Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 190

A young Haitian of extraordinary beauty was standing at the bottom of my bed when I awoke. His
shoulders and arms were draped with snake skins. Observing without a word that my eyes had opened, he
spread all these treasures across the bedclothes and placed a little stuffed alligator on my breast. Many of
the skins had beautiful markings, and one, which, judging by its breadth, must have sheathed an enorm-
ous brute, was over seven feet long. But our finances were in such a bad state that I had to refuse them. In
slow Créole sentences that I could just grasp, he explained that he spent all his time in the woods hunting
snakes, and, hearing that some whites had come to Gonaïves, he had walked in to offer them for sale.
What about school? He said there were no schools within miles of his village, and nobody there could
read or write. (About ninety per cent, of the peasants are illiterate, and schools are, indeed, very scarce.
Until recently the Catholic Church, by building schools and instructing the peasants, was the only author-
ity that did anything to modify this high level of illiteracy.)
He made himself our guide through Gonaïves. Robbed of the moonlight, it appeared much smaller
and less imposing than it had seemed last night. The streets petered out in coral rocks by the sea, and a
limestone bluff loomed over it inland. The market was the same African turmoil as in Port-au-Prince: the
pitiful mounds of wares, trussed chickens, tethered animals, and market women, crouching in the sun,
clad in coarse dresses made out of grain sacks cut up and stitched so that the great stencilled lettering and
trade-marks formed symmetrical designs. He showed us the place where Haitian independence had been
declared by Jean Jacques Dessalines in 1804.
The Saint Rose of Lima had mysteriously left without us, and we had to wait in the road in the hopes
of getting a lift for Cap Haitien. But no car of any description came, and it began to look as though we
would have to spend another night in Gonaïves. We sat on, with sinking hearts, on stools under an acacia
tree.
The sun had cleared the streets. For three hours the only passer-by was a young girl who shuffled along
with a tin of Vim balanced on her head, and her hands hanging idle. Every hour a corporal came out of
the barracks of the Haitian Guard opposite, blew a fanfare on his bugle, and withdrew. Somebody had
dropped a bull's-eye in the dust in front of my chair, which was the centre of a whirl of activity, the only
one in the town, among the ants and flies. We felt, as the time dragged past, that the sun was treading the
life out of our souls. What business had we got to be here, anyway? In Gonaïves, lost in the interior of
Haiti in midwinter?
At last a car appeared, the Camion poste , and, thank heavens, bound for le Cap . The driver, a tall, act-
ive man armed with a vast pistol slung in a bandolier, threw our luggage in the back with the mail-bags,
made room for us beside him on the broad front seat, and away we went.
We drove on through the Artibonite: a landscape of angry desolation. The derelict villages huddled
in hollows. Occasionally we overtook a young man riding along on a mule saddled with sackcloth, and
women poured water on the green leaves of tiny vegetable gardens that were strangely planted on racks
a few feet above the ground. Pepinières , explained the driver, for young vegetables which are planted on
these raised beds in soil that is specially imported from more fertile regions. The soil of the Artibonite
is too salty and poor and rainless for anything to prosper. Flocks of sheep grazed on the weeds among
the clumps of organ-cactus. We scarcely saw a church all day, but all the villages were equipped with a
tonnelle and a dusty cemetery in which the Baron's cross was prominent.
These country regions and the mornes of the southern peninsula are the places where Voodoo (and the
superstitions of which Father Cosme had spoken) prosper unconditionally. I wondered sleepily whether
one of them which I had discovered in the pages of Moreau de St. Méry was still in force: the transforma-