Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

There was no difficulty in finding representative Haitians of sufficient culture to be worthy a place in such an assembly. Men educated in Paris, graduates of the best universities in other European capitals, men who spoke the French language as perfectly as the French themselves, men who could give the average American business man cards and spades in any discussion of art, literature, and the finer things of civilization, were to be found in the best Haitian homes. The native membership as finally constituted included cabinet ministers, former ambassadors to the principal world capitals, lawyers famous for their oratory, and men who had produced volumes on profound subjects, to say nothing of very tolerable examples of lyric poetry. The club did not, it is true, completely obliterate the color-line. It merely moved it along. A complete sweep of the crowded table at the weekly club luncheons, with whites and Haitians nicely alternating, did not disclose a single jet-black face. But that was not the fault of the club; it was due to the fact that the benefits of higher education have seldom reached the full-blooded Africans of the island, as distinguished from what are known locally as the “men of color.”

The wives of the white club members took up the task of providing a suitable Christmas where the men left off, and pushed the matter with American enthusiasm. They canvassed the white colony for additional funds; they solicited contributions in kind from the merchants of Caucasian blood. Their evenings they spent in making things that would bring joy to the little black babies, in putting the multifarious gifts in order, in laying new plans to make the affair a success. By day they drove about in their automobiles through all the poorer sections of the city, distributing tickets to the swarms of naked black piccaninnies. Mobs of harmless, clamoring negroes surrounded their cars, holding up whole clusters of babies as proof of their right to share in the extraordinary generosity of the strange white people. Seas of clawing black hands waved about them like some scene from Dante’s Inferno in an African setting. A tumult of pleading voices assailed their ears: “Cartes, mamá, donne-moi cartes! Moi deux petits, mamá! Non gagner carte pour petit malade, mamá?”

The “ladies of color” of the other club members formed a committee of their own and lent a certain languid assistance, but the brunt of the work fell on the incomprehensibly generous whites. The men of the yellow features were even more willing to leave matters to their Caucasian associates. The latter were more experienced in the arrangement of Christmas-trees; moreover, they could descend to vulgar work, which the élite of Port au Prince could not indulge in without losing caste. Curious creatures, these whites, anyway; let them go ahead and spread themselves. The “men of color” were quite willing to sit back and watch les blancs run the whole affair—except in one particular, the distribution of tickets. In that they were more than ready to coöperate. They even made the generous offer of attending to all that part of the affair. The minister of public instruction came forward with a plan in keeping with his high rotarian standing. If the bulk of the tickets, say two thirds of them, for instance, were turned over to him, he would personally accept the arduous labor of distributing them to the school-children. Now you must know that the school-children of Port au Prince constitute a very small proportion of the young population, and that they are exactly the class which the sponsors of the Christmas-tree were not trying to reach. Furthermore, do not lose sight of the fact that the men of color must be constantly on the qui vive to keep their political fences in order. Even the ladies of the Haitian committee advised against the minister’s proposition. He, they whispered, would divide the tickets between his favorite teachers, who in turn would distribute them to their pet pupils.

Meanwhile Christmas drew near. A band of black men were sent far up into the mountains to fetch down a pine-tree. They are numerous in some parts of Haiti, occasionally growing side by side with the palms. The blacks could not, of course, understand why they must lug a tree for two or three days over perpendicular trails when trees of a hundred species abounded in the very outskirts of Port au Prince; but this was not the first time they had received absurd orders from the incomprehensible blancs. They selected as small a tree as they dared and started down the mountain-side. As the wide-spreading branches hindered their progress, they lopped most of them off. How should they know that the inexplicable white men wanted the branches to hang things on? The gentleman of color, right-hand man of their great national president, who had transmitted the order to them had said nothing about that, nor explained how the branches might be bound close against the trunk by winding a rope around them.

Christmas morning came. Several Americans defied the tropical sun to direct the labors of another band of blacks engaged in planting a diminutive pine-tree with a few scattered twigs at its top, and to hide its nudity beneath another tree of tropical luxuriance, out on the glaringly bare Champs de Mars before the grand stand from which the élite of Port au Prince watches its president decorate its national heroes after a successful revolution. The rotarians of color could not, of course, be expected to appear at such a place in the heat of the day.

The ceremony was set for five o’clock, and was expected to last until nine. The American Electric Light Company had contributed the illumination, and its manager had installed the festoons of colored lamps in person. The American chief of police had assigned a force of native gendarmes to the duty of keeping order. It would be almost their first test of handling a friendly crowd in a friendly manner. Hitherto their task had been to hunt down their caco fellows with rifle and revolver, an occupation far better fitted to their temperament and liking. An American of benevolent impulses had consented to play Santa Claus, and give the little black urchins a real Christmas, with all the trimmings.

Poor Santa Claus did not get time even to don his whiskers. By two the crowd began to gather. By three all the populace of Port au Prince’s humble sections had massed about the tree which the incomprehensible blancs had planted for the occasion instead of performing their strange rites under one of the many live trees with which the city abounded. Word had been sent out that full dress was not essential. Old women who had barely two strips of rag to hang over their dangling breasts, boys whose combined garments did not do the duty of a pair of swimming-trunks, had tramped up from their primitive hovels on the edges of the city. If they were ragged far beyond the northern meaning of that term, at least their strings and tatters were as clean as water and sun-bleaching could make them. The women and most of the men carried or dragged whole clusters of black babies, most of them as innocent of clothing as a Parisian statue. As they arrived, the children were herded within the roped inclosure about the tree. Only adults with infants in arms were permitted inside the ropes; the jet-black sea of small faces was unbroken clear around the wide seething circle. It was hard to believe that there were so many piccaninnies in the world, to say nothing of the mere half-island of Haiti. Outside the ropes an immense throng of adults, mingled with better-dressed children without tickets, was shrieking a constant falsetto tumult that made the ear-drums of those in the focus of sound under the tree vibrate as if their ears were being incessantly boxed. A “conservative estimate” set the number present at ten thousand.

Up to this point the gentlemen of color, even those who had been appointed on the original committee, had kindly refrained from interference with their more Christmas-experienced white associates—except in the aforementioned matter of tickets. Now they appeared en masse to give the distinction of their presence and the sanction of their high caste to so praiseworthy an undertaking. Cabinet ministers, newspaper editors, the bright lights of the Haitian bar, the very president of the republic, strutted down the human lanes that were opened in their honor and took the chief places of vantage on the distributing platform beneath the tree. Their dazzling dernier cri garments made the simple American committeemen look like the discards of fortune. Their features were wreathed in benign smiles. They stepped forth to the edges of the platform and waved majestic, benevolent greetings to their applauding constituents outside the ropes. Some one handed the president a toy horn. He put it to his lips and blew an imaginary blast to prove what a bonhomme he was at heart and how thoroughly he entered into the prevailing spirit. The other gentlemen of color assumed Napoleonic poses; they raised their voices in oratorical cadences, and, when these failed to penetrate the unceasing din, they waved their hands at the heaps of gifts about them with sweeping gestures that said as plainly as if they had spoken in their impeccable French, “See, my beloved people, what I, in my bounty, have bestowed upon you!”

Soon after four the minister of public works snatched up a bundle of presents and flung them out into the sweltering sea of upturned little faces. That was neither the hour nor the manner of distribution that had been agreed upon, but what should a great political genius know of such minor details? Besides, there was no hope of delaying the ceremony much longer. The surging throng was in no mood to watch the absurd antics of the unfathomable white people, with their patched-up tree and their queer ideas of order and equal distribution. What they wanted were the presents, and at once. Those behind were already climbing over those in front in an effort to get at the heaped-up wares. If the original plan of waiting until nightfall and the colored lights had been carried out, the gifts would probably have disappeared in a general mêlée.

The beau geste of the Rotary vice-president was a signal for all his yellow confrères to distribute largess to their clamoring constituents. In vain did the white women attempt to exchange gifts for tickets, according to the system they had worked out. Their kinky-haired associates would have no such restrictions. As long as a hand was held out to them they continued to thrust gifts into it, perfectly indifferent to other hands clutching tickets that were being wildly flourished about them. There were presents of every possible usefulness to Haitian poverty—shoes, stockings, hats, shirts, suits, collars, ties, bales of cloth cut in sizes for varying ages of children’s garments, candy, toys, food stuffs ranging all the way from cakes to cans of sardines. The plan had been to gage each gift by the appearance of the recipient. There was nothing particularly Santa Claus-like in handing a necktie to a boy who had not shirt enough to which to attach a collar, nor in wishing a pair of stockings off on a youth whose feet had never known the imprisonment of shoes. Stark-naked black babies whose ribs could be counted at a hundred paces were not so much in need of an embroidered sailor-blouse as of a tin of biscuits. But all this meant nothing to the excited Haitians on the platform. They poured out gifts as if the horn of plenty were their own private property. The ministers caught up whole armfuls of presents and flung them clear over the heads of the invited children into the shrieking mobs beyond the ropes. The adults out there were far more likely to vote for them at the next elections than were the half-starved urchins beneath them. One cabinet member was seen to toss bundle after bundle to an extraordinarily tall negro who was known to wield great political power among the masses. Meanwhile the helpless little urchins within the circle rolled their white eyes in despair and frantically waved the tickets clutched in their little black hands, until they went down under the bare feet of those fighting forward behind them.