Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

A Haitian wayside store

The market women of Haiti sell everything under the sun—A “General Store” in a Haitian market

There are still more primitive sugar mills than these in Haiti

More temperamental than our own negroes, the Haitians are incredibly childlike in their mental processes. A certain gendarme officer whose butler was frequently remiss in his duties had him enrolled in the native corps in order to bring military discipline to bear upon him. A few days later the servant requested that he be given the right to carry arms, like other gendarmes. The officer good naturedly gave him a harmless old revolver that had been captured from the cacos. A few days later reports began to leak into headquarters that the national force was terrorizing the inhabitants of a certain section of Port au Prince. The detectives got busy, and found that the gendarme-butler, his day’s service over, was in the habit of patrolling that part of town in which he was born and where he was well known, strutting back and forth among his awed fellow-citizens during the evening, and from midnight on beating on house doors and commanding the inmates, “in the name of the law,” and at the point of his revolver, to come outside and line up “for inspection.” He had no designs upon their possessions, but was simply indulging his love for display and authority. When his employer took his putative weapon away from him again, he wept like a child of six. His grief, however, was short lived, for when the President called at the home of the officer on New Year’s afternoon, he found the butler so dressed up that he inadvertently shook hands with him as one of the guests.

Abuse of authority is a fixed fault in the Haitian character, as with most negroes. Of the several reasons why there are only two or three native lieutenants in the gendarmerie, lack of intelligence and dishonesty are less conspicuous than the inability to wield authority lightly. The Haitians of the masses have only three forms of recreation, dances, cock-fights, and voodooism. They have not even risen to the level of the “movies,” for though there are two cinemas in the capital and one in Cap Haïtien, these are too “high brow” for any but the upper class. Of pretty native customs we found only one—that of hanging up little colored-paper churches with candles inside them at Christmas-time. The Haitians are inveterate gamblers, which is only another way of saying that they abhor work. As the negro admires the successful and dominant, so he has supreme contempt for the broken and discredited. The Germans who once ruled the commercial roost in Haiti and who were interned after our entry into the war would find no advantage in returning, even if they were permitted to, for they have lost for life the respect of the natives by allowing themselves to be arrested. The profiteering Syrians who have largely inherited their control of commerce have far more standing to-day despite their slippery methods.

Between the primitive bulk of the population and the slight minority of educated citizens, mainly “people of color,” there is a wide gulf. Haiti has no middle class, not even a skilled labor class. Those who have ambition or wealth enough to go in for “higher education” will have nothing to do with anything even suggestive of manual labor. The ability to read, write, and speak French automatically brings with it a contempt for work and workers. As in all Latin America, an agricultural school is worse than useless, because it serves only to spoil what might have been good foremen, and the mere possession of a scrap of paper announcing the holder a graduate of such an institution is prima-facie evidence that he intends to loaf in the shade all the rest of his days. The result is that the population is made up of poverty-stricken, incredibly ignorant laborers and peasants, and of lawyers, “doctors” of this and that, and the political-military class which tyrannizes and fattens on the African masses.

Superficially, the educated class of Haiti is pleasant to meet, though the first impression seldom lasts. It has all the outward manners of the French, with none of their solid basis. In discussions of literature and art these “gens de couleur” could give the average American business man cards and spades; in actually doing or producing something worth while they are completely out of their depth. Once in a blue moon one runs across a full-blooded negro who shows outcroppings of genius. We were invited to meet such a one at the home of a “high yellow” senator on New Year’s eve, a pianist who had studied in Paris. I had been told that there were several fine musicians in Haiti, but, in the light of other experiences, had inwardly scoffed at the idea. It required but very little time to be convinced that here at least was one. The man not only played the best classics in a manner that would have been applauded in the highest class of concert halls, but gave several pieces of his own composition which could hold their place in any program. He had played a few times in the United States, but the drawback of color had proved insurmountable, and as there is naturally no income to be derived from such a source in Haiti, Ludovic Lamothe now holds a minor clerkship in the ministry of agriculture! When he had finished, the senator himself sat down at the piano and gave an exhibition which, I have no hesitancy in asserting, could scarcely have been duplicated by any member of our own upper house, and one which reminded us by contrast of the uproarious rag-time that was even at that moment reigning along Broadway. Yet it was such men as these that our marines once evicted from the Haitian senate with, “Come on, you niggers, get out of here!” Even the Southerner who had been induced to come with us, and whose muscles seemed to tense with inward horror as our host greeted him with a handshake and introduced him to the pianist, gradually shrank down into his chair in unconscious acknowledgment of his own ignorance of the higher things of life as compared with these cultured “niggers.”

We met a few other men of this type at the yearly “Haitian ball” in the chief native club, which American civilians attend, to the unbounded disgust of the forces of occupation. Yet the primitive African now and then showed itself in the whitest of them. Those who know them well say that even Haiti’s élite, educated in Europe or the United States, are apt to forget their Christian faith when troubles assail them and go to a “Papa Loi” for a wanga, or charm, and pay for a voodoo ceremony. In Paris lives a certain Mme. Thebes, in high repute among those who believe in sorcery and prophecy. If the stories which gradually leak out from the confidences of returning natives to their friends are trustworthy, she tells all Haitians that they are some day to become president of their country, not a bad guess under old conditions, though the supernatural madame does not seem to have kept up with the times. More than one revolution has been started on the strength of her prophecies. Some of these upper-class “people of color” are descendants of the same families who fled to Philadelphia and New Orleans at the time of the slave revolt. The members who remained behind were or have since become intermixed with the blacks. At least one American connected with the forces of occupation was introduced at a presidential reception to a colored family of the same name, which turned out to be relatives. As the American chanced to be a Southerner, it is easy to imagine whether the discovery brought joy and mutual social calls.