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Saturday-night voodoo dance is over. "Bon Dieu Bon," they say; God is good, and supreme in matters of the soul, but the voodoo loa of remote African memory—Maitresse Erzulie. Papa Legba and the snake-god Damballa—are still highly serviceable in such workaday matters as appeasing the dead and assuring successful births. The peasants are poor (per capita income is $62 yearly, lowest in the hemisphere), but they somehow rise above the deadening poverty of the Andean Indian or the Moscow streetsweep-er. They have sun, fertile (but dry) land, fruitful trees, personal freedom and hot-blooded vitality.
The conflict between these two extremes—the rich and the poor, the cultured and the uncouth, the mulatto minority and the black mass—has kept Haiti aboil for most of the 150 years since it first proclaimed its independence, yet the contest is basically economic, i.e., the haves to keep and the have-nots to get, rather than racial. Say the Haitians: "The rich Negro is a mulatto, the poor mulatto is a Negro."
Queen of the Antilles. Modern Haitians can trace the roots of this basic division back through a turbulent history that still clings like a remembered nightmare. Columbus discovered the island on his first voyage, pronouncing the estimated 1,000,000 Arawak aborigines "lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous and praiseworthy." Spanish exploitation and smallpox soon wiped out the lovable Indians. In the 17th century, French buccaneers loosened Spain's grip on the island and France fastened onto the western end; a century later Saint-Domingue was France's proudest colony, the "Queen of the Antilles." Its foreign trade of $140 million yearly dwarfed that of the infant United States, and the profits from sugar, chocolate, indigo, coffee and cotton built many a chateau on the Loire or town house in Paris.
To till the plantations, the French repopulated Saint-Domingue with Negroes from Dahomey, Senegal and the Congo. On jasmine-scented nights, white planters took to wenching with African maids, and ultimately produced a light-skinned class of freedmen with color lines so finely drawn that a contemporary record recognized 250 different blood combinations. By the time the French Assembly pronounced the Rights of Man. 40,000 whites were lording it over 28,000 gens de couleur, while both were keeping a firm hand on 450,000 black slaves.
One Saturday night in 1791, the drums at a plantation voodoo dance subtly changed their beat. On other plantations the talking drums picked up the word and passed it on. Minutes after the signal, the lush, peaceful colony of Saint-Domingue flamed up in murderous revolt. With pruning forks, machetes and torches, the slaves massacred 2,000 French planters and their families, fired the canefields and the great houses. In the following decade of turmoil, Toussaint L'Ouverture, an obsequious slave coachman until he turned himself into a general, led his black armies to bloody victories over the French and the interventionist Spanish and English as well.