Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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