The Serpent and the Rainbow

Epilogue

“SO IS THIS your choice?” Herard asked. We had met on a roadbed beneath a searing sun. I was ill at the time, my body frail and my throat too dry for talk, and the fevers pushed me into the shade of the scrubland. Herard followed.

“You didn’t listen to me,” he said. “You cannot do these things casually. Everything carries its price. There are things to know and things best left unknown.”

“But we have been received well,” I told him.

“Yes, a child’s game. What do you know?”

“I know that the answers I seek will be found among the Bizango.”

“You know nothing.” He looked away. “And when you fall, will the society of this man be strong enough to lift you up?” The words startled me, for they were the very same as those used by Jean-Jacques Leophin; you could join but one Bizango society, he had cautioned, and it had best be one that could support you in time of need.

“You have been lucky,” Herard continued. “Do not wait for a time when you’ll see things that you should not see.”

“Do you mean the sacrifices?”

“That is the time. Near the end of each year they must gather their powers.”

Herard turned and began to make his way slowly back to the road. As he reached the jeep he called back to me, “You may choose to join the Bizango, or you may come with me and serve the loa. You cannot do both.”

Here were two diverging paths that represented less a choice than a signal that my work had come to a temporary end. To the last Herard would condemn the Bizango, and what he had told me contained a deep warning, a powerful declaration that my actions bore consequences. To complete the initiation into the Bizango society of Andrés Celestin would be an irrevocable step. No longer would I be an outsider, free to alight wherever I chose. I would become part of a matrix, bound to the other members by vows and obligations.

I had arrived in Haiti to investigate zombis. A poison had been found and identified, and a substance had been indicated that was chemically capable of maintaining a person so poisoned in a zombi state. Yet as a Western scientist seeking a folk preparation I had found myself swept into a complex worldview utterly different from my own and one that left me demonstrating less the chemical basis of a popular belief than the psychological and cultural foundations of a chemical event. Perhaps more significantly, the research had suggested that there was a logical purpose to zombification that was consistent with the heritage of the people.

To be sure, I had failed to document a zombi as it was taken from the cemetery, but this was no longer something I deliberately sought out. In the last weeks I had, in fact, been offered two promising opportunities to do so, provided, of course, that the cash payment to the bokor be sufficient. I had gone as far as making the preliminary contacts before I realized that the whole concept had changed. A year or two before I would have gone ahead, emboldened by the deep skepticism I had brought with me to Haiti; now that I had completely overcome my doubts, I found myself forced by that very certainty to turn aside an opportunity that might have offered final proof to those who still shared my early skepticism. The money that the party in question demanded was considerable. If the affair turned out to be fraudulent, I would have wasted the money. If, on the other hand, it turned out to be legitimate, I would have no way of being certain that the money had not been responsible for the victim’s fate. It was an ethical Rubicon I was not willing to cross.

What did remain were the secret societies, but to pursue that connection demanded a new orientation. It would not be enough to document a set of principles as perceived by the Bizango leadership; I would have to observe how they were played out in the day-to-day lives of the people. To do that I would have to enter a community and undertake a study that would require months, not weeks. It was another level of commitment that might well involve completing my initiation into the Bizango society—not as an end in itself but only as a means. It was not something to be undertaken lightly. Regretfully, I decided to curtail my work with Andrés.

It was, in any case, a time for change. Rachel had reports to prepare before she returned to her university and had to stay in the capital. I had a book to write. But it was summer again, the season of the pilgrimages, and just before returning to the States I was drawn north to the festival at Plaine du Nord, where those who serve the loa pay homage to Ogoun, the god of fire and war.

A sacred mapou tree marks the place where once each year a mud pond spreads over a dry roadbed near the center of the village. Like the waters of Saut d’Eau, the mud of the basin is said to be profoundly curative, and each year thousands of pilgrims arrive, some to fill their bottles, some to cleanse their babies, many to bathe. Unlike Saut d’Eau, the area around the basin is constricted by houses that funnel all the energy of the pilgrims into a small, intensely charged space. And in place of the serenity of Damballah, there is the raging energy of Ogoun.

Around the periphery of the basin a ring of candles burns for the spirit, and the pilgrims dressed in bright cotton lean precariously over the mud to leave offerings of rum and meat, rice and wine. There is a battery of drums to one side, and those mounted by the spirit enter the basin, disappear, and emerge transformed. One sees a young man, his body submerged with only his eyes showing, move steadily like a reptile past the legs of naked women, their skin coated with slimy clay. Beside them, children dive like ducks for tossed coins. At the base of the mapou, Ogoun feeds leaves and rum to a sacrificial bull; others reach out to touch it, and then the machete cuts into its throat, and the blood spreads over the surface of the mud.

I was watching all this when I felt something fluid—not water or sweat or rum—trickle down my arm. I turned to a man pressed close beside me and saw his arm, riddled with needles and small blades, and the blood running copiously over the scars of past years, staining some leaves bound to his elbow before dripping from his skin to mine. The man was smiling. He too was possessed, like the youth straddling the dying bull, or the dancers and the women wallowing in the mud.