Haiti Noir

“Do you think it’s rum?” Philippe’s eyes were bright with excitement.

“I think it’s gross.”

Monsieur Duval was tall, with the broad-muscled shoulders of an athlete and smooth caramel skin. He would have looked just as good in a designer suit as in the white robe of the ougan. He probably still had some business suits from his days as a chemical engineer, before his father summoned him back to Haiti to assume the mantle. My parents knew him as a student in Paris, where he was a real bon vivant, popular with the French girls he took dancing to all the best jazz clubs.

The believers were now in the middle of the room, chanting and clapping between the drumbeats. Their luminous faces seemed even darker in the candlelight. Duval pointed to one of the complicated line drawings on the dirt floor. To me it looked like a cross standing on a coffin. “These are vèvès, which we draw with cornmeal and wood ash. Each lwa has his or her own.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Duval set fire to a small pile of twigs near the vèvès. The smoke snaked along the poto mitan, the middle post holding up the temple. Grandmère Lucille would always say women were the poto mitan of the world. Then one day I asked her why all the priests at our church were men. Her face lit up and she hugged me tight, like she was proud of me.

Duval closed his eyes and muttered a few words while the believers circled him, still doing that two-step. The hypnotic chanting became a call-and-response, lulling me to the edge of sleep. I rubbed my eyes and opened them wide.

“Look at that!” I cried out, and my mother hushed me.

A woman had stopped right in front of us. She had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a kind of midnight-blue, and her arms and legs were trembling in spasms. She threw back her head and screamed. I grabbed my brother’s arm. No way would I let my mother see me get scared.

“What’s happening?” I whispered to Philippe.

“She’s possessed, in a trance.”

I glanced at my mother and her expression of calm bemusement.

Now the woman was bent over, still shaking, lunging toward Duval. She grabbed his bottle from the floor and drank from it. We all gasped when we heard the sound of glass breaking and saw her chewing.

“No way,” said Philippe. My mouth hung open in disbelief.

The candles glowed brighter, as if fueled with gasoline. The possessed woman picked up a piece of wood from the fire and put it in her mouth. I flinched but didn’t turn away. A stream of black and red trickled from her lips, inching its way to the white of her collar.

Please don’t let her come over here. I should never have insisted on sitting in the front. Now she was bent over again near the fire. Only when she turned to face us did we see the white rooster she held by its feet, which she began to swing in circles above her head.

Oh no. Not that.

It was all over in less than a second. Blood gushed from its severed head, and the rooster’s feet seemed to tremble and kick in her hands. The crowd let out a collective groan with hands over mouths. The gods ride the possessed like horses, Monsieur Duval had explained, and of course they demand sacrifices. The rooster’s lifeless corpse was laid to rest on the vèvè by the fire.

I had always been the squeamish one, letting Philippe hack the family of snakes in our rose garden with a hoe, or drown my mouse Ivory, white like that rooster, in a jar of alcohol when it grew a huge tumor in its neck. Later I would laugh and pretend I’d never been scared. I stared at the ground to the stop the awful rollercoaster in my stomach. If only I could manage not to throw up. By the time I realized Philippe was nudging me, it was too late. Here she was. The possessed woman’s mouth was splattered with blood and soot. She was looking right at me, still holding a charred piece of wood from the fire.

The audience was quiet, the drums muted. She stood in silence in front of me, as if she could hear my heart pounding. She took my right hand. Her eyes were strange, like a tunnel of darkness, but suddenly I wasn’t afraid anymore because it felt like I had stepped out of my skin and was floating to the ceiling, watching all of this from above. She turned my hand over and using a sooty twig, she marked my palm with an X.

I looked down at the mark, then back at her, thinking she would say something to me, but she dropped my hand and spun away, joining the believers in their hypnotic shuffle around the fire. A few minutes later, she fainted and was carried off. The drumming died out and the candles were extinguished. The house lights came on to reveal the bare earth spattered red.

“Whoa! What a show,” Philippe said in what sounded like awe.