Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

We followed our insouciant guides into a dense canebrake and then made our way slowly until reaching a narrow path that pointed to a small house perched on a high mound of earth. In the shade of its porch two men were pounding grain in a mortar, the rhythmic movement of the pestles fluid and powerful. Oris nodded to Rachel, then he and his companion backed away and the reeds closed behind them.

“Honneur!” Rachel called out as we approached. The men glanced up, and one of them sent a young child scurrying into the house. They continued to look at us for a while, then returned to their work. It was a crude welcome, far below the standards of peasant etiquette. We waited beneath a tree laden with green oranges until a frail old woman appeared. She was the mother of Ti Femme, and her name was Mercilia. We gave her ours, and she invited us into the front chamber of her home, where we shared cigarettes and coffee. After several minutes of perfunctory chatter, we came to the point of our visit.

“The girl died by God’s will,” Mercilia said, “and was revived by God’s will. We know nothing of these things. They are wrong to say someone killed her. She died, she just died.”

“Yes, that is what we have heard. And she had been quite ill, I suppose.”

“For months, fever and a pressure from beneath her heart. She was a good girl, everyone liked her. They all came to the funeral. There were two wakes.” She nodded confidentially toward Rachel. “The coffin didn’t come, and then it rained.”

Rachel cast a perplexed glance my way, then turned quickly back to Mercilia. “Where was she when she died?”

“Right here in the house of her birth. In the night. They buried her at daybreak. I went to the grave three days after.” She was rocking slowly on the edge of her chair. “Ti Femme never said anything about passing through the earth, only that she heard people say she was dead like she was dreaming and she couldn’t do anything. When I went I didn’t know she wasn’t there.”

“Where is she now?” Rachel asked.

“With the state, in the clinic. If I could, I would have her here, but my husband is dead and Ti Femme has no one and is a child. When they found her, she couldn’t even bathe or comb her own hair.”

The door creaked open revealing a pod of children eavesdropping. Mercilia shooed them away. A pair of chickens slipped past her legs and sped into the room, clucking and pecking the cement floor out of habit. Rachel and I stood up to leave.

“There was not a single person who didn’t like her,” Mercilia volunteered, as she took a little money from my hand. “She never had arguments with anyone.”

As expected, our talkative guides were waiting for us just beyond the canebrake. Oris was stretched out in the shade of a mombin batard tree, resting on one elbow and gnawing on a stick of sugarcane.

“Well?” he asked with puckish confidence.

“Well what?” Rachel replied, laughing.

The walk back to our jeep was uneventful, and once we had dispatched the two lads at the marketplace Rachel turned to me.

“It’s odd, you know. A wake is always held at night, and if there were two the body must have been waiting around for what, thirty-six hours?”

“At least.”

“Wouldn’t the family have noticed that it hadn’t begun to decompose?”

“You’d assume so.” I thought for a minute. “What do you make of the boy’s story.”

“I’m not sure. But there is a friend of my father’s on the coast who trades here, and she would know.”

The sun was just going down when we reached the outskirts of Gonaives and pulled up to a dusty compound enclosed by a tall blue-and-green wall decorated with a great naive painting of a mermaid.

“It’s a nightclub sometimes,” Rachel explained. “Clermezine is the mermaid, it’s one of her spirits. She’s a great serviteur.” Rachel said something to one of the idlers hanging around the entrance. He slipped inside and returned in a moment followed by a young woman. Rachel kissed her gently on both cheeks, and we followed her past a concrete dance floor and a broken-down bandstand to the inner courtyard. To one side some kind of noisy cabal was under way, presided over by a most extraordinary woman. When she stood up to receive us she was as regal and imposing as a queen. Rachel disappeared beneath a heap of endearments, and before we had a chance to find the places made for us in the small circle of chairs, a tray of steaming thick coffee arrived.

Within a few moments a great whirlwind of voices enveloped us. I had no idea what was going on. The woman in charge seemed in deadly earnest, and one of the men grew steadily angrier, but Rachel was beside herself with laughter. From what I later gathered the man had been entrusted with some task, which he had failed to carry out. The woman suggested that if he let her down again, “there won’t be a shovel small enough to pick up your pieces.” He in turn threatened to send a loup garou , a werewolf, her way. She countered by saying that she could fly faster than anything he could come up with, especially if, like him, it was hindered “by those things that hang between your legs.” This nattering salacious humor continued for some time, until finally the woman bellowed a few harsh words that cut him off immediately.

The subject of Ti Femme set her off again. She explained that Ti Femme used to come down to Gonaives to buy cornmeal, which she then sold at a profit in Ennery and Savanne Carée. She called her maloktcho , a Creole invective that translates poorly as “crude, uncivilized, raw.” Like young Oris, she said that Ti Femme was rude and always swore at people. She was also dishonest.

“If you went to buy from her, and what she was selling was worth five gourdes, she’d say seven, then six, and you’d say five and she’d take it. But when she had measured it out, she’d hand it to you and say six. That’s why they killed her.”

“Some say her family was behind it.”

“I tell you it was in the market. Everyone hated her. If you left your money out, she’d take it. She was a thief.”

“It could have been anyone, then?”

“All of them! No one person could afford to kill her.”

The next morning we passed by the Baptist mission at Passereine, intending to speak with Jay Ausherman, the American woman who had cared for Ti Femme just after she was found in the Ennery marketplace in 1979. The missionary was out of the country, but as we drove away I noticed a robust, balding man sitting alone on the steps of the cinderblock church. His was not a face readily forgotten. As we soon discovered, Clairvius Narcisse had been living off and on at the mission since being discharged from the psychiatric institute.

In this, the first of a number of informal interviews that took place away from Douyon’s clinic, Narcisse spoke more easily about his ordeal. He had been a very strong man, and almost never sick, he claimed, and he hadn’t suspected anything. There had been a dispute with one of his brothers, a bokor who coveted a piece of land that Narcisse had been cultivating, and only now did he fully understand what had occurred. His brother passed the magic to him on a Sunday. Tuesday he had been in Gonaives, feeling weak and nauseated. By the time he entered the hospital late that day, he was coughing and having difficulty breathing. By noon the next day, he was dying.

“What was this poison they passed onto you?” Rachel interrupted.

“There was no poison,” he replied, “otherwise my bones would have rotted under the earth. The bokor sent for my soul. That’s how it was done.”

“In the basin?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s full of water, but they prick your skin and call the spirit and the water changes into blood.”