Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 164

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Haiti continued
IT was hard to remember that these alley-ways were scarcely ten minutes' walk from the Champ de Mars.
The women leaning and squatting in the lighted doorways and the glimpses of brass bedsteads and rocking-
chairs grew more scarce, and the shanties that bordered these lanes looked, in the light of the setting moon,
blank and extinguished; jet black on one side of the road, on the other, pale as asbestos. Only an occa-
sional thread of light showed that there was any life bolted in there behind the planks for the night. The
pulse of the drums grew stronger until, at a turn in the flank of a little cliff, it became all at once very loud,
and augmented now by a steady metallic clangour and the sound of singing. Rodolfe led the way along a
path between broken fences and waited for us outside the entrance to the tonnelle . The noise, the throng
of Haitians, the scene that was taking place, and, above all, the idea of intruding three pale faces into a
gathering so exclusively Negro, made us pause.
Slowly, out of the turmoil and the smoke and the shattering noise of the drums, which, for a time, drove
everything except their impact from the mind, the details began to detach themselves.
The tonnelle was a roof of woven palm-trash, supported in the middle by a wooden pillar painted in
spirals of blue and red. The trees and bushes, and the Haitians gathered round the edges, blocked out the
moon, and the only light radiated over the beaten mud floor from an oil-lamp that hung from a nail on the
pillar. At one end stood the Houmfor, the small white temple, and the three Rada drummers sat at the other,
gripping their long wooden tom-toms between their knees.
These instruments are the dwelling-places of gods of whom the drummers are the especial ministers,
and each of the brightly painted sections of tree-trunk is of a different size and key. They taper in both dir-
ections from the broadest point just below the top, and rawhide is stretched across the upper end and lashed
to massive pegs. The fourth instrument is the Hogan, a hollow iron vessel with a handle on which an iron
rod beats with continuous clangour. The rhythm of the last two are unchanging and the second sometimes
alters, but the first drum, which dominates everything, is subjected to countless changes of rhythm and
mood and pitch.
The floor was covered with dancers, but at their centre about twenty women danced round the main
pillar in a more formal fashion. They wore identical white dresses, and white kerchiefs were tied round
their heads. One of them, a middle-aged virago of enormous bulk, was plainly some kind of a leader. They
were the hounci-bossales and hounci-canzos, Voodoo adepts of the first and second stages of initiation,
who form the staff of the tonnelle , and act as acolytes and chorus to all the ceremonies under the direction
of the woman of more commanding aspect who was the mambo, or high priestess.
Backwards and forwards, very slowly, the dancers shuffled, and at each step their chins shot out and
their buttocks jerked upwards, while their shoulders shook in double time. Their eyes were half closed
and from their mouths came again and again the same incomprehensible words, the same short line of
chanted song, repeated after each iteration, half an octave lower. At a change in the beat of the drums, they
straightened their bodies, and, flinging their arms in the air while their eyes rolled upwards, spun round
and round.
A thin clanging, caused by the shaking of the açon and the ringing of a little bell in the priest's left
hand, cut across the sound of the four musicians. The açon , symbol of the priestly office, is a long-necked