Chapter VII: Hither and Yon in the Haitian Bush (1)

Of many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in the company of gendarme officers, the first was to the _caco_-infested district of Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on an inspection trip there had a seat left after his assistant and a native gendarme had been accommodated. Among the four of us there were as many revolvers and three rifles, all ready for instant action. One can, of course, hire private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from the decided expense, a Haitian chauffeur under military orders is much to be preferred to one who is subject to his own whims; moreover, there is much more to be seen and heard in gendarme company, and, lastly, if one chances to “pop off” a _caco_, there is not even the trouble of explaining, for one’s companions will do that in their laconic report to headquarters.

There are few roads in the West Indies as crowded as that broad new highway across the plain which is a continuation of the wide main street of Port au Prince. By it all traffic from the north and west enters the capital. The overwhelming majority of travelers are market-women, most of them barefooted and afoot, but a large number are seated sidewise on their donkeys or small mules, balancing on their toes the slippers, which are never known to fall off under any provocation. Pedestrians carry their invariably heavy and cumbersome loads on their heads, the haughtier class in crude saddle-bags, and the sight of this river of jogging humanity, often completely filling the broad highway as far as it can be seen in the heat-hazy distance, is one of which we never tired as often as we rode out through it.

At the time of the outbreak against the French the population roughly was made up of thirty thousand whites, as many “people of color,” and four hundred and fifty thousand blacks. There has been, of course, no census since that time, but signs indicate that Haiti has now two and a half million inhabitants, for however unproductive the semi-savage hordes may be in other ways, they are diligent in the process of multiplication. White people are more rare to-day, even if one counts our forces of occupation, than before the revolt, the mixed race has not greatly increased, so that fully nine tenths of the population are full-blooded Africans. Close observers are convinced that, thanks mainly to the constant revolutions, there are three females to every male, and of the latter a considerable number are now roaming the hills of the interior as _cacos_. Furthermore, the men take little part in selling the country produce. The result is that the stream of humanity pouring into the capital is almost entirely made up of jet-black women and girls.

The throng was particularly dense on the morning of our journey to Las Cahobas, for it was Friday, and the great weekly market in Port au Prince begins at dawn on Saturday morning. An American once stationed himself at the typical negro arch of triumph, straddling the entrance from the Cul-de-Sac to the capital, and counted thirty thousand travelers in an hour, of whom all but about two hundred were market-women. They were somewhat less multitudinous during our stay in Haiti, for the Americans had recently set a maximum scale of prices for foodstuffs, and many of the women had gone on strike and refused to bring their produce to town. They had another grievance in the requirement to sell most things by weight. For generations they had sold only by the “pile,” consisting of three articles of such things as eggs, plantains, yams, and the like, or of tiny heaps in the case of grains and similar produce; few of them, moreover, could afford to buy scales, and they resented the right given purchasers to appeal to gendarmes stationed in the market-places for the verifying of weights. But only those who had seen it under still more crowded conditions would have realized that the highway was not thronged to its full density on this particular morning.

Through the main street, out past the only modern sugar-mill in Haiti, for miles across the plain, our constantly honking Ford plowed through this endless procession of black humanity, casting it aside in two turbulent furrows of donkeys, mules, women, and multifarious bundles. There is nothing more amusing, and pathetic, too, than the behavior of the primitive masses of Haiti before an automobile. This is scarcely to be wondered at in a country where any wheeled traffic except a very rare ox-cart crawling along on its creaking and wobbling wheels was unknown up to a few years ago, and where the half-dozen automobiles of Port au Prince could not make their way into the country until the Americans had begun the reconstruction of the roads. But it is proof, too, of the close relationship of the Haitians to their savage brethren in central Africa. Just like this, one can easily imagine, the latter would act at the sudden apparition of a strange machine which the great mass of Haitians firmly believe is run by voodoo spirits devoted to the white man.

The highway, like most of those the Americans have built, is of boulevard width, and there is ample room for even such a throng as this to pass an automobile in safety. But the primitive-minded natives are terror-stricken at sight of one bearing down upon them. The mounted women invariably tumble off their animals and fall to beating, pushing, and dragging them to the extreme edge of the road, at the same time shrieking as if the Grim Reaper had suddenly appeared before them with his sickle poised. The pedestrians succumb to a similar panic, so that the journey out the flat highway presents a constant vista of dismounting women and a turmoil of animals and frightened human beings tumbling over one another in their excited eagerness to get well out of reach of the swiftly approaching demon of destruction. Farther on, where the road begins to wind, and the cuts into the hills are often deep, the scene is still more laughter-provoking, for the startled animals invariably bury their noses in the sheer road-banks and will not, for all the cajolery or threats in the world, swing in sidewise along them. If they are donkeys, the women pick up their hind quarters and lift them out of the way by main force; when they are too large for this courageous treatment, the riders put a shoulder to the quivering rumps, abandon those useless tactics to drag at the halters as the machine draws nearer, and finally bury their faces also in the bank, as if to shut out the horrible experience of seeing their precious animals mutilated beyond recognition.

Still more distracting to drivers is the behavior of persons approached from the rear. A horn is of little use in this case. The Haitian’s hearing is acute enough, but his mind does not synchronize in its various faculties; he is aware of a disagreeable noise behind him, but that noise does not register as a warning of danger and a call for action. Then, when at last he realizes that it means something and is addressed to him, or when the bumper or fender touches his ragged coat-tail, he is electrified into record-breaking activity. Unfortunately, his psychology is that of the chicken, and in eight cases out of ten he darts across the road instead of withdrawing to the side of it. This happens even when he is far out of danger at the edge of a wide street or highway, and every automobile trip through the crowded parts of Haiti is a constant succession of interweaving pedestrians bent on getting to the opposite side of the road.

An American estate manager who drives a heavy car at a high rate of speed, yet who is noted for his freedom from accidents, was bowling alone one September afternoon far out in the country. The road was twenty-two feet wide, and he was driving to the right of it, without an animate object in sight except for one ragged countryman plodding along the extreme left in the same direction. Seeing no reason to do so, he did not blow his horn. Suddenly the pedestrian caught sight of the car out of the tail of an eye and darted across the road. The machine struck him squarely and knocked him, as was afterward proved by measurement, fifty-two feet, then ran completely over him. The driver hurried him back to a hospital, where it was found that the only injuries he had sustained were a few minor bruises and a gash on the head. This was treated, and a few days later he was discharged, and returned to his hut, where he died the next week of blood poisoning caused by the native healer whom he insisted on having redress his almost healed wound.

Though somewhat stony and grown with an ugly, thorny vegetation, the great Cul-de-Sac plain is noted for its fertility. Here the aborigines cultivated cotton and tobacco; at the time of French expulsion it had nearly seven thousand plantations, chiefly of sugar-cane, which was brought to Haiti from the Canary Islands early in the sixteenth century. The French had covered it with a thorough irrigation system, with a _grand bassin_ in the hills above and streams of water spreading from it like the fingers of the hand to all parts of the plain. There were numerous splendid highways between towns and estates, and the ninety thousand acres were dotted with fine residences, hundreds of sugar-mills, and many coffee, cotton, and indigo works. To-day the roads which our forces of occupation, or the two American companies that are beginning to reclaim some of the plain, have not found time to restore are rutty successions of mud-holes so narrowed by ever-encroaching vegetation as to resemble the trails of blackest Africa, or have disappeared entirely. There are a few rude bridges, usually patched upon the crumbling remains of once fine French structures, but as a rule streams are forded. Except where the newcomers have constructed new ones, the saying in Haiti is, “Never cross a bridge if you can go around it.” Many of the former estates are completely overgrown with brush and broken walls, trees rise from former courtyards, the remnants of once sumptuous halls are the haunts of bats, night birds, and lizards. In some of the less dilapidated ruins negro families now cluster; most of them live in shanties patched together of jungle rubbish, their only furnishings a sleeping-net and a German enamelware pot. Whatever else he lacks, the Haitian always has the latter, its holes stopped with corncobs until they become too large, when the pot is filled with earth, planted with flowers, and set up in a conspicuous position about the hovel. Everywhere are to be found reminders of the prosperous days when Haiti was France’s richest colony. Large, semispherical iron sugar-kettles, rusted, broken, and full of holes, lie tumbled everywhere along the highway and across the plain. Old French bells bearing pre-Napoleonic dates and quaint inscriptions, ruined stone aqueducts, mammoth grass-grown stairways, rust-eaten machinery, inexplicable stone ruins of all shapes and sizes, are stumbled upon wherever the visitor rambles.

The characteristic sour stench of a dirty little sugar- and rum-mill only rarely assails the nostrils. The natives have lost not only the energy, but almost the knowledge, required for the growing and making of sugar, producing only _rapadoue_, dark-brown lumps of crude, coagulated molasses, which, wrapped in leaves, are to be found in every Haitian market. The American companies found the people so ignorant of agricultural methods that it was impossible to introduce the _colono_ system. The men and women who work in the sugar- and cotton-fields of these new enterprises are as patched and ragged a crew as can be found on the earth’s surface. The average daily wage for adult male laborers in Haiti is a _gourde_, or twenty cents, a day, women and boys in proportion. The new companies have raised this to thirty cents. In theory the laborers are fed by their employers, but it would be considerable exaggeration to call the one gourdful of rice-and-bean hash which a disheveled, yet dictatorial, old negro woman was dishing out to each of a long line of gaunt and soil-stained workmen on one of the estates at which we stopped one evening the nourishment needed for a long day in the fields. Except for a sugar-cane, a lump of _rapadoue_, or possibly a bit of rice or plantain, which they find for themselves in the morning, this is the only food of the Haitian field laborer. So lazy have they become in their masterless condition that this one meal a day has come to be the habitual diet of the masses and all they expect of their employers; but the impression on both sides that this is all they need is probably costing the companies more in lack of efficient labor than they themselves realize. Only at one season during the year does the average Haitian get more than these slim pickings; that is in mango-time, and then the roads and trails are carpeted with the yellow pits.

Dusty, thorny, and hot, the Cul-de-Sac plain continued as level as the sea at its edge to where we began to climb the steep slope of wrinkled, rusty mountains shutting it off abruptly on the north and offering a panorama of rare beauty from Port au Prince, particularly when sunrise or sunset gives them a dozen swiftly changing colors. As we rose above it, the reedy edged first of two large lakes, one of which stretches on into the Republic of Santo Domingo, broke the red-brown carpet with a contrasting shimmer of blue at the eastern end, and the mountains behind the capital stood forth in silhouette against the transparent tropical sky. The aboriginal name “Haiti” means a high and mountainous land; like its inhabitants, its scenery and vegetation are more savage than those of Cuba. So steep was the new road climbing diagonally up the face of the range that we were twice compelled to dismount and call upon a gang of road laborers to push the machine over the next stony rise. The stream of market-women continued to pour down this in cascades. Many of the heavy black faces would have made splendid gargoyles. Almost all of the women wore gowns of blue denim; the year before, the driver said, they had all worn purple, but the style had changed only in color. Once we met a lone marine, and higher up paused at a camp where there were several of them. But they were not the spick-and-span “leather-necks” we know taking their shore leave along Broadway. They wore only the indispensable parts of their uniforms, on the faces of those old enough to produce it was a week’s growth of beard, and they clutched their rifles with the alert and ready air of expecting to use them at any moment, for we were now entering a region constantly harassed by _cacos_.

We grasped our own weapons and closely watched the brush-covered banks on each hand, as well as every approaching traveler. There are only two ways of telling a _caco_ from a harmless Haitian; if he is armed or if he runs. Then the orders are to fire, for the “good citizens” do not carry weapons and are very careful to move slowly and be prepared to flourish their _bon habitant_ card at sight of a white face or a gendarme uniform. Several times I fancied for an instant that we had been attacked, until I grew accustomed to the thump of stones with which the road was ever more thickly strewn striking the bottom of the car with reports startlingly like rifle-shots. From the crest of the first range we descended into the Artibonite Valley, remarkable for its colors. A constant series of rusty red humps, more beautiful at a distance, no doubt, than to a hungry marine climbing over them expecting at any moment to run into a _caco_ ambush, patches of scenery almost equal to the Alps in color, slender pines standing out against the red and tumbled background, here and there a clump of palm-trees to give contrast and a suggestion of peaceful tropical languor, spread before us farther than the eye could see.

As far as the marine-garrisoned town of Mirebalais the road was passable, though it had steadily deteriorated from the modern highway of the plain to a road made only by the feet of animals and men. It would have been an exceedingly optimistic stranger, however, who could ever have attempted to drive an automobile over the mountain trail that lay beyond, yet over which the doughty Ford climbed as if military orders forbade it to give up so long as it retained a gasp of life. Here and there we forded a considerable stream, meeting at one of them a group of marines driving pack-laden donkeys and cattle, in some cases astride the latter, more often splashing thigh-deep through the water, and with a score of produce-bearing natives plodding at their heels for protection. Farther on we passed an airplane camp, from which “God’s wicked angels,” as the natives call them, periodically bombard the retreats of the _cacos_. Rumor has it that these warriors of the air have not always made certain of the character of the gatherings they attack, and the _cacos_ once sent a protest to England against the Americans for using a means of warfare which the “Haitians fighting for their liberty” cannot combat or imitate.

The name of Las Cahobas, the old Spanish form of the word for mahogany-trees, is an indication of the fact that it was formerly within the territory of Santo Domingo. It is a miserable little town in which the palm-trunk huts that are the lowest form of dwelling in Cuba are considered residences _de luxe_. A whitewashed jail where the hundred or more black inmates, most simply dressed in two-piece suits of red-and-white striped cotton, seem only too glad to get their three meals a day, two of them with meat rations, was the chief sight of interest. Some of the gendarme guards had become so thoroughly Americanized under their marine officers that they “rolled their own,” closed their tobacco-sacks with their teeth, and returned them to hip-pockets exactly as required by our military manuals. It is remarkable what can be done with a backward race under proper guidance. The officers themselves, nearly all enlisted men in the organization from which they had been loaned, were, like most of those I met throughout the country, forceful, energetic, efficient chaps, many of whom spoke the native “creole” as if they had been born in the district. In the North we scarcely think of a corporal or sergeant of marines as standing particularly high in the social scale; in these Haitian villages they have almost the power of absolute monarchs, and are treated with corresponding respect by their native subjects. Even the village accounts are periodically brought to them to be audited. So accustomed do the Haitians become to obeying the commander of the district in which they live that it is difficult to get them to change their allegiance. A marine major who had long reigned in a certain region summoned all the native authorities to meet a newly arrived lieutenant colonel, explaining that the latter was thereafter the commander in chief; yet as long as the major remained, he never broke the natives of the habit of appealing to him first of all whenever any official matter turned up.

On the edge of Las Cahobas, as here and there along the road to it, was a Haitian cemetery. These are invariably bare and sun-scorched, the graves covered with vault-shaped structures ranging from heaped-up cobbles to almost elaborate stone and plaster mounds. Without crosses or any other indication of the Christian faith, they seem to be direct importations from the interior of Africa, and though one knows that the stones are piled there primarily to keep the energetic Haitian pigs from rooting up and feasting on the corpses, it is hard to think of them as anything but the African’s protection against the voodoo spirits which must be forcibly prevented from escaping out of bodies committed to the earth. The usual Haitian funeral is accompanied with strange rites destined to exorcise these same spirits, after which others of a totally different nature enliven the proceedings, for the corpse is generally carried on the heads of men who dance and sing in a drunken orgy all the way to the burial-ground.

Market-women were still straggling toward town when we returned. The view of the Cul-de-Sac plain toward sunset, carpeted with brown and green vegetation, speckled here and there with little houses, the lakes on the left and the ocean on the right reflecting the colors of the purple and lilac clouds which hung above the mountains, was as striking as any I had seen in many a day. Nearer the capital the road was still almost crowded, while here and there under the trees beside it the women, their big straw hats off now, but still wearing their brilliant bandanas, had camped for the night, and were cooking their humble dinners on fagot fires. Once we found a woman bareheaded, but this was because she was tearing her hair and shrieking in what seemed to be physical agony. As she caught sight of my uniformed companions, she rushed out upon them and reported that she had been robbed by _cacos_ of the produce she had expected to spread out in the big market-square before the cathedral by the dawn of Saturday. Such things happen even on the broad highway into Port au Prince, while more often still gendarmes are sent out along the road by some colonel or major whose wife has invited guests, with orders to buy the chickens and turkeys needed before they reach the close competition of the market. In either case the women are deeply disgruntled, for the mere selling is only half their pleasure in offering their wares.

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Of the other two highways out of Port au Prince one climbs into the hills to Pétionville, from which a trail leads to cool and refreshing Furcy, among its pine-trees, four thousand feet above the sea. A longer road is that to the southern peninsula. Leaving the capital at the opposite end of the main street from that to the Cul-de-Sac, it passes the “navy yard” and skirts the bay for miles beyond. It, too, is apt to be crowded with market-women, and with donkeys, women, and men carrying rock salt from Léogane. Half-way to that town there is a clearing in the dense woods famed as the scene of frequent voodoo rites, and for a long space the road is bordered by the scraggly tree-bushes of an abandoned castor-bean plantation from which our Government once hoped to produce oil for its airplanes. Léogane is a town of considerable size, the usual grass-grown square of which is faced by a quaint old church of what might almost be called Haitian architecture. Churches were the only buildings spared by the infuriated slaves in their revolt against the French, as the priests were the only white people who escaped attack, but neglect and the tropical climate have in most cases completed the work of destruction. The town and the region about it is one of the few places in Haiti where the malarial mosquito abounds. Here, too, are to be found many bush-grown ruins of French plantations. Far to the westward along the tongue of land forming the southern horn of Haiti, and to be reached only by horse or boat, is the town of Jérémie, near which the elder Dumas was born, the son of a French general and a negro slave.

The gendarme officer with whom I was traveling on this occasion, however, had come to inspect Jacmel, on the southern coast. At two and a half hours by Ford from the capital, the last part of it by a narrow dirt roadway winding through high hills, we changed to moth-eaten native horses and rode away down the River Gauche, which we forded one hundred and eighteen times during the next four hours. The black soil was fertile, and cultivated in scattered patches even to the tops of the hills. Coffee in uncared-for luxuriance often bordering the way showed what this region had been under the French. It was still well populated, for the people of the southern peninsula have never revolted, and _cacos_ are unknown, though there is much petty thieving. At every turn of the trail startled, respectful negroes raised their hats as we passed, only a few of them having the half-sullen air of their fellow-countrymen elsewhere at sight of Americans. Their little huts of thatch, or _tache_, as _yagua_ is called in Haiti, were everywhere tucked away in the bush, cattle and pigs were numerous, though all animals except the goats had a half-starved appearance. Bananas and oranges grew in profusion; the trail was strewn with the peelings of the native pear-shaped grape-fruit. Frequent patches of Kafir-corn, called _pitimi_, the “creole” abbreviation of _petit maïs_, waved their lofty heads of rice-like grain in the breeze. Immovable donkeys now and then blocked the trail, indifferent alike to the shrieks of their drivers and to the commanding voice of the native gendarme who accompanied us. Here and there washing parties of women were beating their rags on stones at the edge of the stream and spreading them out in the sun to bleach, their almost nude black bodies glistening in the sunshine and their tongues cackling incessantly until a glimpse of us reduced them to sudden silence. Several times we passed voodoo signs—a chicken with its entrails removed hanging by one leg from a pole, the white skull of a horse decorated with bits of red rag set on the top of a cactus-bush. Now and then we came across the most primitive form of cane-crusher except the human teeth. It consisted of a grooved stick driven through a tree or post, with a bit of sapling fastened at one end. While one negro held a sugar-cane, another rolled the sapling back and forth along it, the juice running down the groove into a gourd or pot. Wherever the breeze reached us the weather was agreeable; in the breathless pockets of the hills the humid heat hung about us like a hot wet blanket.

The marine-gendarme commander of Jacmel met us with an automobile farther out along the trail than one had ever been driven before, and the astounded natives fled shrieking before it as if the malignant spirits they fancied they could hear groaning under its hood were visibly pursuing them. In the town itself the people greeted their benevolent despot with just such antics as one might fancy their forefathers performed before their African chiefs. Jacmel, however, has a number of “citizens of color” of education and moderate wealth. The hills about it grow two crops of coffee a year, cotton and cacao alternate all the year round, veritable forests of cotton-trees cover the sites of old French plantations, and there is considerable shipping, though the bay is deep and dangerous. But its prosperity is mainly due, of course, to its lifelong freedom from _cacos_ and revolutions. It is a hilly town of six thousand inhabitants, with sharp lines of caste, more stone buildings than are usual in Haiti, a Protestant as well as a Catholic church, an imposing _hotel de ville_, with the familiar misstatement “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” on its façade, “summer” homes in its suburbs, and a tile-roofed market. Strangers but seldom disrupt the languid tenor of its ways, however, and not only is there no hotel, but not even a place to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, unless one accept the hospitality of marines or gendarme officers. Some years ago a foreign company erected an electric light plant, fitted up all Jacmel with elaborate poles or underground wires, operated for one night, collected their government subsidy and as much as possible from the citizens, and fled. To this day the town continues to worry along with such lights as might be found in an African village. In 1896 it was completely wiped out by fire, the land and sea breeze joining to pile the flames so high that the population was forced to flee to the hills, leaving all their possessions behind.

On our return to Port au Prince the road, particularly from Léogane in, was even more densely thronged than usual; for it was the last day of the year, and New Year’s is not only Haiti’s day of independence, but the one on which presents are given, after the French custom. Women carrying on their heads heaps of native baskets higher than themselves, others with as disproportionate loads of gourds, donkeys laden to the point of concealment with anything there was any hope of selling for gifts at that evening’s big market, filled the tumultuous wake behind us. I called that afternoon on the mulatto President of Haiti in the unfinished palace, and caught him and the minister of finance in the act of shaking and rearranging the rugs in preparation for the coming festivities. No doubt a president whose duties are assumed by men from the outside world must find something to do to pass the time. Next day, however, there was no such informality in his manner as he was driven in silk-hat solemnity to a Te Deum in the cathedral. Four prancing horses drew the presidential carriage, preceded and followed by a company of native horsemen in more than resplendent uniforms and drawn sabers. At the door he was met by the archbishop and all the higher officers of our forces of occupation, who fell in behind the august ruler as he marched down the central aisle, flanked at close intervals by negro firemen in brilliant red shirts of heavy flannel and shining metal helmets. In their wake came all the élite of Port au Prince, some in silk hats and full dress, nearly all in brand-new garb, for New Year’s takes the place of Easter in this respect in Haiti, and so generously perfumed that the clouds of incense arising about the altar made no impression upon the nostrils. Outside, the great open square and the adjacent streets were compact seas of upturned black faces. The booming of cannon frequently punctuated the ceremony, though the beating of tomtoms would have been more in keeping, and the cost of the powder might then have been spent in running the trade school which had just been abandoned for lack of funds. Faces running all the gamut from white to black were to be seen in the glaringly yellow interior, but none of the former were Haitian, and the latter were in the decided majority. The clergy were white, the acolytes black; the formality and solemnity which reigned could scarcely have been equaled in the elaborate functions in Notre Dame of Paris.

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A Cuban bon mot has it that “The Haitian is the animal which most nearly resembles man.” Without subscribing to so broad a statement, it must be admitted that they are close to the primitive savage despite a veneer of civilization which all but hides the African in the upper class and is so thin upon the masses as to be transparent. Tradition has it that when the uprising against the French was planned the conspirators gave every slave some grains of corn, telling him to throw one away every day and attack when none remained, for in no other way could they have known the date. To this day the intelligence of the masses is of that caliber. Readily capable of imitation, they initiate nothing, not even the next obvious move in the simplest undertakings. They have not a trace of gratitude in their make-up, no sexual morality, unbounded superstition, and no family love. Mothers gladly give away their children; if they ever see them again there is no evidence of gladness shown on either side. They have a certain naïve simplicity and some of the unintentional honesty that goes with it; they have of course their racial cheerfulness, though even that is less in evidence than among most of their race. A French woman who has spent nearly all her life in Haiti long tried to discover some symptoms of poetical fancy or love for the beautiful among the full blacks. One day she found a servant sitting in the back yard looking up into the tree-tops. Asked what he was thinking about, he answered, “I am not thinking; I am listening to the breeze in the cocoanut-palms.” That is the sum total of sentiment during long years of observation. Family relations are little short of promiscuous. Girls who have reached the age of ten are made to understand that they must be on the lookout for lovers; mothers refuse to support them after they have grown old enough to live with a man. An old maid is considered a freak of nature in Haiti, and such freaks are exceedingly rare in the Black Republic.

More temperamental than our own negroes, the Haitians are incredibly childlike in their mental processes. A certain gendarme officer whose butler was frequently remiss in his duties had him enrolled in the native corps in order to bring military discipline to bear upon him. A few days later the servant requested that he be given the right to carry arms, like other gendarmes. The officer good naturedly gave him a harmless old revolver that had been captured from the _cacos_. A few days later reports began to leak into headquarters that the national force was terrorizing the inhabitants of a certain section of Port au Prince. The detectives got busy, and found that the gendarme-butler, his day’s service over, was in the habit of patrolling that part of town in which he was born and where he was well known, strutting back and forth among his awed fellow-citizens during the evening, and from midnight on beating on house doors and commanding the inmates, “in the name of the law,” and at the point of his revolver, to come outside and line up “for inspection.” He had no designs upon their possessions, but was simply indulging his love for display and authority. When his employer took his putative weapon away from him again, he wept like a child of six. His grief, however, was short lived, for when the President called at the home of the officer on New Year’s afternoon, he found the butler so dressed up that he inadvertently shook hands with him as one of the guests.

Abuse of authority is a fixed fault in the Haitian character, as with most negroes. Of the several reasons why there are only two or three native lieutenants in the gendarmerie, lack of intelligence and dishonesty are less conspicuous than the inability to wield authority lightly. The Haitians of the masses have only three forms of recreation, dances, cock-fights, and voodooism. They have not even risen to the level of the “movies,” for though there are two cinemas in the capital and one in Cap Haïtien, these are too “high brow” for any but the upper class. Of pretty native customs we found only one—that of hanging up little colored-paper churches with candles inside them at Christmas-time. The Haitians are inveterate gamblers, which is only another way of saying that they abhor work. As the negro admires the successful and dominant, so he has supreme contempt for the broken and discredited. The Germans who once ruled the commercial roost in Haiti and who were interned after our entry into the war would find no advantage in returning, even if they were permitted to, for they have lost for life the respect of the natives by allowing themselves to be arrested. The profiteering Syrians who have largely inherited their control of commerce have far more standing to-day despite their slippery methods.

Between the primitive bulk of the population and the slight minority of educated citizens, mainly “people of color,” there is a wide gulf. Haiti has no middle class, not even a skilled labor class. Those who have ambition or wealth enough to go in for “higher education” will have nothing to do with anything even suggestive of manual labor. The ability to read, write, and speak French automatically brings with it a contempt for work and workers. As in all Latin America, an agricultural school is worse than useless, because it serves only to spoil what might have been good foremen, and the mere possession of a scrap of paper announcing the holder a graduate of such an institution is prima-facie evidence that he intends to loaf in the shade all the rest of his days. The result is that the population is made up of poverty-stricken, incredibly ignorant laborers and peasants, and of lawyers, “doctors” of this and that, and the political-military class which tyrannizes and fattens on the African masses.

Superficially, the educated class of Haiti is pleasant to meet, though the first impression seldom lasts. It has all the outward manners of the French, with none of their solid basis. In discussions of literature and art these “_gens de couleur_” could give the average American business man cards and spades; in actually doing or producing something worth while they are completely out of their depth. Once in a blue moon one runs across a full-blooded negro who shows outcroppings of genius. We were invited to meet such a one at the home of a “high yellow” senator on New Year’s eve, a pianist who had studied in Paris. I had been told that there were several fine musicians in Haiti, but, in the light of other experiences, had inwardly scoffed at the idea. It required but very little time to be convinced that here at least was one. The man not only played the best classics in a manner that would have been applauded in the highest class of concert halls, but gave several pieces of his own composition which could hold their place in any program. He had played a few times in the United States, but the drawback of color had proved insurmountable, and as there is naturally no income to be derived from such a source in Haiti, Ludovic Lamothe now holds a minor clerkship in the ministry of agriculture! When he had finished, the senator himself sat down at the piano and gave an exhibition which, I have no hesitancy in asserting, could scarcely have been duplicated by any member of our own upper house, and one which reminded us by contrast of the uproarious rag-time that was even at that moment reigning along Broadway. Yet it was such men as these that our marines once evicted from the Haitian senate with, “Come on, you niggers, get out of here!” Even the Southerner who had been induced to come with us, and whose muscles seemed to tense with inward horror as our host greeted him with a handshake and introduced him to the pianist, gradually shrank down into his chair in unconscious acknowledgment of his own ignorance of the higher things of life as compared with these cultured “niggers.”

We met a few other men of this type at the yearly “Haitian ball” in the chief native club, which American civilians attend, to the unbounded disgust of the forces of occupation. Yet the primitive African now and then showed itself in the whitest of them. Those who know them well say that even Haiti’s élite, educated in Europe or the United States, are apt to forget their Christian faith when troubles assail them and go to a “Papa Loi” for a _wanga_, or charm, and pay for a voodoo ceremony. In Paris lives a certain Mme. Thebes, in high repute among those who believe in sorcery and prophecy. If the stories which gradually leak out from the confidences of returning natives to their friends are trustworthy, she tells all Haitians that they are some day to become president of their country, not a bad guess under old conditions, though the supernatural madame does not seem to have kept up with the times. More than one revolution has been started on the strength of her prophecies. Some of these upper-class “people of color” are descendants of the same families who fled to Philadelphia and New Orleans at the time of the slave revolt. The members who remained behind were or have since become intermixed with the blacks. At least one American connected with the forces of occupation was introduced at a presidential reception to a colored family of the same name, which turned out to be relatives. As the American chanced to be a Southerner, it is easy to imagine whether the discovery brought joy and mutual social calls.

Stories of human sacrifices, cannibalism, and occult poisonings are always going the rounds in Haiti, though it is difficult to find any one of unquestioned integrity who has actually seen such things himself. I met two gendarme officers who asserted they had found the feet of a black baby sticking out of a boiling pot, and there are numbers of well-balanced Americans in Haiti who are firmly convinced that all three of the crimes above mentioned are practised. Certainly many of the natives look hungry enough to eat their own children. The body of a marine was once found in a condition to bear out the charge of cannibalism, but it has never been proved that this was not the work of hogs or dogs. Most frequent of all, say the believers, are the cases of blood-sucking, the victims being preferably virgins. Not long before our occupation a baby in the best district of Port au Prince died for loss of blood, which an old neighbor later confessed to having inflicted while the mother was out of the room. The daughter of a former minister is said to have been similarly treated by her grandmother and a prominent man. The rite over, they pronounced her dead, and she was buried with much pomp, the grandmother, according to the story, replacing with coffee the embalming fluid that was poured down her throat. Five years later a rumor of her existence having reached a priest through the confessional, what is believed to be the same girl was discovered in a hill town. She was wild, unkempt, demented, and had borne three children. The coffin was dug up, and in it was found her wedding dress,—for though she was only eight or nine at the time, it is the custom in Haiti to bury young girls in such garments,—but the autopsy proved the remains to be those of a man, the legs cut off and laid alongside the body. That there are Haitian Obeah practitioners who have so remarkable a knowledge of vegetable poisons that they can destroy their enemies or those of their clients without being detected seems to be generally admitted. Some of these poisons are said to be so subtle that the victims live for years, dying slowly as from some wasting disease, or going insane, deaf, blind, or dumb, with the civilized medical profession helpless to relieve them. Men of undoubted judgment and integrity, some of them Americans, claim to have positive proof of such cases.

The less gruesome forms of Obeah and voodooism are known to be practised in Haiti. The former is a species of witchcraft by men and women who are supposed to possess supernatural powers, and who certainly have far greater sway over the masses of the people than priests or presidents. For a small sum they will undertake to help in business matters, to create love in unresponsive breasts, possibly to put an enemy out of the way, and some of the “stunts” they perform are beyond comprehension. Voodooism, unlike the other, is a form of religion, the deity being an imaginary “great green serpent,” with a high priest known as “Papa Loi” and a priestess called “Maman Loi.” Chicken snakes and a harmless python are kept as sacred beings in Haiti, and fed by the faithful. In theory the serpent deity demands sacrifices of a “goat without horns”; in other words, a child, preferably white. But there is no positive evidence to prove that anything more than goats, sheep, or roosters are actually sacrificed. These simpler rites are carried on almost openly, and are accompanied by all sorts of childish incantations, with such nonsensical fetishes as red rags, dried snakes and lizards, human bones, or portions of human organs, stolen perhaps from graveyards. The most frequent form of revenge among the Haitian masses is the burying of a bottle filled with “charms” of this nature, over which are recited various incantations at certain phases of the moon, in the hope of bringing destruction or lesser punishment on the object of the enmity. So firm is the belief of the negroes in the power of Obeah that they sometimes succumb to fear and die merely because some one has cast such a spell upon them. A French priest who was traveling through the country called at a cabin one night to ask the occupant to show him the way. The man refused, whereupon the priest, being denied the customary form of expressing displeasure, began to recite a quotation from Ovid. To his surprise the native dashed out of his hut, fell at his feet, and offered to do anything he demanded, if only he would not “put Obeah” on him. Perhaps the most serious result of these practices is the appalling number of children who die under the ministrations of voodoo “doctors.”

A group of Americans once offered to pay for a voodoo supper if they were allowed to attend it. White men are seldom admitted to the native ceremonies; some have suffered for their intrusion. In this case there was the added fear that the officials who saw the rites would forbid them thereafter; but a Frenchman finally persuaded the natives that it would be to their advantage to let the Americans see one of their festivities in order to prove that they were harmless. How much was left out because of the guests there is of course no means of knowing.

About seventy dollars was spent for corn-meal, _tafia_ (crude native rum), sacrifices, and other things required, and to pay the chief performers their fees. The temple was decorated with flags and various fetishes. The ceremony began with a tomtom dance by the priests, who were soon joined by the high priestess, wearing a white skirt, a red waist, and a brilliant bandana, and waving spangled flags. Then a goat, scrubbed to spotless white, its horns gilded, and a red bow on its head, was brought in. The priestess danced about it with a snaky motion, holding her shoulders stiffly and giving her waist the maximum of movement. Then she got astride the goat and rode round and round, clinging to its horns. Every few minutes the priests gave her _tafia_ until she had worked herself into a real or feigned paroxysm of excitement. To say that she was intoxicated would perhaps be putting it too strongly, for the average Haitian is so soaked in rum from birth that it has little visible effect upon him.

At length a priest caught up a handful of corn-meal and, with what appeared to be two careless gestures, formed a perfect cross with it on the ground. Candles were placed at the ends of the cross, then _tafia_ and other liquors were poured along the lines of corn-meal, the priestess meanwhile continuing to ride the goat with hideous contortions. Finally she dismounted, slipped off the white skirt, leaving her entirely clothed in red, and while a priest held the goat by the front feet she pierced a vein in its neck and drank all the blood she could contain. For a time she seemed to be in a stupor; then she began to “prophesy” in loathsome, incomprehensible noises, which a priest “translated,” probably in terms of his own choosing. While this pair howled, the goat was prepared and put in caldrons to cook, with rice, beans, _tafia_, salt, pepper, and lard. Old women stirred the contents of these with their bare hands, which had been bleached almost white by frequent emersions in similar boiling messes. When the food was cooked, the priestess came suddenly out of her trance and fell to with all the negroes present, who were still sitting about in a circle eating sacred goat meat and drinking _tafia_ when the white spectators finally left.

“The only thing wrong with the Haitians is lack of education,” says a recent investigator, which can scarcely be doubted, since it is true of all mankind. By some oversight, perhaps, no mention of schools and courts was made in the treaty under which we are administering the country. The French maintained no schools for the negroes, and it goes without saying that conditions scarcely improved during the century and a quarter of independence. An American superintendent, who is quite properly a Catholic and of Louisiana creole stock, has been appointed, and is in theory directly responsible to the native minister of public instruction. But the higher American civilian officials, clinging perhaps too closely to the letter of the treaty, have not seen fit to assign any great amount of the public revenues of Haiti to this purpose. There are thirteen hundred teachers in the country, probably the majority of whom are in no way qualified for their task, and of the fifty thousand pupils enrolled barely one in three is in regular attendance. In other words, not ten per cent. of the children of school age get even primary instruction, and less than one per cent. ever reach the secondary schools. The law school in Port au Prince, with thirty students, is reported to be efficient; the medical school is frankly a farce. Teaching methods are in all but a few cases primitive, consisting of little more than monologues by the “teacher,” to which the pupils listen only when nothing else occupies their attention. A thorough reform in this matter is essential to the task we have undertaken in Haiti, unless we subscribe as a nation to the old Southern attitude that the negro is better off without education. The present generation is hopeless in this as in many other regards; it remains to be seen whether we will and can lift the next out of the primitive savagery which at present reigns.

The popular language of Haiti bears no very close resemblance to the tongue from which it is largely descended. The slaves came from different parts of Africa, in some cases belonging to enemy tribes, and “creole” is the natural evolution of their desire to talk with one another. The resultant dialect has French as a basis, but it is so abbreviated, condensed, and simplified, and includes so many African words, that it has become almost a new language. It is quite distinct from the patois of Canada and even of the French West Indies, though there are points of resemblance. It has not even the inflection of real French, and only now and then does one knowing that language catch an intelligible word. Haitian voices have a softness equal to those of our Southern darkies, and are in marked contrast to the rasping tones of Cuba. It is a local form of politeness to use a squeaky falsetto in greetings, and women of the masses curtsy to one another when they shake hands, probably a survival from slave days originally adopted as a sign of their equality to their expelled mistresses. Gender, number, case, modes, tenses, and articles have almost completely disappeared. As a rule, only the feminine form of adjectives has survived. Plurality is indicated, when it is necessary, by a participle. Many words have been abbreviated almost out of recognition. _Plaît-il?_ has become “Aiti?” The Dominicans over the border are called “Pagno.” The word _bagaille_, probably a corruption of _bagage_, means almost anything; servants told to “pick up” that _bagaille_ grasp whatever is nearest at hand; _bon bagaille_ and _pas bon bagaille_ are the usual forms of good and bad. “Who” has grown to be “Qui monde ça?” Many words have changed their meanings entirely; the urchin who approaches you rubbing his stomach and mumbling “grand gout,” wishes to impress upon you the very probable fact that he has “large hunger.” On the whole, it is probably an advantage, in learning Haitian “creole,” not to know real French.

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