Two blacks, manning the schooner’s tender, set us ashore in the Haitian “navy-yard,” a slender wooden pier along which were moored three American submarine-chasers. An encampment of marines eyed us wonderingly from the doors of their tents and wooden buildings, beyond which a gateway gave us entrance to a thoroughly Haitian scene. A stony country road, flanked by a toy railway line, was thronged with the children of Ham. Negro women, with huge bundles of every conceivable contents on their heads, pattered past with an easy-going, yet graceful, carriage. Others sat sidewise on top of assorted loads that half hid the lop-eared donkeys beneath them. Red bandanas and turbans of other gay colors showed beneath absurdly broad palm-leaf hats. Black feet, with the remnants of a slipper balancing on the toes of each, waved with the pace of the diminutive animals. The riders could scarcely have been called well dressed, but they were immaculate compared with the throngs of foot travelers. A few scattered patches of rags, dirty beyond description, hung about the black bodies they made no serious effort to conceal. Men in straggly Napoleon III beards clutched every few steps at the shreds which posed as trousers. Stark naked urchins pattered along through the dust; more of them scampered about under the palm-trees. Bare feet were as general as African features. More than one group sidled crabwise to the edge of the road as we advanced and gazed behind them with a startled expression at the strange sound made by our shod feet. Scores of the most primitive huts imaginable, many of them leaning at what seemed precarious angles, lined the way. Before almost all of them stood a little “shop,” a few horizontal sticks raised off the ground by slender poles and shaded by a cluster of brown palm-leaves. Vacant-faced negro men and women, none of them boasting a real garment, tended the establishments squatting or lolling in the patches of shade which the early morning sun cast well out into the roadway. The stock in trade of the best of them would not have filled a market-basket. A cluster of bananas; a few oranges, small, but yellower than those of Cuba; bedraggled-looking alligator-pears; dust-covered loaves of bread, no larger than biscuits, made up the most imposing arrays. Many of the “merchants” had not advanced to the stick-counter stage, but spread their wares on the ground—little handsful of tiny red beans laid at regular intervals along a banana-leaf, similar heaps of unroasted coffee, bundles of fagots, tied with strips of leaf, that could easily have gone into a coat-pocket. Now and again some black ragamuffin paused to open negotiations with the lolling shopkeepers, who carried on the transaction, if possible, from where they lay, rising to their feet only when the heat of the bargaining demanded it. The smallness of each purchase was amusing, as well as indicative of Haitian poverty. One orange, a single banana, a measureful of a coarse, reddish meal tinier than the smallest glass of a bartender’s paraphernalia, were the usual amounts, and the pewter coins that exchanged owners were seldom of the value of a whole cent. With rare exceptions the purchasers wolfed at once what they had bought as they pattered on down the road.
Details came so thick and fast that it was impossible to catch them all, even with a kodak. Compared with this, Cuba, after all, had been little more than semi-tropical. Here the vegetation, the odors, the very atmosphere were of the genuine tropics. Breadfruit-trees, with their scolloped leaves, which we had never seen in the larger island to the westward, shouldered their way upward among the cocoanut-palms. Mango-trees, as dense as haystacks, cast their black shadows over the rampant undergrowth. But always the eyes came back to the swarms of black people, with their festoons of rags contrasting with, rather than covering, their coal-tinted bodies. What might have seemed a long walk under a tropical sun became a short stroll amid this first glimpse of an astonishingly primitive humanity.
For all their poverty, the inhabitants seemed to be frankly happy with life. They had the playfulness of children, with frequent howls of full-throated laughter; they seemed no more self-conscious at the super-tattered state of their garments than were the ambling, over-laden donkeys at the ludicrous patchiness of their trappings. That lack of the sense of personal dignity characteristic of the African came to their rescue in the abjectness of their condition. For they were African, as thoroughly so as the depths of the Congo. We had strolled for an hour, and reached the very edge of the city itself, before we met not a white man, but the first face that showed any admixture of Caucasian blood. Compared with this callous-footed throng the hodgepodge of Cuban complexions seemed almost European.
As we neared the town, a train as primitive as the scene about us chattered round a bend in the tunnel of vegetation, the front of its first-model engine swinging like the trunk of an excited elephant. The four open, wooden cars that swayed and screamed along behind it were densely packed with passengers, yet even here there was not a white face. The diminutive tender was piled high with cordwood little larger than fagots, and the immense, squatty smokestack was spitting red coals over all the surrounding landscape. As the train passed, the negro women along the road sprang with a flurry of their ragged skirts upon the track and fell to picking up what we took to be coins scattered by some inexplicably generous passenger. Closer investigation showed that they were snatching up live coals with which to light the little brown clay pipes which give them a flitting resemblance to Irish peasants.
A lower-class market was in full swing in a dust-carpeted patch of ground on the city water-front. Here the wares were more varied than in the roadside “shops,” but sold in the same minute portions. American safety-matches were offered not by the box, but in bundles of six matches each, tied with strips of leaf. Here were “butcher-shops,” consisting of a wooden trough full of meat, which owed its preservation to a thorough cooking, and was sold by the shred and consumed on the spot. Scrawny, black hags, who had tramped who knows how many miles over mountain-trails with an ox-load of oranges or coarse tubers on their heads, squatted here all the morning selling a penny-worth of their wares at a time, the whole totaling perhaps forty cents, to be squandered for some product of civilization which they would carry home in the same laborious fashion. The minority of the women venders had come on donkeys and were frank in impressing upon their more lowly sisters the aristocracy which this sign of wealth and leisure conferred upon them. A native gendarme, dressed in a cheap-looking imitation of the uniform of our own marines, but as African of soul beneath it as the most naked of his fellow-citizens, strutted back and forth through the throngs of clamorous bargainers. Now and again, when a group grew too large for his liking, he charged into it, waving a long stick and striking viciously at the legs and backs of all within reach, irrespective of sex or age. Far from fighting back or even showing resentment, the childlike blacks fled before him, often with shrieks of laughter. Ours were the only white faces within the inclosure, yet we were given passage everywhere with an unostentatious consideration that in less primitive societies would be called extreme courtesy.
Beggars as inhumanly sunk in degradation as the lowest pariahs of India shuffled in and out, mutely holding forth filthy tin cups to those barely a degree above them in want and misery. Near the gate a seething crowd was collected around a pushcart filled with tin cans of all sizes, tumbled pellmell together just as they had been slashed open and tossed aside by a marine mess orderly. An old woman was selling them to eager purchasers, who looked them over with the deliberate care one might give an automobile offered for sale, parted at length with the price agreed upon, after long and vociferous negotiations, and wandered away gloating over the beauty of their new acquisition, some of them talking to it in their incomprehensible “French.” The prices varied from “cinq cob” (5 centimes, or 1 cent) for a recent container of jam or pork and beans to a gourde (twenty cents) or more for the five-gallon gasolene tins that make such splendid water buckets on the head of the Haitian women. In another corner was arranged in the dust a display of bottles of every conceivable size, shape, and previous occupation, from three-sided pickle flasks to empty beer bottles, constituting the entire stock in trade of two incredibly ragged females. Scarcely a scrap or remnant, even of things which we hire men to carry to the garbage heap, but had its value to this poverty-stricken throng. Particularly was anything whatever resembling cloth made use of to the utmost end of its endurance. One of the best dressed of the pulsating collection of tatters was a powerful black fellow who strutted about in a two-piece suit fashioned from unbleached muslin that had entered upon its second term of servitude. Unlike those of his fellows, both garments were whole, except for one three-cornered rent in what, to a less self-confident being, would have been an embarrassing position. Diagonally across the trousers, just above this vent, blazed the word “Eventually,” and below it the pertinent query, “Why not now?”
The entire enlisted personnel of the Haitian Navy
A school in Port au Prince