few. Those who chose to submit and endure did what was necessary to ease their plight: self-inflicted wounds allowed a respite from the brutal labor in the fields, women gave themselves to the overseers, or spared their unborn children by practicing abortion. Others sought immediate relief in suicide. But those who could not be broken and whose desire for freedom drove them to accept desperate measures fled the plantations under the cover of night. Some remained close by, hiding out by day and dependent on the collusion of their families and friends that remained behind. Others, especially the skilled workers fluent in Creole, slipped into anonymity in the cities, passing themselves off as freedmen and seeking work among the faceless crowds in the markets or on the docks. Still others made for the Spanish frontier of Santo Domingo, overland across the savannas and mountains and through the dense forests that still blanketed the island. Like stray cattle, these runaways were but a nuisance to the planters, readily dealt with by professional bounty hunters and their dogs. If recaptured on the fringe of the plantation, they were simply returned to be flogged and publicly humiliated, made to kneel outside the white man’s church to beg forgiveness for “insubordination to the situation in which God had placed him.” Should the runaway be unfortunate enough to be discovered some distance away, or should he resist capture, he was summarily killed—shot and ravaged by the hounds—once his identifying brand had been sliced away from his skin.

But there was another type of Maroon, men like Macandal who were not content to hover in the shadows like animals, or waste away in the limestone sinkholes and caves that dotted the land. These were Africans who would take responsibility for their fate, men who sought not just to survive but to fight and to seek revenge for the weight of injustice that had tormented their people. When these men and women left the plantations, taking with them anything of value they had managed to pilfer—a mule, knife, machete, field tools, clothing—they joined the organized bands in remote sanctuaries deep in the hinterland. There they lived in armed camps, sealed off by palisades surrounded by wide ditches, fortified at the bottom by pointed stakes. They cleared gardens, and to a great extent were self-sufficient, supplementing what they grew with periodic raids on the plantations. If solitary runaways were a mere irritation to the French, these independent Maroon retreats were no less than training grounds for guerrilla fighters that threatened the order and stability of the entire colony.

The French regime responded by waging an incessant campaign of extermination. Specialized military forces known as marcehaussée were maintained and sent on frequent and costly forays into the mountains. Some of these expeditions were moderately successful, returning with captives who were publicly broken on the wheel. Others never came back at all. And not one was able to penetrate or destroy the principal strongholds. For the French could not be everywhere, and the Maroons were—in the mountains rising behind the plantations of the northern plain at Cap Francis, the Cul-de-Sac near Port-au-Prince or the rolling valleys near Cayes in the south. As a result, by the mid-eighteenth century entire regions were effectively sealed off to whites. One rebellion that covered a vast mountain block in the south lasted a hundred years, until the French finally abandoned the zone altogether. Further north a Maroon community in the Bahoruco Mountains thrived for eighty-five years, until the French proposed a truce under the terms of which the Maroons would be permitted to form an independent clan. When the leader of that particular band of rebels arrived to negotiate, it was discovered that he had been a Maroon for over forty-five years.

As the French military expeditions collapsed in the mountains, the colonial administration did what it could to destroy the clandestine network that maintained the flow of goods and information between the plantations and the Maroons. Fear of the rebels was behind the constant legislation restricting the movement and normal interaction between the slaves. Blacks were prohibited from going out at night, visiting neighboring plantations, using boats, or even talking among themselves without the master’s permission. Night searches were frequent, and anyone caught with weapons or aiding runaways was brutally and publicly punished. But at a time when slaves outnumbered whites a hundred to one on the plantations, there was really very little the French could do. For even if some of the slaves came to fear the wrath and disruption of the Maroons as much as they did the whip of the planters, there could be no doubt that the rebel bands fought for freedom, and as a result with each successive generation their legend grew. With increasing impunity, the guerrillas came out of the hills, raiding stores, pillaging plantations, and all the while spreading along with terror the idea of liberty. By 1770, according to a contemporary report, the number of Maroons had increased to such proportions that “security became nonexistent” and it was unwise to wander alone in the hills.

Just who and how many chose to follow this desperate path is uncertain, but colonial records provide some clues. Between the years 1764 and 1793, for example, newspaper advertisements alone indicate some forty-eight thousand cases of Maroonage. How many of these ended up in the Maroon enclaves is not known, but the figure does provide a sense of the scale of the problem that faced the French. Significantly, a large percentage of those who did flee had not lived in the colony more than a year, and many escaped virtually off the docks. One colonial document covering a single port for a fifteen-day period in January of 1786 lists 43 new slaves escaped or recaptured. In 1788, out of 10,573 slaves disembarked over a ten-month period at Cap Francis, more than 2,000 got away. Critically, while the Creole Maroon could slip inconspicuously into the bowels of the city, these fresh arrivals from Africa, ignorant of the ways of the colony, were the ones invariably to flee to the hills. Thus a good many of the recruits to the Maroon communities were the individuals least socialized into the regime of the whites. Into their new homes, then, they brought not the burdens of slavery but the ways of Africa.

Behind a veil of secrecy that alone allowed them to survive, these Maroon communities developed genuine political, economic, and religious systems of their own. Their leaders were culled from what contemporary observers described as a “new class of slave” that arrived in the colony throughout the eighteenth century. These were men of royal blood, often educated not just by their own oral traditions but by Arab teachers, and endowed by birth with intelligence, moral vigor, and the call of a militant tradition. Their people were also a chosen lot, mostly young men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five, each one the end product of a tortuous selective process. Merely to reach the Maroon camps implied surviving the brutal passage from Africa, enduring the abuse on the plantations, and then outwitting the hounds of the bounty hunters to face willingly a life of daily risk, physical deprivation, and constant adversity.

Acceptance into the ranks of the Maroons was strictly controlled. Only those who came voluntarily were taken, and these only after making sure that they were not colonial spies. Blacks captured during raids could be made slaves, and on the slightest suggestion of betrayal were put to death. Newly arrived runaways had first to erase their past, mutilating their brands with knives or the juice of toxic plants—acajou or bresillet—that caused disfiguring welts. They endured rigorous initiations in which they learned the secret handshakes and pass words that would distinguish friend from foe during the raids. Publicly they swore allegiance to the community, and discovered in graphic terms what would occur should they betray the secrets of the group. If secrecy defined and protected the integrity of these communities, the obvious models for their internal organization were the secret societies that at least some of the ex-slaves must have joined in their youth in Africa.

As they are today, during the colonial era secret societies were a dominant social force throughout much of West Africa, particularly among the coastal rain forest peoples who were taken in bondage to Saint Domingue. The parallels between these groups and what later evolved in the Maroon communities in the colony are striking. Membership was by initiation, a lengthy process that exposed the candidate to physical hardships, tests of endurance and pain, following which he learned the secret passwords, symbols, and handshakes of the society. As in Saint Domingue, it was knowledge of these esoteric signs that defined the group; in virtually every other regard the societies were not secret, and in fact their function demanded that their existence be completely known. For these societies were no mere peripheral feature of West African culture; they lay at the very core and remained, both before and after the colonial era, the principal and militant champion of the traditional way of life. The Poro society of Sierra Leone, for example, left its mark on virtually every facet of Mende life, taking responsibility for tribal education, the regulation of sexual conduct, the supervision of political and economic affairs, as well as the operation of social services including recreation and medical care. A key to the strength of the West African secret societies—and what was particularly applicable to the needs of the Maroons—was the fact that their interests and activities were defined in terms of the community, rather than a lineage or clan. Thus they provided for the Maroon bands an invaluable model for the consolidation of the diverse cultural backgrounds of the individual slaves.

As the single most important arbiter of culture, the West African secret societies had as a vital function the administration of justice, and as in the case of the leopard society among the Efik of Old Calabar, their tribunals delivered a verdict based on the outcome of the poison ordeal. Judgment by ordeal could cover any and all personal or social crimes, and was inevitably invoked in suspected cases of sorcery. Not surprisingly, the secret societies developed a particularly refined knowledge of toxic preparations, learning not only to identify and experiment with different species of plant and animal, but also to control dosage, means of administration, and even the psychological set of the potential recipient.

But the use of toxic preparations was not restricted to the secret societies, nor even among them to the ordeal tribunals. Perhaps as much as any single material trait, the manipulation of poisons remains a consistent theme through African cultures. In certain regions, for example, criminals were executed by pricking their skin with lances or needles dipped in the juice of toxic plants. In parts of West Africa when a king died, his heir had to submit at least twice to poison ordeals to prove his supernatural strength; should he fail and die, the lineage was broken and the throne was declared vacant. Individual sorcerers often used potions of course, but in one of the most extraordinary developments, poisons were used systematically by established rulers in vain atempts to purge entire populations of evil. The leaders of the Cazamance and Balantes peoples in West Africa, for example, used a preparation based in part on the bark of a tree known as tali (Erythrophleum guineense— Leguminosae). Other ingredients included the powder ground from the dried hearts of previous victims and a number of admixtures reminiscent of those used in contemporary Haiti—ground glass, lizards, toads, crushed snakes, and human remains. Placed in a vat and allowed to ferment for a year, this toxic preparation was then ceremoniously paraded on a day of great festivities and given to every citizen. Each year as many as two thousand people died. With the advent of the slave trade, however, West African rulers discovered an even better means of purging their societies. According to Moreau de Saint-Mery, the most respected of the early colonial authorities, certain kings made use of their treaties with the European merchants to get rid of their poisoners by condemning them to deportation to Saint Domingue.

When Macandal finally fled the plantation he buried his vengeance deep within his breast. He didn’t fear recapture; no planter would risk the price of valuable hounds to run down a one-armed slave, let alone a Mandingue whose very tribal name was synonymous with rebellion. Macandal’s concern was one of timing—when and how to best seek retribution. It would be easy enough to kill. Muskets and powder were available for a price from the freedmen in the cities, and even armed with clubs and a few machetes a dozen Maroons could handily overrun a plantation, burning the stables, the drying sheds, and the cursed mills, and still have time to pay their respects to the master’s wife before the militia arrived. But pillaging plantations and sacking mansions now held little attraction for Macandal, and for what he intended to do there weren’t enough guns in all the colony. Once when asked to interpret one of his dreams, he had called for a clay vessel and placed into it three kerchiefs. He pulled out one that was yellow and explained to the crowd that it was the color of the ones who were born on the land. The next one was white, and it was they who now ruled. And here, he said, finally, are the ones that shall remain masters of the island, and the color of the kerchief was black.

For six years the network spread, with the whites completely oblivious of the danger about to befall them. Macandal was everywhere, moving with the impunity of a god garnering favors and awakening the zeal of the people. He chose his agents with care and placed them in every corner of the colony, and they in turn kept him informed of potential converts—perhaps a coachman whose woman had been recently raped by the master, or a kitchen boy whipped raw for stealing bread. On parchment and bark he drew figures in charcoal, tallying in symbols that only he understood the names of the plantations and the leaders of each and every work gang that toiled beneath the relentless sun—every man and woman who would come to his cause. He wanted everyone; they could look on him as they chose so long as their eyes held terror; be it fear of God or man it mattered not to him, just terror so that the secret would remain safe. But above all he needed those who worked on the inside—the coachmen, cooks, and domestic servants, the ones whose presence in the very bosom of the whites would not sound the alarm. In that way, Macandal would be assured that with each anguished dying breath the slavers would stare into the faces of those closest to them and see only the reflection of their own evil smiles.

By night Macandal wandered, but by day he ran a school, the students spread out before him in the thick grass, their fingers releasing the musty odor of fungi, the ooze of molds, and the pungent scent of crushed venom glands. The men held Macandal in awe, and at his behest combed the island, bringing back herbs with sap that stung, evil-looking sea creatures, snakes, and toads. Together they reached deep into their collective memory, struggling with senses numb from disuse to remember the lessons taught in their youth, the formulae and preparations and ingredients that might be mirrored among the plants and animals of the new land. If Macandal was their teacher, he in turn was the apprentice of others, the old women and men who lived alone among the dripping stalactites in caves and slept on beds of bat droppings. It was they who retained the ancient wisdom, some learned in Africa and some acquired on the island from the descendants of those who had lived among the remnants of the Arawakans, the tortured sons of the caciques that had ruled the land before the arrival of the whites. In the caves, these elders studied Macandal’s discoveries, fingering the fruits that bled red and blackened in the air, the shriveled lizards, and venomous insects. What they finally approved, after years of study, Macandal placed in the belly of the mortar, broken at the edges and worn with use. Then before their eyes he ground the silent death that would one day walk across the fields, and reach into every kitchen in the land.

In time, like ink on a blotter, the poison seeped into the lives of the whites. First the cattle died, one by one, until the stiff carcasses littered the northern plain. The planters in dismay hired the best scientific minds, herbalists who left their physic gardens in the Cap to tramp across the pastures in search of some vile weed fouling the fields. For days and weeks they combed the grass. Just as they thought that they had found the guilty plant, and the work gangs had begun to sweep clean the pastures, the first of the dogs died, and word came that poison had entered the houses.

To their horror, the whites found themselves in a trap of their own making, dependent on the very people who were the agents of their doom. The poison appeared everywhere: baked into bread, in medicine vials, in kegs of ale lifted directly from the ships and drunk because the water from the wells could no longer be trusted. Entire banquets succumbed, sometimes from the soup, perhaps the tea, the wine, or even fruit picked fresh from the trees. The terror of the whites gave way to rage, and innocent slaves were flayed alive. The slightest suspicion of collaboration with the poisoners meant a horrible death. But the enemy could not be seen; only its mark was felt, universally on the whites and equally on any black who showed signs of betraying the agents of Macandal. The colonial administration declared a state of siege and emptied the garrisons to parade up and down the streets of the Cap, their guns shouldered and useless against the invisible enemy. The courts condemned whoever they imagined to be guilty, and work gangs were decimated in attempts to secure the names of the leaders of the conspiracy. The chemists and herbalists reconvened to attempt once more to identify the source of the plague, whether animal or plant, or perhaps some compound taken from the apothecary or some potion brought by the wretches from Africa. A royal proclamation prohibited any slave from concocting any remedy, or attempting to cure any sickness with the exception of snakebite. But nothing that the government did could stop the contagion. Hundreds of slaves died, and as many whites. Before Macandal was through, six thousand at least would be dead.

It was a child that finally betrayed him, a young girl arrested along with three men as poisoners and condemned to be burned alive. One by one she was made to suffer the agonies of the others, watching the flames grow from the base of the pyre until they flared out of the acrid smoke to ignite the creosote-soaked rags. The smell of the flesh turned her stomach, and as she tried to look away they twisted her face to the sight and held it until she saw the belly of the men bloat, bubbling at the surface, dripping fluid until the skin, stretched to the limit, split, disgorging the steaming entrails of the gut. When her turn came, the executioner tormented her with the pinewood torch, tracing patterns in the air, brushing its burning end close to her skin. Her horror grew with her rage and fear, and just as the order was given, she broke, releasing the names of fifty others, which were dutifully recorded before the executioner, ignoring her cry of protest, went ahead and dropped the burning ember onto the base of the pyre.

The web of betrayal grew until it enveloped Macandal himself. But when his turn came, and he was paraded stripped to the waist before the people assembled in the capital, the citizens in their silk waistcoats beneath festive parasols, the slaves standing ebony black and solemn, the soldiers cautious, moving at the pace of death with the rhythm tapped out on drums covered in dark cloth, a strange thing happened. Macandal looked neither frightened nor even defiant as they lashed him to the post and brought forth the torch; he seemed indifferent, almost bored as he waited for the event, so carefully orchestrated by the governor, to be over. And when they saw him like that, a murmur ran through the ranks of the slaves, and their normally inscrutable expressions became radiant, expectant, disquieting to those whites sensitive enough to notice. Then, as the first flames reached the base of his legs, Macandal lifted his face, screaming at the sun. His body began to shake violently, his torso thrusting away from the post, his free stump pounding the air until with a single spasm that drew the breath out of the crowd he broke free and flung himself beyond the flames. Pandemonium broke over the mob. Amid calls of “Macandal is free!” the whites fled the plaza, and the guards rushed to the pyre, claiming later that they had recaptured the slave and bound him to a plank and cast him back onto the flames. But none of the blacks saw it done, and though the governor even produced the ashes to quell the fears of the whites, it was to little effect. The entire northern province, lulled into complacency by his capture, rang out with the alarm, and once again the planters felt like prisoners barricaded within their own houses. For the blacks there was little doubt as to what had occurred. If captured, Macandal had always told them, he would turn himself into a fly, and no one questioned his ability to do so, especially when after his reputed death, the toll of poison continued as before.

Macandal’s was not the first, nor certainly the last, Maroon revolt to shake the foundations of the colony. As early as 1681, before the colony had passed from the Spanish to the French and at a time when there were as many indentured whites as Africans, with a total population of only about six thousand, Maroonage was already an acknowledged threat. Two years before, in one of the earliest documented revolts, a slave named Padrejean had killed his master, recruited a band of twenty Africans, and embarked on his goal of strangling every white in the land. The revolt failed, but it was the type of incident that drew the attention of the king and led to the royal edict of 1685, a law that among other injunctions specified that a captured Maroon have his ears cut off and a shoulder branded with a fleur-de-lys; should the offense be repeated the hamstrings would be cut and a second brand applied to the other shoulder. The publication of this decree was an indication of a growing concern among the free whites, a fear that would become hysteria as the population of slaves soared. By the early years of the eighteenth century seditious plots, mysterious killings, and rumors of impending catastrophe became a staple of colonial life. Poisons were already so common that in 1738, two years before Macandal even fled the plantation, they were specifically prohibited by royal decree. Their political potential as a weapon of the slaves and a nefarious threat to the planters was made explicit upon the arrest of the Maroon leader Medor. “If the blacks commit poisonings,” he told his captors, “the end purpose is to gain freedom.”

By the last years of French rule, it was patently clear to all that the greed of the entire system had set the colony on a path of self-destruction. Only the potential for massive profits could possibly have numbed the whites to the imminent disaster. As absentee planters scrambled to increase their holdings, the borders of the plantations touched, and then to meet the rising demand for coffee, in particular, rose higher and higher into the mountains, displacing bands of Maroons and ironically forcing more and more of them to depend on pillage. The voracious consumption of labor, meanwhile, doubled the population of slaves in a mere fifteen years. How long could the whites possibly have expected to control close to a half-million blacks, the vast majority of them born in Africa and steeped in a military tradition of their own that had spread kingdoms across half a continent?

Like Macandal, the slaves plotted their final revolt with care. As their network spread and desertions swelled the ranks of the Maroons, the night air reverberated with the sounds of mutiny. In 1786 an informant reported clandestine meetings of two hundred or more slaves being held on the plantations. A contemporary document states “a great deal has been said of slave superstitions and of their secret organizations, and the scheming and crimes for which they provided pretext—poisonings, infanticide—… whites were not admitted to these secret meetings, and legal documentation was usually held secret or destroyed.”

From these nocturnal assemblies and within the passion of the vodoun rituals, the idea of liberty spread. Maroon bands grew in number as well as size, and the names of their leaders—Hyacinthe, Macaya, Romaine La Prophétesse—spread through the ranks of the slaves. The flash point came in the summer of 1791, and the spark was cast at a vodoun ceremony attended by delegates from every plantation on the northern plain.

The historic gathering was invoked by the Maroon leader Boukman Dutty, and held on a secluded knoll at Bois Caiman near Morne-Rouge. There on August 14, 1791, beneath the spindly branches of a frail acacia, with the wind twisting the ground and the jagged lightning crashing on all sides, an old woman stood transfixed by the night, quivering in the spasms of possession. The voices of Ogoun the Warrior, the god of fire and the metallurgical elements, called for the cutlass, and with a single blow severed the head and spilt the foamy blood of the black pig of Africa. The leaders were named—Boukman himself, Jean François, Biassou, and Celestin—and one by one the hundreds of slaves swore allegiance. Boukman stood up, and in a voice that matched the fury of the wind cried out, “God who made the sun that shines on us from above, who makes the sea to rage and the thunder roll, this same great God from his hiding place in the clouds, hear me, all of you, is looking down upon us. He sees what the whites are doing. The God of the whites asks for crime; ours desire only blessings. But this God who is so good directs you to vengeance! He will direct our arms, he will help us. Cast aside the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears and pay heed to the voice of liberty speaking to our hearts.” Thus was sealed the pact of the final revolt, in the shadow of the loa and with the blood of the sacrifice.

Two days later the first plantation burned, and then on the night of August 21 the slaves at five plantations around Macandal’s old territory rose up and moved on the center of Limbé. By morning Acul was in flames, Limbé destroyed, and throughout the next day the uprising rode the sound of the conch trumpets as one by one each settlement in the north fell—Plaine du Nord, Dondon, Marmelade, Plaisance. In a single night of indescribable horror, a thousand whites were strangled and two thousand sugar and coffee mills destroyed. For days dark columns of smoke rose beyond a wall of flames that isolated the entire northern half of the colony. Fire rained from clouds of burning straw torn from fields and swept up by the fireballs. Ash coated the sea, and the image of an entire land aflame reddened clouds as far away as the Bahamas.

After the first weeks of the uprising, as the frenzy of destruction gave way to skirmishes and then out-and-out battles with the colonial militia, the ranks of the slaves coalesced around certain leaders, who in turn drew their inspiration from the gods. In the western province Romaine La Prophétesse marched to the music of drums and conch shells, behind an entourage of houngan chanting that the weapons of the whites, their cannon and muskets, were bamboo, their gunpowder but dust; his personal guard carried only long cowtails blessed by the spirits and thus capable of deflecting the bullets of the whites. Sorcerers and magicians composed the staff of Biassou, and much of his own tent was devoted to amulets and sacred objects and devotions. In his camps great fires flared by night as naked women invoked the spirits, singing words known only in “the deserts of Africa.” Biassou walked in triumph, exalting his people, telling them that if they were fortunate enough to fall in battle, they would rise again from the hearth of Africa to seed their ancient tribes. A contemporary report from Cap Francis suggests that the black women of the capital went out at night, singing words unintelligible to the whites. For some time they “had adopted an almost uniform dress, around their bellies wearing kerchiefs in which the color red dominated…. The Voodoo King had just declared war (they said) and accompanied by his Queen dressed in red scarf and agitating the little bells decorating the box containing the snake, they marched to the assault of the colony’s cities.”

If vodoun charged the revolt, the tactics and organization of the rebel bands came directly from the precedent established by the Maroons. With increasing boldness the rebels poured out of the hills ravaging plantations, disrupting communication, and plundering supply trains. Raiding by night, they left in their wake fire, poison, and corpses, before retreating at daybreak into every inaccessible gorge and ravine in the land. There they lived as they had always, protected by palisades and rings of sentinels, and most critically by the potent magic of their sorcerers. A French force of some twenty-four hundred troops dispatched in early February 1792 to invade and destroy rebel camps reported being “astonished to see stuck in the ground along the route large perches on which a variety of dead birds had been affixed…. On the road at intervals there were cut up birds surrounded by stones, and also a dozen broken eggs surrounded by large circles. What was our surprise to see black males leaping about and more than 200 women dancing and singing in all security…. The Voodoo priestess had not fled … she spoke no creole…. Both the men and the women said that there could be no human power over her … she was of the Voodoo cult.” The leader of the French expedition also encountered the cloak of secrecy that continued to protect the rebels as it had the Maroons. From a woman initiate he learned that “there was a password but she would never give it to me…. She gave me the hand recognition sign: it was somewhat similar to that of the Masons. She told me this as a secret, assuring me … I would be killed or poisoned if I tried to penetrate the great mystery of the sect.”

Perhaps unfortunately for the ex-slaves, they were not alone in their quest for freedom. For some time tension had been growing between the white planters and the enfranchised mulattos. The latter, though equal in numbers to the whites, and entitled by law to all the privileges of French citizens, were, in fact, treated as a class apart. Social discrimination of the crudest sort had made them resentful, and at the same time their energetic exercise of their right to property had made them exceedingly wealthy and powerful; this was a dangerous combination for the French, especially once fanned by the rebellious ideas that had grown out of the American and French Revolutions. Even before the uprising of the slaves, a force of mulattos had marched on the government demanding full implementation of the accords worked out by the revolutionary assemblies in Paris. Their incipient revolt failed, and the leaders were brutally tortured, but it was the first incident in a struggle that would, in time, pit whites against mulattos, whites against mulattos allied with blacks, and mulattos against whites working sometimes with and sometimes against the interests of the black ex-slaves. The result was a reign of confusion, chaos, and destruction that after two years left the French in control of the cities, the blacks firmly entrenched in the countryside, and the mulattos still caught in between.

In February 1793 the Haitian revolution was profoundly affected by the war that broke out in Europe between Republican France and England allied to Spain. To the problems of the colonial administration, already preoccupied by political events in Paris, stunned by the uprising of the slaves, and torn asunder by the power struggle between mulatto and white planters, was now added the threat of an enemy army moving overland from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. The Maroons predictably aligned themselves with the invaders, and their leaders Biassou and Jean François—Boukman by then being dead—became officers in the Spanish army, as did Toussaint, an ex-slave who had not left bondage until some months after the uprising, but who was about to begin his meteoric rise to power.

The French, hard-pressed even before the Spanish invasion, were now forced to negotiate with the Maroons, and in the summer of 1793, under pressure from the rebel leaders, the colonial administration officially abolished slavery. But the Maroons soon recognized the proclamation for what it was—no more than a desperate attempt to defuse the explosive potential of the blacks, while retaining intact the essential structure of the colonial economic order. Biassou and Jean François rejected the French offer and defiantly remained allied to the Spanish, who had promised unconditional emancipation. But for reasons that would only come clear in the light of subsequent events, Toussaint shifted his allegiance back to the French. Then, at a time when he remained unquestionably less powerful than the prominent Maroon leaders, Toussaint and his forces ambushed the camps of Biassou and Jean François, killing many of their followers and turning those that survived over to the French authorities.

Toussaint moved quickly to consolidate his position, and by 1797, having defeated two foreign armies as well as a rival mulatto force, this ex-slave, by now christened Toussaint L’Ouverture, emerged as the absolute ruler of all Saint Domingue. He then set to work to restore under French rule the order and prosperity of the colony. And of what type of colony, there could be no doubt. The people, though nominally free, were in fact compelled to work in a manner reminiscent of exactly the system they had fought so desperately to overthrow. Toussaint’s autocratic decrees prohibited movement between plantations and ordered those without urban trades to the fields, where they labored under military supervision. True, he eliminated the worst excesses of the colonial brutality, but the essential structure of the plantation system remained just as the French had intended. As for the traditional beliefs of the people, Toussaint as a devout Roman Catholic had no interest in what he considered the pagan beliefs of Africa.

If there were any doubts as to the ambitions of the new black military elite, they were to be quelled by events that took place following the invasion of Leclerc’s French army in 1801, the betrayal of Toussaint by Napoleon, and his ignoble deportation to France. The French, of course, had never intended to tolerate black rule in the colony, and even as Toussaint struggled to rebuild the plantations, plans for his overthrow were laid in Paris. Napoleon, himself, clearly identified his real military enemy in the colony and ordered his brother-in-law to concentrate his efforts, following the deportation of Toussaint, on destroying the remnants of the Maroon bands. As was predicted in Paris, it was a task that the French commander was able to assign to local generals that had so recently served under Toussaint—in particular Dessalines and Christophe, who by historical record applied themselves and their troops willingly to the slaughter.

Still the Maroons resisted, and as the pressure mounted their forces were in place to receive both black freedmen and mulattos into the final alliance that would wage the war of independence. There were a number of pitched battles, but there is little doubt that the tried-and-proven tactics of the Maroons—raids, fire, poison, ambush—provided the margin of victory. Yet in the final defeat of the French, the Maroons were as soon forgotten as they had been after the wars of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The dictatorial rulers that emerged in the vacuum of independence lost no time in revealing the depths of their dedication to equality or liberty. Christophe—a former slave who had fought by the side of Toussaint, taken part in the deceitful raid on the forces of Biassou and Jean François, and then temporarily joined hands with the French armies of Leclerc—became the ruler of the northern half of the country in 1806. He declared himself king, and in the ways of kings he wasted the lives of twenty thousand subjects to build himself an opulent palace and a fortress that would never fire a shot.

With Christophe the betrayal of the Maroons appeared to be complete, but their struggle, in fact, continued. Those of their leaders who were still alive, and who had been instrumental in maintaining the revolt, had long grown accustomed to deceit, and they were, if nothing else, resilient. In the early years of the republic, as they faced new oppressors, they also found a new and remarkable means of protecting their freedom.

Some fifty years ago, Zora Neale Hurston, a young American black woman and a former student of the great ethnographer Franz Boas, stumbled upon an extraordinary mystery while preparing for her first field trip to Haiti. In what was at the time perhaps the only reliable monograph on the vodoun society, she read that in the valley of Mirebalais there were secret societies that terrorized the local inhabitants. According to the author, the noted Africanist Melville Herskovits, these clandestine organizations were called together at night by the beating of one rock against another in a manner reminiscent of the Zangbeto, a secret society he had studied in Dahomey. So feared were these Haitian groups that only with great difficulty had Herskovits obtained the names of two. One was the bissago, whose members appeared at night “wearing horns and holding candles,” and the other was Les Cochons sans Poils—the Pigs without Hair. Both societies were believed capable of changing their members into animals and sending them into the night to spread evil.

Although this was the first report of secret societies in Haiti that Hurston had come across, the persistence of such a prominent West African cultural trait had not surprised her. For Zora Neale Hurston, born at the turn of the century in a small all-black village in Florida, had come at an early age to sense the African roots of her people. Her father was a Baptist preacher, and behind the frenzy of his service, the wailing gospel hymns, the sermons and spirit possession, she had perceived even as a young girl what she would recognize as the raw power of African worship. Nine years old when her mother died, Zora Neale promptly left home and drifted north, working as a maid for a traveling theatrical troupe before eventually ending up in Baltimore, where she finished her schooling. Luck rode with her, and her interest in literature and folklore led her to Howard University, and hence to a scholarship at Columbia. There she met Boas, who became her “Papa Franz,” her confidant, intellectual mentor, and strongest supporter.

At the time Franz Boas was in the process of revolutionizing the field of anthropology. In an era when British social anthropology was still an explicit tool of imperialism, he rejected arbitrary notions of progress and evolutionary theories that invariably placed Western society at the top of a social ladder. Instead he championed the need to study cultures because of their inherent value. Every culture possessed a certain logic, he would say, and they appeared peculiar to the outsider only because he or she did not understand that logic. More than anyone before him, Boas saw anthropology as a calling, an opportunity to herald the wonder of cultural diversity, while revealing the intricate weave of the human fabric that binds us all together. In the spirit of her teacher, Zora Neale Hurston had been one of the first to undertake scholarly research in the field of Afro-American folklore. At this time when racism was fashionable, she had written boldly that the “Hoodoo doctors [of the American South] practice a religion every bit as strict and formal as that of the Catholic Church.”

Inspired by Boas’s stress on the need for fieldwork, Zora Neale Hurston developed her own style, to say the least. Packing a pearl-handled pistol, she roamed the dusty backroads of the deep South in a beat-up Chevrolet, seeking out the hoodoo doctors, guitar players, and storytellers, herself playing just about as many roles as there were characters in the stories she collected. Sometimes they thought she was a bootlegger’s woman on the run, or a widow looking for a man. And when she sped away singing some bawdy song, they were certain she was a vaudeville star looking for new material. This amazing woman decked out in her beret and cheap cotton dresses, with all she possessed stuffed into a flimsy suitcase, reached into every bayou and woodlot in the South, and when she got there she carried to its limits what anthropologists stiffly call participant observation. Once to satisfy a hoodoo priest she had to steal a black cat, then kill it by dropping it into boiling water; after the flesh fell away, she was instructed to pass each bone through her teeth until one tasted bitter. During an initiation ceremony in New Orleans, she had to lie naked for sixty-nine hours on a couch with a snakeskin touching her navel; at the tolling of the seventieth hour, five men lifted her from the floor and began a long ritual that culminated with the painting of a symbolic streak of lightning across her back. Then the hoodoo priest passed around a vessel of wine mixed with the blood of all present. Only by sharing in this ritual drink did Zora Neale become accepted by the cult.

It was this spirit of adventure combined with a passionate desire to continue her investigations and promote vodoun as a legitimate and complex religion that drew Hurston to Haiti. There is little doubt that by the time she read of the secret societies her proposed journey had become something of a personal crusade. For some time American and European foreign correspondents had indulged their readers’ perverse infatuation with what was known as the Black Republic, serving it up garnished with every conceivable figment of their imaginations. For Americans, in particular, Haiti was like having a little bit of Africa next door, something dark and foreboding, sensual and terribly naughty. Popular books of the day, with such charming titles as Cannibal Cousins and Black Bagdad, cast the entire nation as a caricature, an impoverished land of throbbing drums ruled by pretentious buffoons and populated by swamp doctors, licentious women, and children bred for the cauldron. Most of these travelogues would have been soon forgotten had it not been for the peculiar and by no means accidental timing of their publication. Until the first of this genre appeared in 1880—Spenser St. John’s The Black Republic, with its infamous account of a cannibalistic “Congo Bean Stew”—most books that dealt with vodoun had simply emphasized its role in the slave uprising. But these new and sensational books, packed with references to cult objects such as voodoo dolls that didn’t even exist, served a specific political purpose. It was no coincidence that many of them appeared during the years of the American occupation (1915-1934), and that every Marine above the rank of captain seemed to manage to land a publishing contract. There were many of these books, and each one conveyed an important message to the American public—any country where such abominations took place could find its salvation only through military occupation. Zora Neale Hurston, as much as anyone, was aware of these slanderous accounts, and she was quick to realize how the material she had collected in the American South could be exploited if placed in the wrong hands. Thus it was not only a trained but a judicious eye that now was turned on the Haitian secret societies.

Even within her first weeks in Haiti, as she moved at will through the streets of Port-au-Prince, Zora Neale heard the whispers running along the front edge of the night. They came at first alone, single incidents without any obvious pattern. First there was the drum that sounded one Thursday above her village, a rapid staccato beat, highly repetitious and unlike any rhythm she had heard in a hounfour. She woke up her housegirl and suggested they investigate, much as they had done many times before. But instead of the eager companion she had grown accustomed to, Zora Neale beheld for the first time a trembling child, unwilling to step beyond the threshold of their doorway. Then some weeks later, again at night, Hurston was disturbed by the acrid smell of burning rubber in her yard. When she questioned the man responsible, he apologized profusely but explained that the fire was necessary to drive away those who planned to take his child, the Cochons Gris, or Gray Pigs, who he claimed ate people. Apparently he had already seen them parading by the house, figures draped in red gowns and hoods. Yet a third incident occurred on a sailboat en route to the island of La Gonave, when she encountered a force of militia moving in to suppress some society based in a remote region of the island. No details were provided, just a few words followed by a hush of uneasiness, which Hurston interpreted as fear. Finally back in the capital, a contact led her to the house of a houngan in the Bel Air slum, and there she saw a temple unlike anything she had known. At the center of the sanctum was an immense black stone attached to a heavy chain, which in turn was held by an iron bar whose two ends were buried in the masonry of the wall. As she stood before the stone, her host handed her a paper, yellow with age and patterned with cabalistic symbols, and a “mot de passage”— password of the secret society known as the Cochons Gris.

Following these and other leads, Zora Neale over the course of several months managed to put together an astonishing portrait of the Haitian secret societies. According to her informants they met clandestinely at night, called together by a special high-pitched drumbeat; members recognized each other by means of ritualized greetings learned at initiation, and by identification papers—the passports. In a vivid description of a nocturnal gathering, she mentions a presiding emperor accompanied by a president, ministers, queens, officers, and servants, all involved in a frenzied dance and song ritual that she likens to the “sound and movement of hell boiling over.” The entire throng formed a procession and marched through the countryside, saluting the spirits at the crossroads, picking up additional members before convening in the cemetery to invoke Baron Samedi, the guardian of the graveyard, and beg him to provide a “goat without horns” for the sacrifice. With the spirits’ permission, scouts armed with cords made from the dried entrails of victims combed the land for some traveler foolish enough to be still journeying after dark. If the unfortunate wayfarer was unable to produce a passport indicating his membership in a society, and thus his right to move by night, he was taken to be punished.

Unfortunately, it appears from her writings at least that Hurston was never able to attend one of these gatherings herself. Perhaps because of this she was unable to get beyond the public face of the societies, an image that cast them in the words of a later ethnographer as “bands of sorcerers, criminals of a special kind.” A member of the mulatto elite, for example, told Hurston:

We have a society that is detestable to all the people of Haiti. It is known as the Sect Rouge, Vinbrindingue and Cochons gris and all these names mean one and the same thing. They are banded together to eat human flesh…. These terrible people were kept under control during the French period by the very strictures of slavery. But in the disturbances of the Haitian period, they began their secret meetings and were well organized before they came to public notice. … It is not difficult to understand why Haiti has not even yet thoroughly rid herself of these detestable creatures. It is because of their great secrecy of movement on the one hand and the fear that they inspire on the other…. The cemeteries are the places where they display the most horrible aspects of their inclinations. Some one dies after a short illness, or a sudden indisposition. The night of the burial the Vinbrindingues go to the cemetery, the chain around the tomb is broken and the grave profaned … and the body spirited away.

Yet who were these secret societies? Zora Neale Hurston never really says. She concludes simply by emphasizing that they are secret, and that the very lives of their members depend upon the confidence of the group. But she also, rather remarkably, describes what she could not have realized was the primary method of zombification. “There is,” she writes, “swift punishment for the adept who talks. When suspicion of being garrulous falls upon a member, he or she is thoroughly investigated, but with the utmost secrecy without the suspect knowing that he is suspect. But he is followed and watched until he is either accounted innocent or found guilty. If he is found guilty, the executioners are sent to wait upon him. By hook or crook, he is gotten into a boat and carried out beyond the aid and interference from the shore. After being told the why of the thing, his hands are seized by one man and held behind him, while another grips his head under his arm. A violent blow with a rock behind the ear stuns him and at the same time serves to abrase the skin. A deadly and quick-acting poison is then rubbed into the wound. There is no antidote for the poison and the victim knows it.”

It wasn’t until almost forty years later that a young Haitian anthropologist by the name of Michel Laguerre managed to begin to answer some of the questions raised by Hurston’s fieldwork. In the summer of 1976, Laguerre met a number of peasants who had been invited to join the secret societies, but who later had converted to Protestantism and hence were willing to talk. There were, according to these informants, secret societies in all parts of the country, and each one maintained control of a specified territory. Names varied from region to region but included Zobop, Bizango, Vlinbindingue, San Poel, Mandingue, and, most interestingly, Macandal. Membership was by invitation and initiation, open to men and women, and was strictly hierarchical. Laguerre verified the existence of passports, ritual handshakes and secret passwords, banners, flags, and brilliant red-and-black uniforms, as well as a specialized body of spirits, songs, dances, and drumbeats. He also noted the central importance of the cyclical rituals performed to strengthen the solidarity of the group: gatherings that occur only at night, that begin with an invocation to the spirits and end with the members in procession, flowing beneath the symbol of the society, the sacred coffin known as the sekey madoulè.

But according to Laguerre the function of the secret societies was unlike anything reported by Hurston. In no way could they be considered criminal organizations. On the contrary, he described them as the very conscience of the peasantry, a quasi-political arm of the vodoun society charged above all with the protection of the community. Like the secret societies in West Africa, those of Haiti seemed to Laguerre to be the single most important arbiter of culture. Each one was loosely attached to a hounfour whose houngan was a sort of “public relations man” acting as a liaison between the clandestine society and the world at large. In fact, so ubiquitous were the societies that Laguerre described them as nodes in a vast network that, if and when linked together, would represent a powerful underground government capable of competing head-on with the central regime in Port-au-Prince. And of the origin of these secret societies, Michel Laguerre had no doubts.

It was his view that in the aftermath of the war of independence, and in the face of a history of betrayal at the hands of the military leaders, the struggle of the Maroons had continued. In certain parts of the country Maroon bands had persisted as late as 1860 but on the whole, as the ex-slaves took to the land and the vodoun society was born, the role of the Maroons was transformed from fighting the French to resisting a new threat to the people—an emerging urban economic and political elite distinguished not by the color of their skin but by the plans they harbored for both the land and labor of the peasants. And whereas the war with the French could be won, the new struggle promised to be a permanent feature of peasant life. From overt and independent military forces, the Maroons went underground and became a clandestine institution charged with the political protection of the vodoun society. Thus were conceived the immediate predecessors of today’s secret societies. As the Maroons fought for liberty, the contemporary secret societies, according to Laguerre, “stand strong to keep safe the boundaries of power of their local communities and to keep other groups of people from being a threat to their communities.”

If Laguerre was correct—and his was the only explanation that made sense to me—the implications were clear. From the leading medical authorities in Port-au-Prince I had been told that zombification was a criminal activity that had to be exposed and eradicated for the collective good of the nation, but now a quite different scenario presented itself. In the minds of the urban elite, zombification might well be criminal, but every indication suggested that in the vodoun society it was actually the opposite, a social sanction imposed by recognized corporate groups whose responsibility included the policing of that society. Zombification had always struck me as the most horrible of fates. Now, if what I was beginning to think was true, I realized that it had to be. After all, what form of capital punishment is pleasant?

I knew from my own research that in at least some instances the zombi powder was controlled by the secret societies, and a knowledge of poisons and their complex pharmacological properties could be traced in a direct lineage from the contemporary societies to the Maroon bands, and beyond to the secret societies of Africa. There was no doubt that poisons were used in West Africa by judicial bodies to punish those who broke the codes of the society, and Hurston had suggested that the same sort of sanction was applied among the secret societies of Haiti. I had every reason to believe that Ti Femme and Clairvius Narcisse had received a poison, and that at the time of their demise they were both pariahs within their respective communities. Narcisse’s transgression was directly related to access to land, precisely the sort of issue that, according to Laguerre, would attract the attention of the secret society. By his own account, Narcisse had been taken before a tribunal, judged, and condemned. The possible link to the tribunals of West Africa was obvious. What’s more, Narcisse had referred to those who had judged him as the “masters of the land,” and had implied that he would only encounter more trouble if he created further problems himself. Finally, Max Beauvoir had told me directly that the answer to the zombi mystery would be found in the councils of the secret societies.

If my identification of the zombi poison revealed a material basis for the phenomenon of zombification, the work of Michel Laguerre combined with the information provided by Max Beauvoir and others finally suggested a sociological matrix. And once again, the indomitable Zora Neale Hurston provided a critical clue.

In October 1936, a naked woman was found wandering by the roadside in the Artibonite Valley. She directed the authorities to whom she was taken to return her to her family land, and there she was identified by her brother. The woman’s name was Felicia Felix-Mentor. Like Ti Femme she was a native of Ennery, and twenty-nine years before she had suddenly taken ill, died, and been buried. Death certificates and the testimony of her ex-husband and other family members seemed to support her account. When found she was in such a wretched condition that the authorities, after her identification in Ennery, placed her in a hospital in Gonaives, and it was there that Zora Neale Hurston found her. In Hurston’s own words, the woman was a dreadful sight—a “blank face with dead eyes” and eyelids “white as if they had been burned with acid.”

Hurston remained with the reputed zombi for only a day, but she came away from the encounter quite able to tell the world just about everything there was to know about the phenomenon. Unfortunately, nobody believed her. For example, she later wrote that she and the attendant physician “discussed at great length the theories of how zombies came to be. It was concluded that it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of a semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few. Some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down generation to generation. The men know the effects of the drug and the antidote. It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and will power. The victim can move and act but cannot formulate thought. The two doctors expressed their desire to gain this secret, but they realize the impossibility of doing so. These secret societies are secret [italics mine].”

When Hurston published this hypothesis in 1938 in Tell My Horse, it was ignored in the United States, while in Haiti it earned her the scorn of the intellectual community. It wasn’t that the notion of a poison seemed impossible. On the contrary, the belief in the poison was so common that virtually every subsequent student of Haitian culture would make some reference to it. Alfred Métraux’s suggestion that the “hungan [sic] know the secret of certain drugs which induce a lethargic state indistinguishable from death” was typical. And though most anthropologists remained equivocal, the Haitians themselves recognized the existence of the poison with such assurance that it was specifically referred to in the Penal Code.

Hurston’s problem was less one of credibility than of timing. Her report appeared just in the period when Haitian social scientists trained in the modern tradition were most anxious to promote the legitimacy of peasant institutions. These intellectuals were still smarting from the sensational publications that had emanated from the United States, which in their minds had both slanderously misrepresented the Haitian people and rationalized the American occupation. The subject of zombis, which had figured so prominently in these books, as it would later in low-budget Hollywood movies, was simply anathema to them. Unworthy of serious consideration, the embarrassing phenomenon was dogmatically consigned to the realm of folklore. Zora Neale Hurston, meanwhile, whose insight, if encouraged and pursued, might have solved the zombi mystery fifty years ago, bore the brunt of her colleagues’ contempt.

In defense of her critics, it must be said that her case for the poison hypothesis was suspect on several grounds. First, many informants insisted that the actual raising of a zombi depended solely on the magical power of the bokor. Secondly, despite the provocative case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, no physician had examined an indisputably legitimate case. And finally, of course, no one had penetrated the cults to obtain a sample of the reputed poison. Hurston did not help her position by concluding that “the knowledge of the plants and the formulae are secret. They are usually kept in certain families and nothing will induce the guardians of these ancient mysteries to divulge them.” Here, unfortunately, Hurston was unduly influenced by the warnings she had received from Haitian medical authorities, who had obviously sought the formula in a completely inappropriate manner. In one instance, for example, a zealous physician had used his connections to have a bokor imprisoned on no charges and threatened with a long term unless he divulged the secret. Not surprisingly, the recalcitrant old man refused, saying it was a mystery brought over from Guinée, which he would never reveal. From these same authorities Hurston received the dire warnings that may have prevented her from pursuing the mystery. “Many Haitian intellectuals,” she was told, “are curious, but they know that if they dabble in such matters, they may disappear permanently.” If she persisted in her desire to contact the secret societies directly, she was told, “I would find myself involved in something so terrible, something from which I could not extricate myself alive, and that I would curse the day that I had entered upon my search.”

Zora Neale Hurston was a woman of uncommon courage, but she worked as a pioneer in a complete vacuum that left her no option but to heed the words of her Haitian colleagues. But if Michel Laguerre was correct and the secret societies represented a legitimate political and judicial force in the vodoun society, it had to be possible to contact them safely. Only by doing precisely that could the final aspect of the zombi mystery be solved. And in Herard Simon, I had someone who could take me there.

12 Dancing in the Lion’s Jaw

MY REFLECTIONS from the vantage of New York and Cambridge trembled within me like a lodestar, pulling me back to Haiti. The desire to understand the connection between the creation of zombis and the secret societies had, by the late fall of 1982, extended into an ambition to penetrate the groups themselves. Only through this final step could I get beyond the public face, could I understand why zombis were made.

It was a potent idea, and one that, if I were to accept the counsel of my advisors, was fraught with danger. After all, I was in effect asking who actually ruled rural Haiti. Nathan Kline, though remaining wed to the notion of raising a zombi from the grave, knew enough about Haiti to appreciate immediately the ramifications of my proposed venture, and in a series of meetings held throughout the early winter offered his total endorsement and support. Heinz Lehman remained cautious, and both he and the producer David Merrick, who I had since discovered was the principal financial backer of the project, echoed the concern of various anthropologists who had suggested that the most distinct and likely outcome of such an adventure was that I would get myself killed. I reassured them that based on the information I had, the dangers had been exaggerated. Finally it was agreed that I would be given full financial support, with the one stipulation that I give priority to arranging for the medical documentation of the resurrection of a zombi. But then, soon after the last of our meetings, circumstances beyond our control eclipsed any plans for my return. In mid-February 1983, Dr. Nathan Kline died unexpectedly while undergoing routine surgery at a New York hospital. Within forty-eight hours David Merrick suffered a debilitating stroke that left him incapacitated and severed his interest in the project. Thus, as the year turned through a winter of tragedy and rapid change, the chance to study the secret societies slipped temporarily from my grasp.

It was a full year later before Haiti would again claim me, this time without backers, and with many things changed. Not the country, of course. Driving once more through the streets of Port-au-Prince, past the gingerbread houses with their tall palms thrust to the sky, past the stagnant pools of sewage by the side of the Truman Boulevard and the men from the public works, a mantle of green slime clinging to their thighs, I remained fixed as ever by the words of the stranger at the Hotel Ollofson: “Haiti will remain Haiti as long as the human spirit ferments.” Still, along with the easy happiness I had come to associate with the country, I was aware of a new and perhaps less superficial sensation—that sense of familiarity and alienation that comes to one who knows a place well, but who can never hope to become a part of it.

Among my old contacts I would soon discover that time allowed us to expose new facets of ourselves, revealing contradictions previously unseen. On the surface, however, very little seemed to have changed. In Saint Marc, Marcel Pierre had reached giddy heights of fame as a result of the BBC documentary having been aired on national television, and he had recently been seen wandering the halls of the local hospital parroting the words of the reporter and insisting that he was not serving evil, but the future medical needs of all humanity. His exhilaration would soon be checked by the brutal illness of his favorite wife, who was slowly bleeding to death from a malignant tumor in her uterus. Max Beauvoir was still his ebullient, debonair self, only far poorer due to the virtual cessation of the tourist trade in the wake of the AIDS scare. As for myself, the death of my benefactor had brought a marked change in my financial status, and what little money I had soon went into buying blood for Marcel’s wife. The Haitians responded to all of this in a most unexpected way. When I had been flush with Kline’s money, they had done what they could to relieve me of the burden; now that I was limited to my own comparatively scant resources, they asked of me almost nothing.

But of all of us who had joined hands in this unlikely drama, it was Rachel who had most truly changed. In the fall of 1982 she had begun her studies in anthropology at Tufts University, and her exposure to the United States had reaffirmed her identity among her own people. In a very real way, she had discovered her sense of place, and the free, undecided spirit I had known in Haiti had become committed. When I told her of my plans, she wanted to pursue the mystery with me. She contacted her academic advisor and arranged to receive credit for the time.

We knew we would have to start with Herard Simon.

In the late afternoon the air had been stifling, but then the rain began as it so often does in the early summer evenings, first in wild gusts and then more steadily in broad sheets that filled the horizon. As suddenly as it began the rain had stopped, leaving something ominous in the steely night wind that blew through the streets of Gonaives. A partial blackout had cut off the electricity, and kerosene lamps flickered in many quarters, casting a wan light. The waterfront, though, had been spared; a large crowd huddled beneath the marquee of the movie house where Herard Simon was supposed to be waiting. Herard loved the movies, and this dilapidated theater was one of his favorite conduits to the outside world. He took his films in pieces, dropping in on a whim, almost never watching from start to finish—a peculiar habit but one perfectly suited to Gonaives’s only theater, where American films are dubbed into garbled French that crackles in the ears of people who understand only Creole.

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

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

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

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

“The whites say this?”

“No, the Indians.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But we shall be.”

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

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

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

“Unless you take us.”

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

“We only want to see what they do.”

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

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

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

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

Cross of Jubilee, Cross of Jubilee

I am innocent!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honneur!”

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

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

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

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

The peristyle was similar to others we had visited, with a single centerpost and three sides of bamboo and thatch running upon a solid wall of wattle and daub. A tin roof on top of flimsy rafters seemingly supported by the web of strings displayed what must have been a hundred faces of President Jean-Claude Duvalier and ten times as many small Haitian flags. Three doors in the wall led to the inner sanctum of the temple, and there were two exits—the doorway we had entered through, and an open passage at the other end through which Herard had left. The benches were full, but people continued to arrive—the men stolid and unusually grave, the women determined, and everyone wearing fresh clothes: cotton beaten over river rocks, hung out to dry on tree limbs, pressed with ember irons and liberally scented with talcum powder. As at other vodoun gatherings I had attended, there were more women than men. Many of them arrived with pots of food that were hastily carried to charcoal cooking fires flickering beyond the far end of the enclosure.

But there were other symbols before us I had never seen: the black skirting around the pedestal of the poteau mitan; and the color red in the cloth that entwined the centerpost, on the wooden doors that led into the bagi, and in the flags whose significance I finally understood. Red and black—the colors of the revolution: the white band in the French tricolor ripped away and the blue in the time of François Duvalier becoming black, the color of the night, with red the symbol of transition, lifeblood, and rebellion. On the wall hung paintings of the djab—the devil—gargoylelike with protruding red tongues pierced by red daggers and lightning bolts, and with the inscriptions beneath, again in red paint dripping across the whitewash, “The Danger of the Mouth.” There were figures of other strange spirits—Erzulie Dantor, the Black Virgin; and Baron Samedi, the Guardian of the Cemetery. Arched across one of the entrances to the bagi, again in red but this time etched carefully in Gothic script, was yet another inscription, which read “Order and Respect of the Night.” Finally, at the foot of the poteau mitan lay a human skull wearing a wig of melted wax and crowned with a single burning candle. Herard Simon, defying all our expectations, had brought us to a gathering of the Bizango.

Rachel’s hand touched mine, and her eyes led me toward an imposing figure standing alone by the rear exit, beckoning us to his side. We followed him outside, past the cooking hearths and across a small courtyard, until we reached Herard and another man sitting together on the lip of a well.

“So,” Herard began, “you are where you want to be. Salute the president and ask what you will.”

It had happened that quickly. Stunned, we groped for words in the darkness. Herard leaned back, both hands resting on the hilt of his wooden sword. The president lifted his face to us and spoke in soft, velvety words. “Mes amis, has the djab seized your tongues?” His tone was gentle and surprisingly kind.

“It is Monsieur … ?” Rachel began.

“Jean Baptiste, mademoiselle, by your grace.”

“It is my father, Max Beauvoir, who brings us to you. He serves at Mariani. Perhaps you have heard him on the radio?”

“I know your family, Rachel. I am of Saint Marc, and your uncle will tell you of me. But what is it that has led you to me tonight? Your father has shared his table with me, but now sends his daughter as an envoy to the Shanpwel?”

“There are things a child of Guinée must understand,” Rachel said. She began a brief summary of our previous activities, but was abruptly cut off by Herard.

“These things are well known. He doesn’t have all night.”

“Women,” she went on hesitantly, “have their place in the Bizango?”

Jean Baptiste didn’t answer. His eyes looked beyond us, sweeping the compound.

“Rachel,” Herard interceded again, “are you not the daughter of your father? Women have a function everywhere. What kind of society wouldn’t have women?”

“The people say,” she tried again, more boldly, “that the society can be as sweet as honey or as bitter as bile.”

The president lit up. “Ah, my friend,” he sighed, “she is already a queen! Yes, this is so. Bizango is sweet because it is your support. As long as you are in the society you are respected and your fields are protected. Only the Protestants will hate you.”

“And bitter?”

“Because it can be very, very severe.” The president paused and glanced over toward Herard, who nodded in affirmation. “Bizango is a great religion of the night. ‘Order and Respect of the Night’—that is the motto, and the words speak the truth. Order because the Bizango maintains order. Respect of the night? As a child, Rachel, what did your father teach you? That the night is not your own. It is not your time, and you must not encounter the Shanpwel because only something terrible can occur. Night belongs to the djab, and the eyes of the innocent must not fall upon it. Darkness is the refuge of thieves and evildoers, not the children. It is not a child that should be judged.” The president looked up. “It is time,” he said softly, excusing himself. “Stay with us now and dance. Tomorrow you will visit me at my home in Saint Marc.”

The drums began, and as we passed back into the tonnelle small groups of dancers swirled before them, challenging each other to greater and greater bursts of effort. The appearance of Jean Baptiste had a sobering effect, and as he began to sing the dancers drew into a fluid line that undulated around the poteau mitan. Knees bending slightly and bodies inclined backward, they answered him with a chorus that praised Legba, the spirit of the crossroads. Salutations to other familiar loa followed—Carrefour, Grans Bwa, Aizan, and Sobo. It struck me that this gathering of the Bizango was like the beginning of any vodoun service. Women continued to mingle about, and the old men on the cane-bottomed chairs passed bottles of clairin peppered with roots and herbs. An hour went by, and although the atmosphere became charged with activity no spirit arrived. Instead, just before eleven o’clock, a cry went out from the president and was answered by all present.

“Those who belong!”

“Come in!”

“Those who don’t belong!”

“Go away!”

“The Shanpwel is taking to the streets! Those who belong come in, those who don’t go away! Bête Sereine! Animals of the Night! Change skins!” A man with ropes across each shoulder like bandoliers came hurriedly across the tonnelle carrying a sisal whip and took up a position just outside the exit. The door slammed shut, and the dancers rushed into the bagi.

“Seven cannon blows!”

From outside came the deep penetrating moan of a conch trumpet, followed by seven cracks of the fwet kash, the whip. Moments later the dancers reemerged from the bagi and, encouraged by steel whistles, took up marshal positions around the poteau mitan. On one side stood the men, dressed uniformly in red and black, and across from them the women, clad in long red robes.

With the president standing to one side and all the members in place, a woman with a high, plaintive voice sang out a solemn greeting asking God to salute in turn each officer of the society. As they were called, one by one men and women stepped out of rank, stood before the group, and then, following the slow, almost mournful rhythm of the prayer, moved to form a new line still facing the poteau mitan. Their titles were mostly unfamiliar to me: secrétaire, trésorier, brigadier, exécutif, superintendant, première reine, deuxième reine, troisième reine. Suddenly a whistle broke the tension, eliciting shrill ritual laughter from the ranks. Unaccompanied by the drums, and with the members formally bowing and curtsying in time, the society began to sing:

I serve good, I serve bad,

We serve good, we serve bad,

Wayo-oh!

When I am troubled, I will call the spirit against them.

Then came a song of warning, set off from the last by whistles and the cracking of the whip:

What we see here

I won’t talk,

If we talk,

We’ll swallow our tongue.

The singing continued until three people reemerged unexpectedly from the second door of the temple. One was the secretary, only now he carried a machete and a candle and wore a black hat covered by a sequined havelock. Beside him came a woman, perhaps one of the queens, cloaked in green and red, and following these two a woman in red with a small black coffin balanced on her head. The rest of the society fell in behind her, and singing a haunting hymn of adoration, the small procession circled the poteau mitan, eventually coming to rest with the woman laying the coffin gently on a square of red cloth. An order went out commanding the members to form a line, and then the secretary, the president, and one of the women walked ceremoniously to the end of the tonnelle, and pivoting in a disciplined military manner returned as one rank to the coffin.

President Jean Baptiste, flanked by his two aides and speaking formally in French, officially brought the assembly to order.

“Before God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, I declare this séance open. Secretary, make your statement!”

Holding his machete in one hand and a worn notebook in the other, the secretary exclaimed, “Gonaives, twenty-four March nineteen eighty-four, Séance Ordinaire. By all the power of the Great God Jehovah and the Gods of the Earth, and by the power of the Diabolic, of Maître Sarazin, and by authority of all the imaginary lines, we declare that the flags are open! And now we have the privilege of passing the mallet to the president for the announcement of the opening of this celebration. Light the candles!”

One by one each member solemnly stepped out of line and in graceful gestures of obeisance paid homage to the coffin, leaving a small offering of money and taking a candle, which was passed before the flame burning at the base of the poteau mitan. A line of soft glowing light spread slowly down one side of the tonnelle, and the society members, their heads bowed and their hands clasping the candles to their chests, began to sing once more. Three songs, each an eloquent call for solidarity. The first posed a potent question:

President, they say you’re solid,

And in this lakou there is magic.

When they take the power to go and use it outside,

When they take the power who will we call?

When we will be drowning, what branch will we hold onto?

The day we will be drowning, who will we call?

What branch will we hold onto?

Then, as if to answer this lament, the second song continued:

Nothing, nothing can affect us,

Before our president,

Nothing can hurt us,

If we are hungry, we are hungry among ourselves,

If we are naked, we are naked among ourselves.

Before our president nothing can harm us.

The final song was raised in defiant, raucous voices with the feet of all members stamping the dry earth, raising small clouds of dust:

I refuse to die for these people,

This money is for the djab,

Rather than die for people, I’d rather the djab eat me,

This money is for the djab,

I will not die for these people!

By now the tension in the rank had become palpable, and the president had to slap a machete against the concrete base of the poteau mitan to restore order. At his command a man later identified to us as the treasurer advanced with one other to count the money, and with an official air they announced, “Sixteen medalles—sixteen gourdes”—a sum of less than five dollars. The president stepped forward reciting a Catholic litany blessing the offering and seeking the protection of God for the actions of the society. As his final words expired, the drums exploded, breaking open the ranks at long last. Other songs rose in strange rhythms, with one of the four drums played lying on its side, giving the staccato sound of wood striking hollow wood. The drums ceased as suddenly as they began, and once again attention focused on the president, now standing alone by the poteau mitan, his hands cradling a weeping and terrified baby. His own voice, high and soft with reverence, was soon joined by all the others:

They throw a trap to catch the fish,

What a tragedy! It is the little one who is caught in the trap!

The baby’s mother stood by the president’s side, and as the others sang tears came into her eyes and ran in rivulets down her cheeks. With gentle gestures Jean Baptiste led her and the baby around the poteau mitan, and then he lifted the child tenderly above his head to salute the four corners, the four faces of the world. As he turned slowly, the society members beseeched him:

Save this little one,

Oh! President of the Shanpwel!

Save the life of the child we are asking,

Oh! President of the Shanpwel!

Save the life of this child!

Yawé! Yawé!

The unbroken circle of the Shanpwel closed around the body of the president, and one by one they lifted the child from his arms and bathed it with a warm potion of herbs. Then, the treatment completed, the drums resounded once more, and the members of the Bizango danced long into the night.

Sunlight has a way of diffusing mysteries, and the next afternoon, as Rachel and I sat near the waterfront of Saint Marc waiting for Jean Baptiste, all we could think about was the heat and the surge of flies hovering about us. It was as if all the lurid tales of the Bizango had given way to this: a shoreline and the smell of fish, briny nets and cracked tar rising to mingle with the dust of the city. No babies had been slaughtered the night before, nobody had been transformed into a pig, least of all the two of us, who rather had been treated graciously as honored guests. Quite contrary to the image I had been given, the gathering of the Bizango had impressed me as a solemn, even pious, ceremony that revealed among other things a strict hierarchical organization modeled at least superficially on roles derived from French military and civil government. Whether this was a purely symbolic hierarchy or something more remained to be seen.

We had spent much of the morning trying to find out more about Jean Baptiste, speaking with Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié, at one time the prefect for Saint Marc. Mr. Erié is a kind, generous man, and though a large landowner and leader among the local bourgeoisie, he is clearly respected and liked by the entire community. Though unaware of Jean’s position as president, Robert Erié knew the man well. He had in fact employed Jean as a chauffeur for the entire time he had been prefect. A diligent and competent driver, Jean was remembered as being a good man, quiet and discreet, but not particularly influential in the traditional peasant society of Saint Marc. Although I said nothing about it, it had struck me as significant that the president of a secret society should be employed in such a capacity. During the colonial era many of the slaves who eventually became important leaders of the revolution had worked as coachmen, an ideal position from which they could spy on the ruling authorities.

Speaking with the former prefect had offered an unusual insight into how a prominent official appointed by the central government interacts with the traditional society. Despite his ignorance of Jean’s position, he knew about the activities of the Bizango in some detail. As prefect, he explained, it had been his responsibility to know what went on in the region under his jurisdiction. As an official he didn’t condemn or even judge what the societies did. They were his friends, and he moved freely among them, “drinking his drink,” as he put it, “without problems.” But they in turn had the responsibility of keeping him informed. No ceremony, for example, should be held without the prefect’s preknowledge. Erié considered this a matter of courtesy, not coercion, and stressed that during his entire time in office he had not once taken steps to interfere. Nor, he added, could he imagine a situation when this would be necessary. This easy relationship between the representative of the urban-based authorities on the one hand and the traditional leaders of the vodoun society on the other is no accident, I was to learn. On the contrary, it is mandated by the very nature of the contemporary government in Haiti.

The civil government of Haiti is divided into five départements, and each of these, in turn, is divided into a number of arrondissements, with each one headed by a prefect appointed directly by the president of the nation. Each arrondissement—there are twenty-seven in all—is composed of communes led by the equivalent of a mayor assisted by an administrative council that is based in a village. Beyond the edge of the village itself, the land of the commune is divided into a number of sections rurales.

The military have their own parallel subdivision of the country, and while it is somewhat different, the important point is that at the lowest level the two systems come together, making the rural section the basic level of local government. It is within these rural sections that at least 80 percent of the Haitian population lives.

There is a curious and important paradox in the governing of these rural sections, however, and it hinges on the role of an official outside the hierarchical organization of either form of government. Gerry Murray, one of the most thoughtful anthropologists to have worked recently in Haiti, has pointed out that the rural section in no way coincides to a community or village, but rather describes “an arbitrary administrative lumping of many communities for the purposes of governance.” The rural peasants themselves identify not with their section but with their own extended families and neighbors in its lakous, the familiar compounds made up of clusters of thatched houses one sees all over the country. In other words, neither institution of the government, the civil or the military, recognizes in any juridical sense the actual communities in which the vast majority of the rural peasants live and die. To reach these people the national authorities depend on one man, the chef de section, an appointee from within the rural sections who is expected to establish networks of contacts that will place his eyes and ears into every lakou in his jurisdiction. This he does, but in a very special way.

Although the chef de section derives his authority from the central government, the basis of his power is not his official status so much as the consensus of the residents of his own section. He does not act alone, but rather heads a large nonuniformed force of local peasants that in turn derive their extrastatutory authority not from him but again from their own people. The chef de section can be quite helpless without such popular support, and historically efforts of the central government to place outsiders in the position—most notably when the American occupation forces attempted to replace vodounists with literate Protestants—have always failed. Haitian law provides for the chef de section to retain certain assistants, but as Murray indicates, “the particular form the structure of police control will take in a particular region will be largely governed by local traditions and by adaptive adjustments to local social reality on the part of local law enforcement officials, who are themselves intimately familiar with this reality.” What this implies is that the official government, in order to reach the peasants, must tap into their own traditional networks of social control, in the person of the chef de section.

Who is this chef de section? Above all he is himself a local peasant. Typically he maintains his own fields, is polygynous, and serves the loa. In many instances he is a prominent houngan. His behavior, personal values, and expectations are not those of a bureaucrat, but rather those of a leader of the traditional society. Although technically he receives a salary from the capital (and sometimes the money actually arrives), he depends financially on his own land, and like the African patriarch he considers it his right to recruit unpaid labor for his fields. This service the community members willingly provide, in effect as compensation for the hours he must spend attending to their affairs. It is his task, after all, to investigate conflicts and convene the informal tribunals at which virtually all local disputes are said to be resolved. With their power thus rooted in their own jurisdictions, the chefs de section remain relatively unaffected by political upheavals in the capital, and as Murray points out they retain, sometimes for indefinite periods, virtual unchallenged control of their areas. Threats to that power and their position, then, come not from Port-au-Prince but from dissatisfaction among their own people, so it is with them that the loyalties of the chef de section lie.

In brief, though the institution of the chef de section serves as an interface between the two separate worlds that make up the Haitian reality, the man himself is a member of the traditional society, and the network of contacts he taps is the network within that society. It was, therefore, by no means a trivial discovery to learn from Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié that in most instances the chef de section was also the president of a Bizango secret society.

Jean Baptiste surprised us by turning up dressed in the uniform of an army corporal and driving a military vehicle, looking like all the anonymous soldiers one runs into at the scattered roadside outposts in Haiti, the ones you catch napping behind their desks when their subordinates lift you from your car for a passport check. Yet within moments of stepping off the street into the privacy of his home he again assumed the air of quiet dignity and authority that had so impressed me the night before. He spoke freely, answering every question we put to him, and as we listened the nefarious facade of the Bizango crumbled piece by piece.

“No, no. It was an accident. Children are the little angels. They can do no wrong. Children do not fall within the sanction of the society. What you saw was an unfortunate victim. Another society needed to take someone, but the coup l’aire fell upon her by mistake.”

“Who did they want to take?”

“That is their business.”

“It could be anyone?”

“Not at all. Listen, you must understand that the Bizango is just like a normal government. Everyone has their place. It is a justice.” Jean Baptiste reviewed each member’s grade. The leadership consisted of the emperor, presidents, first, second, and third queens, chef détente, and vice-president. This ruling body was known as the chef d’état-majeur. There were other queens—the reine dirageur, who was generally the emperor’s wife; the flag queens; and the flying queens. Other lesser positions read like a list from the French civil service-prime minister, conseiller (advisor), avocat (lawyer), secrétaire, trésorier, superviseur, superintendant, intendant, moniteur, exécutif. Military titles included general, prince, brigadier general, major, chef détente and soldat. Finally, there were three positions of note: the bourreau, or executioner, whose task it was to enforce the collective decisions of the society; the chasseur, or hunter, who was dispatched to bring culprits before the society; and the sentinelle, who was positioned at the gate as a scout to prevent unwelcome individuals from entering a society gathering.

According to Jean Baptiste, his was but one of as many as a dozen Bizango societies in the Saint Marc region alone. Each one maintained control over a specific area and was led by a founding president known also as the emperor. In time members of the society’s hierarchy might launch out on their own, establishing their own bands still within the umbrella of the original leader, and as a result within any one Bizango territory in Saint Marc there might be as many as three societies operating. Each principal society was supposed to respect the borders of its neighbors, and disputes if necessary could be taken before the one selected by all the society emperors to reign as the emperor of the entire region.

The purpose of the Bizango, as Jean Baptiste insisted on reiterating, was to maintain order and respect for the night. To its members and their families it offered protection, and since almost everyone had some relative initiated, the Bizango became the shelter of all.

“For the sick, or the troubled,” he explained, “it is a wonderful thing, whether you have money or not. But it is only good because it can be very bad. If you get into trouble with it, it can be very hard on you.”

“Do you mean someone bothering the society, or just anyone?”

“No, of course not anyone. I tell you it is a justice, so they must judge you. Listen, say someone is out on the street and the time is not his. Then perhaps he will receive a coup l’aire just as a warning. He becomes sick a little, and then he remembers not to walk by night.” Jean shrugged, as if what he was saying was the most obvious thing in the world. “But if someone disturbs a member of the society for no reason it will be something else. The guilty one will be sent to sit down. You see, we have our weapons.”

That arsenal, as Jean explained, contained a number of spells and powders—the familiar coup l’aire, coup n’âme, and coup poudre—that were surreptitiously applied to the victim at night. To do so the society executioner set traps in places the person was known to frequent. A powder sprinkled in the form of a cross on the ground to capture a ti bon ange was one example of such a trap. Once caught, the victim could only be saved by the intervention of the society president, a treatment that could cost him dearly.

“They say we eat people,” Jean continued, “and we do, but only in the sense that we take their breath of life.”

“But Herard said that the Bizango will do far more than that.”

“The commandant says what he wants to say.”

“He’s a society of one,” I said with a smile, remembering Herard’s words at Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Jean looked at me, but he didn’t return my smile.

Just what was going on was uncertain—as was whether Herard was still involved. The image he had presented so forcefully of the Bizango was unlike anything we were seeing with Jean Baptiste; yet at the same time he had led us to the ceremony, introduced Jean, and sat all evening delighted to see us participate.

“When might a society take someone?” Rachel asked.

“They are out at night,” Jean began, then hesitated, “or word may come through even by day. Just as long as it becomes known that someone has been talking improperly. Perhaps he is the one who runs to the blanc or the upper-ups in the government and tells them what such and such a society is doing. The person may try to hide, but we shall find him. That is how a man ends up passing through the earth twice.”

“A zombi?” I asked.

Jean regarded me steadily. “Every evildoer will be punished. It is as we sing.” In a high voice that took us back to the night before at Gonaives, he proceeded to sing:

They kill the man

to take his zombi

to make it work.

O Shanpwel O

Don’t yell Shanpwel O

They killed the man

to take his zombi

to make it work.

Jean was laughing aloud even before he finished the verse.

“And what about thieves?” Rachel asked.

“You need proof, you always need proof. If someone complains to the society, they will investigate. If it is true, the trap will be set. If a Shanpwel steals, he is rejected immediately from the society.”

“And if he escapes?” I asked, recalling the way Isnard described dodging the trap.

“For those who are guilty there is no escape. The society will follow him to the ends of the land, even to the height of the Artibonite.”

“Across the water?”

“Even to the streets of New York.”

“But on the land, is this not the work of the chef de section?”

“Yes. It is all the same. The society moves by night, and since most crimes are done in the dark we naturally prevent many things. We work together. The chef de section must know what goes on, and so we tell him. He’ll find out anyway. If the society is going into a territory to take someone, and the chef de section is told and he knows the culprit is guilty, he won’t interfere. Anyway, most often the chef de section is a houngan or president Shanpwel. He walks by day, but by night he too changes his skin.”

“The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate,” Rachel said, echoing the words of Marcel Pierre.

Jean laughed once more. “My friends, what you have seen is so little.” He explained that the ceremony the night before had been no more than a bimonthly training session of a single society. The next week there was planned a regional gathering of all the Saint Marc bands to celebrate the founding of a new society. It would be his honor if we would accompany him as his guests.

13 Sweet As Honey, Bitter As Bile

BLOOD IN HAITI costs the peasant twenty dollars a liter, assuming he can get the official price at the door of the Red Cross blood bank. Marcel Pierre, Rachel, and I stood by the hospital bed and watched yet another bag of it enter the frail arm of Marcel’s wife, and almost as quickly seep out between her legs to soak the cotton sheets. Public hospitals in Haiti have something in common with the jails; the care of the inmates depends less on their condition than on the ability of their kin to pay—for medicines, food, bedding, even rental space on the lumpy mattresses left over from the American occupation. Marcel had sold most of what he owned, and still no one had done anything to cure his wife. He had shuttled her from hospital to hospital, bringing her south from Saint Marc by camionnette squeezed in among the market women and chickens. Earlier in the day he had spent his last money getting her to the capital only to have to watch her now, lying in the hospital bed, knowing that if he didn’t get more blood by nightfall she would die.

It was under these conditions that his pride allowed him to turn once again to us. For some time I had been giving him money—“advances,” as we agreed, against another preparation. He knew I didn’t need it, just as he knew that the money I had already paid him was far more than any powder was worth. Still, all this remained unsaid that evening when he turned up forlornly at the Peristyle de Mariani. Rachel kissed on him on both cheeks and rushed off to fetch a tray of food. Marcel and I embraced, then sat together on the couch. By now, of course, we knew all about him, not only his business and reputation, but also his relative position in the traditional hierarchy of Saint Marc. He was small stuff, really, a houngan nieg as some had said—one who must walk the streets to have any presence at all. Marcel was an outcast, a pimp, a malfacteur, a powderer, and now more than ever I sensed his isolation. Haitian men do not cry, but tears slipped from Marcel’s eyes. My hand held his, but there was nothing more I could do. Watching Marcel beside me, I realized just how far he and I had come from the early days and the foolhardy images we had both projected to each other.

Max Beauvoir knew all about Marcel’s reputation as well, but when he walked into the room with Rachel he received him as a peer. It was an important gesture, one that moved Marcel visibly. And that night before the ceremony, Max took Marcel aside, and they worked together in the inner sanctum of the temple. Later, after the opening prayer, he honored Marcel by inviting him to lead the ceremony. Marcel took this to heart, and the singing transformed him. In time the spirit Ogoun came up on him, and he raced around the periphery of the peristyle, ripping the tablecloths from beneath the drinks of the startled audience. Beauvoir did nothing to stop him. Ogoun burned with a raging intensity. An hour before, death had seemed so close. Now the man had become a god, and death was suddenly an impossibility.

Rachel and I spent most of the next day moving around Port-au-Prince with Marcel—buying more blood, finding a clinic for his wife, a rooming house for his daughter. It was one reason we were late getting to Saint Marc that night for Jean Baptiste’s Bizango ceremony. There were others. The rain again flooded the Truman Boulevard, backing up traffic halfway down the Carrefour Road, and then we ran into the presidential motorcade that blocked the road just north of the capital. Finally, there was Isnard, who had turned up unexpectedly at Mariani with an invitation to attend a Bizango ceremony early that same evening in Archaie. By the time we had negotiated the various traffic snarls and ferried Isnard on a number of last-minute errands in the capital, it was already well past dark. A blinding rain slowed our journey north, as did the unsuccessful diversion at Archaie. The site of Isnard’s reputed ceremony was deserted and the hounfour shrouded in darkness, save for the warm embers of a recent fire. Behind a crack in the sealed door of a neighboring hut a lone woman dressed in red and black informed Isnard that someone had died during the ceremony, and the society had fled. By the time our jeep once more gathered momentum against the deepening night, we knew that we would be late for our rendezvous with Jean Baptiste.

Even Jean’s oldest son, with his father already having left, did not know the exact location of the Bizango gathering, but following his father’s instructions he led us along a fretted track to a crossroads just south of the town. There we waited. The storm had passed and the trade winds overhead blew away the last wild rage of tattered clouds revealing a night sky deep with stars. The stillness was broken only by the sound of the waves beating the shoreline. When, after close to an hour, the expected contact failed to appear, we swallowed our disappointment and began to make our way slowly back toward Saint Marc. It was just after we turned away from the sea that Isnard heard the sound of the Bizango drums. Leaving him by the roadside, we returned to town to drop off Jean’s son, then immediately doubled back. By then Isnard had discovered the source of the distant rhythms. He led us to an open field enclosed by a living fence of caotchu. At the center of the field stood a complex of low buildings.

Instantly an enormous man bearing the rope bandoliers of the sentinelle stepped before us to plug the gap in the fence. A second guard appeared in the path behind, blocking our rear.

“Who are you?” demanded a harsh anonymous voice.

“Bête Sereine. Animals of the Night,” Isnard replied flatly. The sentinelle moved aside, revealing yet a third Shanpwel, who accosted Isnard by clapping his hands on each of our friend’s shoulders.

“Where are you coming from?” he asked.

“I come from the heel.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going into the toes.”

“What toe?”

“I am the fifth.”

“How many stars do you walk with?”

“We are three.” Isnard offered his hand but the gesture was ignored. The arms of the shadowy figure remained firmly anchored to his sides. Rachel moved confidently forward.

“We have come to you by invitation of our friend Jean Baptiste,” she said politely. The man glanced at her suspiciously.

“He expects you and the blanc?”

“Yes, we are late. There was too much rain.” Loosening his hold on Isnard, the man dispatched the sentinelle to take our message into the ceremony. For several awkward minutes we stood quietly, listening to the rhythms of the Bizango drums. Though the temple was but a hundred meters away, the sound was fainter than it had been when we first heard it from the roadside. It was just as Herard had said. “When the Bizango drum beats in front of your door, you hear it as from a great distance, and when it is miles away it sounds as if resonating in your own yard.”

The arrival of a messenger from Jean Baptiste broke the tension. The man’s warm greeting sent the sentinelle and his companions back into the shadows. Chatting idly, then falling silent, we followed the messenger along a narrow path toward the temple. The incessant drumming continued to soften, and as we drew near we heard the words of the song:

The band is out, the society is out,

Watch out mother who made me.

The band’s out, the society is out

Mothers of Children

Tie up your stomachs.

The society was out, its procession winding past some distant crossroads, but the temple was still packed, a catacomb of gestures and faces that seemed vaguely inimical as we eased our way into the crowded entry. To one side in a small open space around the poteau mitan a handful of men and women dipped and swayed, and just beyond, hidden from the light, a group of drummers stood straddling their instruments, teasing the dancers like puppeteers. The music didn’t stop, but the drummers looked up, and their throaty irreverent voices announced our presence in no uncertain terms.

The messenger led us out the back of the temple into a courtyard vibrating with several hundred people. There was a festive air, and all the crowded tables together with the lingering odor of grilled meat and sweet potatoes reminded me at first of a community picnic. But the atmosphere was also charged with tension, somehow accentuated by the loud hissing of dozens of Coleman lanterns set around the periphery of the courtyard. They cast a harsh, almost blinding light that kept my eyes to the ground as Rachel, Isnard, and I wove past a number of tables until we reached the one at the back headed by Jean Baptiste. We were welcomed and invited to sit by his side, but there were no introductions, and when Rachel finished apologizing for our delay and exhausted a few easy phrases of greeting, a disconcerting stillness gripped us. Across the table a half-dozen men sat as still as stones. The light from behind them completely obscured their faces in shadow and reduced their enormous bodies to a single ominous silhouette. I started any number of stories that had always worked in the past but now drew no response. Isnard was equally uncomfortable, yet our presence challenged his pride to display his knowledge of the Bizango, and in a foolish gesture he pulled a demijohn of clairin from his hip pocket and stood up to propose a toast. To make matters worse, the bottle was empty.

“Friends of the night,” he said with inappropriate melodrama, “we are all brothers.”

A flat voice responded from across the table. “What do you mean all brothers?”

“Well,” Isnard stumbled, “we are Haitians, we are all Haitians.” He had intended, of course, to imply that he too was a member of the Bizango.

“Yes, it is so. We are Nég Guinée, the people of Africa,” the shadow agreed. “Some of us.”

Fortunately, before Isnard could go any further, the tables around us began to buzz with the rumor of the returning procession, and within moments the entire courtyard was filled with anticipation. Jean led us quickly into the peristyle, which, already crowded when we arrived, was by now bulging with members of the Bizango. In the distance, seen through the gaps in the bamboo wall, the procession like an articulated serpent crawled over the hills—proceeding, halting, then moving again, slowly emerging out of the nether darkness of the night. Lanterns on either flank floodlit great swirls of chalky dust. You could hear the distant voices, the whistles, and the short barking commands driving the members into line. The crack of sisal whips kept time with the ponderous cadence of the march as the leaders paused to allow the coffin to sway like a pendulum hanging from the shoulders of the escort. To this fusion of red and black, the droning voices lent a certain uniformity binding everyone present to the rhythms of the music.

We come from the cemetery,

We went to get our mother,

Hello, mother the Virgin

We are your children

We come to ask your help

You should give us courage.

As the procession poured into the temple, clusters of lanterns at the entryway outlined the stern faces of the magnificently robed acolytes. First inside was the sentinelle, who leapt around the poteau mitan in a mock display of suspicious concern. Behind him walked a lone man carrying a rope, followed closely by the sacred coffin and its circle of retainers. As the bulk of the society squeezed into the room, the guests pulled back into an adjoining chamber until the enclosure swelled with red-and-black robes. Slowly the procession circled the poteau mitan, but there were so many that the members didn’t walk so much as lean into each other, flesh to flesh, sending a single wave surging around the post. A tall, dazzling woman wearing a satin and spangled Edwardian dress and a buccaneer’s hat complete with ostrich plumes took the center of the room. With slow sweeping gestures she orchestrated the entire movement while her face, half hidden beneath her hat, radiated perfect serenity, a look both world-weary and utterly calm.

The power of the moment was dreamlike. The sacred coffin rested on the red-and-black flag, caressed by flowers. The Shanpwel blew out the burning candles they had clasped to their chests and laid them in one of two velvet hats placed at the foot of the coffin. The majestic woman in the glittering robe moved at ease through the huddled members of her procession, nodding to each one. Whistles and conch shells echoed as a great shout arose.

“Twenty-one shots of the cannon in honor of the executive president!” As the whip outside began to crack, the woman, her head and great hat tilting slightly like the axis of a globe, turned slowly back toward the base of the poteau mitan. She was the empress, I now realized, and we were all gathered to celebrate the founding of her society. A man acting as a herald stepped forthrightly to her side.

“Silence! In a moment we …” he began, but the raucous excitement kept him from being heard. “Silence! People, you are not in your houses! Be quiet!” The empress raised an arm and the room fell silent.

“In a moment,” the man continued, “we shall have the honor of presenting you with the attending presidents.” Then one by one as their names were called five Bizango leaders including Jean Baptiste stepped forward. The empress, lifting her face to the light to reveal the finest of features—thin bones and skin drawn beautifully across high cheekbones—formally opened the ceremony.

“Circonstantier, thirty-one March nineteen eighty-four, Séance Ordinaire. By the entire power of the great God Jehovah, Master of the Earth!”

A short man moved forward to assume the center of attention. As his dazed eyes scanned the room, silence followed easily.

“My dear friends,” he began. “Often on a day such as this you have seen me stand before you, and for me it is a joyous occasion, for it allows a chance to welcome you and to share through my words a number of ideas and themes that mean so much to us all. Sadly, tonight my thoughts have escaped, my imagination has escaped, and this prevents me from yielding to my strongest desires. Still, I wish to thank all the guests for responding to the invitation of this morning.”

With this introduction he fell quiet for some time. It was as if for him, with his oral tradition, the spoken words were alive and each had to be savored.

“Brothers and sisters!” he continued. “It is today that we come together in a brotherly communion of thoughts and feelings. Feelings that are crystallized into the force of our brotherhood, the force that gives meaning to our feast of this night.

“Yes, we are talking about our Bizango institution, in the popular language Bizango or Bissago. Bizango is the culture of the people, a culture attached to our past, just as letters and science have their place in the civilization of the elite. Just as all peoples and all races have a history, Bizango has an image of the past, an image taken from an epoch that came before. It is the aspect of our national soul.”

Nobody made a sound as he paused again, and when he resumed, his words spread over the cushion of moist hot bodies, mingling with the heat of the lanterns until the air was vibrant with the ebb and flow of a timeless idea.

“The Bizango brings joy, it brings peace. To the Haitian people Bizango is a religion for the masses because it throws away our regrets, our worries, problems, and difficulties.

“Another meaning of the Bizango is the meaning of the great ceremony at Bwa Caiman. They fall within the same empire of thoughts. Our history, such moments, the history of Macandal, of Romaine La Prophétesse, of Boukman, of Pedro. Those people bore many sacrifices in their breasts. They were alive and they believed! We may also speak of a certain Hyacinthe who as the cannon fired upon him showed no fear, proving to his people that the cannon were water. And what of Macandal! The one who was tied to the execution pole with the bullets ready to smash him but found a way to escape because of the sacrifice he did. Again we see …”

Suddenly a harsh voice from across the room interrupted the speech, directing the gaze of all present at Rachel and me. I recognized the rotund man as one of the presidents who had been introduced earlier.

“By your grace, my friends. Dessalines used to tell us things. I am a man. I am not in my house, but I can talk. Why is it that a blanc is here to listen to our words?” A shiver of confrontation ran through the people around us. With the permission of Jean Baptiste I had been recording parts of the ceremony openly, and now my tape became the center of concern.

“Are our words meant to pass beyond the walls of this room?” In the stiff silence I could hear raindrops hissing as they dropped into a small flame by my ear.

“Give me the tape, quickly,” Rachel said. I did so, and stepping before the assembly she offered the cassette to the offended party and begged his forgiveness. “The blanc is here as my guest, and I am here because I am a child of Guinée.” The tape was accepted with equal grace, and the crisis seemed to have passed when Jean Baptiste stepped forward, face to face with the other president.

“The tape is mine. The blanc is my guest also. My house is his, and the girl is the child of my friend.” Thus, after a moment’s hesitation, the tape came back to me. An uneasy calm returned to the room, and the intense man standing by the poteau mitan resumed his speech from the beginning, closing with a pointed reference to the Haitian revolution.

“We say again that there was a moment in eighteen-oh-four, a moment that bore fruits, that the year eighteen-oh-four bore the children of today. Thank you.”

In a prudent attempt to reestablish the rhythm of the celebration, the empress called immediately for the offerings to the sacred coffin. She led a prayer and then sang the opening verses of the adoration hymn, as one by one each person in the room came forward to place a small sum before the society.

“You certainly won’t go through this if you visit my society.” A short, elfin woman had nestled up beside me, and was speaking softly. “This is crazy. It’s a public ceremony. Everyone should be welcome.” Before we knew it the woman was standing between Rachel and me gently holding each of us by the hand. Her name was Josephine, and her society met every second Wednesday. We were more than welcome to attend, she assured us. A nattering, affectionate conversation ensued between her and Rachel, until interrupted by an aggressive, threatening voice coming from the other side of the room.

“Brothers and sisters! Wait a minute! The ceremony at Bwa Caiman was a purely African affair. There should be no blanc assisting with this ceremony of ours tonight! No blanc should see what we do in the night.” The entire room erupted with angry, disembodied voices. The members split into two camps, a vocal minority who condemned my presence, and the majority who claimed that the feast was a public event, a party open to anyone. Jean Baptiste lunged across the peristyle in our defense, and a semicircle of our supporters formed a cordon around us. My hands reached impulsively behind my back, tentatively gauging the strength of the thatch-and-mud wall. Beside me Rachel trembled.

“Don’t worry,” Josephine whispered, “there are no imbeciles here. It is a public ceremony. If it were private, you wouldn’t be here. But this is only a party.”

Suddenly the electric lights went off and on. Josephine looked concerned. Flames leaping from a fire at the base of the poteau mitan chased the shadows of the dancers across the walls of the temple, distorting them over the cracks in the thatch. A spasm of heavy breathing was broken by cries of intense effort, earth-pounding rhythms as the shoulders of the dancers moved like pistons, whiplash movements that pressed upon us.

“What is this stupidity?” Josephine yelled, even as she pulled us closer to her side. “Shanpwel! Open your asses!” The lights went out again, and the cordon around us tightened.

“Watch out!” Isnard screamed at us. “Breathe through your shirt!” For a single terrifying moment we waited, watching the dust suspended in the amber light. This was the time, Isnard believed, that the powder would come. I grabbed Rachel. All I could sense was past and future flowing over us like an uneddying river.

But nothing happened. Amid shrieks of excitement the lights came back on, and as the tension subsided Rachel’s anxiety gave way to indignation.

“Listen,” she said, “if they don’t want us around here we should leave.”

“No, my darling, you are not walking one step!” Josephine was adamant.

“But this is ridiculous!”

“Don’t worry, child, it is past their time.” And she was right. Whatever anger there had been but moments before and given way to laughter and public displays of welcome. The rotund president who had first objected to my presence now took the floor with a gesture of appeasement.

“Brothers and sisters,” he began after the drums had stopped. “I’ll explain something to you.”

“Silence!” someone shouted.

“The question of a man being more a man or less a man, a man being white or a man being black, never changes whether he is right or wrong.” He was interrupted by resounding applause.

“Myself,” he went on, “I know that to want is to be able. I speak publicly now so that my motives will be understood. I took that cassette for a reason. President Jean Baptiste said it was his, and I gave it back to the blanc. But I am no fool. If the blanc comes to my place, he is welcome to record the vodoun part, and he may learn the songs of the Cannibal, but the words must remain ours. The songs are public, but the words are private. That is all. Excuse me, mademoiselle,” he said looking toward Rachel, “I tell you this as a favor.” Rachel thanked him and promised to take him up on his invitation to attend his ceremony, but her words were faint and lost in the growing pressure of impatient drummers and people anxious to dance.

All reflections and recriminations were dashed by the sudden intensity of motion that turned the peristyle into a great circle of spinning light. In a place that minutes before had been packed shoulder to shoulder there was now room for everyone to move. A dance of dervishes, of arms flailing the air, gave way to one of convulsive movements, of feet pounding the ground and raising small clouds of dust that lingered at knee level across the entire floor. Rachel is as good a dancer as I am clumsy, but in the space of moments even I felt pulled by the rhythm. To the delight of all, we leapt into line, moving as one with the Shanpwel as they lunged across the ground. The staccato beat of the drums flung us into the air, or beat us back into line. You could actually feel its vibration striking at the base of your spine and rising like electricity to your skull. For hours it seemed the drums held us like that, sweat pouring from our skin, the smell of incense and dust, of cheap perfume and rum fusing with a mocking sensuality that brought our bodies so close before flinging them apart. My mind wove its way through the night, becoming lost in some vast region of the past, responding only to the steady rhythm, moving like a great strand of kelp floating in a wild current yet all the time anchored firmly to the earth.

I don’t know when it ended. I only remember waking to the cool wind outside the temple, and the dawn breaking through a pearl gray sky. I remember the stillness of the palm trees, and on the road back a few market women on their mules clip-clopping into town, and the lights of Marcel Pierre’s brothel, his clients leaning on the porch enjoying the aftertaste of a night in the darkness with those soft, pliant women I had almost forgotten.

It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that we were able to appreciate the full significance of the recording we had come so close to losing. Amid the flurry of song and dance ritual, two vital pieces of information stood out. First there was the speech. It was a clear public statement that in explicit terms traced the origins of the Bizango directly to the Haitian revolution and the prerevolutionary leaders of the Maroon bands, precisely in the way that the anthropologist Michel Laguerre had proposed. Secondly, and perhaps more immediately important, the tape provided the names of more than a half-dozen prominent leaders in the Saint Marc region alone. With the generous assistance of Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié, we were able in one day to establish contact with five Bizango founding presidents, or emperors. One of the most informative was also the most impressive, a crafty and powerful figure named Jean-Jacques Leophin.

Our first call on Leophin was purely social, and he received us formally. He was an old man, thin, slightly stooped, with a penchant for gold, which he displayed in wide bands on each finger and great loops of chains around his neck. A snap of his fingers brought forth a table and chairs, a tray of ice and whiskey. We drank in the middle of a blue-walled peristyle, surrounded by leaping images of the djab and the penetrating vision of the Black Virgin. In the yard outside, propped up on blocks like an icon, sat a broken-down Mercedes-Benz.

Beneath these and other frills—a black fedora and the habitual use of a cigarette holder—lay the soul, I would soon learn, of a man fully wed to the mystical. When he spoke his eyes sank deep into every listener, and from within his layered phrases came a resonance that lent his words great density. As we got to know him better he struck me as one of those rare people who have managed to forge a unique personal philosophy from a thousand disparate elements of the universe, and who then dedicate their lives to living up to the tenets of their belief. He spoke in parables, reciting myths and legends from Africa, mixing them liberally with citations from Le Petit Albert, a medieval text of sorcery once banned in Haiti, yet still the bible of choice of every conjurer and magician.

“Bizango is a word that comes from the Cannibal,” he explained. “You find this word in the Red Dragon or the books of the Wizard Emmanuel. Bizango is to prove that change is possible. That’s why we say ‘learn to change.’ We are in the world, and we can change in the world. Everyone says that the Shanpwel change people into pigs, but we say this only because it teaches that everything is relative. You may think that you and I are equals, are humans with the same skin, the same form, but another being looking at us from behind might say that we’re two ‘pigs,’ or ‘donkeys,’ or even ‘invisible.’ This is what is called the Bizango changing. That is what it means.

“Long ago the Shanpwel did not exist. The four great Makala nations, that of the north, south, east, and west, formed the Bizango to create order and respect among their people.”

“In the time before the blanc?”

“Yes, before and after. There was a girl from the south who kept taking the words of one leader and passing them around. She was the mouthpiece stirring up trouble. Finally, the four leaders came together, and once they realized what was going on they had to have her executed. A great public feast followed, and it was announced to the people that what happens within the four nations must stay there, and what happens outside stays outside. That’s when they formed the Bizango to protect against the dangers of the mouth. That’s why even today if someone speaks against the society he must be made to respect his mouth. So we all come together.”

“To form a judgment?”

“No, a council. Someone gets the feast organized—the rice, beans, colas, rum, and so on—and then the major members of the Bizango move apart. The groupe d’état-majeur—president, ministers, the queens. We pass the person. Once we agree that, say, so and so should die January 15, then we go to the emperor, in this region myself, and if the emperor agrees we mark the paper and the person dies. But if anyone disagrees, the case may drag on. Every three months or so we will convene a séance to discuss the case. If we reach an impasse we form a group of thirteen members, and the majority will rule. This is how the Shanpwel works. But a society cannot judge someone who hasn’t directly affected a member. You can’t just work against anyone.”

“Is this what it means to sell someone to the society?”

“Only in that there is a justice. There is always a justice. But selling is different in that it is an action that starts from the people, not the leadership of the society. Selling is a means for each member of the society to seek his own justice. If you have a dispute, you make a small deposit of money and give your name and a description of the problem to the emperor, and if it is conscientious the society will pass both you and the offending party through a judgment.”

“But does the body of the person appear before the society?”

“A stupid question. I tell you again and again, but you don’t listen. I say it is a justice. Of course the accused appears. The emperor dispatches the chasseur, the hunter. That is his task. What kind of justice would judge a man from afar?” Leophin shifted in his chair impatiently. “But naturally these affairs may become complicated. Sometimes the one who has been sold may remain ill for as long as three years while the judgment is pending. In that case, since everyone knows that the sick one is on the list, the family may hire a diviner to go out and find out what happened. Once he does so, the family has one chance to make retribution. Word goes out and the society to whom the person was sold gathers. The family must pay each of the four leaders of the society.”

“So the punished one may be bought back?”

“Under certain circumstances.”

“Such as?”

“Look, I tell you it is a judgment, so the circumstances will vary.”

“But what if I just want to get rid of someone?”

“You will be judged, for it will be you who breaks the code of the society.”

“What code?”

“The seven actions.” Without our asking, like a master of jurisprudence, Jean-Jacques Leophin enumerated the seven transgressions for which one could be sold to a society. These were, in order:

1. Ambition—excessive material advancement at the obvious expense of family and dependents.

2. Displaying lack of respect for one’s fellows.

3. Denigrating the Bizango society.

4. Stealing another man’s woman.

5. Spreading loose talk that slanders and affects the well-being of others.

6. Harming members of one’s family.

7. Land issues—any action that unjustly keeps another from working the land.

The list read like a character profile of Clairvius Narcisse, and listening to it sent me whirling back to his case.

Clairvius fought often with various members of his own family. He sired numerous children whom he didn’t support. By neglecting these and other community obligations, he managed to save enough money so that his house was the first in the lakou to have the thatch roof replaced by tin. But although his profligate existence certainly offended his extended family, the dispute with his brother was basically a question of access to land, and a dispute as serious as that between the Narcisse brothers would likely have involved arbitration by the Bizango society. Herard Simon had told me that it had been an uncle of Clairvius who had actually requested that the tribunal be convened. We can only surmise what might have occurred at that judgment, but there are several points to consider. The father of the two brothers was still alive at the time, and Clairvius Narcisse did not have any children recognized by the community. Now in Haiti it is customary that family land-holdings not be divided up “among the first generation of heirs, since younger brothers would not take it upon themselves to imply such disrespect of the senior ones as to demand that their tracts be split off.” What’s more, if heirs “insist on a formal division before the death of their elders, tradition brands them disrespectful and impertinent.” One of the brothers was clearly wrong in terms of the proper code of conduct of the Haitian peasant society. The most important obligation of a patriarch in Haiti is to keep “family resources intact in order to provide a start in life for children.” This explicit emphasis on posterity would have placed the childless, wifeless Narcisse in a less favorable position compared to the brother who had a large family to support at the time. Furthermore, if Narcisse had, in fact, been in the right and had been zombified by the guilty brother, it is difficult to imagine that the secret society would have permitted that brother to live on in peace in the village for close to twenty years. Given the current chilly relationship between Narcisse and his family, it seems more likely that Clairvius was the guilty party, a conviction held by the majority of my informants in Haiti and reinforced by an extraordinary statement made by Jean-Jacques Leophin the moment I mentioned Narcisse’s name.

“Narcisse’s brother sold him to a society of Caho. It was the seventh condition. It was the parent’s land. He tried to take it by force.” He paused, then added emphatically, “But this doesn’t mean that the society is an evil thing. If someone on the inside of your house betrays you, they deserve death. But that doesn’t make your house a bad place.”

“So the people who took Narcisse were not from his village?”

“This happens. For example, I’m here at Fresineau. Everyone knows that Leophin is the master of the area. I have my limits from Gros Morne up to Montrouis. That’s my quarter. Another society can’t leave Archaie to catch someone in my territory unless he comes to me first. He’ll explain the problem, and if it seems reasonable, I’ll call a séance to discuss giving away the guilty one. If my people object, or if the accusation is unjust, I place him under my protection, and he won’t be harmed. All the emperors communicate between each other, sometimes in person, sometimes by means of the superviseur, the messenger.”

“The Bizango reaches into every corner of the land,” Rachel said in honest amazement.

“It doesn’t reach,” Leophin corrected her. “It is already there. You see, we are stars. We work at night but we touch everything. If you are poor, I will call an assembly to cover your needs. If you are hungry, I will give you food. If you need work, the society will give you enough to start a trade. That is the Bizango. It is hand in hand.

“There is only one thing that the society refuses to get involved in. You can do almost anything, and the society may let you off, but if you stick your mouth in government talk, you can forget it. The society says you must respect the grade of the chief of the law. You can’t just seize any office, you must deserve it. Go through elections and hear the voice of the people.”

“But what if, for example, there is a policeman, abusing a member of the society,” I asked.

“If you like the government, then you’d best remember that all the king’s dogs are kings, even those doing evil. On the other hand, if the policeman is a real bother, one day his chief will call him in and tell him that he’s been transferred. We don’t want to harm him, but we too have our limits of tolerance.”

“So the Bizango presidents work actively with the government. What happens when …”

Leophin interrupted somewhat indignantly. “The government cooperates with us. They have to. Imagine what would happen if some invaders landed in some remote corner of the Department of the Northwest. They would be dead before they left the beaches. But not by the hand of the government. It is the country itself that has been prepared for such things since ancient times.

“The people in the government in Port-au-Prince must cooperate with us. We were here before them, and if we didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be where they are. There are not many guns in the country, but those that there are, we have them.”

This last statement of Jean-Jacques Leophin was no idle boast, at least if we are to judge by the zeal with which prominent national politicians, most notably Dr. François Duvalier, have courted the Bizango societies. The Duvalier revolution, often misrepresented in the Western press and remembered only for its later brutal excesses, began as a reaction on the part of the black majority to the excessive prominence of a small ruling elite that had dominated the nation politically and economically for most of its history. When Duvalier was first elected in 1957, he was unable to trust the army—indeed by the end of his tenure in office there would be over a dozen attempted invasions or coups d’état—and thus he created his own security force, the Volunteers for the National Security, or the Ton Ton Macoute, as they became known. (The latter name, incidentally, comes from a Haitian folktale that admonishes misbehaving children that their Ton Ton, or uncle, will carry them off in his macoute, his shoulder bag.) To date, however, nobody has adequately explained the genesis of the Ton Ton Macoute as a national organization, or the remarkable speed with which it was established and emplaced in virtually every Haitian community. An explanation may lie in the network of the Bizango societies discussed so candidly by Jean-Jacques Leophin.

François Duvalier, a physician by training, was a keen student of Haitian culture. A published ethnologist, he was in his youth a pivotal member of a small group who put out an influential journal called Les Griots, and it was within its pages that the germ of Duvalier’s movement was sown. Though themselves scions of the elite, well educated and thoroughly urban, the intellectuals galvanized by Les Griots were responding to the humiliation of the American occupation and the flaccid acquiescence of their bourgeois peers. They did so by espousing a new nationalism that openly acknowledged the African roots of the Haitian people. At a time when drums and other religious cult objects were being hunted down and burned, and the peasants forced to swear loyalty to the Roman Catholic church, the members of Les Griots declared that vodoun was the legitimate religion of the people. It was a courageous stand, and one that earned Duvalier the unqualified support of the traditional society. During the 1957 election that brought him into power, Duvalier actively sought the endorsement of the houngan, and in certain sections of the country vodoun temples served as local campaign headquarters. With his success, François Duvalier became the first national leader in almost a hundred years to recognize the legitimacy of the vodoun religion and the rights of the people to practice it. During his term in office, he appointed houngan to prominent governmental positions. At least once he had all the vodoun priests in the country brought to the national palace to confer with him. And he was himself rumored to be a practicing houngan. It was an extraordinary transformation of official government policy. A year or two before the accession of Duvalier, vodoun drums were still being burned; a year after, a vodoun priest was serving as minister of education.

Critically, François Duvalier knew that he was surrounded by enemies, and he recognized with equal clarity that his strength and the ultimate power of any black president lay within the traditional society. Throughout his time in office, he went out of his way to penetrate the network of social control that already, as Jean-Jacques Leophin had suggested, existed within that society. He openly courted prominent houngan, and it is no coincidence that a man such as Herard Simon—a man both deeply religious and deeply patriotic—became the effective head of the Ton Ton Macoute for a full fifth of the country. Before Duvalier, blacks had limited access to public or governmental positions. In some cities there were parks where by unwritten agreement blacks were not permitted to walk. For men like Herard, Duvalier seemed like a savior. That was why, when I once asked him if he had had to kill many people during the early days of the struggle, he could reply sincerely, “I didn’t kill any people, only enemies.”

Undoubtedly Duvalier’s close contacts with the houngan put him directly in touch with the Bizango societies and their leaders. Significantly, he was the first national president to take a direct personal interest in the appointment of each chef de section. It is also intriguing that the Haitian peasantry came to regard Duvalier as the personification of Baron Samedi, a spirit prominently associated with the secret societies. In his own dress and public behavior Duvalier appeared to affect that role quite deliberately: the ubiquitous black horn-rimmed glasses, the dark suit, and narrow black tie are the apparel that show up time and again on the old lithographs of the popular spirit. In short, whatever his motives, François Duvalier succeeded in penetrating the traditional vodoun society on a number of levels. The leaders of the secret societies almost inevitably became powerful members of the Ton Ton Macoute, and if the latter was not actually recruited from the Bizango, the membership of the two organizations overlapped to a significant degree. In the end, one might almost ask whether or not François Duvalier himself did not become the symbolic or effective head of the secret societies.

Josephine, the old woman who had befriended us that night at the ceremony, sold beans in the Saint Marc market, so she wasn’t hard to find. By then we were recognized by most of the Shanpwel, and a dozen familiar but peculiarly anonymous faces guided us through the cluttered market stalls. It made for a strange sensation, weaving past the telling smiles, being known but still not knowing.

When we reached her shop—a simple wagon with an awning of tattered cloth, a rusty measuring tin, and a few neat piles of speckled beans—it was untended, but within moments Josephine came scampering back like a schoolgirl, so surprised and delighted that she could scarcely keep still. Leaving her business in the care of a neighbor, she marched us back through the market, pausing often to caper about the stalls of her friends until finally by the most circuitous route imaginable we reached the jeep. Then rather than taking the most direct road to the home of the president of her society—for that was the point of our visit—she managed to have us drive not once but twice through the market.

Eventually Josephine directed us along a dirt road that ran through the irrigated land east of Saint Marc. The valley, like so many along the central coast of Haiti, is an oasis in the midst of a barren man-made desert, and as we reached just past the edge, where the lush fields gave way to scrubland, we stopped. It was a melancholy place—a few tired trees leading up to a small compound literally carved into the porous sidehill. There were two main structures, both small, linked by a tonnelle and surrounded by a wattle fence. Though not old, the mud surface of the temple had already cracked into a thousand pieces. Overhead, a limp Haitian flag hung on a long staff.

Inside it was cooler, and as our eyes adjusted to the light, Josephine introduced us to her president, Andrés Celestin. As it happened we had seen him twice before, once at the ceremony where he had been presented with the other Bizango leaders, and a second time when Rachel’s uncle Robert Erié had pointed him out in the main plaza of Saint Marc. Then he had appeared rather dashing, dressed in the stiff denim uniform of the Ton Ton Macoute. Now he seemed a broken man, lying prostrate on a cot with much of his face swollen and distorted by a sharp blow received, as we would learn later, when two Rara bands had met and clashed several nights previously. He was in no condition to receive anyone, and when despite his obvious pain he tried to stand to greet us, Rachel moved quickly to his side to ease him gently onto his back. He was severely concussed, and though the wound itself was not serious, it had become dangerously infected. We remained with him only long enough to promise to return the next day, and then, leaving some money for food, we hurried back to Saint Marc to purchase medication, which we dispatched with the old woman Josephine. We did return the next day, and each day after that until slowly his condition improved. Finally, about a week after being injured, he felt strong enough to speak with us, and by then, of course, he knew exactly what we needed.

Quite unlike Leophin or Jean Baptiste, established men whose authority was so certain that it appeared transparent, Andrés was a man on the rise, and his every gesture revealed a restless entrepreneurial spirit. As a youth he had deliberately moved close to Saint Marc, a center of Bizango activity, and it came as no surprise to discover later that he had been prominent in Leophin’s society until eventually the competition between them became too great. Dismissed for disobeying orders, he had formed his own society, which he was now in the process of consolidating. He was ambitious, perhaps excessively so, but he wasn’t corrupt, and in a grand manner he was terribly sincere. It was just that like many of his peers, while being true to his gods, he was more than willing to push them a bit toward satisfying his own aspirations. For Andrés, our chance meeting was a potent opportunity, for him no less than us.

“It is quite normal,” he explained, “that we work together. I have something that you want, which is knowledge. And you have something that I need.” He was speaking of more than just money, but also what our connections could mean for his society, and for my part I found his summation refreshingly frank. Behind him a pod of children gathered around a cooking fire, pushing out their hungry bellies. To one side, a tired-looking woman dislodged a clump of coarse sand from the ground to scour a pot; beside her lay piles of spindly firewood, and tin cans of water too precious to bathe in. A certain undeniable truth lay between us. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he lifted his head from the cot and his croaky laughter sealed our agreement.

It was Wednesday, the day when the society met, and that night following Andrés’s instructions we returned to the compound. We were late, as usual, and already most of the members were there, mingling about, waiting somewhat impatiently in the dark for a Coleman lantern so that the ceremony could begin. At the back of the tonnelle, in place of the cooking fires, three women moved impulsively to the rhythm of a small battery of drums. They stopped soon after we arrived. The compound was too small and the members were too few for anyone to feign discretion. Those who knew greeted us fondly; the rest stared in bemused disbelief.

Andrés was completely unfazed by our awkward arrival, and after a few moments of idle conversation he suggested politely that it was a good time to speak with the master. Groping in the darkness, we followed him out of the shelter of the tonnelle and around the corner of his house to a small outbuilding perched precariously on the steepest part of the sidehill. After knocking three times to alert the spirits, Andrés unlocked the rusty latch and led the way inside, passing through a voile curtain that concealed a small altar in the midst of which burned a single wick in a bowl of hot wax. Above the flame, a canopy of dozens of small mirrors and bells hung by ribbons from the ceiling. Rachel and I sat close together, knees touching on two small wicker chairs huddled to one side. Andrés leaned toward us, and for the first time I noticed the black patch that covered his wounded eye.

“You see, you have never met him, and you must. I cannot do something that is beyond my time. He is the one who can really give you the secrets.” Someone coughed behind us, and I realized we were not alone. Andrés pulled back the curtain and ordered whoever it was to bring a bottle of rum. “And tell the people they can dance,” he added before turning back to the altar. “Now, my friends, there are so many lessons. I shall show you great things. Wade, you are a blanc, and Rachel, you must serve as his master to show him all that I show you. Understand? Both of you? Good.”

Andrés picked up a bell and rang it while his free hand swept through the mirrors, sending bits of amber light dancing across every surface. The assistant scuttled back in, placed the bottle at our feet, and backed away. Another chime, and then Andrés sat down, and commenced a hypnotic drone of the liturgy, on and on, beseeching perhaps two hundred or more spirits and powers, until, stumbling over a single syllable, his voice changed. And started to stutter almost uncontrollably. In the guise of the master “Hector Victor,” the pwin, or mystical force, of the society had arrived.

“O-O-O-O-O Wha-wha-what is this? How are you? We-we-we-we have two foreigners here. Where are you from? Port-au-Prince? I-I-I’m glad. I am Hector Victor. I serve anywhere, do-do anything. Listen, little lady. I-I-It seems you need me? You need information? No? What then? O-O-Oh! Ha! So the guy talked to you already. What did he tell you?”

“He said that we should speak with you because you’re the one who knows,” Rachel answered quietly.

“O-O-Oh! It is true. I do know one thing. That is something that costs. It’s like school. Y-You must pay. Y-Y-You see. A-Ahow much can you pay?”

“No, no, Hector Victor, you must tell us the price. I can’t just say any amount.”

“Oh.” The voice paused. “Sa-sa-say, is that rum?” I passed him the bottle. Only in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god. “We-we-well,” Hector Victor continued, “little lady, myself, I know that you can make me much more money than what I make here. So, th-th-this will cost s-s-s-sixty dollars. But you’ll see how worthy it is. Your father is a houngan, no? Y-y-you’ll see how pleased he’ll be.”

“Well,” Rachel paused as if buying vegetables.

“Rachel,” I said quietly, “it’s fine.”

“All right, we’ll pay forty dollars now and owe the rest.”

“Oh. Yes, I can trust you. I surely can. I-I-I’ll take this, but you’ll see that it is worth far more. So, I’ll be going now and let my horse do the work. But remember that Hector Victor can mount any bagi.” Hector Victor turned to the assistant that had brought the rum and handed him one of the bills I had given him. “T-t-t-take this and change it and give it to the others. Tell them they’ll bring more.” The shadowy figure of the assistant scurried out of the bagi.

The master blew his nose into a piece of newsprint, and then sat slumped on his chair looking comically disconsolate. “M-m-m-money,” he sighed, “see how it goes?” Another assistant arrived. “W-w-w-who’s there? Ah! My dear. Listen, there is something we are going to do. Do it well. We need these people. W-w-w-we want them and nothing must go wrong. T-t-t-tell my horse that these people will make us walk over land we never could have walked over.” The assistant distracted us for a moment, insisting that we write down his name so that we could contact him by way of the public announcements on the national radio. The master lifted his one good eye into the light, and once he was sure that the correct information had been recorded, he disappeared, leaving a limp body that soon came to life in the form of Andrés Celestin.

Andrés was exhausted, and it took a few minutes and several drinks of rum before he could pull himself together. Outside the bagi, the rhythm of the drums had changed and the hollow sound of the conch shell signaled the beginning of the séance.

“So,” the president said finally, “now we can get to work. Did Hector Victor speak properly? Good. He can be very rude. Do you have any matches? Stand up, both of you.” Andrés blew out the candle, and the tip of the wick smoldered like a jewel in the darkness before it died.

“This is a moment that is still to come. A hard time when you’ll get very dirty. The clothes you arrive in will be worth nothing when you leave. It is rough, perhaps too rough.” He paused, and I could hear his breathing as he moved away from the altar. “Light the flame!” A match flared and moved toward the candle.

“The candles are stars. Everything falls into flux and day becomes night, the end becomes the beginning. This is the new life. Move away from the light.”

Rachel and I stepped cautiously into the shadows behind the curtain. Andrés took each of us, first Rachel, then me, and taught us how to shake hands, and how to greet the members of the Bizango. Once satisfied, he led us out of the bagi back to the tonnelle. By then the gate of the compound was sealed and guarded, and the Shanpwel had changed skins and fallen into a single rank that ran along the periphery of the enclosure. Andrés called them to attention, then began to speak. Almost every phrase earned him immediate and violent applause. He explained that he had met us at the celebration of Empress Adèle, and that it had infuriated him to have seen us treated so poorly. How many fools could there be, he asked, who did not know that the whites could be important, that they could help when the proper time came?

“The whites need us, and we need them.” Those were his final words, and with them he instructed Rachel and me to shake hands with each member. Slowly, obeying his order, we moved around the ring offering the ritual greeting we had just learned. Some of the members smiled, some giggled, some displayed faces as hard as wood.

The drums began, then stopped, and one of the queens, her voice like a peacock, began the sad plaintive hymn of the adoration. Other women opened the wooden doors of a small earthen chamber and brought out the sacred coffin, the madoulè, the mother of the society. The procession formed, and Andrés added us to its tail, and together with the other members of the Shanpwel we moved in an ever narrowing circle, so slowly that my ankles began to tremble. When the coffin finally came to rest, each member stepped before it, made his or her offering, and saluted. A series of genuflections followed, and there were other lessons. And then, once the coffin had been lifted and marched back to its chamber, Andrés again led us away from the tonnelle to the bagi.

“It is only a beginning,” he told us, “like a shadow of what there is to know.” We would return, he insisted, both to host a feast and to discover other mysteries. After that it would be our duty to come to each séance. Even if I, in particular, was displaced beyond the great water, I would have to send my genie as an emissary—also, of course, the occasional financial offering to hold up those who might be in need. This said, Andrés leaned forward and whispered two passwords that we would have to know. Then, reaching behind him, he brought out four glasses.

“Drink,” he said, handing one to each of us. The green potion seared my throat.

“And this.” The second dose was viscid and syrupy. “Now you will know how things are to be,” he explained. “The first it was bitter. And the second?”

“Sweet,” I replied.

“Yes. Well, this is the Shanpwel. One side is bitter, the other is sweet. When you’re on the bitter side, you won’t know your own mothers.” The president, his silhouette showing through the voile curtain, threw the dregs of each glass onto the ground, and the drops ran together like mercury to sink into the dusty surface of the earth floor.

After that, Rachel and I entered a long, silent passage and for the next month were as strangers to the sunlight.