From Vaudoux to Voodoo

Faustin Wirkus

[Introductory Note] [Transcription not proof-read]

Chapter XV: A Christmas Eve Party

[167] It was many months before orders and my own desire came together and took me into La Gonave again.

For a time I was stationed at Port-au-Prince. Just before Christmas in 1922, I was acting as assistant chief of police under Major Rupertus. A report came in to us that there was to be a rather important voodoo ceremony at Croix Bossale, just within the city limits of Port-au-Prince but far enough out of the business and residential town so as to be in the jungle, as much as though it were a hundred miles away.

Under the law of the land, as I have said before, voodoo meetings were forbidden. We were sworn to enforce the law. I had no share in making that law. I very seriously believe that it is unwise of the government to attempt to regulate the religious practices of its people unless they tend to create disorder, disloyalty, and moral or physical disease. But my beliefs had nothing to do with my job.

As an enforcer of the law it was for me to learn all I could about these rites which I was sworn to suppress. In honesty I must admit that it fitted very well with my urgent curiosity about these secretive people that such was my duty. To satisfy my personal curiosity I preferred gaining friendly admission into voodoo ceremonies, but by raiding them I found out a great deal that would otherwise have taken many months and infinite patience.

It was Christmas Eve. The United States recognizes the Christmas festival formally by prescribing turkey, afloat or ashore, at home and abroad, as part of the day's menu of the soldier and sailor at an added expense to the government [168] over the ordinary ration allowance. Out of this formal recognition in the military law has grown a voluntary assumption of men in the service that - except in time of conlifct with an enemy - Christmas Eve and Christmas are play days.

When the report about the Christmas Eve voodoo party came to me, I organized an expedition as secretly as possible. There was a lot of good-natured grumbling among the officers who were included in the plan which ended with whoops of joy at six o'clock when word came that the natives had been warned of our intended raid and had postponed their services.

A crap game started at once on a blanket stretched across the cot of the officer of the day in his quarters. The game was in full blast when a messenger came to tell me that the ceremony had not been postponed but secretly transferred to a voodoo temple or houmfort at Croix des Missions.

Everybody had been released from duty for the night. I could only ask for volunteers. By the time I was ready to start there were seven or eight who were quite willing to break away from the game, but they were all winners. There were just as many losers who set up a howl at the mention of breaking the game up.

When I left at midnight there were no other officers with me. I went out ahead on the road to Croix des Missions with a light truck which carried five gendarmes behind me.

Half an hour out we came to a small gendarmerie post. Nothing had been heard there of any voodoo meeting in the neighborhood. No natives had been seen on the roads.

Five hundred yars from the post I stopped my car at a cross-roads. From somewhere came the throb of the ceremonial drums and the lilt of singing voices. The drums seemed to be much farther away than the voices. The drums seemed to be much farther away than the voices. Then at times the voices seemed to recede to a distance as great as that of the drums. Both were actually quite near. I left the gendarmes on the road and headed across gardens, irrigation ditches, and cactus hedges towards the sound. Within less than two hundred years of the road I found myself on the edge of an open space, surrounded by whitewashed mud houses and sheds. There were at least four hundred people in the largest shed and the space outside.

[169] The low volume of the drumbeats was explained by the fact that the drums had been filled with cotton fibre, except for an inch or two beneath the leather tops, and were thus muffled. The singing outdoors was in low tones, but behind closed doors and windows it was at full-throated volume. It was when the door was opened for a moment to admit someone that the full-throated chorus pealed out over the night in a way that had made me feel it was much nearer the road than the drums.

There were a few dim lights moving through the trees, like fireflies in July at home.

What with the noise of the drums, the murmur of voices, and the apparent sureness of the natives that they were not observed and that the merrymaking Marines in Port-au-Prince would forget them over the holiday, it was entirely unlikely that the movements of myself and my gendarmes would disturb the meeting.

I brought over the five gendarmes from the road after hiding the two carsin the bushes.

The general stir of excitement, the loud buzz of murmurs and whispers from the congregation about the huts, and the number of bobbing heads and ghostly white figures flitting through the steaks of moonlight between the trees were enough to make me know that this was no small meeting no incidental religious holiday observance upon which I had happened. It loked to be the best chance I had since I came to Haiti to see a voodoo congregation in a general ceremonial at a mystery house. The other ceremonies I had seen were small special services conducted for a few chosen individuals particularly invited.

It was hard for me to keep control of my feelings. I caught myself bloodthirstily whispering threats to the gendarmes that if any of them made a noise which betrayed our presence and broke up the meeting I would shoot him on the spot.

I took my own post at a break in the cactus hedge which was nearest the largest shed or pavilion and the houmfort. The two were built so that one might pass through the dancing pavilion into the only door of the houmfort.

Off to my left were some goats and sheep tied to bushes. In [170] the moonlight I could also see a number of turkeys and chickens lying around with their wings tied back. The fowls lay on their sides with their heads craning around but with no movement of their bodies.

The drums rolled continuously.

My men were posted at a greater distance from the meeting ground than I was myself, in order to control the paths by which the worshipers would run if there was a panic on discovery of our presence and also because the gendarmes were less likely to be heard moving about or coughing nervously. There was always the danger that they might get religiously excited and give the whole raid away to their voodoo brethren in an ecstasy of emotion.

There wasn't much ease of mind in thinking what would happen if there was a rush to get away from the place through us. We were outnumberd a hundred to one.

Along about two o'clock in the morning nearly all the people gathered in the open space facing the houmfort. it was a building about thirty feet long and fifteen wide. There were two windows and a series of ventilation holes in queerly grouped patterns under the roof.

From the houmfort came two women, folded cloths over their forearms, bottles in their hands. They approached the place where the goats were tied. The priestesses stood before the goats and chanted monotonously, bowing to the animals with respect as though they had been holy figures. They swayed in a stately rhythm without moving their feet, now and then stretching out their arms to the goats.

The goats bleated. They were angry, frightened, frantic. Others who have described this ceremony have said that the goats seemed to them to be filled with a sense of approaching doom and were actually crying out in protest and supplications for mercy.

It did not seem that way to me. They seemed to me to be acting very naturally; to be behaving as goats should, surrounded by four hundred hungry humans, or wolves or tigers, wild with frenzy and anticipation of the kill. I could not get the slightest supernatural thrill out of those goat bleats or the [171] similar though less insistent baa-ing of the sheep. To me they acted like animals who knew instinctively that they were soon to be eaten - as they were.

Two assistant priests came out from the houmfort with gourds of water and began bathing the goats. They used pink and green soap in scrubbing them. Several hours afterwards I found that this was cheap scented soap, which must have been bought in Port-au-Prince. So much, at least, white vulgarity had corrupted the Congo traditions since the Occupation.

As in other ceremonies of which I had heard and ahve seen since, they dressed the goats fantastically in little red and black trousers and garlanded their horns with ribbons.

Meanwhile the natives swayed and whirled in the dance and squatted and moaned, with their hands over their eyes. There were now many small red lights brought forward to the spot where the deputy priests and priestesses were tending the goats. The dim glare of the lights made the goings-on al the more unreal and queer and seemed to get the worshipers more and more excited.

It was impossible to help wondering just what would happen if they found out that a white officer and five gendarmes were spying on them out of the shadows. I rather feared the effect of the same wonder on my black soldiers, and crawled about to look them over. They were all holding fast to their posts, but none too calmly in mind.

At a signal, which I did not catch, the whole assembly became silent. The drums played a subdued march. In a square of yellow light, which showed when the door opened, the high priest appeared. He word a long robe like a dressing gown, covered with queer figures in many colors. He also wore a mitre. About his shoulders, fastened in festoons of ribbons on his chest, was a broad stole. The ribbons were pink, red, blue, and white.

Behind him walked the high priestess. She wore a ceremonial necklace which had side loops through which her arms passed. Her dress was as many-colored as Joseph's coat. The priest and priestess were followed by two children dressed like altar boys, each bearing a many-colored flag.

[172] The congregation burst out in mightly chorus with the Dembala hymn, the chant of the snake God, which is written in many studies of voodooism and which I could follow by fitting the rather jumbled words to the text of it I had read.

As they sant, the high priestess approached the goats. She held out a little bouquet of leaves to them and tried to make them eat from her hand. She spoke to them most politely and wheedlingly.

The goats, in terror which increased with the wild temper of the mad crowd about them, bleated and turned away their heads and tugged at their collars. They were not interested in food or in anything except getting away from that crazy crowd surging around them.

The priestess raised her hand. The priest gave a command.

All the people became as still as statues. There was some heavy breathing. Here and there a grunt of impatience. The goats became quieter. The priestess squatted before them, put her arms around their necks, stroked their heads, and even kissed them on their noses.

First one goat and then the other reached out and nibbled at the leaves on her hand.

The crowd went mad again as through the acceptance of the leaves by the goats was a symbol. It has occurred to me that perhaps the leaves had a narcotic quality and was given to the goats to lessen their pain in being killed - to make them stupid as I ahve been told men about to be executed are made stupid before they are hung or electrocuted. I have asked about this since but have never had a satisfactory answer.

The worshipers were in a frenzy. They leaped high in the air with hoarse shouts. They threw their arms about one another and shrieked and whooped, dancing together.

One of my gendarmes appeared beside me, his eyes big and rolling. He was all atremble. He tried to talk but merely jabbered. At last he made me understand.

"There is a demon loose in the crowd," he said. "It is very bad. These people may not be able to see you or to know that we are here, but there is no telling what a demon may see or know. And if the demon tells them we are here --"

[173] He began to blubber and snort.

I hit him on the head with the butt of my revolver and he lay over and did not worry me for awhile.

I crawled about a bit and saw that the other gendarmes were all of them flattened out behind bushes and tree trunks so that they would have been invisible had I not known were I had placed them. I signaled to them that everything would be all right if they stayed quiet. That signal was a hopeful lie. I was more scared than I have ever been, before or since. If a bat had struck me in the face - and there were plenty around native villages - I should probably have begun shooting at the moon.

The priest raised a gleaming machete with ribbons festooned from its handle. And there was silence. He prayed with his head tilted back so that his face looked straight up at the stars. He prayed wildly, incoherently. he strode to the nearest goat. The assistants of the ritual caught up the gamelle or wooden bowl and rushed to either side of him and placed it under the throat of the goat.

The sweep of the knife which cut the throat of the goat was not vicious or brutal. It was graceful, swift, and skillful. The goat dropped forward on its knees. The assistants kept the wooden bowl under the gushing slit across its throat. The priest turned his face starwards again and seemed to be in silent prayer.

The people became hysterial. Some sprawled on the ground as though in swoons. Others stood and shook as though with a violent ague. Some yelled like mad persons straining against the bars of a cell, scream after scream.

Oblivious of all the tumult, the priest repeated the ritual and drew the upturned blade of his knife across the throat of the other goat. Presently all the noise quieted from the sheer exhaustion of the limbs and voices of the assembly.

The priestess darted from the priest's side to where the turkeys and roosters lay, and came back running, a flapping rooster held by the neck in either hand. She had evidently released the pinions on their wings when she caught them up.

She hegan dancing around the priest with the roosters; [174] dipping, swaying, using them like a Japanese dancer in a circus dancing on a gith-rope with parasols. The drums accompanied her with an ever quicker rhythm. They stopped short with a few quick beats and she snapped off the neck of the rooster in her right hand so that its body looped through the air and fell twenty feet from her. Before it had struck the ground she dropped its head and changed the other bird from her left hand to her right and was swinging it over her head in circles while she trod another whirling measure. The short beats came again in the drum cadence and the headless body of the second rooster thumped beside the body of the first, which was still doing a death deance on the trampled courtyard with a score of Negroes in a ring around it trying to keep time with its convulsions. It was a shock of surprise to realize how fast things were moving. It seemed, until I saw that the first rooster was still flopping, that the priestess had been dancing with the second for at least twenty minutes, whereas it could not have been more than one or two.

The priest poured something from a bottle into the basin in which had been caught the blood from the throats of the goats. The slight breeze was my way and I fancied I caught an odor of cinnamon. Later I learned that this impression was right.

He lifted the bowl in both hands to heaven solemnly and muttered a prayer and set it reverently upon the ground. F rom the bowl he dipped out blood until he had filled two shallow earthen bowls. One of these he placed in the hands of the priestess. The two of them walked backward in the direction of the houmfort.

the worshipers crowded forward step by step towards the bowl in a semicricle, but always watching the priest and the priestess. At the threshold of the temple they paused. The priest nodded graciously to the dense curved wall of people before him and they darted at the big bowl. Some used cups to dip up blood to drink. Others scooped it up with the palms of their hands. Those who reached the blowl first fell back to make room for others. The blood was spattered over their white clothing, so that it became mottled and streaked in the moonlight.

[175]The priest and priestess disappeared into the houmfort. They were followed by the little flag bearers and the assistants of the ritual, and a few others who seemed to be deacons or wardens and had acted as ushers in holding back the excited worshipers all through the ritual when they seemed likely to bound into the cleared circle and bump into the officiating members of the ceremony.

The frenzy started again and became more violent than it had been before. The people were nearing complete exhaustion, but their nerves were making them jump as though their bodies had been bags filled with coiled bed springs. They went vaulting into the air, came down crouching, and bounced up again. Knocking one another over, scrambling to their feet, reeling. Some stood erect and, without any apparent effort or bending of their knees, hopped, both feet held close together, in jumps two feet or more from the ground across the court and back again. Some stood and shook until it seemed as though their arms and legs would be disjointed.

This violent trembling was the sign that the spirit or loi had entered into the subject. Their eyes bulged and they stared into space without focusing. They saw nothing near or far. Sometiems they grew weak and fell upon the ground, their figures rippling with their trembling. Others fell upon their knees and waddled aimlessly ahead, bending to kiss the earth. Always when this happened others upon whom the loi had not descened formed a group and followed the possessed one around worshipfully, awestricken and shouting their joy and envy for his exaltation.

As those who had been possessed by the loi gave away to exhausion and sank into quiet, the others became quiet and turned to prepare the carcasses of the goats and the roosters for food. The sheep were slaughtered and the turkeys were killed and plucked and laid over charcoal fires to be roasted.

The religious ceremony seemed to be over and a feast about to follow.

I slipped back to the hiding places of my gendarmes and gave my orders for the raiding of the houmfort.

I ordered one man to go to each of the two windows. They [176] were to hit each head that appeared at the window with their cocomacaque clubs, which are much more effective for their purpose than the hickory sticks carried by policemen in the United States for similar purposes. They were to carry their rifles slung over their backs and not to unsling them unless they had a clear order from me to do so. Two more were to take the houmfort doorway and the fifth man and myself were to hold the second doorway and the outlet of the dancing pavilion, holding back the men and women in the paviolion and keeping those outside from going to the rescue of those in the houmfort.

It was certain that the persons most important for the purposes of the raid were the high priest and priestess and those who had gone in with them after the outside ceremony.

The crowd had settled down to feasting.

They were also drinking from gourds and bottles and there was a strong smell of clarin in the air.

No one paid the slightest attention to my men, who went quietly to the posts to which I had assigned them. The rada drums, which are the ceremonial drums, were throbbing steadily in the pavilion outside the houmfort entrance, apparently furnishing the ceremonial music for a ritual still going on inside.

The rada drums, once heard, never die out of one's consciousness even after years have passed. I still hear them sometimes when waking in the dark or when walking alone in deep woods. They are always three rada drums, one big drum and two smaller. They are never used for social dances and are usually kept in the houmforts and regarded with reverence and respect.

When the men had time to reach their appointed places I fired one shot in the air. I found myself so wrought up that I delayed the shot a few seconds to make sure I had full control of my nerves. I had no idea whether the natives would stampede or whether they would jumps us in a mass attack, and I did not want to be in any doubt, when the time came, as to which they were doing. My experience in mountain patrols was that the surprise of a shot or two and a good deal of shouting, sharply and authoritatively, was apt to hold them in check long enough for me to get in control of almost any crowd which my voice could reach.

[177]The surprise of the noise coming from armed men confused them, as I expected it to, so that they did not realize until too late how small our numbers were compared to theirs.

The doors of the pavilion and the houmfor and the windows were blocked with struggling forms, wrestling in panic to force their way out. The crack of cocomacaque clubs on hard skulls was loud and clear. There were some screams of fright and warning, which died away very quickly as the thresholds of the doors were piled with fallen men, knocked senseless.

I kept shouting in Creole, as did the men at the doors and windows, that if everybody would stand quiet, nobody would be hurt, but that anybody who tried to run past us would be knocked on the head.

Quiet came far sooner than I could have hoped. The crowd on the outside had taken to the bush. Those in the paviolion who were not unconscious on the ground were standing with their arms by their sides, looking at us in sullen fright and curiosity.

I walked through the pavilion into the temple door. At the threshold I halted involuntarily. I felt as though I were bursting into a real church like a blasphemous rowdy.

The altar was built up in three receding steps. On the top step or shelf were nearly three hundred small red water jugs, crishes. Each was a little different in size and form from the others, some were misshapen or distorted in baking. Around the neck of each jug was a collar of eathers. Each collar was sprinkled with fresh blood.Afterthe outside ceremony of teh purifying of the goats and their consecration and sacrifice, the platters of blood, spice-perfumed, had ben taken inside the shrine to be used in consecrating these crishes for service in smaller chapels throughout the country. This particular ceremony, I found later, was always held on Christmas Eve.

Somewhere earlier I had something to say about the mixed-up voodoo-Christian religion of the Haitians. This was the greatest ceremonial of their religious year and its day was the day observed by Christianity as that of the birth of Christ. To Christians of a certain type this may seem blasphemy. For myself, reared in the strictest of Catholic teachings, I have not [178] been able to make out of it anything but a rather beautiful desire on their part to include in their worship all supernaturally powerful masters of human destiny. Nothing is surer than that if the Haitians had known Mohammedanism, the rites of Islam too would have found a place in their rituals.

On each end of the second shelf bwlow the little father-collared jugs were the pacquets Congo; one black, one red. The red or male pacquet was the priest's; the black, or female, the priestess's. They are cloth bags stuffed with a specially prepared mixture of herbs and powdered roots. They are decorated with feathers and bead embroideries and with many ribbons sewed into the cloth. Except that they have no faces and arms they are very like the crudest rag dolls of the children of the poor all over the world. These charms are prepared and blessed at an especial ceremony and are found in all houmforts. It was not until long, long after that I was permitted to see the very impressive making of these pacquets.

In the middle of this second shelf between the pacquets Congo was a shrine light, a deep saucer in which burned with steady flame a wick supported by a small cross of wood floating in oil of the castor bean.

Along the lowest tirer were strewn stone knives and hammers which were relics of the Indians who inhabited the island before the French and Negroes came. They had been found in caves of those early peoples and, like the scared things of every other religion they knew anything about, had been brought into voodooism. These two were freshly spattered with the sacrificial blood. At opposite ends on the lowest shelf were the platters from which the blood had been sprinkled.

A white cloth covered the three ledges of the altar and hung down over the front hallway to the floor.

In the far corners were the flags which the little children had carried behind the officiating priests during the sacrifice ritual. Seen in the light they were definite in design. The field of each flag was of blood-red silk. They were embroidered with silk threads and with beads and bits of metal.

On the left wall as one faced the altar was a large lithograph picture of St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland. It had [179] been printed in Europe. To the Haitian mind St. Patrick was the Christian personification of Dembala, the Snake God, and with this understanding they gladly gave to St. patrick all reverence. On the opposite wall was a similar European-made lithograph of St. Peter holding the keys of heaven. To the Haitians he represented Papa Legba, the Keeper of the Gate of the Beyond. As Christians worship God and do reverence to His saints, the Haitian makes all the saints separate gods with jurisdiction over separate blessings and curses.

Under each picture burned an Everlasting Light. Something in the look of voodoo priests I have talked with about the permanence of these lights has made me a little skeptical. But at any rate they are always lighted when the priests admit others to the houmfort.

Against the back wall stood the priest and the priestess, still in the robes in which they had officiated at the sacrifice. They stood with their hands crossed on their breasts looking at the altar with steadfast humility. It was as though they were appealing to their gods to witness that they were about to die in their faith and for it. On the ground beside them sat the two little serving children, looking up at them and whimpering softly.

I took from the priest, as evidence, the stole which he wore over his shoulders and across his breast and likewise his embroidered surplice-like outer robe. I also took from the priestess the necklace which looped her neck and upper arms.

The necklace was strung with beads big and little, made of stone, and sea shells, tin and silver-plate thimbles, human teeth, metal crucifixes, iron washers, and pierced copper coins.

At each end of the priest's stole were crosses, machine-made, such as may be brought at any store where religious books and rosaries and other religious articles are sold. Besides the ribbon rosettes with trailing ends which fastened it across his chest, the stole had feathers worked into its texture. Some were tiny humming bird's wings and others were large enough to have been taken from fish eagles and others were large enough to have been taken from fish eagles or even turkeys. They could not have been put in for beauty and must have represented some religious significance of the birds. The humming bird I [180] know is credited with great potency in some ancient Hebrew charms and so are the fathers of a bird or the skin of an animal offered in sacrifice.

Neither priest nor priestess made any resistance to being stripped of their insignia. They stood as though in a trance. The priest was murmuring constantly in prayer. His eyes, as when he prayed outside over the goats, were fixed on vacancy, but his words were very low and I could not follow them.

I also gathered up the Indian pieces on the altar and a number of coins scattered over the altar cloth. Some of them were gold Spanish coins, bearing the date of 1790, relics of the days when the Caribbean was the Spanish main; there was also a few pieces of Haitian coinage of the far-gone days of the emperor Solomon.

Including the priest and priestess, w had had fifty-four prisoners in all. These I put under the guard of four men in the moonlit compound. With my fifth man I explored the other buildings.

Some of them were merely storehouses for field tools and scraps of iron and rope. In one of them I found an open hearth - without a chimney, of course. On each corner of the hearth was a polished human skull. In a corner of this hut was a pile of bones, unmistakeably human bones.

There was nothing to show whether these skulls and bones had been there for weeks or for years. But they had not yet turned the rich ivory brown which is the color of bones which have been preserved for centuries.

If we had found these bones of men in the houmfort it might have meant nothing more than that they were used in the ritual, as I have heard of similar objects being used in entirely civilized communitiesin the 'work' of secret societies. It was their being found in a room with the fireplace, a sort of sacred cookhouse not used in the preparing of ordinary food for the community, which made me uneasy and a little tight about the pit of the stomach.

We loaded all we could of the evidence and the food supplies on the truck and in my car. Two men were left to guard the rest of the village. With the cars and the prisoners, the column, led by a gendarme, flanked by two gendarmes and followed by [181] me, marhced back into Port-au-Prince. Rooster calls were echoing from valley to hill and from hill to hill. It was a time of a meteor shower, and as the column filed out into the road from Croix des Missions, flaring sky sparks sped over us with flickering tails of radiance behind them and dropped far out to sea beyond the city. Then the first dawn streamers shot like faint searchlights across the heavens, blotting out all the stars. It was impressive.

The prisoners felt it, too. I heard them murmuring: 'The good God is plenty angry with us.' And one voice uttered again and again in a whisper that the papaloi (who was out of hearing) must have somehow made a mistake in his prayers.

The sun was almost up when we arrived at the port-au-Prince police station. With the break of dawn the crap game was breaking, too. My old comrade of Perodin, Place, and a couple of other men were on the steps of the station on their way home. They waited for us to come up. When I told them what they had missed by not accepting my invitation to to along, they were very much disgusted. They had been among the winners at midnight who wanted to go with me but had been held back by the losers.

'You needn't rub it in,' said Place, after looking over the load of stuff on the truck and listening to all of my story that he could bear up under, 'I missed a big show and it cost me a month's pay.'

He walked away sleepy and broke, while I superintended the locking up of the prisoners and sent back the truck, after it had been unloaded, to bring along more of the seixed property. Of all the stuff I had left at Croix des Missions everything reached the police station except five gallons of clairin. From certain odors which played around the gendarmes as they brought in the last truckload I had an idea what might have happened to the clarin. But they had been good, all in all; I had kept them out all night and they had been terrified to their very souls and yet obeyed orders bravely. They were still alert and level-headed about their work and it was no time for picking on them.

The prisoners were all taken before the juge de paix of Sec- [182] tion Nord, the district in which Croix des Missions lies, and were sentenced from one to three months in jail. Major Rupertus, my immediate chief in charge of police, and Coloniel Kennedy, commander of the Department of Port-au-Prince, were very well satisfied with my night's work. So was I. I had learned a lot of things about which I had been guessing blindly ever since I came to Haiti.

Source: Faustin Wirkus and Taney Dudley, The White King of La Gonave (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Company, 1931), pp167-82.