The Sugar Islands Read online

  Words cannot describe the citadel. In photographs it would look like any other ruin. A cinematograph, worked from a circling aeroplane, would give no more than an impression of it. To appreciate its meaning you have to come to it as they that built it came to it, with the hot sun upon you, with your back damp against your shirt, with the fatigue of riding in your knees, with the infinitely varied landscape before your eyes, with the innumerable jungle sounds in your ears, and in your nostrils the innumerable jungle scents. Then you can walk along the grass-grown courtyards, the galleries with their guns that will never fire, the battlements through the windows of which trees are sprouting; then you can realize the prodigious effort that the citadel’s building cost; you realize that nothing that has been said of it has been an exaggeration, that it is the most remarkable monument in the modern world.

  Pétion was envious. But Pétion was right. It could not last. As the months passed Christophe’s tyrannies grew more barbaric. He trusted no one. He, in his time, had betrayed every one that he had served. Toussaint, when he had made his truce separately with Leclerc. Leclerc, when he had joined with Dessalines. Dessalines, whose murder he had plotted. What reason had he to believe that in just that way Marmelade and the rest were not plotting against him in his turn. His cruelties increased with his suspicions.

  But the story of those last days has been already too well told to need retelling here. Vandercook’s Black Majesty tells all that can be known of the tragic drama of those last hours, of the trigger of the silver bullet pulled at length, of the mulattoes of the south sweeping victoriously across the plain. There was to be an end of tyranny. It was peace that had been fought for; it was peace that was desired. If France wanted her six million pounds as a compensation for taken property, as a guarantee of noninterference, as a recognition of Haiti independence, then let her have them. Let Haiti be free and unfettered to rule itself.

  Twenty years after the surrender of Rochambeau to the English, peace was signed. For ninety years Haiti was left to govern herself without white interference.

  Bryan Edwards, writing of the Caribs in the Leeward Islands, made this prophecy of San Domingo. ‘What they are now,’ he wrote, ‘the freed negroes of San Domingo will hereafter be: savages in the midst of society—without peace, security, agriculture, or property; ignorant of the duties of life and unacquainted with all the soft endearing relations which render it desirable; averse to labour, though frequently perishing of want; suspicious of each other and towards the rest of mankind: revengeful and faithless; remorseless and bloody-minded; pretending to be free while groaning beneath the capricious despotism of their chiefs and feeling all the miseries of servitude without the benefit of subordination.’

  In 1830 Edwards was chastised severely by the Quarterly Review for this prophecy. Forty years later, in part anyhow, it had been fulfilled. Politically the story of Haiti is one of tyranny and mismanagement. Of the twenty-four presidents who held office, two were murdered, one committed suicide, two died in office, two only retired into civilian life; the remaining seventeen, with as much of the national treasury as they could lay hands on, fled to Jamaica. In 1907, when Kingston was badly mauled by an earthquake, the Haitians very generously dispatched a shipload of provisions for the destitute, with a naïve letter saying how happy they were to be able to do something for an island that had shown so much hospitality to those of their own countrymen to whom chance had been capricious.

  The object of the majority of presidents—though there were exceptions like Hippolyte—was to transfer as much of the national revenue as they could to their pockets while the going was still good. ‘Graft,’ an English Chargé d’Affaires wrote in his report to the Colonial Office, ‘is the chief national pastime of the country.’ In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the country slipped back into disorder. Houses and roads crumbled away. God had spoilt the roads, said the Haitians; God would mend them.

  There was no organized industry. Nearly all the land was in the hands of peasant proprietors. Coffee, which grew wild over the hills, was the chief export. When the wind blew down the pods the natives gathered them, put them on their heads or on their donkeys, and carried them down to a middle-man, through whom, by various stages of bribery, they reached the Customs shed. No rich families needed to be supported from the land. All that the land was required to do was to provide in export tax high enough to support the expenses of government. That it was perfectly capable of doing so has been proved during the American occupation. It could not be expected to stand the strain of revolution, changing presidents, and corrupt officials.

  Life in Haiti must, during those years, have been half comic opera and half grim tragedy. During Spencer St. John’s residence as Chargé d’Affaires it had an army consisting of six thousand generals, seven thousand regimental officers, and six thousand other ranks. There was little discipline. The sentries had chairs to sit upon. Justice was casual. No prisoner had any right to be considered innocent. The policeman’s idea of arresting a man was to hit him into unconsciousness with a cocomacoque, a large iron-studded cane. Ordinarily the negro, who has a great imitative capacity and therefore a sense of precedent, makes an extremely good lawyer. But as judges were in Haiti appointed for political purposes, instances would arise in court when, it being a case of one witness’s word against another’s, the judge would turn with a puzzled look towards the prisoner who was accused of theft with no other testimony than the evidence of plaintiff: ‘But she says she saw you steal her purse. You can’t get away from that, you know.’ Inevitably, as the money destined for public works passed into private possession, the state of the towns grew fearful. There was no sanitation. It was maintained that the harbour of Port au Prince was half-choked with filth which could be smelt seven miles out at sea.

  On the surface Bryan Edwards’ prophecy was being proved correct. And the surface is about all that the majority of people who wrote of Haiti at the end of the nineteenth century ever saw of it. Like Froude, they read Spencer St. John’s book, and landed in transit for a few hours in Jacmel or Port au Prince. Very often captains would not allow passengers to land. Haiti to the West Indian of that time was rather what the Russia of today is to the European. The Jamaicans were so desperately afraid that the negroes of their island would follow the example of the Haitian that they leapt at any opportunity of exaggerating the condition of Port au Prince.

  Very few of the visitors to Haiti stayed longer than their ship was anchored in the harbour. They never, that is to say, went into the country and saw the natives; nor did they in Port au Prince see anything of the Haitians themselves. Had they done so they would have learnt two things. They would have learnt that the peasant negro under conditions of freedom is a far pleasanter person than he is in slavery; and that the educated negro, under conditions where he is not presented at every moment with the consciousness of his race inferiority, develops qualities for which you would look in vain among the rich negroes of other islands. The Haitian peasant is a friendly and happy person, with no animosity to the Whites, with whom you can talk as freely as you would in Sussex with an English farmer. When it comes on to rain you can take shelter in his cabin and there will be no feeling of self-consciousness on either side, while in the towns there is a society of Haitians, the majority of whom have been educated in Paris, speak a pure French, are talented and cultured, with gracious manners and a gracious way of life. Haiti has produced its poets. I do not say that they are major poets, though Oswald Durand is unlikely to be forgotten, but the existence of poetry in a society is the proof of culture. I do not see how anyone who has been brought into touch with the Haitians on friendly terms can have failed to feel them to be superior to the negroes of the other West Indian islands.

  No one deplored more than the Haitians themselves the anarchy into which their country degenerated during the last twenty years of its independence. It was like a wheel going downhill: nothing could stop it. The country grew yearly nearer bankruptcy. Revolution
followed revolution. No property was safe when the presidents were giving the order to their troops: ‘Mes enfants, pillez en bon ordre.’ The men in the country did not dare to come into the towns for fear of being conscripted into the army. The women who brought their produce into market were robbed by soldiers. The hills were infested by brigands. The public departments drew up schemes of development, but before these schemes could be carried out a new Government and a new set of officials were in control. As bankruptcy drew closer the certainty of white intervention grew more clear. Most of the securities of the country were pledged outside the country. America was only waiting for a convenient pretext. It came during the first year of the war when, with brigands’ fires burning in the Champ de Mars, and after two hundred of the most influential Haitians had been slaughtered in jail without a trial, the body of the President was torn limb from limb by a maddened mob.

  It is fourteen years since the American marines landed in Port au Prince, and during these years a good many writers have been to Haiti. Haiti has become news. There have been revelations about voodooism, and revelations about Congo dances, and it was, I suppose, in a mood of rather prurient curiosity that I sailed from Kingston on the Araguaya. I do not know quite what I had expected to find there: the primitive to the nth degree, I fancy, and I have little doubt that any one who took the trouble to make friends with the peasants could contrive to be initiated into some lively ritual. I am not sure that it was not with some such intention that I myself set out there. I had not been ashore five minutes before I had abandoned it. There is so much in Haiti that is more worthwhile.

  I am not sure that I had not abandoned that intention before I had even landed. Port au Prince, as you approach it, is one of the loveliest towns in the New World that I have seen. It is white and green. The walls of houses and the twin spires of the cathedral gleam brightly through and above deep banks of foliage. The circling hills above them are many-shaded. It is through wide, clean streets, through the open park of the Champ de Mars, through a town that is half a garden, that you drive out towards the hills. It is a wild, untended garden. The houses that are set back from the road are wooden, two-storied, turretted, half-buried in the trees that shelter them. The roads linking the main streets are country lanes, rambling through shadowed hedges. You feel you are in an enchanted wilderness. There is nothing sinister. It is clean and fresh and green. It is everything that you expected it not to be.

  There are slums in Port au Prince. Where are there not? Squalid successions of dust-covered cabins by the cockpits along the shore and on the road to Bizotin; shacks that can give you some idea of what the town must have been like before the American occupation. Once it was the dirtiest town in the Antilles; now it is one of the most attractive.

  The Americans have done much for Haiti. They have cleared and laid out streets. They have made roads. They have built fine buildings. They have established hospitals. They have established order. They have wiped out the brigand forces. The men of the hills have no fear now when they come into the towns of being conscripted into revolutionary armies. The women know that they will receive in the market what their merchandise is worth. They will not have to pay toll to sentries along the way. Planters can breed cattle without the fear that they will be plundered by the cacos. And all this has been done with the surplus from the Haitian revenue, with the money that was before squandered in bribery. Haiti has become one of the most pleasant tropical places in the world. No island could be lovelier. Whether you are driving along the shore towards St. Marc or southwards to Aux Cayes, or whether you are climbing on horseback the hills beyond Pétionville and Kenscoff, whether you are looking across blue water to lilac-coloured hills or looking down upon green valleys, you will be unable to find any parallel for that landscape. The climate is healthy; the healthiest in the Antilles, doctors say. There is plenty to do. There is reasonable bathing. There are horseback trips into the interior. There is the choice for the athlete of tennis, polo, cricket.

  The atmosphere of Haiti is a combination of three things. There is the haphazard South Sea atmosphere of a simple, unexploited peasantry living on its own land, working just so much as it needs to support life; where there is no need to work hard if your needs are simple. They are a happy and sweet-natured people. You feel happiness as you ride past their villages, as you pass them and are passed by them on the road. Where the streams run down into the valleys you will find them in groups of six or seven seated washing their clothes upon the stones; where the streams deepen to a pool you will see them bathing, their black, naked bodies glistening in the sun. Every few miles or so along the road you will see a woman with a tray and a few bottles, a wayside restaurant, where the women will lower their loads from their heads or dismount their mules and exchange the gossip of the hour. And always they will smile friendlily at you as you pass.

  There is a beauty in their little properties that you do not find in the mathematically laid-out plantations. Stalks of sugar cane, cocoa trees, and coffee shrubs trail side by side with mangoes and bananas. You feel here the rich luxuriousness of tropic growth as you will never feel it in Martinique. You feel that life is rich and life is easy. That there is no need to worry much.

  You will get the same feeling if you choose as your hotel the wooden, two-storied house half-way up the hills to the American Club that was the house, in earlier years, of a French admiral. There is a long drive leading to the house, a drive that is grass-grown now. Nor is there any fountain playing in the large stone basin. Nor can you tell where lawn and hedge divide. But the proportions of the house remain. The wide balconies, the spacious courtyard, the cameoed picture through the trees of Port au Prince. The rooms are cool and the cooking good. You never quite see how things run themselves, for there never seem to be any servants. And in the bar you will find the visitors at the hotel mixing their drinks in such proportions as they choose; but things do run themselves. Meals arrive, hot water arrives; in the end somebody signs for drinks. At the end of the month a bunch of chits arrives, and you have a pleasing sense of life crumbling round you like the garden and house; but that it will last your time.

  There is the South Sea atmosphere. There is also the French atmosphere; a Parisian atmosphere of cafés and elegance and well-dressed women. There is more grace of living, more culture in Port au Prince than anywhere else in the Antilles. As you sit on the veranda of the cafés in Port au Prince, or walk on the hills in Pétionville, with its little green square in front of you, its church and gendarmerie and playing children, you feel that you might be in the heart of France.

  Thirdly, there is America: the America of efficiency and wide streets and motor cars, and the feeling that always goes with them, that good though the past was, the best’s ahead of us.

  These three atmospheres are combined in Haiti, and when there is so much else to have, it seems a waste of time to set oneself the task of discovering the ritual of a religion that is based upon nothing but the superstitions of undeveloped minds.

  At the moment Haiti is one of the world’s pleasant places. No one can tell what the future holds for it. In 1936 the American treaty with Haiti will be reconsidered, and many assert that then the American occupation should end. In America, the same kind of person who in London asserts that the English should evacuate Egypt and hand back India to its princes, are claiming that America’s interests in Haiti are an imperialistic violation of the Monroe Doctrine. While many Haitians contend that America has served its purpose: it has restored order, placed a balance in the Treasury; that it has started the machine, that the Haitians can now carry it on themselves. Having learnt their lesson, they will be capable of administration; that if they are left with, at the most, a financial adviser they will be able to run their show.

  They may be able to. It may be that they will be given the chance, that in six years’ time there will be no khaki uniforms and broad-brimmed hats in Port au Prince. That once again a negro people will be allowed to make the experiment of self-gove
rnment.

  And then . . . will history repeat itself? Will the cacos return to the hills? Will the road across the arid valley of Gonaïves crumble into a bridle path? Will the bridges justify the old complaint that it was safer to go round than over them? Will the peasant be afraid to come down into Port au Prince? Will the green lawns of the Champ de Mars straggle on to the puddled and untended roads? Will angry mobs shriek for vengeance outside the white palace of the President? Will the police with the cocomacoque batter the skulls of the suspected?

  Sometimes one feels that Haiti is set surely now on the high road to prosperity. What else can you feel when you sit at twilight on the veranda of the Eldorado Café, looking on to the harbour, in which are anchored the ships whose presence there means riches, when Buicks and Pontiacs are sweeping with their broad beams the broad, smooth roads and the white buildings and the pretty women? Everything looks so secure, so confident, far too far down the road of civilization for anarchy. You think that then.

  But you recall the hot and dusty mornings in the cockpit, where you have seen negroes taking into their mouths the torn and bleeding heads of the dying cock, to suck and lick the wounds, in the desperate hope of restoring the will to battle to the beaten beast. You remember into what paroxysms of rapture and misery and wrath you have seen those black faces contorted as the chances of victory recede. You remember the hot-blooded passion of their dancing, their contorted bodies, their clutching fingers, the fierce lustre in their eyes, and, remembering that, you wonder into what frenzies of savagery this people might not still be worked. You remember how, late at night, after the sounds of Port au Prince are still, you have heard in the hills the slow throbbing of the drums. It breaks the silence. It is slow, rhythmic, monotonous. It is like the beating of a heart, the beating of the black heart of Africa.