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.
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.
Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over Haiti
