Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 191

tion of all who were guilty of sexual intercourse in Holy Week into frogs. Sir Algernon Aspinall, who had
been such a helpful authority in all the preceding islands, is disappointing on Haiti. 'The late Sir Henry
Johnston,' he says, 'declared that the black points of Haiti had been exaggerated…. The Haitians were
certainly in love with military pomp and display, but too much had been made of their revolutions….
He characterized the stories connected with Voodoo worship as “exaggerated nonsense,” and ridiculed
the “bosh” talked about cannibalism….' Well, I suppose Sir Henry was attempting to neutralize the harm
done by a third English knight in the Republic, Sir Spencer St. John. His book, based on the famous af-
faire Bizoton of which I spoke in the last chapter, consists entirely of lurid accounts of cannibalistic rites.
Poor Haiti! It seems to be condemned by foreigners to the two extremes of denigration and whitewash.
Like all other countries in the predicament of swift evolution, it deserves ni cet excès d'honneur, ni cette
indignité . One must thank one's stars for Herskovitz and Leyburn and, now, Rodman. The only danger, a
natural and rather noble one which springs from disgust at misrepresentation in the past, is to bowdlerize
Haiti, and turn it in print into a sort of black Switzerland or Holland. It is something much more vital
and interesting than either. If (as I think they do) obsolescent, superstitious excesses still occur once in
a blue moon, there is as little purpose in pretending they do not as in denying the various atrocities that
occasionally impair the civilizations of France, America or Great Britain.
I woke up in a completely different world. The road, climbing higher at each twist, was flung like a tangle
of white tape over beautiful rolling hills as rounded and smooth as the parts of an anatomy: shoulders,
flanks, breasts and thighs. Forests and woods appeared in the valleys like curling green moss in the hol-
lows of a human body. A distant pool was eyelashed with slender trees, and all was soft, gracious and
feminine, as though the Camion poste , reduced to the size of a ladybird, was scaling the contours of a
lovely recumbent giantess. J'eusse aimé vivre auprès d'une jeune géante …. The landscape supplied a
long-felt want.
Streamside villages of conical huts, à l'ombre de ses seins comme un hameau paisible , gathered under
the mangoes and breadfruits in the mild Arcadian ravines. Hibiscus and the pale bells of datura brushed
the side of the truck, and the air was loaded with the scent of sweet-smelling trees. Then the road sailed
up again on to the clear and delectable highlands of the next mountain ledge. Clematis and morning glory,
the scarlet dogs'-tongues of poinsettia, wild maguey and aloes grew at the side of the track. Stalks fifteen
feet high issued from the heart of their savage blades to hold aloft great round yellow flowers like mini-
ature suns. Solitary cabins, shaded by a mango or a ceiba tree, appeared on the slopes below us, and little
circular granaries of cane and thatch were perched in the air on flimsy-looking stilts which swelled, just
below the granary floor, to peculiar globes. They were hard lumps of clay plastered there by the peasants
to foil the inroads of rats on the garnered maize-cobs.
The ascending curves raised us high into the clear mountain air, until, from the pass of a lofty water-
shed, we looked down into the north of Haiti, and up and away to the mountain ranges that lay all round
us in an amphitheatre of massifs. Feathered with woods and darkened in the hollows by the shades of
evening, the road sank through succeeding ranges of hills. As we drove on, the driver, deceived by our
talking French though we were ignorant of Haitian Créole, asked us if we were from Canada or from
Louisiana. We explained ourselves. French people come so little to Haiti, he said, and the Americans sel-
dom speak French. English people and, above all, Greeks, are even rarer birds. He had travelled to the
United States and spent some time wandering about in Louisiana. Speaking of the Mississippi and the
Negroes living in the swamps, he described the old French houses—' comme ,' he said with a wave, ' il y