UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI
We sailed away from Cuba on the Haitian Navy. It happened that the fleet
in question put into Guantánamo Bay to have something done to her
alleged engine at a time which happily coincided with our own arrival at
the eastern end of the island. Otherwise there is no telling when or how
we should have made our second jump down the stepping-stones of the West
Indies, for Cuba and Haiti do not seem to be particularly neighborly.
The once proud _Adrea_ of the New York Yacht Club is a schooner of
almost a hundred tons, and still preserves some of her aristocratic
features despite the lowly state to which she has fallen under her new
name of _L’Indépendance_. Time was when the fleet of the Black Republic
boasted more than twice its present strength; but the larger half of it
was sold one day to the “slave trade,” as they still call the carrying
of negro laborers to the sugar-mills of Cuba, and on the two masts of
_L’Indépendance_ has fallen the entire burden of preserving the Haitian
freedom of the seas.
Eleven wild men, all of them, except one yellow fellow for contrast,
blacker than the shades of a rainy-season midnight, made up her crew,
and the deep-blue and maroon flag of sovereign Haiti flew at her stern.
But there was a lighter tint superimposed upon this dark background both
of flag and crew. The former bore the white shield which announces a
white man in command, and her three officers, averaging the advanced age
of twenty-five, were as Caucasian as a New England village. In real life
they were a bo’s’n of the American Navy and two enlisted men of our
far-flung Marine Corps, hailing from such quaint corners of the world as
Cape Cod, Toledo, and Indianapolis; but in that topsyturvy fairy-world
of the West Indies they were all first lieutenants of the “Gendarmérie
d’Haïti.”
By noon of a midsummer day in December _L’Indépendance_ was rolling
across the Windward Passage in a way out of all proportion to her
importance or to the mere playfulness of the Caribbean waves. When
morning broke, the two horns of Haiti loomed far to the rear on each
horizon, and we had already covered some two thirds of our journey.
But not so fast, lest the inexperienced reader get too hasty and
optimistic a notion of wind-wafted travel. A schooner is a most romantic
means of conveyance—when there is something to fill her sails. I can
imagine no greater punishment for American impatience than to be
sentenced to lie aimlessly tossing through the hereafter in tropical
doldrums where even the fish scorn to bite. Evidently the winds within
the gaping jaws of Haiti are as erratic as the untamable race that
peoples its mountainous shores.
However, let us avoid exaggeration. We did move every now and then,
sometimes in the right direction, occasionally at a spanking pace that
sent the blue waters foaming in two white furrows along our bows. Yet
the mountainous ridges on either hand crept past with incredible
leisureliness. All through the second night the tramp of hurrying bare
feet and the stentorian “French” of the officers sounded about the deck
cots we had preferred to the still luxurious cabins below—and by sunrise
we had covered nearly twenty miles since sunset! Gonave Island, with its
alligator snout, floated on our starboard all that day with a
persistency which suggested we were towing it along with us. Brown and
seeming almost bare at this distance, it showed no other signs of life
than a few languid patches of smoke, which the mulatto cabin-boy
explained as “Burn ’em off an’ then make ’em grow.” It was well that he
had picked up a fair command of English somewhere, for the mere fact
that we both prided ourselves on the fluency of our French did not help
us in any appreciable degree to carry on conversation with the black
crew. The youthful officers, with that quick adaptability which we like
to think of as American, had mastered their new calling even to the
extent of acquiring that strange series of noises which is dignified in
the French West Indies with the name of “creole,” but it would never
have been recognized even as a foster-child on Parisian boulevards.
The mountainous northern peninsula on our port grew slightly more
variegated under an afternoon sun that gave the incredibly blue
landlocked sea the suggestion of an over-indigoed tub on wash-day. The
peninsula was brown, for the most part, with a wrinkled and folded
surface that seemed to fall sheer from the unbroken summit into the
placid blue gulf, and only here and there gleamed a little patch of
green. Yet it must have been less precipitous than it seemed, for we
made out through our glasses more than one clustered village along the
hair-line where sea and mountains met, and now and then a fishing smack
crawling along it put in at some invisible cove.
Before the third day waned, our goal, Port au Prince, was dimly to be
seen with the same assistance, a tiny, whitish, triangular speck which
seemed to stand upright at the base of the hazy mountain-wall stretching
across the world ahead. The wind, too, took on a new life, but it blew
squarely in our faces, as if bent on refusing us admittance to our
destination. The shore we were seeking receded into the dusk, and the
men of endless patience which sailing-vessels seem to breed settled down
to battle through another night, with little hope of doing more than
avoid retreat. We were rewarded, however, with another of those
marvelous West Indian sunsets which only a super-artist could hope to
picture. Ragged handsful of clouds, like the scattered fleece of the
golden-brown _vicuña_, hung motionless against the background of a
pink-and-blue streaked sky, which faded through all possible shades to
the blackening indigo of the once more limitless sea.
How long the winds might have prolonged our journey there is no knowing.
Out of the black night behind us there appeared what seemed a pulsating
star, which gradually grew to unstar-like size and brilliancy.
Excitement broke out among the three white mariners. One of them
snatched an electric lamp and flashed a few letters of the Morse code
into the darkness. They were answered by similar winkings on the arc of
the approaching star. This shifted its course and bore down upon us. The
captain caught up a megaphone and bellowed into the howling wind. The
answer came back in no celestial tongue, but in a strangely familiar and
earthly dialect: “Hello! That you, Louie? Tow? Sure. Got a line, or
shall I pass you one?” A search-light suddenly revealed the navy of
Haiti like a theatrical star in the center of the tossing stage; a
submarine-chaser snorted alongside us with American brevity; our sails
dropped with a run, and a few moments later we were scudding through the
waves into the very teeth of the gale. When I awoke from my next nap,
_L’Indépendance_ was asleep at anchor in a placid little cove.
* * * * *
Port au Prince is not, as it appears from far out in the bay, heaped up
at the base of a mountain-wall, but stretches leisurely up a gentle, but
constant slope that turns mountainous well behind the city. Off and on
through the night we had heard the muffled beating of tomtoms, or some
equally artistic instrument, and occasionally a care-free burst of
laughter, that could come only from negro throats, had floated to us
across the water. The first rays of day showed us a stone’s-throw from a
shore which the swift tropical dawn disclosed as far denser in greenery
than a Cuban coast. The city lay three miles away across the curving
bay. Two slender wireless poles and the stack of a more distant
sugar-mill stood out against the mountain-range behind, while all else
still hovered in the haze of night. Then bit by bit, almost swiftly, the
details of the town began to appear, like a photographic plate in the
developer. A cream-colored, two-towered cathedral usurped the center of
the picture; whitish, box-like houses spotted the slope irregularly all
about it, and the completed development showed scores of little hovels
scattered through the dense greenery far up the hillsides and along the
curving shore. Then all at once a bugle sounded, an American bugle
playing the old familiar reveille, and full day popped forth as suddenly
as if the strident notes had summoned the world to activity.
Two blacks, manning the schooner’s tender, set us ashore in the Haitian
“navy-yard,” a slender wooden pier along which were moored three
American submarine-chasers. An encampment of marines eyed us wonderingly
from the doors of their tents and wooden buildings, beyond which a
gateway gave us entrance to a thoroughly Haitian scene. A stony country
road, flanked by a toy railway line, was thronged with the children of
Ham. Negro women, with huge bundles of every conceivable contents on
their heads, pattered past with an easy-going, yet graceful, carriage.
Others sat sidewise on top of assorted loads that half hid the lop-eared
donkeys beneath them. Red bandanas and turbans of other gay colors
showed beneath absurdly broad palm-leaf hats. Black feet, with the
remnants of a slipper balancing on the toes of each, waved with the pace
of the diminutive animals. The riders could scarcely have been called
well dressed, but they were immaculate compared with the throngs of foot
travelers. A few scattered patches of rags, dirty beyond description,
hung about the black bodies they made no serious effort to conceal. Men
in straggly Napoleon III beards clutched every few steps at the shreds
which posed as trousers. Stark naked urchins pattered along through the
dust; more of them scampered about under the palm-trees. Bare feet were
as general as African features. More than one group sidled crabwise to
the edge of the road as we advanced and gazed behind them with a
startled expression at the strange sound made by our shod feet. Scores
of the most primitive huts imaginable, many of them leaning at what
seemed precarious angles, lined the way. Before almost all of them stood
a little “shop,” a few horizontal sticks raised off the ground by
slender poles and shaded by a cluster of brown palm-leaves. Vacant-faced
negro men and women, none of them boasting a real garment, tended the
establishments squatting or lolling in the patches of shade which the
early morning sun cast well out into the roadway. The stock in trade of
the best of them would not have filled a market-basket. A cluster of
bananas; a few oranges, small, but yellower than those of Cuba;
bedraggled-looking alligator-pears; dust-covered loaves of bread, no
larger than biscuits, made up the most imposing arrays. Many of the
“merchants” had not advanced to the stick-counter stage, but spread
their wares on the ground—little handsful of tiny red beans laid at
regular intervals along a banana-leaf, similar heaps of unroasted
coffee, bundles of fagots, tied with strips of leaf, that could easily
have gone into a coat-pocket. Now and again some black ragamuffin paused
to open negotiations with the lolling shopkeepers, who carried on the
transaction, if possible, from where they lay, rising to their feet only
when the heat of the bargaining demanded it. The smallness of each
purchase was amusing, as well as indicative of Haitian poverty. One
orange, a single banana, a measureful of a coarse, reddish meal tinier
than the smallest glass of a bartender’s paraphernalia, were the usual
amounts, and the pewter coins that exchanged owners were seldom of the
value of a whole cent. With rare exceptions the purchasers wolfed at
once what they had bought as they pattered on down the road.
Details came so thick and fast that it was impossible to catch them all,
even with a kodak. Compared with this, Cuba, after all, had been little
more than semi-tropical. Here the vegetation, the odors, the very
atmosphere were of the genuine tropics. Breadfruit-trees, with their
scolloped leaves, which we had never seen in the larger island to the
westward, shouldered their way upward among the cocoanut-palms.
Mango-trees, as dense as haystacks, cast their black shadows over the
rampant undergrowth. But always the eyes came back to the swarms of
black people, with their festoons of rags contrasting with, rather than
covering, their coal-tinted bodies. What might have seemed a long walk
under a tropical sun became a short stroll amid this first glimpse of an
astonishingly primitive humanity.
For all their poverty, the inhabitants seemed to be frankly happy with
life. They had the playfulness of children, with frequent howls of
full-throated laughter; they seemed no more self-conscious at the
super-tattered state of their garments than were the ambling, over-laden
donkeys at the ludicrous patchiness of their trappings. That lack of the
sense of personal dignity characteristic of the African came to their
rescue in the abjectness of their condition. For they _were_ African, as
thoroughly so as the depths of the Congo. We had strolled for an hour,
and reached the very edge of the city itself, before we met not a white
man, but the first face that showed any admixture of Caucasian blood.
Compared with this callous-footed throng the hodgepodge of Cuban
complexions seemed almost European.
As we neared the town, a train as primitive as the scene about us
chattered round a bend in the tunnel of vegetation, the front of its
first-model engine swinging like the trunk of an excited elephant. The
four open, wooden cars that swayed and screamed along behind it were
densely packed with passengers, yet even here there was not a white
face. The diminutive tender was piled high with cordwood little larger
than fagots, and the immense, squatty smokestack was spitting red coals
over all the surrounding landscape. As the train passed, the negro women
along the road sprang with a flurry of their ragged skirts upon the
track and fell to picking up what we took to be coins scattered by some
inexplicably generous passenger. Closer investigation showed that they
were snatching up live coals with which to light the little brown clay
pipes which give them a flitting resemblance to Irish peasants.
A lower-class market was in full swing in a dust-carpeted patch of
ground on the city water-front. Here the wares were more varied than in
the roadside “shops,” but sold in the same minute portions. American
safety-matches were offered not by the box, but in bundles of six
matches each, tied with strips of leaf. Here were “butcher-shops,”
consisting of a wooden trough full of meat, which owed its preservation
to a thorough cooking, and was sold by the shred and consumed on the
spot. Scrawny, black hags, who had tramped who knows how many miles over
mountain-trails with an ox-load of oranges or coarse tubers on their
heads, squatted here all the morning selling a penny-worth of their
wares at a time, the whole totaling perhaps forty cents, to be
squandered for some product of civilization which they would carry home
in the same laborious fashion. The minority of the women venders had
come on donkeys and were frank in impressing upon their more lowly
sisters the aristocracy which this sign of wealth and leisure conferred
upon them. A native gendarme, dressed in a cheap-looking imitation of
the uniform of our own marines, but as African of soul beneath it as the
most naked of his fellow-citizens, strutted back and forth through the
throngs of clamorous bargainers. Now and again, when a group grew too
large for his liking, he charged into it, waving a long stick and
striking viciously at the legs and backs of all within reach,
irrespective of sex or age. Far from fighting back or even showing
resentment, the childlike blacks fled before him, often with shrieks of
laughter. Ours were the only white faces within the inclosure, yet we
were given passage everywhere with an unostentatious consideration that
in less primitive societies would be called extreme courtesy.
Beggars as inhumanly sunk in degradation as the lowest pariahs of India
shuffled in and out, mutely holding forth filthy tin cups to those
barely a degree above them in want and misery. Near the gate a seething
crowd was collected around a pushcart filled with tin cans of all sizes,
tumbled pellmell together just as they had been slashed open and tossed
aside by a marine mess orderly. An old woman was selling them to eager
purchasers, who looked them over with the deliberate care one might give
an automobile offered for sale, parted at length with the price agreed
upon, after long and vociferous negotiations, and wandered away gloating
over the beauty of their new acquisition, some of them talking to it in
their incomprehensible “French.” The prices varied from “cinq cob” (5
centimes, or 1 cent) for a recent container of jam or pork and beans to
a _gourde_ (twenty cents) or more for the five-gallon gasolene tins that
make such splendid water buckets on the head of the Haitian women. In
another corner was arranged in the dust a display of bottles of every
conceivable size, shape, and previous occupation, from three-sided
pickle flasks to empty beer bottles, constituting the entire stock in
trade of two incredibly ragged females. Scarcely a scrap or remnant,
even of things which we hire men to carry to the garbage heap, but had
its value to this poverty-stricken throng. Particularly was anything
whatever resembling cloth made use of to the utmost end of its
endurance. One of the best dressed of the pulsating collection of
tatters was a powerful black fellow who strutted about in a two-piece
suit fashioned from unbleached muslin that had entered upon its second
term of servitude. Unlike those of his fellows, both garments were
whole, except for one three-cornered rent in what, to a less
self-confident being, would have been an embarrassing position.
Diagonally across the trousers, just above this vent, blazed the word
“Eventually,” and below it the pertinent query, “Why not now?”
[Illustration: The entire enlisted personnel of the Haitian Navy]
[Illustration: A school in Port au Prince]
[Illustration: The Central Square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on
Market Day]
[Illustration: Looking down upon the market from the Cathedral platform]
The American residents of Port au Prince complain that visitors of
scribbling propensities have given too much space to its comic-opera
aspect. It is hard to avoid temptation. The ridiculous is constantly
forcing itself into the foreground, innocently unaware of distracting
attention from the more serious background. For there is such a
background, one which should in all fairness be sketched into any
picture of Haiti which makes a pretense of being true to life. If there
has been a constant tendency to leave it out, it is probably due to the
fact that the average wanderer over the face of the earth finds most
“interesting” the incongruous and the ludicrous.
To close our eyes, then, for the moment to the more obvious details, the
capital of the Black Republic is by no means the misplaced African
village which common report would indicate. Its principal streets are
excellently paved with asphalt; scores of automobiles honk their way
through its seething streams of black humanity. Even along the
water-front the principles of sanitation are enforced. Barefooted “white
wings,” distinguished by immense green hats of woven palm-leaves worn on
top of their personal headgear, are constantly sweeping the city with
their primitive bundle-of-grass brooms. A railroad, incredibly
old-fashioned, to be sure, but accommodating a crowded traffic for all
that, runs through the heart of the town and connects it with others
considerable distances away in both directions. An excellent electric
light service covers the city. Its shops make a more or less successful
effort to ape their Parisian prototypes; its business offices by no
means all succumb to the tropical temptation to sleep through the
principal hours of the day. The French left it a legacy of wide streets,
though failing, of course, to bequeath it adequate sidewalks. Its
architecture is a surprise to the traveler arriving from Cuba; it would
be far less so to one who came direct from Key West. Wooden houses with
sloping roofs are the general rule, thin-walled structures with huge
slatted doors and windows, and built as open as possible to every breeze
that blows, as befits the climate. There are neither red tiles,
strangely tinted walls, nor Moorish _rejas_ and patios to attract the
eye. Indeed, there is little or nothing in the average street vista to
arouse the admiration, though there is a certain cause for amusement in
the strange juxtaposition of the most primitive African reed huts with
the attempts of Paris-educated mulattoes to ape, with improvements of
their own, their favorite French châteaux.
Only two buildings in Port au Prince—one might perhaps say in all
Haiti—boast window-glass. One is the large and rather imposing
cathedral, light yellow both outside and within, flooded with the
aggressive tropical sunshine in a way that leaves it none of the “dim
and mystic light” befitting such places of worship. The other is the
unfinished, snow-white presidential palace, larger and more sumptuous
than our own White House. The cathedral looks down upon the blue harbor
across a great open square unadorned with a single sprig of vegetation;
the palace squats in the vast sun-scorched Champs de Mars, equally bare
except for a Napoleonic statue of Dessalines, his tell-tale complexion
disguised by the kindly bronze, and attended by a modest and deeply
tanned Venus of Melos. The absence of trees in the public squares gives
assistance to the wooden houses in proving the city no offshoot of
Spanish civilization. The tale runs that the Champs de Mars was once
well wooded until a former president ordered it cleared of all possible
lurking-places for assassins.
But Port au Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential part
up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gorgeous
tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in its grove
of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial trees, and
flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our northern roses to the
pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses of the
lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the
tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of Haiti
hang almost within reach from one’s window; alligator-pears may be had
in their season for the flinging of a club; he who cares to climb high
enough can quench his thirst with the cool water of the green cocoanut.
The dwellings here are spacious and airy, their ceilings almost double
the height of our own, and if they lack some of the conveniences
considered indispensable in the North, they have instead splendid
swimming-pools and, in many cases, such a view of the lower city, the
intensely blue bay, and the wrinkled brown ranges of the southern
peninsula as would make up for a far greater scarcity of the stereotyped
comforts.
[Illustration: A Cuban residence in a new clearing]
[Illustration: Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land]
[Illustration: Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar mill]
[Illustration: A station of a Cuban pack-train]
It is a leisurely, but constant, climb from the water-front to these
forest-embowered dwellings. Port au Prince is not blessed with a
street-car system, and its medieval railroad staggers only to the upper
edge of the Champs de Mars. Moreover, the painted drygoods-boxes on
wheels are invariably so densely crammed with full-scented blacks that
not only the white residents, but even the haughty yellow ones, rarely
deign to patronize the spark-spitting conveyance. Long-established
families have their private carriages; the parvenus from foreign lands
own, borrow, or share automobiles; mere clerks and bookkeepers jog
homeward on their diminutive Haitian ponies; and chance visitors trust
to luck and the oily-cushioned wrecks that ply for hire, finishing the
journey on foot from the point where the bony and moth-eaten caricature
of a horse refuses longer to respond to the lashings and screams of the
tar-complexioned driver. Fortunately, it is perfectly good form to
“catch a ride” with any car-owning member of one’s own race.
Let me not leave the impression, however, that the majority of those who
ascend the city depend on gasolene or horseflesh. At least two thirds of
them walk, but it is the two thirds that do not count in polite
parlance. All day long, though far more incessantly, of course, in the
delightful coolness of early morning or the velvety air of evening,
processions of black people of varying degrees of raggedness plod
noiselessly up and down the stony streets of the upper town.
Noiselessly, that is, only in their barefooted tread; their tongues are
rarely silent, and frequent cackles of unrestrained laughter sound from
the bundles beneath which their woolly heads are all but invariably
buried. For be it large or small, a mahogany chest of drawers or a tin
can three inches in diameter, the Haitian always bears his burdens on
his head. _Her_ head would be more nearly the exact truth of the case,
for the women rarely permit their lords and masters to subject
themselves to the indignity of toil. But the merest child of the
burden-bearing sex is rarely seen abroad except under a load that gives
her the appearance of the stem of a toadstool. Some of these
uncomplaining females serve the more fortunate residents of the hill;
most of them trot to and fro between the market and the tiny thatched
cabins sprinkled far up the range behind the city like rice grains on a
green banana leaf. Where the streets break up beyond the last man’s-size
dwellings, narrow trails tunnel on up through the prolific greenery to
these scattered huts of the real Haitian, among which it is easy to
imagine oneself in the heart of Africa.
Five years ago there were barely a score of white men in Port au Prince,
and not many more than that in all Haiti. To-day there are perhaps three
hundred American residents, without counting a large force of occupation
and their families, and to say nothing of a considerable sprinkling of
French, the remnants of what was a flourishing German colony until an
epidemic of internment fell upon it, and a scattering of Italian,
Syrian, and similar tradesmen. The Americans of the first category are
carrying on or opening up new enterprises that promise to offer Haiti a
prosperity not even second to that of Cuba. No one who has visited the
island can question the extraordinary fertility of its soil. The
overwhelming portion of it is as virgin as if the French had never
exploited what was once the richest of their colonies; revolutions have
become, by _force majeure_, a thing of the past. Every new undertaking
must, to be sure, be built or rebuilt from the ground up. During their
more than a century of freedom the negroes have done nothing but
destroy. They have not even exercised their one faculty, that of
imitation, for they have been too much shut off from the rest of the
world to find anything to imitate. Though the sugar-cane was introduced
into Cuba by the French refugees from Haiti, the entire country cannot
at present compete with the largest single sugar-mill in the prosperous
island to the west. The Haitian laborer has lost all knowledge of the
sugar-making process except his own primitive method of producing
_rapadoue_. He must be taught all over again, and he is not a
particularly apt pupil; moreover, complain the men who are striving to
make Haiti bloom once more with cane, no sooner is he taught than the
Cuban planters entice him across the Windward Passage with wages ten
times as high as he receives at home. But capital is beginning to
recognize that despite its obvious drawbacks Haiti offers a rich future,
and several syndicates have already “got in on the ground floor.”
The American residents of Port au Prince, men, women, and children,
swear by it. I have yet to meet one who is eager to leave; many of those
who go north for extended vacations cut them short with a cry of “take
me back to Haiti.” To the misinformed northerner its very name is
synonymous with revolution and sudden death. Outside the field of
romance there is about as much danger of meeting with violence from the
natives as there is of being boiled in oil at a church “sociable.” There
is not a deadly representative of the animal or vegetable kingdom on the
island; except for some malarial regions of rather mild danger the
climate is as healthful as that of the best state in our union—with due
regard, of course, to the invariable rule that white women should season
their residence with an occasional invigorating breath of the north. The
Americans have acquired one by one, as some yellow politician has lost
his grasp on the national treasury, the grove-hidden houses in the upper
town, some of them little short of palatial. There they live like the
potentates of the tropical isles of romance. The blacks are respectful,
childlike in their manner, and have much of the docility of the negroes
of our South before the Civil War. They work for wages which, as wages
go nowadays, are less than a song. House servants receive from five to
eight dollars a month, and the one meal a day to which the masses have
long been accustomed rarely costs a twenty-cent _gourde_. Families who
could scarcely afford the luxury of a single “hired girl” in the land of
their birth keep five servants in Haiti, a cook, butler, upstairs maid,
laundress, and yard boy; for the Haitian is strictly limited in his
versatility, and the cook could no more serve a dinner than a laundress
could give the yard its daily sweeping. They are usually stupid beyond
words, with the mentality of an intelligent child of six, but they are
sometimes capable of great devotion, with a dog-like quality of
faithfulness; and between them all they swathe the existence of their
masters in the comfort of an old-time Southern plantation. All this is
but half the story of contentment with Haitian residence, for the mere
fact that the sun is certain to break forth in all the splendor of a
cloudless sky as sure as the morning comes round is sufficient to make
the cold and dismal north seem a prison by comparison.
There is a certain amount of friction between the several classes of
Americans in Port au Prince, not to mention heroic efforts in “keeping
up with Lizzie.” Ten-course dinners with all the formality and
ostentation which go with them are of daily occurrence; “bridge”
flourishes by day and by night, with far from humble stakes, and dances,
whether at the American Club or in private houses, are not conspicuous
for their simplicity. The two things go together, of course; it is of
little use to disagree with a man if you cannot prove yourself his equal
by “putting up as good a front” as he does. Roughly speaking, our
fellow-countrymen in the Haitian capital may be divided into four
classes, though there are further ramifications and certain points of
contact. Each class has its own faults and virtues, and comes naturally
by them. The half dozen civilian officials who hold the chief offices of
our “advisory” share in the civil government have in too many cases been
chosen for their political standing rather than for their ability or
experience in such tasks as that they are facing. The navy and the
marine officers, between whom a rift now and then shows itself, have the
characteristics of the military calling the world over. They are by
nature direct and autocratic, rather than persuasive and tactful; they
have an almost childish petulance at any fancied slight to their rank,
which does not make it easy for them to coöperate with the civilian
officials. Of their efficiency in their chosen profession there is no
question, but our policy of assigning them to administrative positions
simply because they are already on the national pay-roll and expecting
them to shine in tasks which call for a lifetime of training quite
opposite to that they have received has its drawbacks. The very
qualities which make for success in pacifying the country hamper them in
dealing with the better class of natives, who are, to be sure, negroes,
yet who have the sensitive French temperament and are much more amenable
to persuasion than to bullying. By chance or design the great majority
of our officers in Haiti are Southerners, and they naturally shun any
but the most unavoidable intercourse with the natives. This is one of
the chief bones of contention between the forces of occupation and the
American civilians engaged in business. The latter, while still keeping
a color-line, contend that the natives of education should be treated
more like human beings. They deplore the narrow view-point, the
indifference to industrial advancement, the occasional schoolboy
priggishness of the officers, and the latter retaliate by considering
the term business man as synonymous with money-grabbing and willingness
to cater to the natives for the sake of trade. Not that these
differences cause open rifts in the American ranks, but the atmosphere
is always more or less charged with them. The native of education, on
his side, resents the whole American attitude on the race question, and
not wholly without reason. The color-line is justifiable in so far as it
protects against intermingling of blood, characteristics, and habits,
but there is a point beyond which it becomes d—d foolishness, and that
point is sometimes passed by our officers in Haiti. After all, the
Haitians won their independence without our assistance, and to a certain
extent they are entitled to what they call their _dignité personelle_.
The Southerner is famed for his ability to keep the “nigger” down, but
he is less successful in lifting him up, and that is the task we have
taken upon ourselves in Haiti.
* * * * *
As every American should know, but as a great many even of those who
pride themselves on keeping abreast of the times do not, Haiti has been
an American protectorate since the summer of 1915. There is a native
government, to be sure, ranging all the ebony way from president to
village clerks, but if it functions efficiently, and to a certain degree
it does, it is thanks to a few hundred of our own marines and certain
representatives of our navy. How this strange state of affairs, so
contrary to the forgiving spirit of the present administration, came
about is a story brief and interesting enough to be worth the telling.
The Spanish discoverers—for one must be permitted a running start if one
is to race through the reeking fields of Haitian history—soon wiped out
the native Indian population in their usual genial, but thorough, way.
Fields will not plant, or at least cultivate, themselves, however, even
in so astonishingly fertile a land as the island that embraces the
republics of Haiti and Santo Domingo. Hence the Frenchmen to whom the
western end of the island eventually fell, after varying vicissitudes,
followed the custom of the time and repopulated the colony with negro
slaves. Prosperity reigned for a century or more. There are still
jungle-grown ruins of many an old French plantation mansion to be found
not merely within the very boundaries of the Port au Prince of to-day,
but in regions that have long since reverted to primeval wilderness.
Unfortunately, for the French at least, the slave-traders supplied this
particular market with members of some of Africa’s more warlike tribes,
the descendants of whom, taking the theories of the French Revolution
_au pied de la lettre_, concluded to abolish their masters. Under a
genuine military genius with the blood of African chieftains in his
veins, one Toussaint l’Ouverture, and his equally black successor,
Dessalines, the slaves defeated what was in those days a large French
army, commanded by the brother-in-law of the great Napoleon, and drove
the French from the island. New Orleans and Philadelphia received most
of the refugees, whose family names are still to be found in the
directories of those cities. Except for a few persons the French never
returned, and Haiti has been “the Black Republic” since 1804.
The result was about what our Southern statesmen would have prophesied.
In theory the government of Haiti is modeled on that of France; in
practice it has been the plaything of a long line of military dictators
of varying degrees of color and virtually all rising to power and
sinking into oblivion—usually of the grave—on the heels of swiftly
succeeding revolutions. There have been a few well-meaning men among
them, the last of whom, named Leconte, was blown up in 1912, palace and
all. Most of them were interested only in playing Cæsar, or, more
exactly, Nero, over their black fellow-citizens until the time came to
loot the national treasury and flee, a program which was frequently cut
short by appalling sudden death. The detailed recital of more than a
century of violence, of constant bloody differences between the
mulattoes and the genuine blacks, would be a tale too long for the
modern reader.
In 1915 the presidency was occupied by a particularly offensive black
brother named Guillaume Sam. Though it has not been so recorded, Sam’s
middle name was evidently Trouble. Foreign war-ships took to dropping in
on Port au Prince and demanding the payments of debts to foreigners. Up
in the northern peninsula, as usual in mango-time, when the trees of the
island constitute a commissary, revolution broke out, and, to top off
his woes, Sam was busy marrying off his daughter and installing her in a
new palace. In his wrath at being disturbed at such a time Sam passed
the word to his chief jailer to clean out the penitentiary, some of the
political prisoners in which were no doubt in sympathy with the
revolutionists, but many of whom were there merely because they had
aroused the personal enmity of Sam, or some of his cronies. The sentence
was carried out more like a rabbit-hunt than an execution. In an orgie
in which the primitive instincts of the African had full play the two
hundred or more prisoners were butchered in circumstances better
imagined than described. Among them were many members of the “best
families” of Port au Prince. It is not recorded that any of this class
took personal part in the revenge that followed, but they undoubtedly
instigated it. The rank and file of the town, those same more or less
naked blacks who are ordinarily docile and childlike, surrounded the
palace. Sam had taken refuge in the French legation. For the first time
even in the turbid history of Haiti, the sanctuary of a foreign ministry
was violated by the voodoo-maddened mob. Sam was dragged out, cut to
pieces, and tossed into the bay. Then our marines landed and, to use
their own words, “the stuff was all over.”
American control is due to continue for at least twenty years from that
date. A treaty drawn up soon after the landing of our forces, and
subsequently renewed, provides for the form under which our “assistance”
shall be exercised, as well as specifying the time limit. An American
financial adviser, who is far more than that in practice, an American
receiver of customs, and heads of the engineering and sanitation
departments, are required by the terms thereof, and the final decision
in most matters of importance lies with the American minister. Unlike
the Republic of Santo Domingo in the eastern end of the island, Haiti
still retains her native government, but its acts are subject to a
relatively close supervision by the officers above named, despite the
pretense that our share is only “advisory.”
There are both natives and foreigners who contend that Haiti is fully
capable of governing itself if the white man will go away and let the
Black Republic alone. The following incident is not without its bearing
on the subject:
The Rotary Club of Port au Prince decided in the fifth year of American
occupation to assess every member five dollars for the purpose of
providing a community Christmas for the poor children of the city. Never
had a Christmas-tree been seen in Haiti outside the homes of American or
other foreign residents. The vast majority of Haitians had no conception
that so benevolent a being as Santa Claus existed.
The Port au Prince branch of the club had been very recently organized.
Its membership included not only the representative business men of all
grades in the foreign colony, but it had made a special point of
overlooking the color-line and admitting as many Haitians as white men.
A little closer intercourse now and then between the two races, it was
felt, would do no one any harm, and the experience of similar clubs in
Cuba suggested that it might do considerable good. The military colony,
of course, took no part in this flagrant violation of its strict
Southern principles beyond granting its official blessing, but the
civilians had long contended for a broader-minded attitude.
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.
The native gendarmes in their uniforms so like that of the American
marines were preserving order much as the pessimists had predicted. One
of them, starched and ironed to the minute, approached an American
distributor and asked, with the sweet-faced courtesy of a Southern lady
of the old school, for one of the riding-whips which some merchant had
contributed. “Here’s a fine fellow,” said the unadorned Santa Claus to
himself, “a real soldier. He wants a whip to use on mounted duty, and so
gentle-mannered a chap will make only proper use of it.” The gendarme
accepted the gift with a polite bow and a grateful smile and marched
back across the ring—to strike full in the face with all his force a
pitiful old black woman who was being forced forward by the crush
behind, and to rain blow after blow on her bare head and breast and on
the naked infant she had brought on the invitation of the ticket
clutched in its tiny hand. What was the good of protesting? He had been
ordered to hold back the crowd, and as he had been forbidden to use the
revolver strapped at his side, how else could he do so? If he had been
checked in his onslaught, he would have spent the rest of the afternoon
wondering what these strange Americans wanted, anyway.
By dint of superhuman exertions the white distributors succeeded in
exchanging something or other for every ticket. But it was a sadly
mis-gifted swarm of children who finally rescued themselves from the
maelstrom. Tiny tots who had set their hearts on a cake or a package of
candy held up the neckties they knew no use for with a “_Pas bon pour
moi! Donne gateau!_” The greatest demand was for shoes. “_Non, non,
papa! soulier, soulier!_” came incessant shrieks from the urchins who
waved unwelcome gifts before the weary distributors. The gentlemen of
color had continued to strew armfuls of presents upon the throng beyond
the ropes. The minister with the lanky confederate had tossed him
assorted wares enough to break the back of a Haitian donkey—a feat
verging on the impossible. When there was nothing else left, he flung
him several huge native baskets which a lady of the committee had loaned
for the occasion. These he followed with the decorations snatched from
the tree. Then he took to unscrewing from their sockets the electric
light bulbs belonging to the company that had contributed the useless
illuminations. This was too much even for the benevolent-featured man
who had been cast for the rôle of Santa Claus. He gathered the slack of
the minister’s immaculate trousers in one hand and set him down out of
reach of further temptation.
The festivities were entirely over by the time the blazing-red tropical
sun sank behind the mountainous range to the westward. The throng
streamed out across the Champs de Mars like a lake of molten lead that
had long been dammed up and had suddenly broken its dikes. Not a scrap
even of the tickets that had been canceled by being torn in two
remained. In Haiti everything has its commercial value. For days to come
little heaps of these bits of cardboard would be offered for sale by the
incredibly ragged old women of the more miserable market-places, to be
made use of the voodoo gods know how. Among the last of the gentlemen of
color to leave the platform was a pompous being resplendent in Port au
Prince’s most fashionable raiment. He was a graduate of the Sorbonne, a
political power in the Black Republic, an officer of the Rotary Club,
and the editor of Haiti’s principal newspaper. In one hand, which he
held half concealed beneath the tails of his frock-coat, he grasped a
dozen bright-colored hair-ribbons and several silk handkerchiefs which
he had filched from the basket of presents that had been intrusted to
him for distribution.