Conversation with a Haitian Police Detective in 1980

The sun was setting. The trees hiding the homes of Port au Prince were half on fire half in deep green. It was hard to see the sea at sunset from the Grand Hotel Oloffson. There was a glare in the haze of dust and ever present simmer. Noise of traffic was there when thought about and not there when not. It was just too hot to complain about the noise so in Haitian fashion it was stuffed casually into its own box of non-consciousness. We were having coffee on the verandah of the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince. Toulouse, my friend, was a cop.

   He put down his demitasse and nodded at me, ’My friend, you are different, you see. You are not of any place on this planet that is what I see.’ he nodded to himself as if to confirm the statement, ‘I have seen many types of people in my work and have to always analyse them, you know the way the walk, talk, listen, sit, respond to questions. I search their eyes to look into their souls for that is what we are here, soul searchers. Our very being is a centre for searching the essences of people. That is the Haitian, Rod. You, though, are the same and different. I have only seen a couple of people before like you. I think they will accept you.’ Don Toulouse stopped to sip his coffee, never taking his eyes off me.

‘Don Toulouse, sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful but I don’t particularly trust those who start telling me that I am special. Not modesty, man, just there is usually something else they are about to want from me, you know? I trust you but have to take a breath to erase that stuff from my mindset, you know? And, I really don’t give a fuck about anybody accepting me, whoever that they might be.’

He smiled and gave a deep nod.

‘Rod, I should have prefaced that with a recounting of what has come before and probably what will happen again to this blessed land and why I tell you that you have something to offer us. You know that we were the centre of spiritualism here in the Caribbean forever until the European came. We brought the teachers and seers from all around this circle of water. They came to us and brought wisdoms beyond the comprehension of the Europeans and for that when they arrived they tried to wipe it out in the name of their spiritualism, or their religion, their Catholicism. There was the thought that since it was so hard to tear the heart out of our being here that they needed to import all the negative spirits to this place and let that fight our wisdoms. Our voudoun is not a good spiritualism nor a bad one, just an acceptance of our humanities in all forms and because of that and the abundance of what they brought to us we were conquered for a while.’

I know I was sitting there almost with my mouth open, wanting to ask some questions that seemed too dumb to ask.

Don Toulouse continued with a frown to organise his words. ‘There are a lot of people who have tried to understand us by comparing us to their own cultures. To the romantic Haiti seems a last frontier, a land of strong individualism, anarchy and capitalism at its purest. It is not a country that usually criticises other lands or politics. It is a country that looks inward, with a kind of Haitian eyes.

‘To the pragmatist, Haiti represent the black snake of loathsome disorder. The streets are crumbling, the children begging, the people will sell anything. The elite drive Mercedes Benz and consider the masses as cheap labour. Haiti, to them, the pragmatist, this is a sort of feudal system with a whiff of slavery. To them the government is a band of silver barrelled Colt 45-carrying TonTon Macoutes who wear sunglasses in interrogation rooms.’

He looked up at the sky, shook his head a tiny bit, ‘Strange.’

He looked back at me,’People who visit the country, without any particularly negative motive, find it a happy place, nowadays, of extremely courteous people. The Haitian, granted, are black, and in Port au Prince, are crowded… but we laugh at everything or socially judge most incidentals rarely, very rarely allowing violent momentum to be carried out. That is why the most sensational aspects of “reporting” are usually lost to foreign visitors, save the poverty in the slums of La Saline, Cite Simone, Cite Soleil or Saint Martin. And these slums are new creations, the over blasphemed government’s answer to the growing unemployment problem. They are built by the government’s inadequate reliance on foreign standards that seem to need to centralise societies.

‘Port au Prince is a city. It is not as large as most in the world and it was never intended to be. It has very few tall buildings, its downtown is crowded during the workdays with a labyrinth of shops and street venders where on can get a suit designed and tailored for next to nothing; where shoes will be made for you while you wait,; where Chicklets are sold from a tray containing watches, sunglasses and transistor radios. There is more to this microcosm than the rushed cruiseship visitors have time to consider. Their time is usually taken up by the street hustler, similar to any other port city with the typical learned jargon, style and approach, you know, “Sayfriend. No, no, I don’t want anything. I will just show you a few things, so the bad ones won’t bother you. You can call me your guide, friend, etcetera etcetera. That kind of thing. The hustlers are hustlers and the tourists are tourists. But, you know all that stuff.

‘Now, journalists, not like you now, but the way you were at first maybe a little. The journalists are another subject entirely. Generally North American journalists come to Haiti with the purpose of bringing out some sensational new twist on the normal themes of poverty, corruption, homelessness and voudoun. From drink to drink at the Oloffson they will report on the slavery sales at the Dominican border, pointing out that Haitians have to pay Haitian employment agencies to get work in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans also have pay the Haitian agents for workers. Account books are kept and periods of contract are enforced. But, if you leave out the organisational aspects and insert the word slavery then you sell a story… all from the bar at the Oloffson. And the mentioning of that term, slavery, exacerbates the image of the Black race not being able to take care of itself even in the hardly mentioned country of the first successful slave revolt in the world.

‘My friend Auguste, you know him in Cap Haitien, he said, “Haiti is a bad example that is always written about in the States with a need for them to control our country and thereby the Black people in their country. This is the same America that a lot of Haitians went and fought for the American Independence War. Haiti is the only country in the West to say that we are Black; that we are a Black country.”

He is alluding to the question, is this class-racism of putting down the spirit of the Haitian Revolution one of the controls of the American Blacks? Are we, in our poverty, the carrot that dangles before the rest of the West as the only out for them unless they conform to what the European White man says? Are these the only stories that are bought by the newspapers and sold by the journalists?

‘Mexico City has far worse poverty, Hong Kong has more congestion, Madison, Wisconsin has more crime and Biloxi, Bible Belt, Mississippi has more drugs. Miami has a combination of all and seems proud to report them.’

Don Toulouse sat back and put his fingers together with the tips touching his lips. ‘Rod, there is a vacant piece of desert in the Northwest promontory of Haiti’s geography with a large deep water bay. The bay with its small town of Mole Saint Nicolas is 130 kilometres directly across the strategic Windward Passage from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States has been attempting to negotiate with Haiti for Mole Saint Nicolas. Haiti has not been negotiating back. Haiti has taken the stand that no North American military presence will maintain residence upon our soil again. 

‘We feel that the US Marines occupation of our country from 1916 through 1934 with its war against the independence fighters they called Maroons was humiliating. Their past of murdering and torturing of our people is not to be repeated with others as a new Guantanamo Marine Corps prison. It would be again control of our people, a US strategic location and an insertion for the mining of minerals. The United States again assumed governmental control of Haiti during World War II with just a couple of puppet presidents. The goals were to supply the war effort with rubber, aluminium, copper, sugar, coffee and to investigate the gold and silver along the Dominican border mountain chain.

We were an extremely wealthy country when under French rule and later again under Haitian rule by both President Alexandre Petion and President Jean Pierre Boyer. Boyer gave us over 36 years of stability. But now, we are cheap labour. The elite have partnered with the American and European and push the values of those people as aspirations for our people. We have been confused for many many years and our spiritual base has been demonised. Did you know about the Carte Rouge?’

I remembered that I was there and that this was a conversation. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘the Red Paper?’

He clicked his tongue to the upper part of his mouth as a way of saying, you don’t know that? in a playful way.

‘The Carte Rouge is a book, well it was seven books of Black Magic.’

‘Like voudoun?’

‘No, like Black Magic, and real. Voudoun had nothing to do with Black Magic until these books were created and their contents trained and used by Catholic priests.’

I gulped out, ‘What? Catholic priests? I don’t understand.’

‘Yes. When I said they attacked our spiritual base they did it by gathering as much Black Magic from every source they had influence in and concentrated it all right here as a way, they say, of understanding how to fight it. Of course if you put the world’s negatives in one place that place becomes negative.’

‘Wait, Don Toulouse, you are saying that the Catholic Church used Black Magic to conquer the old spiritual practices of Haiti? When was this taking place?’

‘Yes. They always conquered by force as in Mexico with the Aztecs and Mayans or in the Slovakian countries or in England. Military force, then spiritual force. In Haiti there was resistance that was put down by the military and disease, then they tried religious force but found too much resistance to their ideology and came in with this, the Carte Rouge. It worked and is working. Not for the Catholic Church today, but back in the 17th, 18th, even into the 19th centuries. It used the African imported voudoun and added ways of Africans ruling over Africans over here. The French system of slavery created African bosses, or chiefs to rule the African enslaved. The new voudoun came out of the development of a peaceful spiritualism mixed in this Carte Rouge power teaching. This new Voudoun is what we have today.’

‘So this, these books are held and used by the Catholic Church?’

‘According to passed down history the books were captured during the original revolution and supposedly burned by Dessalines who wanted nobody else to rule his newly created empire. But, it is also handed down history that some of the seven books survived and are in the country. Who knows?

‘But back to cheap labour. Our problem isn’t that we only are producing cheap labour for ourselves and the over 250 sweat shops owned by North Americans but that we are losing our brains. The people who have the administrative abilities to organise our businesses and our government have hardly a reason to stay here. Those in control are those who are entrenched in the swirling tides of power. They do not, like Dessalines, want to share even pieces of their tentacles of power. So, we have a population of climbers who can only get to the edges of the mud of a fast moving river. They cannot get ashore because the tide of poverty keeps their mindset barely able to claw against this flow of power to start to get dry. Those who have the skills have returned to some degree and have been trying, again to some degree, to assist the most creative but I do not believe it will be a successful outcome. Greed is another word for hate.’ 

He was silent and I could tell he was in deep thought. This was an exciting and very unexpected telling of his view of his country. He works for the power structure as a policeman who provides security for the power structure. He sees what it is and what it does and assists their controls as a principle controller. I had a lot to digest about things I already thought I knew and here Don Toulouse throws it all in a river metaphor. 

He gave a frowning thought. ’The way that I see it is that here you make a deal and you honour that deal until you find a better deal. When you find that better deal you use it in any way that you have in your cards to move forward.’

He leaned back. ‘We are talking about a country with a revolutionary culture in-which change is a constant even at its upper levels. When you truly understand this, as with voudoun, you will not find a bad guy and a good guy as a separation of peoples but just as a part of a make up. That make up is real. The good guy being different from the bad guy concept is a basis for religious and economic controls.

‘We see the grey here in Haiti. There are whites and blacks, then there are the invisible that can be referred to as the grey. Every now and then a grey sprouts up and becomes a white or a black in some area that is not harmful to the power structure and indeed knows how to work with the power structure. This grey portion is our positive anarchy and for now, at least for the last couple of years, it has yielded quite a few sprouts as the whole country recognises the power of the screen. The greys are looking at the screen and understanding that they are poverty stricken. They might have been content or ambitious as greys but they are awakening to the prospect of greed and extreme materialism. It is there on the screen and not in their hands but the characters on that screen seem a lot like them but are dressed better and live in nice homes and apartments with their own screen, not just a community one, and they have electricity in their own places, and running water there with hot water. The present power structure will not be able to combat their own religion of greed when it consumes the masses. There will be violence.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what will happen?’

‘What do you think? There will be violence. You can strike a Haitian and strike him and strike him but when you strike him one time too many he will cut your head off. That is what will happen. We beat Napolean when we were struck one too many times.’

A corporal came to the table with a sorrowful expression. Don Toulouse nodded for him to come over but he stayed at his place with his eyes going toward me. Don Toulouse spoke to him in Creole and he smiled at me then told his boss something in an urgent tone. Don Toulouse nodded to him and he left. 

‘I have to go but enjoyed being able to say all of this, Rod.’ He hesitated, ‘Oh, and Rod, my nickname is Slick. It is a lot easier than saying Don Toulouse all of the time.’

‘Slick,’ I repeated, ‘like, s-l-i-c-k?’

‘Slick, like, s-l-i-c-k.’

‘Hey Slick…’ I smiled running the nickname through my overloaded brain.

Slick rose and I walked him toward the rounding staircase.

‘Rod?’ he called.

I smiled.

‘What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ Slick had his quizzical expression.

‘Haven’t gotten that far on my schedule.’

‘Good.’ He looked down at the large tiles on the Oloffson’s verandah floor, then up to me, ‘I have to arrange it but I would like you to meet somebody and if she cannot come then we can have a very good meal together but I hope she will be able to be there.’

‘She?’ I smiled. ‘Your wife?’

‘No, not my mistress either. You will…, well, I have said too much already. She will be a delightful surprise.’ With that Slick took a quick hold of my arm let go and descended stairs.

I went to the bar and had a double to try and remember most of the points in the conversation. As happens when you sit at a bar with a drink in hand your mind wanders and so I started writing my history of the revolutions in Haiti as I still try to understand them from Slick’s point of view. What was actually accomplished with the first successful slave revolt in history?