The Sugar Islands (18 page)

He never did.

Pétion was never to see the citadel. Never to see the sun strike yellow on its curved prow from the road to Milhot. But with the mind's clearer eye, the poet's eye, he saw it, and seeing it foresaw how that proud ship of stone would outlive the purpose it was built for, the imperial idea that it enthroned; would stand, derelict through the decades, to outlive ultimately even the quarrel so eternal-seeming of brown and black.

Today those pages of Vandercpok's that describe all that Christophe achieved within his brief fourteen years of power read like a fairy tale. You cannot believe that
Black Majesty
is history, that one man, and at that a negro, could in so short a time have done so much. You have to go to the Cape itself to realize that.

Milhot, from Cap Haïtien, is a half-hour's drive. It is a bad road through a green and lovely wilderness. You can scarcely believe that this bumpy track was once an even carriage drive, that these untended fields were orderly with care, that the crumbling stone gateways, half-buried in the hedge, opened on carefully-kept lawns, on verandaed houses, on aqueducts and sugar mills. Along the road passes an unending stream of women carrying, some of them on their heads, some of them on donkeys, bags of charcoal and sticks of sugar cane to market. They move slowly. The sun is hot. There is no hurry.

Milhot was once a pretty suburb of Cap François. It is now a collection of squat, white-plastered houses, the majority of them with cone-shaped, corrugated-iron roofs; looking down on them from the hills they seem like the bell-tents of a military encampment. Nothing remains of the old Milhot except the ruins
of Christophe's palace. And of that, only the façade and the terraces are left. Goats and lizards drowse under the trees where the King delivered judgment. The underground passage to La Ferriére is blocked. The outhouse walls are creeper-covered.

At Milhot, at the police station, there will be mules or ponies waiting for you. Christophe's carriage drive to the citadel is little more than a mountain path. It is a hard two and a half hours' climb. You pass little along the way; a thatch-roofed hut or two from the doors of which natives will run out in the hope of selling you bananas; a gendarme returning from the citadel to duty; a negro collecting coconuts. For a hundred years that road had been abandoned. The natives were frightened of the citadel. It was a symbol of tyranny. They could not be prevailed upon to go there. As the road mounts you have a feeling of Nature returning into possession of its own. The lizards are large and green that dart across the road, the butterflies brighter and more numerous, the birds that dip into a richer foliage are wider-winged. For ninety minutes you climb in silence. Then suddenly, at a bend of the road, you see high above you the citadel's red-rusted prow.

Words cannot describe the citadel. In photographs it would look like any other ruin. A cinematograph, worked from a circling aeroplane, would give no more than an impression of it. To appreciate its meaning you have to come to it as they that built it came to it, with the hot sun upon you, with your back damp against your shirt, with the fatigue of riding in your knees, with the infinitely varied landscape before your eyes, with the innumerable jungle sounds in your ears, and in your nostrils the innumerable jungle scents. Then you can walk along the grass-grown courtyards, the galleries with their guns that will never fire, the battlements through the windows of which trees are sprouting; then you can realize the prodigious effort that the citadel's building cost; you realize that nothing that has been said of it has been an exaggeration, that it is the most remarkable monument in the modern world.

Pétion was envious. But Pétion was right. It could not last. As the months passed Christophe's tyrannies grew more barbaric. He trusted no one. He, in his time, had betrayed every one that he had served. Toussaint, when he had made his truce separately with Leclerc. Leclerc, when he had joined with Dessalines.
Dessalines, whose murder he had plotted. What reason had he to believe that in just that way Marmelade and the rest were not plotting against him in his turn. His cruelties increased with his suspicions.

But the story of those last days has been already too well told to need retelling here. Vandercook's
Black Majesty
tells all that can be known of the tragic drama of those last hours, of the trigger of the silver bullet pulled at length, of the mulattoes of the south sweeping victoriously across the plain. There was to be an end of tyranny. It was peace that had been fought for; it was peace that was desired. If France wanted her six million pounds as a compensation for taken property, as a guarantee of noninterference, as a recognition of Haiti independence, then let her have them. Let Haiti be free and unfettered to rule itself.

Twenty years after the surrender of Rochambeau to the English, peace was signed. For ninety years Haiti was left to govern herself without white interference.

Bryan Edwards, writing of the Caribs in the Leeward Islands, made this prophecy of San Domingo. ‘What they are now,' he wrote, ‘the freed negroes of San Domingo will hereafter be: savages in the midst of society—without peace, security, agriculture, or property; ignorant of the duties of life and unacquainted with all the soft endearing relations which render it desirable; averse to labour, though frequently perishing of want; suspicious of each other and towards the rest of mankind: revengeful and faithless; remorseless and bloody-minded; pretending to be free while groaning beneath the capricious despotism of their chiefs and feeling all the miseries of servitude without the benefit of subordination.'

In 1830 Edwards was chastised severely by the
Quarterly Review
for this prophecy. Forty years later, in part anyhow, it had been fulfilled. Politically the story of Haiti is one of tyranny and mismanagement. Of the twenty-four presidents who held office, two were murdered, one committed suicide, two died in office, two only retired into civilian life; the remaining seventeen, with as much of the national treasury as they could lay hands on, fled to Jamaica. In 1907, when Kingston was badly mauled by an earthquake, the Haitians very generously dispatched a shipload of provisions for the destitute, with a naïve letter saying how
happy they were to be able to do something for an island that had shown so much hospitality to those of their own countrymen to whom chance had been capricious.

The object of the majority of presidents—though there were exceptions like Hippolyte—was to transfer as much of the national revenue as they could to their pockets while the going was still good. ‘Graft,' an English Chargé d'Affaires wrote in his report to the Colonial Office, ‘is the chief national pastime of the country.' In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the country slipped back into disorder. Houses and roads crumbled away. God had spoilt the roads, said the Haitians; God would mend them.

There was no organized industry. Nearly all the land was in the hands of peasant proprietors. Coffee, which grew wild over the hills, was the chief export. When the wind blew down the pods the natives gathered them, put them on their heads or on their donkeys, and carried them down to a middle-man, through whom, by various stages of bribery, they reached the Customs shed. No rich families needed to be supported from the land. All that the land was required to do was to provide in export tax high enough to support the expenses of government. That it was perfectly capable of doing so has been proved during the American occupation. It could not be expected to stand the strain of revolution, changing presidents, and corrupt officials.

Life in Haiti must, during those years, have been half comic opera and half grim tragedy. During Spencer St. John's residence as Chargé d'Affaires it had an army consisting of six thousand generals, seven thousand regimental officers, and six thousand other ranks. There was little discipline. The sentries had chairs to sit upon. Justice was casual. No prisoner had any right to be considered innocent. The policeman's idea of arresting a man was to hit him into unconsciousness with a
cocomacoque
, a large iron-studded cane. Ordinarily the negro, who has a great imitative capacity and therefore a sense of precedent, makes an extremely good lawyer. But as judges were in Haiti appointed for political purposes, instances would arise in court when, it being a case of one witness's word against another's, the judge would turn with a puzzled look towards the prisoner who was accused of theft with no other testimony than the evidence of plaintiff: ‘But she says she saw you steal her purse. You can't get away from that,
you know.' Inevitably, as the money destined for public works passed into private possession, the state of the towns grew fearful. There was no sanitation. It was maintained that the harbour of Port au Prince was half-choked with filth which could be smelt seven miles out at sea.

On the surface Bryan Edwards' prophecy was being proved correct. And the surface is about all that the majority of people who wrote of Haiti at the end of the nineteenth century ever saw of it. Like Froude, they read Spencer St. John's book, and landed in transit for a few hours in Jacmel or Port au Prince. Very often captains would not allow passengers to land. Haiti to the West Indian of that time was rather what the Russia of today is to the European. The Jamaicans were so desperately afraid that the negroes of their island would follow the example of the Haitian that they leapt at any opportunity of exaggerating the condition of Port au Prince.

Very few of the visitors to Haiti stayed longer than their ship was anchored in the harbour. They never, that is to say, went into the country and saw the natives; nor did they in Port au Prince see anything of the Haitians themselves. Had they done so they would have learnt two things. They would have learnt that the peasant negro under conditions of freedom is a far pleasanter person than he is in slavery; and that the educated negro, under conditions where he is not presented at every moment with the consciousness of his race inferiority, develops qualities for which you would look in vain among the rich negroes of other islands. The Haitian peasant is a friendly and happy person, with no animosity to the Whites, with whom you can talk as freely as you would in Sussex with an English farmer. When it comes on to rain you can take shelter in his cabin and there will be no feeling of self-consciousness on either side, while in the towns there is a society of Haitians, the majority of whom have been educated in Paris, speak a pure French, are talented and cultured, with gracious manners and a gracious way of life. Haiti has produced its poets. I do not say that they are major poets, though Oswald Durand is unlikely to be forgotten, but the existence of poetry in a society is the proof of culture. I do not see how anyone who has been brought into touch with the Haitians on friendly terms can have failed to feel them to be superior to the negroes of the other West Indian islands.

No one deplored more than the Haitians themselves the anarchy into which their country degenerated during the last twenty years of its independence. It was like a wheel going downhill: nothing could stop it. The country grew yearly nearer bankruptcy. Revolution followed revolution. No property was safe when the presidents were giving the order to their troops:
‘Mes enfants, pillez en bon ordre.'
The men in the country did not dare to come into the towns for fear of being conscripted into the army. The women who brought their produce into market were robbed by soldiers. The hills were infested by brigands. The public departments drew up schemes of development, but before these schemes could be carried out a new Government and a new set of officials were in control. As bankruptcy drew closer the certainty of white intervention grew more clear. Most of the securities of the country were pledged outside the country. America was only waiting for a convenient pretext. It came during the first year of the war when, with brigands' fires burning in the Champ de Mars, and after two hundred of the most influential Haitians had been slaughtered in jail without a trial, the body of the President was torn limb from limb by a maddened mob.

It is fourteen years since the American marines landed in Port au Prince, and during these years a good many writers have been to Haiti. Haiti has become news. There have been revelations about voodooism, and revelations about Congo dances, and it was, I suppose, in a mood of rather prurient curiosity that I sailed from Kingston on the
Araguaya.
I do not know quite what I had expected to find there: the primitive to the n
th
degree, I fancy, and I have little doubt that any one who took the trouble to make friends with the peasants could contrive to be initiated into some lively ritual. I am not sure that it was not with some such intention that I myself set out there. I had not been ashore five minutes before I had abandoned it. There is so much in Haiti that is more worthwhile.

I am not sure that I had not abandoned that intention before I had even landed. Port au Prince, as you approach it, is one of the loveliest towns in the New World that I have seen. It is white and green. The walls of houses and the twin spires of the cathedral gleam brightly through and above deep banks of foliage. The circling hills above them are many-shaded. It is through wide,
clean streets, through the open park of the Champ de Mars, through a town that is half a garden, that you drive out towards the hills. It is a wild, untended garden. The houses that are set back from the road are wooden, two-storied, turretted, half-buried in the trees that shelter them. The roads linking the main streets are country lanes, rambling through shadowed hedges. You feel you are in an enchanted wilderness. There is nothing sinister. It is clean and fresh and green. It is everything that you expected it not to be.

There are slums in Port au Prince. Where are there not? Squalid successions of dust-covered cabins by the cockpits along the shore and on the road to Bizotin; shacks that can give you some idea of what the town must have been like before the American occupation. Once it was the dirtiest town in the Antilles; now it is one of the most attractive.