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with an exorcising pass of his conductor's baton, horned and bat-winged demons from the surrounding
cactus forest.
Scenes of violence, as one might expect, are frequent. Horses stamp, javelins fly, blood flows and zom-
bies with their hands bound behind them are driven through the tombs with whips. But the vague dream
atmosphere that weighs upon these pictures, and the Gorgon-struck stillness, place their impact several
removes from that of mere horror.
The painter Louverture Poisson has unearthed a curious Baudelairian vein of romantisme du bordel .
A naked Negress combs her hair in front of a looking-glass. A murdered girl, equally naked, sprawls to
the floor from her cocoon of tumbled sheets in a room that is littered with an enamel basin, a man's hat,
some dirty towels and the tell-tale and bloodstained cutlass. The artist has discovered the technique of
unloosing his pictures into movement, and the mood of these pictures is both frightening and tragic. A
third picture, a shadowy and aqueous corridor receding in a tunnel of diminishing doors all swinging ajar
to a distant and inaccessible garden, is hallucinating in its obscure erotic implications and its suggestions
of anguish and disaster.
But the most remarkable of these painters is, without doubt, Hector Hyppolite. His were the frescoes
of fruit and birds on the tavern door that first intimated to De Witt Peters the possibilities of Haitian art.
Coming from a family of Houngans, and, until the time of his death a few months ago, a desultory Houn-
gan himself, he had been steeped in Voodoo all his life, and he had, to the total neglect of his apprenticed
trade of cobbler, always painted. He wandered away to Cuba and New York and, perhaps (for his ac-
counts were always rather vague) to Dahomey and Abyssinia. His life was one of paint, travel, poverty,
love affairs and religion. His house, at the time that we made friends with him, was a trash-roofed shanty
by the sea in one of the poorest quarters of the town, half tonnelle , half studio, with his easel in the middle
of the peristyle. The floor was crowded with canvases, paint pots, drums and Voodoo gear and streamers,
tinsel crowns, stars and witch-balls hung from the rafters. The black cross of Baron Samedi stood in one
corner, duly bowler-hatted, and with a bucket and a bottle hanging from either arm. Along the cross-bar
were painted the words Ecce agnus Dei Dieu Qifer Imedevi . A tablet nailed farther down bore the words
“St. Georges. Hodie! ” and at the very bottom, among a pile of cannon-balls, another, between a skull and
crossbones and the trellised heart of Erzulie, was inscribed with his own initials: H.H. The whole place
was penetrated with air and light, and the earthen floor was striped like a tiger's back with the shafts of
sunlight that slanted through the bamboo walls. A little sobagui behind a partition contained a painting
of his crowned and fish-tailed patroness and lar familiaris , Maîtresse la Sirène, who, with St. John the
Baptist, was his guiding numen. A model sailing ship, dedicated to Ogoun Agoué, projected from the
wall, and outside, on the narrow stretch of sand by the lagoon's edge, stood the skeleton timbers of a full-
sized sloop half-way through building. He explained that when it was completed he intended to travel
about in the realms of his divine spouse, the water-goddess. In speaking of these matters the expression of
his distinguished features abandoned their cast of diffident and scholarly abstraction and the eyes behind
the gold-rimmed glasses kindled for a moment into enthusiasm. His face can best be described by saying
that it looked as though it belonged to a member of the Huxley family mysteriously transformed into the
blackness of coal. Like coal, it offered to the light a series of smooth and glittering facets.
We determined, at the risk of skipping a few meals at the end of our journey (when financial shock-
tactics, anyway, would have to be employed to rectify our dwindling supply), to buy one or two Haitian
primitives. For a very few dollars, I became the owner of a beautiful Wilson Bigaud, the Mango Thieves ,
and Costa bought three very fine Hyppolites.
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