4
I was not fortunate enough to be present at a fête on the French part of the island—the Republic of Haiti—but I obtained the impression that the Haitians are much wilder than the Dominicans. The Negroes do not readily identify their needs, they are more ebullient, more pious, and I should say more haunted by a prehistoric past than are the Spaniards.
Nothing is more serene, more utterly sweet, than Mass as sung in the great Cathedral at Port au Prince. But the scene outside the Cathedral for a square mile is primitive in the extreme. It is like the low suburbs of Nizhni Novgorod in Fair time, massed together and increased.
Port au Prince is built widely on a sun-bathed strand, and looks more like a capital city than Santo Domingo. A few khaki-clad Americans meet the eye, but the black population is too striking for one to consider Americans long. It seems as if the peasantry swarms into the city every day to market their produce. And what a peasantry! It would be impossible to match them. They seem to have all the salient characteristics of the southern French and of the Africans also. Their old-world, alert, shrewd, rough-hewn faces, their wit and mirth, their clamorous noisy French patois, their gay cottons and classical faces, the frankly exposed bare breasts of the women, all these tell of a people of force.
Unfortunately, owing to the calling of "dry" American ships, there is a good deal of vice. Champagne is brought to the quay, and the thirsty, indiscriminate passengers and crew knock the tops off the bottles and pour it down their throats like lemonade. The concomitants of drunkenness are all at hand. Possibly in no port in the world will a man, will any man, receive such attentions from women, be he even a somber-visaged missionary. The black girls swarm about you and fight for you.
But this may be overlooked, though I am surprised the American authorities tolerate it. Probably the soldiers like it. But Haiti is sad because she is denied her liberty. The colored people all over the world have a legitimate pride in their two independent States—Liberia and Haiti. There is no reason why Haiti should not be left to govern herself according to her lights and temperament, no reason except that Haiti furnishes a new field for exploitation. It is a place in which a good deal of money could be made if the population could be tamed.
But the people are too numerous and too fierce—they are in a way indomitable. The French blood is vigorous in them. I venture to suggest that Haiti is not a practical possession for an idealistic democracy. The political conceptions on which America has grown will never be adopted by the black French.