Two Years in the French West Indies Part 13

VI.

From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with clouds of bright green here and there,--foliage of tamarind and corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home; but I look in vain for the light of Pere Labat.

And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval valleys changed by thy will to green-gold seas of cane,--and the strong mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_."...

Eh, _Pere Labat_!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the appellation of the river still known as the Riviere des Peres. Also the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races and colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are pa.s.sing away; the secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a "devil" (_yon diabe_),--cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together;--

"_Soh-soh!--yae-yah!

Rhale bois-canot!_"

And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. G.o.d's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Pere Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home... "_Mi fa.n.a.l Pe Labatt!--mi Pe Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_"

CHAPTER IV. -- LA GUIABLESSE.

I.

Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that startle even while the sun s.h.i.+nes upon them a.s.sume, after his setting, a grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable _Me_: it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital B).

From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a black crawling of unutterable spiders....

Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco: the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes, but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus.

The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent, are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might be a _malefice_ which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side, might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-M_--may be quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and straight. They are almost everywhere,--s.h.i.+ning along the skirts of the woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And the night-walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has other companions.h.i.+p. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other lands does not exist here after the setting of the sun,--the terror of _Silence_.... Tropical night is full of voices;--extraordinary populations of crickets are trilling; nations of tree-frogs are chanting; the _Cabri-des-bois_, [14] or _cra-cra_, almost deafens you with the wheezy bleating sound by which it earned its creole name; birds pipe: everything that bells, ululates, drones, clacks, guggles, joins the enormous chorus; and you fancy you see all the shadows vibrating to the force of this vocal storm. The true life of Nature in the tropics begins with the darkness, ends with the light.

And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. _I ni pe zombi menm gran'-jou_ (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight) is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these lat.i.tudes,--not, at least, to anyone knowing something of the conditions that nourish or inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical day, in the hush of the woods, the solemn silence of the hills (broken only by torrent voices that cannot make themselves heard at night), even in the amazing luminosity, there is a something apparitional and weird,--something that seems to weigh upon the world like a measureless haunting. So still all Nature's chambers are that a loud utterance jars upon the ear brutally, like a burst of laughter in a sanctuary. With all its luxuriance of color, with all its violence of light, this tropical day has its ghostliness and its ghosts. Among the people of color there are many who believe that even at noon--when the boulevards behind the city are most deserted--the zombis will show themselves to solitary loiterers.

II.

... Here a doubt occurs to me,--a doubt regarding the precise nature of a word, which I call upon Adou to explain. Adou is the daughter of the kind old capresse from whom I rent my room in this little mountain cottage. The mother is almost precisely the color of cinnamon; the daughter's complexion is brighter,--the ripe tint of an orange.... Adou tells me creole stories and _tim-tim_. Adou knows all about ghosts, and believes in them. So does Adou's extraordinarily tall brother, Yebe,--my guide among the mountains.

--"Adou," I ask, "what is a zombi?"

The smile that showed Adou's beautiful white teeth has instantly disappeared; and she answers, very seriously, that she has never seen a zombi, and does not want to see one.

--"_Moin pa te janmain oue zombi,--pa 'le oue ca, moin!_"

--"But, Adou, child, I did not ask you whether you ever saw It;--I asked you only to tell me what It is like?"...

Adou hesitates a little, and answers: --"_Zombi? Mais ca fai desde lanuitt, zombi!_"

Ah! it is Something which "makes disorder at night." Still, that is not a satisfactory explanation. "Is it the spectre of a dead person, Adou?

Is it _one who comes back?_"

--"_Non, Missie,--non; ce pa ca._"

--"Not that?... Then what was it you said the other night when you were afraid to pa.s.s the cemetery on an errand,--_ca ou te ka di_, Adou?"

--"Moin te ka di: 'Moin pa le k'alle b cimetie-la pa ouapp moun-m;--moun-m ke barre moin: moin pa se pe vini enco.'" (_I said, "I do not want to go by that cemetery because of the dead folk,--the dead folk will bar the way, and I cannot get back again._")

--"And you believe that, Adou?"

--"Yes, that is what they say... And if you go into the cemetery at night you cannot come out again: the dead folk will stop you--_moun-m ke barre ou._"...

--"But are the dead folk zombis, Adou?"

--"No; the moun-m are not zombis. The zombis go everywhere: the dead folk remain in the graveyard.... Except on the Night of All Souls: then they go to the houses of their people everywhere."

--"Adou, if after the doors and windows were locked and barred you were to see entering your room in the middle of the night, a Woman fourteen feet high?"...

--"_Ah! pa pale ca!!_"...

--"No! tell me, Adou?"

--"Why, yes: that would be a zombi. It is the zombis who make all those noises at night one cannot understand.... Or, again, if I were to see a dog that high [she holds her hand about five feet above the floor]

coming into our house at night, I would scream: '_Mi Zombi!_'"

... Then it suddenly occurs to Adou that her mother knows something about zombis.

--"_Ou Manman!_"

--"_Eti!_" answers old Thereza's voice from the little out-building where the evening meal is being prepared over a charcoal furnace, in an earthen canari.

--"_Missie-la ka mande save ca ca ye yonne zombi;--vini ti bouin!_"...

The mother laughs, abandons her canari, and comes in to tell me all she knows about the weird word.

"_I ni pe zombi_"--I find from old Thereza's explanations--is a phrase indefinite as our own vague expressions, "afraid of ghosts," "afraid of the dark." But the word "Zombi" also has special strange meanings....

"Ou pa.s.se nans grand chimin lanuitt, epi ou ka oue gouos dife, epi plis ou ka vini a.s.sou dife-a pli ou ka oue dife-a ka mache: ce zombi ka fai ca.... Enc, chouval ka pa.s.se,--chouval ka ni anni toua patt: ca zombi."

(You pa.s.s along the high-road at night, and you see a great fire, and the more you walk to get to it the more it moves away: it is the zombi makes that.... Or a horse _with only three legs_ pa.s.ses you: that is a zombi.)

--"How big is the fire that the zombi makes?" I ask.

--"It fills the whole road," answers Thereza: "_li ka rempli toutt chimin-la_. Folk call those fires the Evil Fires,--_mauvai dife_;--and if you follow them they will lead you into chasms,--_ou ke tombe adans labime_."...

And then she tells me this:

--"Baidaux was a mad man of color who used to live at St. Pierre, in the Street of the Precipice. He was not dangerous,--never did any harm;--his sister used to take care of him. And what I am going to relate is true,--_ce zhistoue veritabe!_

"One day Baidaux said to his sister: 'Moin ni yonne yche, va!--ou pa connaitt li!' [I have a child, ah!--you never saw it!] His sister paid no attention to what he said that day; but the next day he said it again, and the next, and the next, and every day after,--so that his sister at last became much annoyed by it, and used to cry out: 'Ah! mais pe guiole ou, Baidaux! ou fou pou embete moin conm ca!--ou bien fou!'...

But he tormented her that way for months and for years.

"One evening he went out, and only came home at midnight leading a child by the hand,--a black child he had found in the street; and he said to his sister:--