Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

“Do you mean someone bothering the society, or just anyone?”

“No, of course not anyone. I tell you it is a justice, so they must judge you. Listen, say someone is out on the street and the time is not his. Then perhaps he will receive a coup l’aire just as a warning. He becomes sick a little, and then he remembers not to walk by night.” Jean shrugged, as if what he was saying was the most obvious thing in the world. “But if someone disturbs a member of the society for no reason it will be something else. The guilty one will be sent to sit down. You see, we have our weapons.”

That arsenal, as Jean explained, contained a number of spells and powders—the familiar coup l’aire, coup n’âme, and coup poudre—that were surreptitiously applied to the victim at night. To do so the society executioner set traps in places the person was known to frequent. A powder sprinkled in the form of a cross on the ground to capture a ti bon ange was one example of such a trap. Once caught, the victim could only be saved by the intervention of the society president, a treatment that could cost him dearly.

“They say we eat people,” Jean continued, “and we do, but only in the sense that we take their breath of life.”

“But Herard said that the Bizango will do far more than that.”

“The commandant says what he wants to say.”

“He’s a society of one,” I said with a smile, remembering Herard’s words at Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Jean looked at me, but he didn’t return my smile.

Just what was going on was uncertain—as was whether Herard was still involved. The image he had presented so forcefully of the Bizango was unlike anything we were seeing with Jean Baptiste; yet at the same time he had led us to the ceremony, introduced Jean, and sat all evening delighted to see us participate.

“When might a society take someone?” Rachel asked.

“They are out at night,” Jean began, then hesitated, “or word may come through even by day. Just as long as it becomes known that someone has been talking improperly. Perhaps he is the one who runs to the blanc or the upper-ups in the government and tells them what such and such a society is doing. The person may try to hide, but we shall find him. That is how a man ends up passing through the earth twice.”

“A zombi?” I asked.

Jean regarded me steadily. “Every evildoer will be punished. It is as we sing.” In a high voice that took us back to the night before at Gonaives, he proceeded to sing:

They kill the man

to take his zombi

to make it work.

O Shanpwel O

Don’t yell Shanpwel O

They killed the man

to take his zombi

to make it work .

Jean was laughing aloud even before he finished the verse.

“And what about thieves?” Rachel asked.

“You need proof, you always need proof. If someone complains to the society, they will investigate. If it is true, the trap will be set. If a Shanpwel steals, he is rejected immediately from the society.”

“And if he escapes?” I asked, recalling the way Isnard described dodging the trap.

“For those who are guilty there is no escape. The society will follow him to the ends of the land, even to the height of the Artibonite.”

“Across the water?”

“Even to the streets of New York.”

“But on the land, is this not the work of the chef de section?”

“Yes. It is all the same. The society moves by night, and since most crimes are done in the dark we naturally prevent many things. We work together. The chef de section must know what goes on, and so we tell him. He’ll find out anyway. If the society is going into a territory to take someone, and the chef de section is told and he knows the culprit is guilty, he won’t interfere. Anyway, most often the chef de section is a houngan or president Shanpwel. He walks by day, but by night he too changes his skin.”

“The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate,” Rachel said, echoing the words of Marcel Pierre.

Jean laughed once more. “My friends, what you have seen is so little.” He explained that the ceremony the night before had been no more than a bimonthly training session of a single society. The next week there was planned a regional gathering of all the Saint Marc bands to celebrate the founding of a new society. It would be his honor if we would accompany him as his guests.

BLOOD IN HAITI costs the peasant twenty dollars a liter, assuming he can get the official price at the door of the Red Cross blood bank. Marcel Pierre, Rachel, and I stood by the hospital bed and watched yet another bag of it enter the frail arm of Marcel’s wife, and almost as quickly seep out between her legs to soak the cotton sheets. Public hospitals in Haiti have something in common with the jails; the care of the inmates depends less on their condition than on the ability of their kin to pay—for medicines, food, bedding, even rental space on the lumpy mattresses left over from the American occupation. Marcel had sold most of what he owned, and still no one had done anything to cure his wife. He had shuttled her from hospital to hospital, bringing her south from Saint Marc by camionnette squeezed in among the market women and chickens. Earlier in the day he had spent his last money getting her to the capital only to have to watch her now, lying in the hospital bed, knowing that if he didn’t get more blood by nightfall she would die.

It was under these conditions that his pride allowed him to turn once again to us. For some time I had been giving him money—“advances,” as we agreed, against another preparation. He knew I didn’t need it, just as he knew that the money I had already paid him was far more than any powder was worth. Still, all this remained unsaid that evening when he turned up forlornly at the Peristyle de Mariani. Rachel kissed on him on both cheeks and rushed off to fetch a tray of food. Marcel and I embraced, then sat together on the couch. By now, of course, we knew all about him, not only his business and reputation, but also his relative position in the traditional hierarchy of Saint Marc. He was small stuff, really, a houngan nieg as some had said—one who must walk the streets to have any presence at all. Marcel was an outcast, a pimp, a malfacteur, a powderer, and now more than ever I sensed his isolation. Haitian men do not cry, but tears slipped from Marcel’s eyes. My hand held his, but there was nothing more I could do. Watching Marcel beside me, I realized just how far he and I had come from the early days and the foolhardy images we had both projected to each other.

Max Beauvoir knew all about Marcel’s reputation as well, but when he walked into the room with Rachel he received him as a peer. It was an important gesture, one that moved Marcel visibly. And that night before the ceremony, Max took Marcel aside, and they worked together in the inner sanctum of the temple. Later, after the opening prayer, he honored Marcel by inviting him to lead the ceremony. Marcel took this to heart, and the singing transformed him. In time the spirit Ogoun came up on him, and he raced around the periphery of the peristyle, ripping the tablecloths from beneath the drinks of the startled audience. Beauvoir did nothing to stop him. Ogoun burned with a raging intensity. An hour before, death had seemed so close. Now the man had become a god, and death was suddenly an impossibility.

Rachel and I spent most of the next day moving around Port-au-Prince with Marcel—buying more blood, finding a clinic for his wife, a rooming house for his daughter. It was one reason we were late getting to Saint Marc that night for Jean Baptiste’s Bizango ceremony. There were others. The rain again flooded the Truman Boulevard, backing up traffic halfway down the Carrefour Road, and then we ran into the presidential motorcade that blocked the road just north of the capital. Finally, there was Isnard, who had turned up unexpectedly at Mariani with an invitation to attend a Bizango ceremony early that same evening in Archaie. By the time we had negotiated the various traffic snarls and ferried Isnard on a number of last-minute errands in the capital, it was already well past dark. A blinding rain slowed our journey north, as did the unsuccessful diversion at Archaie. The site of Isnard’s reputed ceremony was deserted and the hounfour shrouded in darkness, save for the warm embers of a recent fire. Behind a crack in the sealed door of a neighboring hut a lone woman dressed in red and black informed Isnard that someone had died during the ceremony, and the society had fled. By the time our jeep once more gathered momentum against the deepening night, we knew that we would be late for our rendezvous with Jean Baptiste.