Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

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

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

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

“It surprises you.”

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

“Yes, it is amazing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stood up to leave.

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

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

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

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

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