Haiti - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 160

The theatre was full when we found our places. At first glance, it appeared that the audience apart from
ourselves was exclusively Haitian, but we were able later to pick out four American friends and acquaint-
ances among the rest: De Witt Peters, of the Centre d'Art , Selden Rodman the poet, John Godwin, dressed
in a blue sailor's jersey, with a thin gold ring in the lobe of one ear, and a tall young man who had come
to Haiti for the sympathetic purpose of studying drums.
There was a warm ovation as the curtain went up, for the play was concerned with one of the first ges-
tures of insurrection in pre-Revolutionary Sainte Domingue. Mackandal, after whom the play is named,
was a runaway slave—a Maroon—from the Sudan, who may or may not have been a Moslem, though
he is known to have spoken Arabic. He was reputed, in spite of having only one arm, to possess almost
superhuman strength. He was almost certainly a Voodoo initiate, probably a priest. From his hiding-place
in the mornes , he incited the slaves on the neighbouring estates to rebellion of a peculiarly subtle and ter-
rifying kind: a widespread campaign of poisoning which took heavy toll of the colonists, and terrorized
the whole white population. He was captured finally at a country dance and condemned to be burnt. He
contrived to break the chains that secured him to the stake, but was overpowered and forced back into the
flames, where he perished. (It is recorded that, for some time after Mackandal's death, five or six slaves
were burnt monthly, in order to stamp out the secret network he had organized. The figures are known by
the record of the 600 livres indemnity paid by the King of France to the owners for each executed slave.)
The play seemed at first a lively affair, and the early speeches evoked a great deal of patriotic applause.
But it soon became clear that the amateur company on the stage had not a glimmering of how to act. Most
of the dialogue was inaudible, all the gestures were wooden. No effort had been made to reproduce the
clothes of the period; in fact, the eighteenth-century French villains of the play were dressed in modern
cowboy hats and armed with toy revolvers. It was thoroughly, embarrassingly bad. But most grotesque
and mysterious of all was the device of make-up by which the performers contrived (or rather, for a long
time, failed to contrive) to indicate which of the caste were playing the rôles of white people and which of
Negroes. The colonists, instead of applying white grease-paint, had remained as they were, while Mack-
andal and the slaves had smeared their faces, it appeared, with soot, lending a musical comedy appear-
ance to the actors, without in any way modifying their complexion. I am still bewildered by the mental
processes that prompted this odd convention.
Part of the audience began to show signs of protest at the poverty of the acting: a reaction with which at
first I heartily agreed. The shuffling of feet became an organized stamping, and, by the end of the first act,
shouts of derision were more and more frequent. When the second act started, the heckling had swelled
to a steady and organized roar, of which the tone was so menacing and savage that our sympathies veered
back again to the dismal figures on the stage. This body of noise soon called an opposition into being in
the front rows of the stalls, whose occupants began to rise to their feet and hurl back insults at the heck-
lers. It was impossible to distinguish what the first party were shouting, but the shouts of their opponents
in the front row were very plain. ' Mulâtres! ' they shouted. ' Sales mulatres! Bâtards!' The noise became
a deafening shindy, and things were beginning to look ugly. Our neighbours thought some sort of riot was
about to break out and slipped away. The actors were still moving clumsily about the stage in a pathetic
attempt to make the show go on, like figures in a really bad silent film. The lights were switched on and
the manager walked to the footlights with suppliant and ineffectual gestures for a hearing. The lights re-
vealed that the original hecklers were mainly working-class toughs, and all of them Negroes, while the
group in the front row, who were accusing the first interrupters of bastardy and Mulattohood, were well-