Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land

Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar mill

A station of a Cuban pack-train

It is a leisurely, but constant, climb from the water-front to these forest-embowered dwellings. Port au Prince is not blessed with a street-car system, and its medieval railroad staggers only to the upper edge of the Champs de Mars. Moreover, the painted drygoods-boxes on wheels are invariably so densely crammed with full-scented blacks that not only the white residents, but even the haughty yellow ones, rarely deign to patronize the spark-spitting conveyance. Long-established families have their private carriages; the parvenus from foreign lands own, borrow, or share automobiles; mere clerks and bookkeepers jog homeward on their diminutive Haitian ponies; and chance visitors trust to luck and the oily-cushioned wrecks that ply for hire, finishing the journey on foot from the point where the bony and moth-eaten caricature of a horse refuses longer to respond to the lashings and screams of the tar-complexioned driver. Fortunately, it is perfectly good form to “catch a ride” with any car-owning member of one’s own race.

Let me not leave the impression, however, that the majority of those who ascend the city depend on gasolene or horseflesh. At least two thirds of them walk, but it is the two thirds that do not count in polite parlance. All day long, though far more incessantly, of course, in the delightful coolness of early morning or the velvety air of evening, processions of black people of varying degrees of raggedness plod noiselessly up and down the stony streets of the upper town. Noiselessly, that is, only in their barefooted tread; their tongues are rarely silent, and frequent cackles of unrestrained laughter sound from the bundles beneath which their woolly heads are all but invariably buried. For be it large or small, a mahogany chest of drawers or a tin can three inches in diameter, the Haitian always bears his burdens on his head. Her head would be more nearly the exact truth of the case, for the women rarely permit their lords and masters to subject themselves to the indignity of toil. But the merest child of the burden-bearing sex is rarely seen abroad except under a load that gives her the appearance of the stem of a toadstool. Some of these uncomplaining females serve the more fortunate residents of the hill; most of them trot to and fro between the market and the tiny thatched cabins sprinkled far up the range behind the city like rice grains on a green banana leaf. Where the streets break up beyond the last man’s-size dwellings, narrow trails tunnel on up through the prolific greenery to these scattered huts of the real Haitian, among which it is easy to imagine oneself in the heart of Africa.

Five years ago there were barely a score of white men in Port au Prince, and not many more than that in all Haiti. To-day there are perhaps three hundred American residents, without counting a large force of occupation and their families, and to say nothing of a considerable sprinkling of French, the remnants of what was a flourishing German colony until an epidemic of internment fell upon it, and a scattering of Italian, Syrian, and similar tradesmen. The Americans of the first category are carrying on or opening up new enterprises that promise to offer Haiti a prosperity not even second to that of Cuba. No one who has visited the island can question the extraordinary fertility of its soil. The overwhelming portion of it is as virgin as if the French had never exploited what was once the richest of their colonies; revolutions have become, by force majeure, a thing of the past. Every new undertaking must, to be sure, be built or rebuilt from the ground up. During their more than a century of freedom the negroes have done nothing but destroy. They have not even exercised their one faculty, that of imitation, for they have been too much shut off from the rest of the world to find anything to imitate. Though the sugar-cane was introduced into Cuba by the French refugees from Haiti, the entire country cannot at present compete with the largest single sugar-mill in the prosperous island to the west. The Haitian laborer has lost all knowledge of the sugar-making process except his own primitive method of producing rapadoue. He must be taught all over again, and he is not a particularly apt pupil; moreover, complain the men who are striving to make Haiti bloom once more with cane, no sooner is he taught than the Cuban planters entice him across the Windward Passage with wages ten times as high as he receives at home. But capital is beginning to recognize that despite its obvious drawbacks Haiti offers a rich future, and several syndicates have already “got in on the ground floor.”

The American residents of Port au Prince, men, women, and children, swear by it. I have yet to meet one who is eager to leave; many of those who go north for extended vacations cut them short with a cry of “take me back to Haiti.” To the misinformed northerner its very name is synonymous with revolution and sudden death. Outside the field of romance there is about as much danger of meeting with violence from the natives as there is of being boiled in oil at a church “sociable.” There is not a deadly representative of the animal or vegetable kingdom on the island; except for some malarial regions of rather mild danger the climate is as healthful as that of the best state in our union—with due regard, of course, to the invariable rule that white women should season their residence with an occasional invigorating breath of the north. The Americans have acquired one by one, as some yellow politician has lost his grasp on the national treasury, the grove-hidden houses in the upper town, some of them little short of palatial. There they live like the potentates of the tropical isles of romance. The blacks are respectful, childlike in their manner, and have much of the docility of the negroes of our South before the Civil War. They work for wages which, as wages go nowadays, are less than a song. House servants receive from five to eight dollars a month, and the one meal a day to which the masses have long been accustomed rarely costs a twenty-cent gourde. Families who could scarcely afford the luxury of a single “hired girl” in the land of their birth keep five servants in Haiti, a cook, butler, upstairs maid, laundress, and yard boy; for the Haitian is strictly limited in his versatility, and the cook could no more serve a dinner than a laundress could give the yard its daily sweeping. They are usually stupid beyond words, with the mentality of an intelligent child of six, but they are sometimes capable of great devotion, with a dog-like quality of faithfulness; and between them all they swathe the existence of their masters in the comfort of an old-time Southern plantation. All this is but half the story of contentment with Haitian residence, for the mere fact that the sun is certain to break forth in all the splendor of a cloudless sky as sure as the morning comes round is sufficient to make the cold and dismal north seem a prison by comparison.