WHITE HAITIANS

by Arna Bontemps

The clatter of the market began at dawn. Even before the sun rose, however, swarms of peasants were shuffling along the road in loose sandals, beating down the ears of tiny mouse-colored donkeys, scrambling for the favored places on the dusty cart path where business was expected. There were enormous bags of charcoal to be swung from the backs of the dull, stunted animals. Melons, avocados, mangoes, grapes and bananas required careful handling. Neatly loaded on trays, transported gracefully on the heads of slim-waisted black girls, these arrived in tact at the end of a twenty-mile journey and found space in the humming, road-side mart.

Daybreak, like sunset, is abrupt in the tropics. There isn't much lingering between dark and light. The long lines of country people do not break so suddenly, however. A pig, blind to the wonder of it all, comes to market in a basket that sways safely on the head of an old woman. Meanwhile, he insists on the divine right to protest. Turkeys ride more placidly in their basket. The girl who brings them carries an additional half dozen of the heavy birds suspended from her neck and shoulders. Coils of green rope, stalks of sugar cane, hand-carved walking sticks, gourds of milk, bundles of wood, coffee, home-made sweet meats, oranges that have remained green on the outside even after ripening, game birds that have been caught in traps, baskets of crude sandals, straw hats--everything that the peasant knows reaches the market at some time or other. Everything, that is, except the male

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peasant of adult years. Lord of his small acre or two, this in-
dividual remains at home while the women and children go to town
to sell.

In the market, too, one meets curious people. There was
Rachel, for example, whom we took to be a fake. We were unprepar-
ed for a white cocoanut vender, competing on equal terms with the
throngs of blacks in a Haitian peasant market. It was too much
like the improbable romances of the African jungle in which a
fair heroine is discovered in the depths of the savage land. We
readily agreed that it was both quaint and amusing to see a girl
with blue-green eyes and rich brown hair balancing a cocoanut
tray on her head, but our efforts to account for her presence left
us baffled and perhaps a little exhausted.

Rachel's language was Creole, the same *patois* which all the
other peasants speak. She could do no more with standard French
than could her companions in the market. Like them she wore on
her feet a loose pair of flopping, hand-made sandals that frequent-
ly came off and had to be replaced by raising the foot gingerly
in order to avoid dropping the tray from the head. She was il-
literate.

Though she did not frequently come all the way to Port-au-
Prince, Rachel had been there often enough not to feel strange,
often enough to sit in the market unnoticed. She had learned
to squat beside her tray in the accepted fashion, giving her skirt
a turn and a hoist from beneath for the sake of the native proprieties.
The sleepy, listless way in which she called attention to her
cocoanuts was perfectly in keeping with the strange, bird-like
chatter around her.

The outer soft shell of the cocoanuts had been trimmed
away with a machette. What remained were greenish white affairs

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shaped like cut stones rather than rounded fruits or nuts. The
vendor squatted indolently, a cane knife beside her handy in case
someone actually wanted to spend two cents for a cool drink. In
such an event Rachel would hack a hole in the top of the cocoanut,
hand it to the customer and allow him to drink the milk directly
from the shell.

Two of these was excuse for a few words of conversation.
Rachel, as we made it out, lived at Cassals, a village near
L'Arcahaie. Yes, she was married and her husband lived there too.
Father and mother? Yes, both living at Cassals. And grandfather?
Grandfather too. All blancs? Of course they were white. How
silly of us!

We wanted, naturally, to know something about her ancestry,
her nationality. All she could tell us, however, was that she
was Haitian. All her people were Haitian. They had always been
Haitian. How they became Haitian originally had never occurred
to her. She had noticed that the great majority of Haitians were
black, but it did not seem strange that a few, like herself, were
white.

We were able, with some effort, to mask our wonderment, but
by this time the trip to Cassals had become a foregone conclusion.
Our driver explained that he could get us within seven miles of
the place by automobile. From there horses could be rented.

One Haitian village is very much like another. See one and
you see them all. A cluster of thatch-topped huts in a grove of
wax-green banana trees, long-necked cocoanut palms, leafy mangoes,
gaudy flamboyants. Goats, a lively and sleek breed, are always
in evidence. The pigs are nearly as numerous, but these do not
thrive so well. They seem undersized and emaciated. Often, too,

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they seem to present the forked twigs fitted around their necks
to help keep them at home. The goats and pigs, along with the
turkeys, the ducks, the small game chickens, the family donkeys
and the naked children, enjoy the same freedom in the communal
grounds, and one is as likely as another to enter this or that
leaf-fringed hut. Yet, curiously, a tendency toward cleanness
is often noticeable. The dirt yards are swept daily. Dead leaves
and trash are regularly gathered and burned.

In each hut, presumably, a rakish squire awaits the return
of his womenfolks from market. He is stretched upon the dirt
floor with an old hat shoved down over his eyes, a pipe in his
mouth, hands locked beneath his head, legs crossed, a scaly old
foot propped up proudly. He has been eating mangoes and throw-
ing the seeds and rinds across the room, chewing sugar-cane stalks
and spitting the pulp off to the side. There are few flies to
annoy. Life is substantially good.

The community at Cassals is unique only because the men
you arouse from the huts are white. They can tell you no more
about themselves than can the blacks who surround them on the
countryside. If there is anything historically interesting about
them, they do not know it. If their ancestors have had any part
in the gaudy history of that troubled island, they have forgotten
the day. Now they make no inquiries. They are Haitians now.
White Haitians.

Recently, though they apologize for it, some of the young
women have broken a tradition that has been maintained for much longer
than they know. They have, on a few occasions, when there was a
definite possibility of bettering themselves economically, married
outside of their own circle. In this they have had the approbation
of their old fathers. Times have been hard in Haiti for a

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number of years. It goes back to the competition of Brazilian
coffee, but that is another matter.

The history of Haiti is one grand melodrama. The exploits
of the black slave chieftains in the Revolutionary wars were so
spectacular, so nearly fantastic at times that one is reluctant
to take them seriously. Eventually, however, the whole chronicle
must be accepted. But while Toussaint, Dessalines and Christophe
were shaking the island with their thunder, another drama, wistful
and tragic, was being enacted in the hills of Dondon and Bombard-
olis.

Long before the independence, Haiti had become the refuge of
a group of whites not from the coast of Nova Scotia, refugees
known in other histories as Acadians. Fleeing before the British,
some of these French colonists sought a haven in the wealthy col-
ony of Saint Domingue—as Haiti was known during the colonial per-
iod. Here an aristocratic feudal life was lived by a class of
landed Parisian noblemen who had their baronial estates direct
from the king. The fact that many of them were misfit noblemen
is not important. They had established themselves in the new
world and created a society that rivaled anything in Europe for
gaudiness; they had made themselves so wealthy that the expression
"rich as a Creole" had become common slang in Paris. They were
surrounded by countless slaves, by a considerable spawn of mulattos
and by a certain number of wastrel, petits blancs who had apparently
dropped from the clouds. The patrician rulers of Haiti consented
to receive the Acadians.

Very soon it was discovered that the refugees from Nova Scotia
were not constitutionally fit to endure the hot tropical climate
of the island. Still pleasantly considerate, the colonial govern-

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ment directed the little bands to two spots which seemed cool enough for even *emigrants* from the chill Canadian coast. The Acadians moved to Dondon, and later famous as the home of the mulatto patriot Vincent Oge, and to Bombardopolis, near Port de Paix. There they were happily forgotten during the bloody scourge of revolution. There came a time, however, when they were remembered again.

After a number of years of war and a long succession of battles which generally favored the aroused slaves, Napoleon sent a picked army under the command of his brother-in-law Le Clerc to regain the rich island for France. The result is well-known. Le Clerc was badly beaten by the forces of Christophe and the spine of the opposition was virtually broken. But Napoleon was not a man to give up easily an aim he had cherished to his heart. Having failed in the north, he would make an attempt in the southwest. Accordingly he sent still another army. This time Rochambeau was placed in command and commissioned to take Port-au-Prince and make a campaign from that portion of the island.

Here it is interesting to note that the army of Rochambeau contained a considerable number of Poles. They had been taken by Napoleon during his campaigns in Poland and thrust into this army which he now dispatched to Saint Domingue. How they acquited themselves in arms it is impossible to say, but the whole world knows now that the savage, half-wild Dessalines hurled his black hordes against the forces of Rochambeau with such mad fury that the French army was virtually torn to shreds. Then it was that the question of the Poles arose.

Having been Napoleon's enemies and having fought against him before their capture, they were now unwelcome in his empire unless there was a chance to serve him in distant conquests. Further

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opportunities in that direction now seeming unlikely, they surrendered themselves to the black chieftan who had defeated them. His beady eyes bright, Dessaline weighed the situation. The prisoners seemed sincere in their desire to remain in the island of Haiti. They had once faught against the armies of Napoleon as had the erstwhile slaves of Saint Domingue. What they requested was not much. Besides, Dessalines was in one of his rare magnanimous moods. He would allow them to remain in the island with the single provision that they become Haitian citizens in every good sense.

There is nothing to indicate that the Poles of Rochambeau's army have ever been remiss in the obligations of citizenship which they accepted from Jean Jacques Dessalines. In time they joined themselves to the Acadians in Bombardopolis. Others settled in the valley of the whites, Fond des Blancs, far to the south.

Haitian scholars are sure that among some of them today there is a small admixture of Negro blood, but it is not apparent. They are white. They have kept to themselves. Revolutions and regimes have failed to touch them in nearly a century and a half of turbulent history. They are as satisfied with their state as are the blacks. They are descended from European peasants; they are still peasants.

In one detail they differ sharply from the blacks. They pay the Catholic church a whole-hearted, single-minded acceptance that has in it none of the African's reservations. They do not consort with jungle gots or practice voodoo, as far as we could discover. The only white man we saw on the island who is a practicing believer in voodoo is an American scholar who came to ridicule, but remained to laugh at himself--his former self.

The white Haitians have been christened with Bible names.