Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

This is a stony, sleepy little hamlet among the mountains, famed in Haitian history as the place where Toussaint was living when the French general Brunet wrote him, asking for an interview, at which he was traitorously arrested and sent to end his days in a French dungeon. There we left the road to Cap Haïtien and, still fording, rising constantly over long humps of ground, always turning, gradually gained coffee-growing elevation. A fine new road, passing one large marine camp, carried us higher still, until green mountains stood all about us, the air grew pleasant as that of our Northern spring-time, and at length we found ourselves among pine-trees. Just after sundown, in the soft gray-blue evening of the temperate tropics, we sighted the little white church of St. Michel, beyond which we spun across a floor-level plateau a little farther to the residence of an American estate manager. To say that we had covered a hundred and fifty miles comfortably, with one short and one long stop, between daylight and dark gives some idea of what American occupation has done for Haitian roads.

The great plains, fourteen hundred feet high, were flooded with moonlight all through the night, in which I several times awoke shivering for all my heavy blankets. By day the sea-flat plateau proved to be covered with brown grass beneath which was the blackest of loamy soil. Gasolene tractors were turning this up, working by night as well as by day, and operated by Haitians who had been trained on the spot under American overseers. It was virgin soil, for this region was Spanish territory in the time of the French and had been used only as grazing land. The new company would soon have hundreds of acres planted in cotton, with other crops to follow. Such enterprises, multiplied many fold, are among the most immediate needs of Haiti.

Colonel W—— of the Marine Corps and Major General W——, Chef de la Gendarmérie d’Haiti, who are one and the same person, set out that afternoon on an inspection trip through the heart of Haiti, and invited me to go along. The region being caco-infested and a “restricted district” in which white women were not allowed to travel, Rachel was to continue by automobile on the well-guarded highway to Cap Haïtien. The colonel and I left the plantation by car also, skimming for more than an hour across the wonderful grassy plain without any need of a road. Groups of horses were grazing here and there, but there were no cattle. Occasionally we met a lone gendarme plodding along in the shoes to which he was still far from accustomed. An unfinished road carried us on from where the plain began to break up into rolling country, with clusters of trees in the hollows. Now and then the colonel brought down one of the deep-blue wild pigeons which flew frequently past, but the flocks of wild guineas usually found in this region had evidently been warned of his marksmanship. Four-footed game does not exist in Haiti, and even its harmless reptiles are rare; Noah evidently did not touch the West Indies. Gradually the forest appeared, growing thicker and thicker, until we were inclosed in tunnels of vegetation, fording many small rivers. Suddenly a great hubbub ahead caused us to make sure that our rifles were in readiness, but it was only a cock-fight in the woods, the men standing, the women seated on little home-made chairs outside the male circle about the ring, made of barrel staves driven upright into the ground. In the next mile we passed a dozen black men, each with a rooster under one arm, hurrying to the scene of conflict.

At the town of Maissade we halted at a marine camp on a hill overlooking the surrounding country, and commanded by Captain Becker, a famous hunter of cacos. His tent was almost filled with captured war material: rifles of every kind in use a century ago corded like so much stove-wood; revolvers and pistols enough to stock a museum devoted to the history and development of that arm; French swords dating back to the seventeenth century; rapiers such as flash through Dumas’s stories; heaps of rusted machetes, battered bugles, bamboo musical instruments, and hollow-log tomtoms from voodoo temples; drums abandoned by Leclerc; ragged pieces of uniform decorated with ribbons; dozens of hats and caps of “generals,” of felt, cloth, and straw, all more or less ragged, and all bearing such signs of rank as might be adopted by small boy warriors. Then there were beads and charms, Obeah vials found on the bodies of dead cacos, mysterious articles of unknown purpose and origin. The captain dissected one of the charms. It consisted of a bullet wrapped in a dirty bit of paper on which were scrawled a few strange characters, the dried foot of a lizard, and what was apparently a powdered insect, all inclosed in a brass cartridge-shell, with a string attached to it long enough to go around the neck of the original owner, whom it was supposed to protect against bullets. The captain had shot him a few days before, and as he fell he cried out in “creole,” “O Mama, they’ve got me!” then died cursing the Obeah man for making an imperfect charm. Some of the cacos in the region had recently surrendered, and had been made “division commanders,” with the duty of helping to hunt down their former comrades. One of them had showed the marine who shot him the bullet which he had dug out of his flesh with a machete, and now followed him everywhere like a faithful dog.

In the town itself the gendarme detachment was in command of a native lieutenant who was rated an excellent officer, but he had barely a touch of negro blood. Beyond was a road of boulevard width along which we spun at thirty-five miles an hour. Wild pigeons, parrots, and negroes far less ragged than those of Port au Prince enlivened the striking scenery, and at sunset we drew up before the gendarmerie of Hinche, the birthplace of the departed Charlemagne. There was something amusingly anachronistic in the sight of half a hundred marines playing baseball and basketball on the plain about their camp at the edge of town, for Hinche itself had little in common with such scenes.

All Haitian towns have a close family resemblance. There is always a big, brown, bare, dusty central place, with a tiny bandstand with steps painted in the national colors and surmounted by a single royal palm-tree, called the “patrie.” From this radiate wide, right-angled dirt streets lined by low houses, some of plastered mud, a few whitewashed, many of split palm trunks, most of them of tache, nearly all with earth floors, all except the few covered with corrugated iron in the center of town being roofed with thatch. Some have narrow sapling-pillared porches paved with little cobblestones, these sometimes also whitewashed; and where houses are missing are broken hedges of organ cactus on which hang drying rags of clothing. Facing the place is a more or less ruined church, farther off a large open market-place, with perhaps a few ragged thatch-roof shelters from the sun. Then there is sure to be a spick-and-span gendarmerie, with large numbers of docile prisoners and proud black gendarmes, perhaps a group of marines, or at any rate of their native prototypes, here and there stalking through the dusty streets, ignoring the respectful greetings of the teeming black populace squatted in their doorways or on their dirt floors. Little fagot fires on the ground behind or beside the huts, a well-worn path down to the river, and an indefinable scent of the tropics and black humanity living in primitive conditions complete the picture. Men who have seen both assert that a Congo village is a paradise compared with a Haitian hamlet.

The curate came over to smoke a cigarette and drink a sip of rum with us after supper. He was a large, powerful Frenchman from Brittany, of remarkably fine features, sparkling blue eyes, and no recent hair-cut or shave, dressed in an ecclesiastical bonnet and enormous “congress” shoes run down at heel, and the long black gown which seems so out of place, yet is really very convenient, in the tropics. For twelve years he had shepherded Hinche and the neighboring region, being much of the time the only white man in it. He expected to complete twenty-five years’ residence, then go home in retirement. He traveled freely everywhere within his district, caco sentinels and the bands themselves hiding when he passed rather than molest him. Cannibalism was certainly practised to this day, in his opinion, especially among the hills, where there were many negroes older than he who had never come to town. There was less superstition in this district, he asserted, because the people came somewhat under the more civilized Dominican influence. While we talked, two former cacos, now “division chiefs,” came in to report to the efficient young American gendarme commander, simple old souls with childlike eyes and Napoleon III beards whom one would scarcely have suspected of harming a chicken. The day before two native women had brought in a caco whom they had cudgeled into submission, and that afternoon an old man, unarmed, had presented the commander with another, leading him by a rope around the neck.

In these circumstances we set out on horseback next morning in no great fear of the bandits, though we kept our rifles and revolvers handy. With us went a curious dwarf who lived in the next town and who had attached himself to the Americans like a stray mastiff, which he closely resembled in expression and in his devotion to them. He was of full size from the waist upward, but his legs were scarcely a foot long, and his bare feet hardly reached to the edges of the saddle in which he sat, once he had been placed there, with all the assurance of a cow-boy of the plains. Then there was “Jim,” looking like the advance agent of a minstrel show. “Jim” was a descendant of American negroes, his grandparents having come from Philadelphia to Samaná, Santo Domingo, where a number of black colonists from our northern states settled at the invitation of the Haitians when they ruled the whole island. He spoke a fluent English, with a mixture of Southern and foreign accent, as well as “creole” and Spanish, and having served the colonel as interpreter years before during the marine advance from Monte Cristi to Santiago, had come to Haiti to join him again when he took charge of the gendarmerie. He had been assigned to plain-clothes duty, but “Jim’s” conception of that phrase did not include the adjective, and he had set forth on what promised to be anything but a dressy expedition in a garb well suited for a presidential reception. This was already beginning to show the effects of scrambling through the underbrush in quest of the wild pigeons which had fallen before the colonel’s shotgun.

The mayor of Hinche, a first cousin of Charlemagne, saw us off in person, holding the colonel’s stirrup and bidding him farewell with bared head. We forded the Guayamoc River and wound away through foot-hills that soon gave way to a brown, level savanna which two years before had been covered with cattle, now wholly disappeared. Once we climbed over a large hill of oyster-shells, which geologists would no doubt recognise as proof that the region was formerly under the sea; but the French colonists of long ago were probably as fond of oysters as are their fellow-countrymen to-day, and it is worthy of note that these were all half-shells. We passed one small village in a hollow, with a mud hut full of gendarmes; the rest of the morning the dry and arid, yet lightly wooded, country was almost wholly uninhabited. For long spaces the scornful cries of black crows were the only sounds except the constant switching required to keep our thin Haitian horses and mules on the move.

Thomasique, where we halted for lunch at the mud-hut gendarmerie, was a dismal little hamlet of lopsided thatched hovels. The commander of the district had found a new use for captured caco rifles, using the barrels as gratings for his outdoor cooking-place. The juge de paix, the magistrate, and the richest man of the town, ranging in color from quadroon to griffe, called to pay their respects to the general, frankly admitting by their attitude that the young American lieutenant of gendarmes was their superior officer. Under his guidance the revenues of Thomasique had increased five fold in a single month. It was evident from the manner of the judge that he had something on his chest, and at length he unburdened himself. The Government, it seemed, had not paid him his salary—of one dollar a month—for more than half a year, and he respectfully petitioned the general to take the matter up with the president upon his return to Port au Prince. There was probably a connection between his lack of funds and the auditing of the village accounts by the lieutenant.