Back of Beyond (10 page)

There were patches of millet, too, and other staples. And women out in the hellish heat, clearing more land. The endurance and perseverance of the Haitian hardscrabble farmers hit home that day. Their instinct for freedom, independence, and land to call their own drives them to the most herculean efforts just to keep alive—to grow enough to eat, to sell a little at market, to buy seed to grow again…the eternal cycle. Yet no matter how hopeless their situation seems to outsiders, you see pride and life and determination in their eyes. Somehow they make it work. Year after year after year. As governments tumble in Port-au-Prince and millions of treasury dollars disappear into political pockets, and the Pétionville princes and princesses drive around in shining and ever-larger sedans and the world throws up its hands at the horrors of hapless Haiti, the peasants keep on clearing their fields, planting their crops, and living lives whose rhythms and patterns have ancient origins in their original West Africa homeland, long before the slave traders and the colonialists and the kingly dictators and the never-ending chaos….

Somehow in spite of the boulders, I reached Jean Rabel. A pretty little blue-and-white church, perched on a bluff at the end of a long line of palms, acted as a beacon. The track then promptly became a riverbed—not a ford—but the actual bed of a river for a few miles. A novel way of traveling.

At a riverside market, I bought bags of mangoes, oranges, and bananas for pennies, and gorged my way across the fertile foothills of the Chaine de St. Nicolas to Port-de-Paix. Here at the docks I sat overlooking the famous Tortue Island, once a cavelaced haven for pirates and buccaneers in the days of gold-filled Spanish galleons.

Soup seemed to be the only dish available at the dockside restaurant in spite of its wall painted with every kind of fish and seafood and a sign in Creole boasting “We got everything!” The soup looked tolerable at first, big chunks of chicken and potatoes and carrots. But I’d missed the chilies, whole green chunks of those nefariously lethal, lip-searing, stomach-scorching creatures, obliviously slurped down with the rest of the broth and now sending me into somersaults of agony as I swallowed beer after beer, trying to douse their fires.

Fortunately the coast road after Port-de-Paix was tolerable. The fords were not very deep, the boulders smoothed, and the ruts flattened. My inflamed stomach could at least travel unknotted as I passed lovely beaches and little fishing villages and arrived in Anse à Foleur feeling almost recovered. I even found Jean-Claude without any difficulty, although I still wasn’t sure why Jules had recommended I seek him out. He was very black, very short, and by the wrinkled skin of his face and arms, very old.

One cigar got me a smile, two a handshake, and three a gush of information given at great speed in a raspy half-whisper (the whispers seemed unnecessarily melodramatic as we were sitting in the Jeep), all about voodoo ceremonies, back in the hills, tonight, special celebrations, a houngan called Alisio, and a
mamma
(female voodoo priest), Theral.

I didn’t believe a word of it. He was so theatrical he was ridiculous. Voodoo, I’d been told by people who claimed to know, had virtually disappeared since the ouster of Papa Doc. I was being treated as a tourist and a sucker. I told Jean-Claude that I had to leave to reach Cap Haitien by evening. He looked surprised and hurt. I gave him two more cigars. I didn’t mean to offend him, but Haiti gets too much of a bad rap with all this voodoo stuff…. (Looking back it’s hard to believe I could have been so arrogant—and so dumb.)

From Anse à Foleur the track took a sudden turn inland. My map showed an alternative route along the coast but I was told it had been washed out by recent storms.

“The only way is over the mountains.”

So—over the mountains it was, back to the boulders and gulleys. I had no choice, so I sang songs, ate my mangoes and generally tried to ignore the thrashing and crashing of the poor Jeep as we edged up into the clouds, further and further from the coast.

At the crest of the climb the clouds melted away and I looked down into a magic land. Range upon range of jungle-clad hills rolling away into a violet haze; rivers like bronze snakes winding through the shadowy valleys, thin veils of waterfalls between the canopied tiers of trees. No sign of people or villages.

This was virgin country. All Haiti must have looked like this once, way back before the days of slaves and plantations and colonial empires. I sat by the roadside watching the clouds play tag across the green peaks. The wind was so cool and fresh you could almost drink it. I had been lucky on this journey. I had seen a part of the island few whites had ever seen and this was the climax, this glimpse of ancient Haiti. A moment to treasure.

But Haiti can be mean with its moments. The wind became stronger and colder, the clouds moved in, covering the ranges and the forest. It was suddenly dark, really dark. Leaves and branches began to blow across the track. Time to move on, down the mountainside, into the shelter of the valley. Only the track was even worse on this side, great diagonal gashes of gouged earth littered with loose rocks. I turned the beams on full and drove down slowly through the cloud. Thunder pounded the hills. I tried to whistle to myself as the Jeep creaked and skidded. It could be worse, I thought. We could be having one of those notorious Haitian rainstorms…

And—guess what. A notorious Haitian rainstorm. Wonderful. Just what I needed to end a day that began with a puncture, followed by a morning of the worst desert roads imaginable, followed by a river for a road, a stomach seared by chilies, some phony voodoo peddlers, and now, just when there might be a chance of a nice fluffy bed in Cap Haitien, an evening of skidding down mountainsides, mud slides, and the distinct possibility of being drowned in some raging river crossing. Not my idea of a perfect day.

The rain was like a band of rum-crazed drummers on my roof. I could hardly see anything in front of me. The windshield wipers were useless.

At the first village I knew it was hopeless to go on. The last stream I’d crossed had gone mad, tearing at its own bank, tossing huge branches like twigs, almost toppling the Jeep as I eased her through the surge of syrupy brown water, frothing furiously at the doors.

I’m not sure the village even had a name, it was such a small ramshackle kind of place, looking utterly forlorn in the sheeting rain. I stayed in the Jeep and saw people peeping at me through the narrow doorways of their kays. They probably thought I was mad; they were probably right.

After about half an hour, things eased off. No, that’s completely the wrong image. Someone switched off the storm like a spigot. One moment it was a gray miasma outside, then the pounding on my roof ceased, to be replaced by a pleasant dewy dripping. Color eased back into the picture as if someone was playing with the controls of a TV set. The village actually began to look quite pretty with its little gardens and cottages crouched in the shade of palms. Well—time to move on. Who knows—I might still reach that fluffy bed in Cap Haitien.

A boy came running up, waving his hands.

“Non, blan.”

I pointed ahead.

“Non.” He was adamant.

A few of his friends joined him. I opened the window.

“M’sieur. Rain very strong. No good.”

The other boys all nodded their heads.

“The river. Much water. Very danger.”

They were right. The streams would be full and, according to my map, I had quite a few fords ahead of me. Cap Haitien would have to wait.

And then the strangeness began.

It wasn’t frightening, at least not in the usual way. It was just that things got out of control—out of my control at least. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on except me. I had apparently arrived in the middle of some celebration. The rain had been merely an amusing diversion. Now it was over, I saw all the movement, the lights of candles, the murmurs of songs; I heard drums, not in the village but somewhere back in the hills. There was a sense of festival in the air….

An old man dressed in a torn shirt and baggy black pants came over to me carrying two candles, skinny things, strips of rope dipped once in tallow. He looked at my eyes and laughed, revealing a black maw of a mouth with three enormous teeth. Then he handed me a candle and pointed to where other villagers were walking, up through the forest, beyond the mango trees. Well—why not?

The path was muddy. My boots were soon caked in the stuff and I skidded like a drunk. What am I doing now? Part of me wondered if I should be here. The other part knew I really had no choice. Everyone else walked in bare feet, huge splayed feet, hard as rock on the sole with pink-edged toes. I was tempted to imitate them.

The next few hours were utter confusion to me. Subsequently I’ve learned more about what I actually saw and experienced, but at the time, I was ignorant, cynical and, occasionally, scared stiff. At the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince I’d seen an evening folk dance show that purported to have voodoo elements in it, but, while being colorful and energetic, it felt harmless, sanitized. A safe entertainment for the amusement of blans.

But this night was all fire and power and magic. The spirit I sensed went far beyond any showbiz extravaganza: the villagers were tapping into vast reservoirs of energy, energy that in no way correlated with their thin and often prematurely aged bodies. It was as though the quiet, smiling, candle-carrying inhabitants of this lonely mountain valley had become transformed, possessed by primeval forces that hurled them into dances and spasms and gyrations that, in their everyday world, would have left them drained and gasping after even a few minutes, but which here flung them into higher states of being, made them superhuman, with seemingly boundless energy.

Yet it all began so quietly, almost boring, with three drummers beating out ragtag rhythms and people chatting outside a small mud hut, eating fritters and pork gigots, and placing candles in the trees and around the door of a hut.

It became obvious that this modest building, a peristyle, not much larger than a family kay, was to be the center for the evening’s event. Somehow fifty or so people managed to cram themselves inside around the walls, which were painted in violent purple-blues, lemons, and reds, with primitive figures representing the loas of voodoo but with amusing Catholic overtones—Erzulie, the god-spirit of the heart and love with overtones of the Virgin Mary; Damballah Ouedo (the Snake) with the staff of St. Patrick, and St. Peter as Papa Legba, a sort of master of ceremonies at voodoo rites.

Worshippers believe in the “great God”—Gran Mèt—but see him as too aloof, too concerned with universal challenges to worry about the day-to-day problems of his earthly supplicants. So that’s where the loas come in—the lesser spirits of the plants, the streams, fire, death, and love, and the fierce Guédé, voodoo lord of the crossroads to the underworld. These are the forces that must be recognized and kept in balance and harmony. These are the spirits that are “called” and dominate the fiery ceremonies. Said to enter through the roof of the peristyle down the painted pole, the
poteau-mitoo
in the center of the room, they possess worshippers, seemingly at random, and fling men and women, whirling like dervishes, around and around the cramped space, sending them into paroxysms, reaching out to touch the forces that felt so tangible in that tiny room.

As a novice I understood nothing of the careful sequencing of the ceremony led by the houngan. The incredible noise, the dancing, the sweat, the elaborate drawings of
vévé
patterns in cornmeal in the earth floor, the trembling bodies possessed by the loas, the whirling of machetes, the frantic clapping and chanting in the ancient languages of Benin and Western Africa, the constant boom of the
maman
(the largest drum) behind the sharper sound of the
seconde
drum and the
bula
, the ritual exchanges of sweat, the violent sacrifice of two chickens, the offerings of food at the central post, the strangeness of the interludes when the sounds ceased but continued on in my head…then the crash of the maman and the whole rhythm beginning again, on and on, hour after hour.

It was too much; I couldn’t think. I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing was real. All I could do was let go and feel, remembering the words of one of the CARE workers in Port-au-Prince: “Voodoo is everything—it fills every part of the life of believers—it’s faith, it’s medicine and very necessary medicine in a countryside with hardly any doctors; it’s justice; it’s the ultimate faith and yet it’s tangible—if you ever get to see one of the ceremonies you’ll feel those loas are real—real flesh and blood and with a power you won’t believe….”

Much later on there were more rituals around an altar in a side room, the
houmfor
, filled with sealed urns (said to contain the spirits of the loas), tied bundles of dusty sticks and leaves, plates of flour that had been used for drawing the vévés, and a stone bath set in the floor for sacred washings, rattles made out of gourds, and, most strange of all, neatly framed prints of Christ (with a glowing pink heart), the Virgin, and statuettes of Catholic saints, all under a low ceiling decorated with paper streamers like leftover Christmas decorations.

Sometime just before dawn the ceremonies ended and the people began drifting down out of the forest and back to their homes in the village below. For a while I walked behind a frail elderly man with bowed shoulders and a limp. He turned to me and smiled a wrinkled smile, and I knew I’d seen him before, only then he’d been Papa Legba and he’d been dancing like a disco-crazed youth around the post, crashing into bodies, his face filled with sweat, his eyes bursting with fire and life….

The rest of the drive back through the mountains was uneventful. The fords had become mere trickles again, the sky was aqua blue, and the rain-washed trees sparkled. Eventually I arrived on the coastal plain, passing more world-class beaches, all pristine and all empty.