Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

These revelations of Isnard, particularly the notion of “selling someone to the society,” brought together the two separate but obviously related sides of the mystery. On the one hand there was the case of Clairvius Narcisse—his reference to “the masters of the land,” a secret tribunal that had judged him, and a powder that had allowed him to pass through the earth. On the other stood the Bizango and their provocative but tentative link to the secret societies of West Africa, their knowledge of poisons, their use of tribunals and judicial process, their pervasive influence on community life. Our conversations with Isnard cast an image of the Bizango quite different from the popular stereotype, and at odds with Herard’s dark picture of a wholly malevolent organization. Just how much of what Isnard told us was true we had no way of telling, but given his longtime friendship with the Beauvoirs we were encouraged to pursue our quest with him. As a youth Isnard had lived for some time with Max and his family, so we had this connection as a key to his confidence. Over the next ten days or so we met frequently both at his home and in the privacy of the Peristyle de Mariani. Our relationship with him blossomed, and he had managed to get us invited to a Bizango ceremony to take place the following week in Archaie when we received a summons from Herard Simon.

Herard wasn’t on the corner by the theater as expected, and so while we waited Rachel and I took in the last few minutes of that week’s movie, which turned out to be an unimaginably poor print of Raiders of the Lost Ark . The soundtrack was unintelligible, and as a result the movie became as much as anything a Rorschach test measuring the sensibilities of the audience. The climactic scene when the spirits shoot out of the ark and the flesh of the Nazi melts down was simply too much for many of the viewers. Pandemonium gripped the theater. Amid shouts of “Loup garou”—the werewolf—someone screamed a warning to pregnant women, and another cautioned all of us to tie ribbons around our left arm. It was a scene beyond anything in the picture itself. As the film ended the madness poured onto the street, and amid the shouts and laughter we barely heard Herard’s harsh whistle. He had been in the theater the entire time, had in fact loved the movie, particularly the moment when the hero was trapped with the snakes in the Egyptian crypt.

“Someone born with a serpent’s blood could do it,” he assured us. “Otherwise it had to be a mystical thing.” Herard explained that if you emptied your mind of all worries and made space you could shelter the spiritual allies that might allow a man to do the sorts of things that went on in the film.

“Only a fool,” he added pointedly, his lips parting in the faint semblance of a smile, “would attempt to dance alone in the jaw of a lion.”

Herard, of course, was aware of our recent activities in Archaie, our conversations with Isnard, even the invitation we had received to attend a Bizango ceremony the following week. I stepped away from his gratuitous, thinly veiled advice to join a small knot of moviegoers relieving themselves against the whitewashed wall of the theater.

“What kind of blanc pisses in the alley?” Herard called out as I came back to his crumbling jeep. “Mes amis , I can see it now. Once again my house is to become a resort of malfacteurs!” Trailing that laugh of his behind him, Herard stepped out of the small circle of light coming from the theater and without word or gesture led us away.

He carried a wooden sword as a staff, and his unwieldy pace took us from the center of town into a maze of narrow paths bordered by small houses of caked mud. It was getting late now, too late for most Haitians to be out. There was little movement, and with the blackout no light save that of the moon and the fitful glow of the odd lamp carelessly left burning. But the maze was alive with sounds—soft voices, babies crying, and the creaking of gates broken at the hinges. As we walked along, my imagination probed the darkness trying to pick out the meaning in the lives of these people living beneath thatch, surviving on the produce of gardens covered by crusted earth. From overhead came the slow drift of sweet ocean wind, sibilant among the fronds of the palm trees, and from the path the profane scent of man—squalid waste and rotting fruit, the corpse of a mule quivering with rats.

“Honneur!”

Herard had paused before a tall gate and rapped three times with his staff. No answer. He knocked again, repeating the customary salutation. There was some movement behind the gate but still no response. Finally, a lone woman’s voice came out to interrogate the darkness. Herard named a man living on the other side of the compound and instructed her to go get him. When she refused, Herard’s tongue lashed out, and the quiet alleyway exploded with all the intensity of an unbalanced dogfight. “Woman, guard your mouth!” Herard bellowed. “Do you want a coup l’aire? Shall I enter and shut your teeth? Shall I sow salt in every crease in your decayed skin?”

Another voice suddenly, and then the stiff click of the steel latch and the livid face of an old man, wild and ragged, poked out past the edge of the gate. When the door swung open and the woman saw whom she had been yelling at, she could not have appeared more frightened if confronted by a viper.

Herard gently ignored her remorse and motioned us to follow him through the tall gate into a compound set about with many huts. The living quarters were cloaked in darkness, but to one side separated by a small planting of bananas was a large tonnelle , the thatched canopy of a temple. Between the slats of bamboo that walled the temple we could see the flicker of lamplights, and numerous people passing silently before them. A man sat alone on a stool at the door of the enclosure, his hands clasping a tin cup. Just as we stepped beyond the flapping leaves of the plantains, whistles pierced the black air, and from the shadows a small group of men appeared, stepped several paces toward us, and then, seeing Herard, greeted him politely before slipping away.

More than two dozen faces met us as we stepped across the threshold. At first obviously startled, within moments they had fallen back within themselves, feigning a polite indifference. One row of benches and another of cane-backed chairs stretched along a wall of the enclosure, and three vacant places appeared directly before the poteau mitan in the front row of chairs. Herard told us to sit, then slipped out the back door of the tonnelle. Within moments a matronly woman trailing the sweet pungent scent of a Haitian kitchen—bay and basil, peppercorns and peanut oil—appeared with thimbles of tnick syrupy coffee. Across from us two young men were setting up a battery of drums; they cast furtive glances at Rachel as she cracked open a bottle of rum, tipped it three times toward the poteau mitan, and took a drink. A murmur of approval ran along the benches behind her.

The peristyle was similar to others we had visited, with a single centerpost and three sides of bamboo and thatch running upon a solid wall of wattle and daub. A tin roof on top of flimsy rafters seemingly supported by the web of strings displayed what must have been a hundred faces of President Jean-Claude Duvalier and ten times as many small Haitian flags. Three doors in the wall led to the inner sanctum of the temple, and there were two exits—the doorway we had entered through, and an open passage at the other end through which Herard had left. The benches were full, but people continued to arrive—the men stolid and unusually grave, the women determined, and everyone wearing fresh clothes: cotton beaten over river rocks, hung out to dry on tree limbs, pressed with ember irons and liberally scented with talcum powder. As at other vodoun gatherings I had attended, there were more women than men. Many of them arrived with pots of food that were hastily carried to charcoal cooking fires flickering beyond the far end of the enclosure.