Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Such stories always hover about those mighty monuments that seem impossible without supernatural aid, yet no one who has beheld the success with which the forces of gravity have been derided in this incredible undertaking, incredible even in the enormousness of the structure itself without taking into account its extraordinary situation, will question its cost in such details as a few thousand more or less human lives. Obsessed with the idea that the French would try to reconquer the country, Christophe had resolved to erect a stronghold that would be an impregnable place of resistance against them, or at worst a “nest-egg of liberty,” which would afford certain refuge to the défenseurs de la patrie until better days dawned for them. There he stored vast quantities of grain and food, of ammunition, flints, bullets, powder, soggy heaps of which are still to be found, clothing, tools, and a gold reserve amounting to more than thirty million dollars. His enemies saw in the citadel only a pretext to indulge his innate barbarism, to decimate his people for the mere pleasure of playing Nero. It may be that this is not a just verdict. Christophe felt that he incarnated the soul of his black brethren and that belief made him wholly insensible to any other consideration. The mere fact that his lack of perspective and his ignorance of such details as the feeding of a long-besieged garrison made his seemingly impregnable fortress an utter waste of effort may speak poorly for the instruction which his French masters gave him, but it does not belittle the actual accomplishment of his superhuman undertaking.

Christophe as violently died as he had lived. Stricken with apoplexy in the church of Limonade, he attempted to cure himself by heroic measures, such as rum and red-pepper baths. Finding this of no avail and refusing to outlive his despotic power over his subjects, he shot himself through the head. Barely was his body cold, if we are to believe current stories, when his officers and retainers sacked the palace of Sans Souci in which it lay, the wealth of many Haitian families of this day being based on the spoils from this and his other royal residences. The corpse was carried to the citadel and covered with quick lime, but tradition asserts that it retained its life-like appearance for many years afterward and was on view to all who cared to peer through the glass heading of the vault until a later ruler decreed this exposition “indecent,” and ordered the remains to be covered with earth.

CHAPTER VIII
THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES

Ouanaminthe is the Haitian “creole” name for a town which the Spaniards founded under the more euphonious title of Juana Mendez. It is the eastern frontier station for those who travel overland by the northern route from Haiti to Santo Domingo. We might have been stranded there indefinitely but for the already familiar kindness of our fellow-countrymen in uniform who are scattered throughout the negro republic. Public conveyances are unknown in Ouanaminthe. Strangers are more than rare, and the natives trust to their own broad, hoof-like feet. Walking is all very well for a lone bachelor with no other cares than a half-filled knapsack. But with a wife to consider, the long trail loses something of its primitive simplicity; moreover there sat our baggage staring us in the face with a contrite, don’t-abandon-me air. In what would otherwise have been our sad predicament, Captain Verner, commanding the gendarmérie of Ouanaminthe, came to our rescue most delicately with the assertion that he had long been planning to run over to Monte Cristi on a pressing matter of business.

The captain’s Ford—his own, be it noted in passing, lest some committee of investigation prick up its ears—was soon swimming the frontier river Massacre with that amphibian ease which the adaptable “flivver” quickly acquires in the often bridgeless West Indies. The change from one civilization to another—or should I call them two attempts toward civilization?—was as sudden, as astonishingly abrupt, as the dash through the apparently unfordable stream. Dajabón, strewn from the sandy crest of the eastern bank to the arid plains beyond, reminded us at once of Cuba; to my own mind it brought back the memory of hundreds of Spanish-American towns scattered down the western hemisphere from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. With one slight exception the island of Santo Domingo is the only one in the New World that is divided between two nationalities; it is the only one on earth, unless my geography be at fault, where the rank and file speak two different languages. Yet the shallow Massacre is as definite a dividing line as though it were a hundred leagues of sea.

Unlike the Haitian shacks behind us, the dwellings of Dajabón were almost habitable, even to the exacting Northern point of view. Instead of tattered and ludicrously patched negroes of bovine temperament lolling in the shade of as ragged hovels of palm-leaves and jungle rubbish, comparatively well-dressed men and women, ranging in complexion from light brown to pale yellow, sat in chairs on projecting verandas or leaned on their elbows in open windows, staring with that fixed attention which makes the most hardened stranger self-conscious in Spanish-America, yet which, contrasted with the vacant black faces of Haiti, was an evidence at least of human intelligence and curiosity. The village girls, decked out in their Sunday-afternoon best, were often attractive in appearance, some undeniably pretty, qualities which only an observer of African ancestry could by any stretch of generosity grant to the belles of the Haitian bourgs behind us.

Even the change in landscape was striking. Whether the Spaniard colonized by choice those regions which remind him of the dry and rarely shaded plains of his own Castille and Aragón, or because he makes way with a forest wherever he sees one, he is more apt than not to be surrounded by bare, brown, semi-arid vistas. Haiti had, on the whole, been densely wooded; luxuriant vegetation, plentifully watered, spread away on every hand. The great plain that stretched out before us beyond Dajabón was almost treeless; except for a scattering of withered, thorny bushes, there was scarcely a growing thing. The rainfall that had been so frequent in the land of the blacks behind us seemed not to have crossed the frontier in months. In contrast to caco-impoverished Haiti, large herds of cattle wandered about the brown immensity, or huddled in the rare pretenses of shade; but what they found to feed on was a mystery, for there was nothing in the scarce, scanty patches of sun-burned herbage that could have been dignified with the name of grass. Even where something resembling a forest appeared farther on it turned out to be a dismal wilderness of dwarf trees with spiny trunks and savage thorny branches without a suggestion of undergrowth or ground plants beneath them. Dead, flat, monotonous, made doubly mournful by the occasional moan of a wild dove, a more dreary, uninspiring landscape it would be hard to imagine; the vista that spread away as far as the eye could see seemed wholly uninviting to human habitation.

It must be an unpromising region, however, that does not produce at least its crop of mankind. Clusters of thrown-together huts, little less miserable in these rural districts, it must be admitted, than those of Haiti, jolted past us now and then, their swarms of stark-naked children of eight, ten, and even twelve years of age scampering out across the broken, sun-hardened ground to see us pass. Yet in one respect at least even these denizens of the wilderness were superior to their Haitian prototypes—they really spoke their native language. Familiar as we had both been for years with French, it was rare indeed that we got more than the general drift of a conversation in Haitian “creole.” The most uneducated dominicano, on the other hand, spoke a Spanish almost as clear and precise as that heard in the streets of Madrid. There must be something enduring, something that appeals to the most uncouth tongue, in the Castilian language. Hear it where you will, in all the broad expanse of Central and South America, in the former Spanish colonies of the West Indies, from the lips of Indians, negroes, mestizos, or the Jews of the Near East, banished from Spain centuries ago, with minor variations of pronunciation and enriching of vocabulary from the tongues it has supplanted, it retains almost its original purity. What a hybrid of incomprehensible noises French, on the other hand, becomes in the mouths of slaves and savages we had all too often had impressed upon us in Haiti, and were due to have the lesson repeated in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles. Even our own English cannot stand the wear and tear of isolation and slovenly vocal processes with anything like the success of the Castilian. The speech of Canada and of Barbados, closely as those two lands are linked to the same mother country, seem almost two distinct languages. But if the Dominicans spoke their language more purely, their voices had none of the soft, almost musical tones of the negroes beyond the Massacre. There was a brittle, metallic, nerve-jarring twang to their speech that was almost as unpleasant as the high-pitched chatter of Cuban women.

If we noted all these differences between the two divisions of the island, there was another that impressed us far more forcibly at the moment. In all our jolting over the roads of Haiti, good, bad, and unspeakable, we had never once been delayed by so much as a puncture. In the first mile out of Dajabón we were favored with four separate and distinct blow-outs. The twenty-eight miles between the frontier and Monte Cristi—for it is best to hear the worst at once—netted no fewer than ten!

It was shortly after the fifth, if my memory is not failing, that the open plain gave way to a thorn-bristling wilderness through which had been cut a roadway a generous twenty feet wide—shortly after certainly, otherwise the sixth blow-out would have intervened. I use the term roadway advisedly, for road there was really none. The Dominican scorns the building of highways as thoroughly as do any of his cousins of Spanish descent. With American intervention he was forced, much against his will and better judgment, to divert a certain amount of public moneys and labor to making wheeled communication between his various provinces possible. But though you can drive an unbridled horse along any open space, you cannot choose the path he shall make within it. Wide as it was, the roadway was an unbroken expanse of deeply cracked and thoroughly churned brown mud, sun-burned to the consistency of broken rock. Along this the first traveler after the long forgotten rains had squirmed and waded his way where the mud was shallowest, with the result that the only semblance to a road wandered back and forth across the misshapen roadway like a Spanish “river” in its ludicrously over-ample bed.