Haiti - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 155

our ancestors. The ringing of the bell and an outburst of shouting in the hut behind us marked the opening
of another main, the third of about fifty billed for that morning.
The telephone wires running beside the road to the capital were bearded, every few inches, with the
wispy little hanging nests of humming-birds.
Port-au-Prince is a sprawling, loose-knit town, and quarters and atmospheres juxtapose and overlap each
other with surprising fortuitousness. Government buildings, smart villas and monuments change, with no
perceptible click, into arcaded streets of shops, or regions of dock and timber yard, rusting small-gauge
railway and patches of dead land and savannah. Minute clumps of forest, with grazing oxen and disin-
tegrating shanties, appear, and then, with half a dozen steps, you are surprisingly back in the heart of the
metropolis. Gazing at the site of a demolished building which used to be called Fort Caca, after the per-
ishable materials from which it was built, I would become aware of a cohort of little boys taking up posi-
tions of attack, and at the first opening an onslaught of begging would begin. ' Blanc ,' they cried, ' blanc,
ba'moin une gourde, blanc .' Worse still, a small élite , steeped in the culture of the Occupation, would
trot behind me repeating, 'Gimme ten cents, boss,' like an incantation. Haitians possess fewer inhibitions
about mendicancy than any race in the world; even plump and well-dressed children, small shopkeep-
ers and soldiers would momentarily, at the approach of a mug, adopt the profession. ' Hé ,' a shoemaker
would shout across the road, rising from his last, ' Ba'moin une gourde .' But the children were the worst;
at the alert of sighted game they remained, whip in air, till their tops ran down and then came padding
across the dust.
The Market is a great arched iron structure painted green and red, and its echoing vaults enclose a
bawling, arguing and bargaining Timbuktoo. Powerful hags preside over pyramids of wares—shoes, san-
dals, bags, trays of trinkets hammered out of old coins, and wooden objects carved from mahogany and
lignum vitae . New and old clothes hang on rails, and broad-brimmed straw hats lie in snowdrifts. Wo-
men insinuate their way through the stalls, carrying on their heads globular baskets of colossal size, some
of them as much as six feet in diameter, and weighing as light as a feather. Piles of them vanish into
the vaults like towers constructed of enormous bubbles. One old woman was nesting like a jackdaw in
a bastion of plaster images, holy water stoups, medals, bunches of rosaries and painted candles of every
length and girth. I noticed a number of unfamiliar utensils among all this—painted gourds, earthenware
and china pots with lids, and sets of three conjoined wooden bowls carved out of the same log. I asked
what they were for. The old woman laughed, and indicated that it was too difficult to explain. When, in-
trigued by her reticence, I pressed her, she gave a toothless cackle and said, ' C'est pour le Voudou.' And
so they were: vessels, as I was to learn later, for containing the souls of the initiates of the Haitian rites.
The Republic of Haiti occupies the westernmost third of the island of Hispaniola. Its history follows,
for a while, a familiar pattern: the extinction of the Indians and the arrival of the first Negro slaves, and
the relaxation of Spanish interest and control; the haphazard settling of French and English filibusters
on her coasts, the use of her waters and hideouts by the buccaneers of both nations; the arrival of great
captains and organizers like Levasseur, de Poincy, du Casse and D'Ogeron with Royal Commissions;
the discomfiture and exit of the English filibusters; and the Treaty of Ryswick that granted the colony
of Sainte Domingue, [1] —modern Haiti—to France. A series of grandees succeeded each other: de Gal-
lifet, de Blénac, de Vaudreuil, d'Estaing, de Rohan, de Vallière, de la Luzerne and the remarkable Bar-
bé de Marbois, as Royal Governors and Intendants, bringing in their wake an influx of French noble-