Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

“Did you eat the meat?” he asked as Rachel and I slowly unfolded the pelt.

“They say it is forbidden,” I answered honestly.

“The whites say this?”

“No, the Indians.”

“Good. You see,” he said, turning to Rachel, “it is as I told your father. Someone of such wildness learns nothing from his elders. So he goes to the wild places to be among the leaves. Now he appears again among the living because leaves are not enough.”

I followed his logic only enough to see that Herard had found a comfortable image for me, untrue but meaningful for him. Since I fitted none of his categories and defied his common image of foreigners, he had forged a new category, a composite not unlike a collage he might have made up of scattered impressions cut from a dozen grade B movies. The jungles, the Amazonian myths and tribes I had spoken of, the animals I had described, some photographs I had shown him: in the end I was something wild, not a white, and that was all there was to it.

“But that’s not why he is here,” Rachel said. “He has come back because we have come together, because …”

Herard lifted his hands before his face, then rose painfully to his feet muttering an undercurrent of groans and unintelligible words.

“Your father has told me,” he said finally. “Rachel, do you think this is a game? Bizango is diabolic. It is not what you think.”

“But there are those who say the Bizango rite is life itself.”

Herard had not expected such a prompt and audacious reply from the Rachel he had known, and for a quick moment a look of baffled vexation came over him. “They can say what they want. The ritual speaks the truth. Listen to the songs. What do they say? None of them says ‘give me life.’ And when they put the money in the coffin, what do they sing? ‘This money is for the djab,’ the devil, or ‘Woman, you have two children, if I take one you’d better not yell or I’ll eat you up!’ The songs have only one message—Kill! Kill! Kill!” Rachel began to say something, but Herard was not to be interrupted. “To do a good service in the Bizango you must do it in a human skull. And it can’t be a skull from beneath the earth, it must be a skull they prepare. Their chalice is a human skull. What does this tell you, child?”

“It is something that must be done.” Rachel was unrelenting, her voice untouched by fear.

“Then let me tell you what will happen. When an outsider intrudes on the society, when he tries to enter the Bizango, he receives a coup l’aire or a coup poudre. Do you want to see beasts fly? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, if you are lucky they shall only frighten you and tie you to the poteau mitan while twenty Shanpwel with knives dance around you. On the side they’ll have a pot of oil, with cooking meat floating on the surface. Only they’ll have a finger in it, and you will not know if the meat comes from your mother. Then they judge you, and you pray that the president says you’re innocent.”

“But we shall be.”

He grabbed my hand, holding it close to his face until I could feel his breath. “Not him!” he snorted.

“No Haitian reads the color of a man’s skin.”

“Girl, stop this foolishness. The Americans stole the country once. In the days of the Father they tried to take it again. No foreigner walks under the cover of the night.”

“Unless you take us.”

“Never. Rachel, your days are young, and Wade must still serve the loa. Bizango is djab, it is evil, and you must not begin it.”

“We only want to see what they do.”

Herard said nothing. He was a man long unaccustomed to argument. Usually when others had finished talking, he would declare his will in a few flat phrases and wait calmly for obedience. But tonight, oddly, Rachel had the last word.

Our disappointment in Herard Simon’s rebuff aside, we soon found, to my surprise if not Rachel’s, Haitians who were more than willing to speak about the Bizango or Shanpwel, terms that many used interchangeably. Within a matter of days of our visit to Herard, Rachel and I had heard people accuse the secret societies of just about every conceivable amoral activity from eating children to transforming innocent victims into pigs. From everything we could gather the public face of the Bizango was still as nefarious as anything that had been reported in the popular or academic literature. It was therefore with special interest that we listened to the account told us by a young man from the coastal settlement of Archaie, a fellow named Isnard who was twenty-five when he entered the Bizango in 1980.

Since his youth Isnard had been warned against going out at night, but one evening when he again heard the drums of the society, and while his mother thought he was asleep, he slipped out of the lakou and followed the sound to a not-distant compound. At the gate he was met by a sentinel, who turned out to be a friend, and while they were speaking a man identified as the president of the local society came out to share a drink with the sentinel. The president, also a friend, invited Isnard to enter. That night two societies were meeting, and the bourreau, or executioner, of the visiting society was an enemy of Isnard’s. Immediately he gave the order for Isnard to be “caught.” A call went out for the members to form a line. Isnard did what he could to mimic the others, but he knew none of the society’s ritualistic gestures, nor any of the songs, and with the society members clad in brilliant red-and-black robes he stood out like a sore thumb. In his own words he had yet “to take off his skin to put on the other.”

The drums began, and the singing rose. The tension around him built terribly until a horrible face running with tears and blood cried out the lyrics that Isnard knew were meant for him: “That big, big goat in the middle of our house, the smart one is the one I want to catch.” Our friend held his breath until his lungs hurt. He thought he was lost, and it was then that his genie came, not exactly possessing him but giving him the strength and mystical agility he needed. Just before they threw the first trap, the lights died and Isnard leapt out of line. They missed, striking instead the one standing next to where he had been. They tried again, and then again, until no fewer than ten members were caught by the trap. When the society leaders finally realized that this young man could not be caught, they sent three officials—the first queen, second queen, and the flag queen—to arrest him. Blindfolded, Isnard was taken before the cross of Baron Samedi to plead his case. Mercifully, the baron acknowledged his innocence, for at that very instant the song came into his mouth:

Cross of Jubilee, Cross of Jubilee

I am innocent!

Impressed by such an endorsement, the Bizango leaders took immediate steps to make Isnard a member of the society, and that night his initiation began. They taught him what he needed to know, so that now he could walk into any society gathering in the land.

Once initiated, however, Isnard discovered that the Bizango was unlike anything he had been told as a child. Rather than something evil, he found it a place of security and support. Whereas his mother had described the nocturnal forays of the societies as criminal and predatory, Isnard came to realize that the victims taken at night are not the innocent, but those who have done something wrong. As he put it, “In my village you kill yourself. People don’t kill you.” Those who must be out on the streets after midnight and who happen to encounter a Bizango band need only kneel in respect and cover their heads and eyes to be left alone.

Isnard also learned that he could appeal to the society in time of need. Should a sudden illness afflict a member of his family, the society would lend money to cover the medical bills. A member who got in trouble with the police, if innocent, could count on the Bizango leaders to use their contacts to set him free. Perhaps most importantly, Isnard found that the society could protect him from the capricious actions of his enemies. If, for example, someone should spread a rumor that cost you your job, by the code of the society you had the right to seek retribution. Again in Isnard’s own words, “If your mouth stops me from living, if you oppose yourself to my eating, I oppose myself to your living.” To exercise that right, a member need only contact the emperor—the founding president—and offer to “sell” the enemy to the society. The emperor, if he believed the case warranted a judgment, would dispatch an escort to bring both the plaintiff and the accused before the society. From what Isnard explained, however, it was not the flesh of the two that was presented but rather their ti bon ange, and though the experience would be remembered as a dream, their physical bodies would never have left their beds. This magical feat was accomplished by the escort—not a man, but the mystical force of the Bizango society. It cast a spell that caused the two adversaries to fall ill, and then just as death came near, it took the ti bon ange of each one. If your force was strong, if innocence was upon you, death was not possible, but the ti bon ange that was judged guilty would never return, and the corps cadavre of the individual would be discovered the next day in bed with the string of life cut. Selling an enemy to the society, however, was never done casually, for if the accused was deemed innocent at the tribunal, it would be the plaintiff who would be guilty, guilty of spreading a falsehood, and it would be he who was punished.