CHAPTER V

UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI

We sailed away from Cuba on the Haitian Navy. It happened that the fleet in question put into Guantánamo Bay to have something done to her alleged engine at a time which happily coincided with our own arrival at the eastern end of the island. Otherwise there is no telling when or how we should have made our second jump down the stepping-stones of the West Indies, for Cuba and Haiti do not seem to be particularly neighborly.

The once proud _Adrea_ of the New York Yacht Club is a schooner of almost a hundred tons, and still preserves some of her aristocratic features despite the lowly state to which she has fallen under her new name of _L’Indépendance_. Time was when the fleet of the Black Republic boasted more than twice its present strength; but the larger half of it was sold one day to the “slave trade,” as they still call the carrying of negro laborers to the sugar-mills of Cuba, and on the two masts of _L’Indépendance_ has fallen the entire burden of preserving the Haitian freedom of the seas.

Eleven wild men, all of them, except one yellow fellow for contrast, blacker than the shades of a rainy-season midnight, made up her crew, and the deep-blue and maroon flag of sovereign Haiti flew at her stern. But there was a lighter tint superimposed upon this dark background both of flag and crew. The former bore the white shield which announces a white man in command, and her three officers, averaging the advanced age of twenty-five, were as Caucasian as a New England village. In real life they were a bo’s’n of the American Navy and two enlisted men of our far-flung Marine Corps, hailing from such quaint corners of the world as Cape Cod, Toledo, and Indianapolis; but in that topsyturvy fairy-world of the West Indies they were all first lieutenants of the “Gendarmérie d’Haïti.”

By noon of a midsummer day in December _L’Indépendance_ was rolling across the Windward Passage in a way out of all proportion to her importance or to the mere playfulness of the Caribbean waves. When morning broke, the two horns of Haiti loomed far to the rear on each horizon, and we had already covered some two thirds of our journey.

But not so fast, lest the inexperienced reader get too hasty and optimistic a notion of wind-wafted travel. A schooner is a most romantic means of conveyance—when there is something to fill her sails. I can imagine no greater punishment for American impatience than to be sentenced to lie aimlessly tossing through the hereafter in tropical doldrums where even the fish scorn to bite. Evidently the winds within the gaping jaws of Haiti are as erratic as the untamable race that peoples its mountainous shores.

However, let us avoid exaggeration. We did move every now and then, sometimes in the right direction, occasionally at a spanking pace that sent the blue waters foaming in two white furrows along our bows. Yet the mountainous ridges on either hand crept past with incredible leisureliness. All through the second night the tramp of hurrying bare feet and the stentorian “French” of the officers sounded about the deck cots we had preferred to the still luxurious cabins below—and by sunrise we had covered nearly twenty miles since sunset! Gonave Island, with its alligator snout, floated on our starboard all that day with a persistency which suggested we were towing it along with us. Brown and seeming almost bare at this distance, it showed no other signs of life than a few languid patches of smoke, which the mulatto cabin-boy explained as “Burn ’em off an’ then make ’em grow.” It was well that he had picked up a fair command of English somewhere, for the mere fact that we both prided ourselves on the fluency of our French did not help us in any appreciable degree to carry on conversation with the black crew. The youthful officers, with that quick adaptability which we like to think of as American, had mastered their new calling even to the extent of acquiring that strange series of noises which is dignified in the French West Indies with the name of “creole,” but it would never have been recognized even as a foster-child on Parisian boulevards.

The mountainous northern peninsula on our port grew slightly more variegated under an afternoon sun that gave the incredibly blue landlocked sea the suggestion of an over-indigoed tub on wash-day. The peninsula was brown, for the most part, with a wrinkled and folded surface that seemed to fall sheer from the unbroken summit into the placid blue gulf, and only here and there gleamed a little patch of green. Yet it must have been less precipitous than it seemed, for we made out through our glasses more than one clustered village along the hair-line where sea and mountains met, and now and then a fishing smack crawling along it put in at some invisible cove.

Before the third day waned, our goal, Port au Prince, was dimly to be seen with the same assistance, a tiny, whitish, triangular speck which seemed to stand upright at the base of the hazy mountain-wall stretching across the world ahead. The wind, too, took on a new life, but it blew squarely in our faces, as if bent on refusing us admittance to our destination. The shore we were seeking receded into the dusk, and the men of endless patience which sailing-vessels seem to breed settled down to battle through another night, with little hope of doing more than avoid retreat. We were rewarded, however, with another of those marvelous West Indian sunsets which only a super-artist could hope to picture. Ragged handsful of clouds, like the scattered fleece of the golden-brown _vicuña_, hung motionless against the background of a pink-and-blue streaked sky, which faded through all possible shades to the blackening indigo of the once more limitless sea.

How long the winds might have prolonged our journey there is no knowing. Out of the black night behind us there appeared what seemed a pulsating star, which gradually grew to unstar-like size and brilliancy. Excitement broke out among the three white mariners. One of them snatched an electric lamp and flashed a few letters of the Morse code into the darkness. They were answered by similar winkings on the arc of the approaching star. This shifted its course and bore down upon us. The captain caught up a megaphone and bellowed into the howling wind. The answer came back in no celestial tongue, but in a strangely familiar and earthly dialect: “Hello! That you, Louie? Tow? Sure. Got a line, or shall I pass you one?” A search-light suddenly revealed the navy of Haiti like a theatrical star in the center of the tossing stage; a submarine-chaser snorted alongside us with American brevity; our sails dropped with a run, and a few moments later we were scudding through the waves into the very teeth of the gale. When I awoke from my next nap, _L’Indépendance_ was asleep at anchor in a placid little cove.

* * * * *

Port au Prince is not, as it appears from far out in the bay, heaped up at the base of a mountain-wall, but stretches leisurely up a gentle, but constant slope that turns mountainous well behind the city. Off and on through the night we had heard the muffled beating of tomtoms, or some equally artistic instrument, and occasionally a care-free burst of laughter, that could come only from negro throats, had floated to us across the water. The first rays of day showed us a stone’s-throw from a shore which the swift tropical dawn disclosed as far denser in greenery than a Cuban coast. The city lay three miles away across the curving bay. Two slender wireless poles and the stack of a more distant sugar-mill stood out against the mountain-range behind, while all else still hovered in the haze of night. Then bit by bit, almost swiftly, the details of the town began to appear, like a photographic plate in the developer. A cream-colored, two-towered cathedral usurped the center of the picture; whitish, box-like houses spotted the slope irregularly all about it, and the completed development showed scores of little hovels scattered through the dense greenery far up the hillsides and along the curving shore. Then all at once a bugle sounded, an American bugle playing the old familiar reveille, and full day popped forth as suddenly as if the strident notes had summoned the world to activity.

Two blacks, manning the schooner’s tender, set us ashore in the Haitian “navy-yard,” a slender wooden pier along which were moored three American submarine-chasers. An encampment of marines eyed us wonderingly from the doors of their tents and wooden buildings, beyond which a gateway gave us entrance to a thoroughly Haitian scene. A stony country road, flanked by a toy railway line, was thronged with the children of Ham. Negro women, with huge bundles of every conceivable contents on their heads, pattered past with an easy-going, yet graceful, carriage. Others sat sidewise on top of assorted loads that half hid the lop-eared donkeys beneath them. Red bandanas and turbans of other gay colors showed beneath absurdly broad palm-leaf hats. Black feet, with the remnants of a slipper balancing on the toes of each, waved with the pace of the diminutive animals. The riders could scarcely have been called well dressed, but they were immaculate compared with the throngs of foot travelers. A few scattered patches of rags, dirty beyond description, hung about the black bodies they made no serious effort to conceal. Men in straggly Napoleon III beards clutched every few steps at the shreds which posed as trousers. Stark naked urchins pattered along through the dust; more of them scampered about under the palm-trees. Bare feet were as general as African features. More than one group sidled crabwise to the edge of the road as we advanced and gazed behind them with a startled expression at the strange sound made by our shod feet. Scores of the most primitive huts imaginable, many of them leaning at what seemed precarious angles, lined the way. Before almost all of them stood a little “shop,” a few horizontal sticks raised off the ground by slender poles and shaded by a cluster of brown palm-leaves. Vacant-faced negro men and women, none of them boasting a real garment, tended the establishments squatting or lolling in the patches of shade which the early morning sun cast well out into the roadway. The stock in trade of the best of them would not have filled a market-basket. A cluster of bananas; a few oranges, small, but yellower than those of Cuba; bedraggled-looking alligator-pears; dust-covered loaves of bread, no larger than biscuits, made up the most imposing arrays. Many of the “merchants” had not advanced to the stick-counter stage, but spread their wares on the ground—little handsful of tiny red beans laid at regular intervals along a banana-leaf, similar heaps of unroasted coffee, bundles of fagots, tied with strips of leaf, that could easily have gone into a coat-pocket. Now and again some black ragamuffin paused to open negotiations with the lolling shopkeepers, who carried on the transaction, if possible, from where they lay, rising to their feet only when the heat of the bargaining demanded it. The smallness of each purchase was amusing, as well as indicative of Haitian poverty. One orange, a single banana, a measureful of a coarse, reddish meal tinier than the smallest glass of a bartender’s paraphernalia, were the usual amounts, and the pewter coins that exchanged owners were seldom of the value of a whole cent. With rare exceptions the purchasers wolfed at once what they had bought as they pattered on down the road.

Details came so thick and fast that it was impossible to catch them all, even with a kodak. Compared with this, Cuba, after all, had been little more than semi-tropical. Here the vegetation, the odors, the very atmosphere were of the genuine tropics. Breadfruit-trees, with their scolloped leaves, which we had never seen in the larger island to the westward, shouldered their way upward among the cocoanut-palms. Mango-trees, as dense as haystacks, cast their black shadows over the rampant undergrowth. But always the eyes came back to the swarms of black people, with their festoons of rags contrasting with, rather than covering, their coal-tinted bodies. What might have seemed a long walk under a tropical sun became a short stroll amid this first glimpse of an astonishingly primitive humanity.

For all their poverty, the inhabitants seemed to be frankly happy with life. They had the playfulness of children, with frequent howls of full-throated laughter; they seemed no more self-conscious at the super-tattered state of their garments than were the ambling, over-laden donkeys at the ludicrous patchiness of their trappings. That lack of the sense of personal dignity characteristic of the African came to their rescue in the abjectness of their condition. For they _were_ African, as thoroughly so as the depths of the Congo. We had strolled for an hour, and reached the very edge of the city itself, before we met not a white man, but the first face that showed any admixture of Caucasian blood. Compared with this callous-footed throng the hodgepodge of Cuban complexions seemed almost European.

As we neared the town, a train as primitive as the scene about us chattered round a bend in the tunnel of vegetation, the front of its first-model engine swinging like the trunk of an excited elephant. The four open, wooden cars that swayed and screamed along behind it were densely packed with passengers, yet even here there was not a white face. The diminutive tender was piled high with cordwood little larger than fagots, and the immense, squatty smokestack was spitting red coals over all the surrounding landscape. As the train passed, the negro women along the road sprang with a flurry of their ragged skirts upon the track and fell to picking up what we took to be coins scattered by some inexplicably generous passenger. Closer investigation showed that they were snatching up live coals with which to light the little brown clay pipes which give them a flitting resemblance to Irish peasants.

A lower-class market was in full swing in a dust-carpeted patch of ground on the city water-front. Here the wares were more varied than in the roadside “shops,” but sold in the same minute portions. American safety-matches were offered not by the box, but in bundles of six matches each, tied with strips of leaf. Here were “butcher-shops,” consisting of a wooden trough full of meat, which owed its preservation to a thorough cooking, and was sold by the shred and consumed on the spot. Scrawny, black hags, who had tramped who knows how many miles over mountain-trails with an ox-load of oranges or coarse tubers on their heads, squatted here all the morning selling a penny-worth of their wares at a time, the whole totaling perhaps forty cents, to be squandered for some product of civilization which they would carry home in the same laborious fashion. The minority of the women venders had come on donkeys and were frank in impressing upon their more lowly sisters the aristocracy which this sign of wealth and leisure conferred upon them. A native gendarme, dressed in a cheap-looking imitation of the uniform of our own marines, but as African of soul beneath it as the most naked of his fellow-citizens, strutted back and forth through the throngs of clamorous bargainers. Now and again, when a group grew too large for his liking, he charged into it, waving a long stick and striking viciously at the legs and backs of all within reach, irrespective of sex or age. Far from fighting back or even showing resentment, the childlike blacks fled before him, often with shrieks of laughter. Ours were the only white faces within the inclosure, yet we were given passage everywhere with an unostentatious consideration that in less primitive societies would be called extreme courtesy.

Beggars as inhumanly sunk in degradation as the lowest pariahs of India shuffled in and out, mutely holding forth filthy tin cups to those barely a degree above them in want and misery. Near the gate a seething crowd was collected around a pushcart filled with tin cans of all sizes, tumbled pellmell together just as they had been slashed open and tossed aside by a marine mess orderly. An old woman was selling them to eager purchasers, who looked them over with the deliberate care one might give an automobile offered for sale, parted at length with the price agreed upon, after long and vociferous negotiations, and wandered away gloating over the beauty of their new acquisition, some of them talking to it in their incomprehensible “French.” The prices varied from “cinq cob” (5 centimes, or 1 cent) for a recent container of jam or pork and beans to a _gourde_ (twenty cents) or more for the five-gallon gasolene tins that make such splendid water buckets on the head of the Haitian women. In another corner was arranged in the dust a display of bottles of every conceivable size, shape, and previous occupation, from three-sided pickle flasks to empty beer bottles, constituting the entire stock in trade of two incredibly ragged females. Scarcely a scrap or remnant, even of things which we hire men to carry to the garbage heap, but had its value to this poverty-stricken throng. Particularly was anything whatever resembling cloth made use of to the utmost end of its endurance. One of the best dressed of the pulsating collection of tatters was a powerful black fellow who strutted about in a two-piece suit fashioned from unbleached muslin that had entered upon its second term of servitude. Unlike those of his fellows, both garments were whole, except for one three-cornered rent in what, to a less self-confident being, would have been an embarrassing position. Diagonally across the trousers, just above this vent, blazed the word “Eventually,” and below it the pertinent query, “Why not now?”

The American residents of Port au Prince complain that visitors of scribbling propensities have given too much space to its comic-opera aspect. It is hard to avoid temptation. The ridiculous is constantly forcing itself into the foreground, innocently unaware of distracting attention from the more serious background. For there is such a background, one which should in all fairness be sketched into any picture of Haiti which makes a pretense of being true to life. If there has been a constant tendency to leave it out, it is probably due to the fact that the average wanderer over the face of the earth finds most “interesting” the incongruous and the ludicrous.

To close our eyes, then, for the moment to the more obvious details, the capital of the Black Republic is by no means the misplaced African village which common report would indicate. Its principal streets are excellently paved with asphalt; scores of automobiles honk their way through its seething streams of black humanity. Even along the water-front the principles of sanitation are enforced. Barefooted “white wings,” distinguished by immense green hats of woven palm-leaves worn on top of their personal headgear, are constantly sweeping the city with their primitive bundle-of-grass brooms. A railroad, incredibly old-fashioned, to be sure, but accommodating a crowded traffic for all that, runs through the heart of the town and connects it with others considerable distances away in both directions. An excellent electric light service covers the city. Its shops make a more or less successful effort to ape their Parisian prototypes; its business offices by no means all succumb to the tropical temptation to sleep through the principal hours of the day. The French left it a legacy of wide streets, though failing, of course, to bequeath it adequate sidewalks. Its architecture is a surprise to the traveler arriving from Cuba; it would be far less so to one who came direct from Key West. Wooden houses with sloping roofs are the general rule, thin-walled structures with huge slatted doors and windows, and built as open as possible to every breeze that blows, as befits the climate. There are neither red tiles, strangely tinted walls, nor Moorish _rejas_ and patios to attract the eye. Indeed, there is little or nothing in the average street vista to arouse the admiration, though there is a certain cause for amusement in the strange juxtaposition of the most primitive African reed huts with the attempts of Paris-educated mulattoes to ape, with improvements of their own, their favorite French châteaux.

Only two buildings in Port au Prince—one might perhaps say in all Haiti—boast window-glass. One is the large and rather imposing cathedral, light yellow both outside and within, flooded with the aggressive tropical sunshine in a way that leaves it none of the “dim and mystic light” befitting such places of worship. The other is the unfinished, snow-white presidential palace, larger and more sumptuous than our own White House. The cathedral looks down upon the blue harbor across a great open square unadorned with a single sprig of vegetation; the palace squats in the vast sun-scorched Champs de Mars, equally bare except for a Napoleonic statue of Dessalines, his tell-tale complexion disguised by the kindly bronze, and attended by a modest and deeply tanned Venus of Melos. The absence of trees in the public squares gives assistance to the wooden houses in proving the city no offshoot of Spanish civilization. The tale runs that the Champs de Mars was once well wooded until a former president ordered it cleared of all possible lurking-places for assassins.

But Port au Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential part up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gorgeous tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in its grove of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial trees, and flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our northern roses to the pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses of the lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of Haiti hang almost within reach from one’s window; alligator-pears may be had in their season for the flinging of a club; he who cares to climb high enough can quench his thirst with the cool water of the green cocoanut. The dwellings here are spacious and airy, their ceilings almost double the height of our own, and if they lack some of the conveniences considered indispensable in the North, they have instead splendid swimming-pools and, in many cases, such a view of the lower city, the intensely blue bay, and the wrinkled brown ranges of the southern peninsula as would make up for a far greater scarcity of the stereotyped comforts.

It is a leisurely, but constant, climb from the water-front to these forest-embowered dwellings. Port au Prince is not blessed with a street-car system, and its medieval railroad staggers only to the upper edge of the Champs de Mars. Moreover, the painted drygoods-boxes on wheels are invariably so densely crammed with full-scented blacks that not only the white residents, but even the haughty yellow ones, rarely deign to patronize the spark-spitting conveyance. Long-established families have their private carriages; the parvenus from foreign lands own, borrow, or share automobiles; mere clerks and bookkeepers jog homeward on their diminutive Haitian ponies; and chance visitors trust to luck and the oily-cushioned wrecks that ply for hire, finishing the journey on foot from the point where the bony and moth-eaten caricature of a horse refuses longer to respond to the lashings and screams of the tar-complexioned driver. Fortunately, it is perfectly good form to “catch a ride” with any car-owning member of one’s own race.

Let me not leave the impression, however, that the majority of those who ascend the city depend on gasolene or horseflesh. At least two thirds of them walk, but it is the two thirds that do not count in polite parlance. All day long, though far more incessantly, of course, in the delightful coolness of early morning or the velvety air of evening, processions of black people of varying degrees of raggedness plod noiselessly up and down the stony streets of the upper town. Noiselessly, that is, only in their barefooted tread; their tongues are rarely silent, and frequent cackles of unrestrained laughter sound from the bundles beneath which their woolly heads are all but invariably buried. For be it large or small, a mahogany chest of drawers or a tin can three inches in diameter, the Haitian always bears his burdens on his head. _Her_ head would be more nearly the exact truth of the case, for the women rarely permit their lords and masters to subject themselves to the indignity of toil. But the merest child of the burden-bearing sex is rarely seen abroad except under a load that gives her the appearance of the stem of a toadstool. Some of these uncomplaining females serve the more fortunate residents of the hill; most of them trot to and fro between the market and the tiny thatched cabins sprinkled far up the range behind the city like rice grains on a green banana leaf. Where the streets break up beyond the last man’s-size dwellings, narrow trails tunnel on up through the prolific greenery to these scattered huts of the real Haitian, among which it is easy to imagine oneself in the heart of Africa.

Five years ago there were barely a score of white men in Port au Prince, and not many more than that in all Haiti. To-day there are perhaps three hundred American residents, without counting a large force of occupation and their families, and to say nothing of a considerable sprinkling of French, the remnants of what was a flourishing German colony until an epidemic of internment fell upon it, and a scattering of Italian, Syrian, and similar tradesmen. The Americans of the first category are carrying on or opening up new enterprises that promise to offer Haiti a prosperity not even second to that of Cuba. No one who has visited the island can question the extraordinary fertility of its soil. The overwhelming portion of it is as virgin as if the French had never exploited what was once the richest of their colonies; revolutions have become, by _force majeure_, a thing of the past. Every new undertaking must, to be sure, be built or rebuilt from the ground up. During their more than a century of freedom the negroes have done nothing but destroy. They have not even exercised their one faculty, that of imitation, for they have been too much shut off from the rest of the world to find anything to imitate. Though the sugar-cane was introduced into Cuba by the French refugees from Haiti, the entire country cannot at present compete with the largest single sugar-mill in the prosperous island to the west. The Haitian laborer has lost all knowledge of the sugar-making process except his own primitive method of producing _rapadoue_. He must be taught all over again, and he is not a particularly apt pupil; moreover, complain the men who are striving to make Haiti bloom once more with cane, no sooner is he taught than the Cuban planters entice him across the Windward Passage with wages ten times as high as he receives at home. But capital is beginning to recognize that despite its obvious drawbacks Haiti offers a rich future, and several syndicates have already “got in on the ground floor.”

The American residents of Port au Prince, men, women, and children, swear by it. I have yet to meet one who is eager to leave; many of those who go north for extended vacations cut them short with a cry of “take me back to Haiti.” To the misinformed northerner its very name is synonymous with revolution and sudden death. Outside the field of romance there is about as much danger of meeting with violence from the natives as there is of being boiled in oil at a church “sociable.” There is not a deadly representative of the animal or vegetable kingdom on the island; except for some malarial regions of rather mild danger the climate is as healthful as that of the best state in our union—with due regard, of course, to the invariable rule that white women should season their residence with an occasional invigorating breath of the north. The Americans have acquired one by one, as some yellow politician has lost his grasp on the national treasury, the grove-hidden houses in the upper town, some of them little short of palatial. There they live like the potentates of the tropical isles of romance. The blacks are respectful, childlike in their manner, and have much of the docility of the negroes of our South before the Civil War. They work for wages which, as wages go nowadays, are less than a song. House servants receive from five to eight dollars a month, and the one meal a day to which the masses have long been accustomed rarely costs a twenty-cent _gourde_. Families who could scarcely afford the luxury of a single “hired girl” in the land of their birth keep five servants in Haiti, a cook, butler, upstairs maid, laundress, and yard boy; for the Haitian is strictly limited in his versatility, and the cook could no more serve a dinner than a laundress could give the yard its daily sweeping. They are usually stupid beyond words, with the mentality of an intelligent child of six, but they are sometimes capable of great devotion, with a dog-like quality of faithfulness; and between them all they swathe the existence of their masters in the comfort of an old-time Southern plantation. All this is but half the story of contentment with Haitian residence, for the mere fact that the sun is certain to break forth in all the splendor of a cloudless sky as sure as the morning comes round is sufficient to make the cold and dismal north seem a prison by comparison.

There is a certain amount of friction between the several classes of Americans in Port au Prince, not to mention heroic efforts in “keeping up with Lizzie.” Ten-course dinners with all the formality and ostentation which go with them are of daily occurrence; “bridge” flourishes by day and by night, with far from humble stakes, and dances, whether at the American Club or in private houses, are not conspicuous for their simplicity. The two things go together, of course; it is of little use to disagree with a man if you cannot prove yourself his equal by “putting up as good a front” as he does. Roughly speaking, our fellow-countrymen in the Haitian capital may be divided into four classes, though there are further ramifications and certain points of contact. Each class has its own faults and virtues, and comes naturally by them. The half dozen civilian officials who hold the chief offices of our “advisory” share in the civil government have in too many cases been chosen for their political standing rather than for their ability or experience in such tasks as that they are facing. The navy and the marine officers, between whom a rift now and then shows itself, have the characteristics of the military calling the world over. They are by nature direct and autocratic, rather than persuasive and tactful; they have an almost childish petulance at any fancied slight to their rank, which does not make it easy for them to coöperate with the civilian officials. Of their efficiency in their chosen profession there is no question, but our policy of assigning them to administrative positions simply because they are already on the national pay-roll and expecting them to shine in tasks which call for a lifetime of training quite opposite to that they have received has its drawbacks. The very qualities which make for success in pacifying the country hamper them in dealing with the better class of natives, who are, to be sure, negroes, yet who have the sensitive French temperament and are much more amenable to persuasion than to bullying. By chance or design the great majority of our officers in Haiti are Southerners, and they naturally shun any but the most unavoidable intercourse with the natives. This is one of the chief bones of contention between the forces of occupation and the American civilians engaged in business. The latter, while still keeping a color-line, contend that the natives of education should be treated more like human beings. They deplore the narrow view-point, the indifference to industrial advancement, the occasional schoolboy priggishness of the officers, and the latter retaliate by considering the term business man as synonymous with money-grabbing and willingness to cater to the natives for the sake of trade. Not that these differences cause open rifts in the American ranks, but the atmosphere is always more or less charged with them. The native of education, on his side, resents the whole American attitude on the race question, and not wholly without reason. The color-line is justifiable in so far as it protects against intermingling of blood, characteristics, and habits, but there is a point beyond which it becomes d—d foolishness, and that point is sometimes passed by our officers in Haiti. After all, the Haitians won their independence without our assistance, and to a certain extent they are entitled to what they call their _dignité personelle_. The Southerner is famed for his ability to keep the “nigger” down, but he is less successful in lifting him up, and that is the task we have taken upon ourselves in Haiti.

* * * * *

As every American should know, but as a great many even of those who pride themselves on keeping abreast of the times do not, Haiti has been an American protectorate since the summer of 1915. There is a native government, to be sure, ranging all the ebony way from president to village clerks, but if it functions efficiently, and to a certain degree it does, it is thanks to a few hundred of our own marines and certain representatives of our navy. How this strange state of affairs, so contrary to the forgiving spirit of the present administration, came about is a story brief and interesting enough to be worth the telling.

The Spanish discoverers—for one must be permitted a running start if one is to race through the reeking fields of Haitian history—soon wiped out the native Indian population in their usual genial, but thorough, way. Fields will not plant, or at least cultivate, themselves, however, even in so astonishingly fertile a land as the island that embraces the republics of Haiti and Santo Domingo. Hence the Frenchmen to whom the western end of the island eventually fell, after varying vicissitudes, followed the custom of the time and repopulated the colony with negro slaves. Prosperity reigned for a century or more. There are still jungle-grown ruins of many an old French plantation mansion to be found not merely within the very boundaries of the Port au Prince of to-day, but in regions that have long since reverted to primeval wilderness. Unfortunately, for the French at least, the slave-traders supplied this particular market with members of some of Africa’s more warlike tribes, the descendants of whom, taking the theories of the French Revolution _au pied de la lettre_, concluded to abolish their masters. Under a genuine military genius with the blood of African chieftains in his veins, one Toussaint l’Ouverture, and his equally black successor, Dessalines, the slaves defeated what was in those days a large French army, commanded by the brother-in-law of the great Napoleon, and drove the French from the island. New Orleans and Philadelphia received most of the refugees, whose family names are still to be found in the directories of those cities. Except for a few persons the French never returned, and Haiti has been “the Black Republic” since 1804.

The result was about what our Southern statesmen would have prophesied. In theory the government of Haiti is modeled on that of France; in practice it has been the plaything of a long line of military dictators of varying degrees of color and virtually all rising to power and sinking into oblivion—usually of the grave—on the heels of swiftly succeeding revolutions. There have been a few well-meaning men among them, the last of whom, named Leconte, was blown up in 1912, palace and all. Most of them were interested only in playing Cæsar, or, more exactly, Nero, over their black fellow-citizens until the time came to loot the national treasury and flee, a program which was frequently cut short by appalling sudden death. The detailed recital of more than a century of violence, of constant bloody differences between the mulattoes and the genuine blacks, would be a tale too long for the modern reader.

In 1915 the presidency was occupied by a particularly offensive black brother named Guillaume Sam. Though it has not been so recorded, Sam’s middle name was evidently Trouble. Foreign war-ships took to dropping in on Port au Prince and demanding the payments of debts to foreigners. Up in the northern peninsula, as usual in mango-time, when the trees of the island constitute a commissary, revolution broke out, and, to top off his woes, Sam was busy marrying off his daughter and installing her in a new palace. In his wrath at being disturbed at such a time Sam passed the word to his chief jailer to clean out the penitentiary, some of the political prisoners in which were no doubt in sympathy with the revolutionists, but many of whom were there merely because they had aroused the personal enmity of Sam, or some of his cronies. The sentence was carried out more like a rabbit-hunt than an execution. In an orgie in which the primitive instincts of the African had full play the two hundred or more prisoners were butchered in circumstances better imagined than described. Among them were many members of the “best families” of Port au Prince. It is not recorded that any of this class took personal part in the revenge that followed, but they undoubtedly instigated it. The rank and file of the town, those same more or less naked blacks who are ordinarily docile and childlike, surrounded the palace. Sam had taken refuge in the French legation. For the first time even in the turbid history of Haiti, the sanctuary of a foreign ministry was violated by the voodoo-maddened mob. Sam was dragged out, cut to pieces, and tossed into the bay. Then our marines landed and, to use their own words, “the stuff was all over.”

American control is due to continue for at least twenty years from that date. A treaty drawn up soon after the landing of our forces, and subsequently renewed, provides for the form under which our “assistance” shall be exercised, as well as specifying the time limit. An American financial adviser, who is far more than that in practice, an American receiver of customs, and heads of the engineering and sanitation departments, are required by the terms thereof, and the final decision in most matters of importance lies with the American minister. Unlike the Republic of Santo Domingo in the eastern end of the island, Haiti still retains her native government, but its acts are subject to a relatively close supervision by the officers above named, despite the pretense that our share is only “advisory.”

There are both natives and foreigners who contend that Haiti is fully capable of governing itself if the white man will go away and let the Black Republic alone. The following incident is not without its bearing on the subject:

The Rotary Club of Port au Prince decided in the fifth year of American occupation to assess every member five dollars for the purpose of providing a community Christmas for the poor children of the city. Never had a Christmas-tree been seen in Haiti outside the homes of American or other foreign residents. The vast majority of Haitians had no conception that so benevolent a being as Santa Claus existed.

The Port au Prince branch of the club had been very recently organized. Its membership included not only the representative business men of all grades in the foreign colony, but it had made a special point of overlooking the color-line and admitting as many Haitians as white men. A little closer intercourse now and then between the two races, it was felt, would do no one any harm, and the experience of similar clubs in Cuba suggested that it might do considerable good. The military colony, of course, took no part in this flagrant violation of its strict Southern principles beyond granting its official blessing, but the civilians had long contended for a broader-minded attitude.

There was no difficulty in finding representative Haitians of sufficient culture to be worthy a place in such an assembly. Men educated in Paris, graduates of the best universities in other European capitals, men who spoke the French language as perfectly as the French themselves, men who could give the average American business man cards and spades in any discussion of art, literature, and the finer things of civilization, were to be found in the best Haitian homes. The native membership as finally constituted included cabinet ministers, former ambassadors to the principal world capitals, lawyers famous for their oratory, and men who had produced volumes on profound subjects, to say nothing of very tolerable examples of lyric poetry. The club did not, it is true, completely obliterate the color-line. It merely moved it along. A complete sweep of the crowded table at the weekly club luncheons, with whites and Haitians nicely alternating, did not disclose a single jet-black face. But that was not the fault of the club; it was due to the fact that the benefits of higher education have seldom reached the full-blooded Africans of the island, as distinguished from what are known locally as the “men of color.”

The wives of the white club members took up the task of providing a suitable Christmas where the men left off, and pushed the matter with American enthusiasm. They canvassed the white colony for additional funds; they solicited contributions in kind from the merchants of Caucasian blood. Their evenings they spent in making things that would bring joy to the little black babies, in putting the multifarious gifts in order, in laying new plans to make the affair a success. By day they drove about in their automobiles through all the poorer sections of the city, distributing tickets to the swarms of naked black piccaninnies. Mobs of harmless, clamoring negroes surrounded their cars, holding up whole clusters of babies as proof of their right to share in the extraordinary generosity of the strange white people. Seas of clawing black hands waved about them like some scene from Dante’s Inferno in an African setting. A tumult of pleading voices assailed their ears: “Cartes, mamá, donne-moi cartes! Moi deux petits, mamá! Non gagner carte pour petit malade, mamá?”

The “ladies of color” of the other club members formed a committee of their own and lent a certain languid assistance, but the brunt of the work fell on the incomprehensibly generous whites. The men of the yellow features were even more willing to leave matters to their Caucasian associates. The latter were more experienced in the arrangement of Christmas-trees; moreover, they could descend to vulgar work, which the élite of Port au Prince could not indulge in without losing caste. Curious creatures, these whites, anyway; let them go ahead and spread themselves. The “men of color” were quite willing to sit back and watch _les blancs_ run the whole affair—except in one particular, the distribution of tickets. In that they were more than ready to coöperate. They even made the generous offer of attending to all that part of the affair. The minister of public instruction came forward with a plan in keeping with his high rotarian standing. If the bulk of the tickets, say two thirds of them, for instance, were turned over to him, he would personally accept the arduous labor of distributing them to the school-children. Now you must know that the school-children of Port au Prince constitute a very small proportion of the young population, and that they are exactly the class which the sponsors of the Christmas-tree were _not_ trying to reach. Furthermore, do not lose sight of the fact that the men of color must be constantly on the qui vive to keep their political fences in order. Even the ladies of the Haitian committee advised against the minister’s proposition. He, they whispered, would divide the tickets between his favorite teachers, who in turn would distribute them to their pet pupils.

Meanwhile Christmas drew near. A band of black men were sent far up into the mountains to fetch down a pine-tree. They are numerous in some parts of Haiti, occasionally growing side by side with the palms. The blacks could not, of course, understand why they must lug a tree for two or three days over perpendicular trails when trees of a hundred species abounded in the very outskirts of Port au Prince; but this was not the first time they had received absurd orders from the incomprehensible _blancs_. They selected as small a tree as they dared and started down the mountain-side. As the wide-spreading branches hindered their progress, they lopped most of them off. How should they know that the inexplicable white men wanted the branches to hang things on? The gentleman of color, right-hand man of their great national president, who had transmitted the order to them had said nothing about that, nor explained how the branches might be bound close against the trunk by winding a rope around them.

Christmas morning came. Several Americans defied the tropical sun to direct the labors of another band of blacks engaged in planting a diminutive pine-tree with a few scattered twigs at its top, and to hide its nudity beneath another tree of tropical luxuriance, out on the glaringly bare Champs de Mars before the grand stand from which the élite of Port au Prince watches its president decorate its national heroes after a successful revolution. The rotarians of color could not, of course, be expected to appear at such a place in the heat of the day.

The ceremony was set for five o’clock, and was expected to last until nine. The American Electric Light Company had contributed the illumination, and its manager had installed the festoons of colored lamps in person. The American chief of police had assigned a force of native gendarmes to the duty of keeping order. It would be almost their first test of handling a friendly crowd in a friendly manner. Hitherto their task had been to hunt down their _caco_ fellows with rifle and revolver, an occupation far better fitted to their temperament and liking. An American of benevolent impulses had consented to play Santa Claus, and give the little black urchins a real Christmas, with all the trimmings.

Poor Santa Claus did not get time even to don his whiskers. By two the crowd began to gather. By three all the populace of Port au Prince’s humble sections had massed about the tree which the incomprehensible _blancs_ had planted for the occasion instead of performing their strange rites under one of the many live trees with which the city abounded. Word had been sent out that full dress was not essential. Old women who had barely two strips of rag to hang over their dangling breasts, boys whose combined garments did not do the duty of a pair of swimming-trunks, had tramped up from their primitive hovels on the edges of the city. If they were ragged far beyond the northern meaning of that term, at least their strings and tatters were as clean as water and sun-bleaching could make them. The women and most of the men carried or dragged whole clusters of black babies, most of them as innocent of clothing as a Parisian statue. As they arrived, the children were herded within the roped inclosure about the tree. Only adults with infants in arms were permitted inside the ropes; the jet-black sea of small faces was unbroken clear around the wide seething circle. It was hard to believe that there were so many piccaninnies in the world, to say nothing of the mere half-island of Haiti. Outside the ropes an immense throng of adults, mingled with better-dressed children without tickets, was shrieking a constant falsetto tumult that made the ear-drums of those in the focus of sound under the tree vibrate as if their ears were being incessantly boxed. A “conservative estimate” set the number present at ten thousand.

Up to this point the gentlemen of color, even those who had been appointed on the original committee, had kindly refrained from interference with their more Christmas-experienced white associates—except in the aforementioned matter of tickets. Now they appeared en masse to give the distinction of their presence and the sanction of their high caste to so praiseworthy an undertaking. Cabinet ministers, newspaper editors, the bright lights of the Haitian bar, the very president of the republic, strutted down the human lanes that were opened in their honor and took the chief places of vantage on the distributing platform beneath the tree. Their dazzling _dernier cri_ garments made the simple American committeemen look like the discards of fortune. Their features were wreathed in benign smiles. They stepped forth to the edges of the platform and waved majestic, benevolent greetings to their applauding constituents outside the ropes. Some one handed the president a toy horn. He put it to his lips and blew an imaginary blast to prove what a _bonhomme_ he was at heart and how thoroughly he entered into the prevailing spirit. The other gentlemen of color assumed Napoleonic poses; they raised their voices in oratorical cadences, and, when these failed to penetrate the unceasing din, they waved their hands at the heaps of gifts about them with sweeping gestures that said as plainly as if they had spoken in their impeccable French, “See, my beloved people, what _I_, in my bounty, have bestowed upon you!”

Soon after four the minister of public works snatched up a bundle of presents and flung them out into the sweltering sea of upturned little faces. That was neither the hour nor the manner of distribution that had been agreed upon, but what should a great political genius know of such minor details? Besides, there was no hope of delaying the ceremony much longer. The surging throng was in no mood to watch the absurd antics of the unfathomable white people, with their patched-up tree and their queer ideas of order and equal distribution. What they wanted were the presents, and at once. Those behind were already climbing over those in front in an effort to get at the heaped-up wares. If the original plan of waiting until nightfall and the colored lights had been carried out, the gifts would probably have disappeared in a general mêlée.

The _beau geste_ of the Rotary vice-president was a signal for all his yellow confrères to distribute largess to their clamoring constituents. In vain did the white women attempt to exchange gifts for tickets, according to the system they had worked out. Their kinky-haired associates would have no such restrictions. As long as a hand was held out to them they continued to thrust gifts into it, perfectly indifferent to other hands clutching tickets that were being wildly flourished about them. There were presents of every possible usefulness to Haitian poverty—shoes, stockings, hats, shirts, suits, collars, ties, bales of cloth cut in sizes for varying ages of children’s garments, candy, toys, food stuffs ranging all the way from cakes to cans of sardines. The plan had been to gage each gift by the appearance of the recipient. There was nothing particularly Santa Claus-like in handing a necktie to a boy who had not shirt enough to which to attach a collar, nor in wishing a pair of stockings off on a youth whose feet had never known the imprisonment of shoes. Stark-naked black babies whose ribs could be counted at a hundred paces were not so much in need of an embroidered sailor-blouse as of a tin of biscuits. But all this meant nothing to the excited Haitians on the platform. They poured out gifts as if the horn of plenty were their own private property. The ministers caught up whole armfuls of presents and flung them clear over the heads of the invited children into the shrieking mobs beyond the ropes. The adults out there were far more likely to vote for them at the next elections than were the half-starved urchins beneath them. One cabinet member was seen to toss bundle after bundle to an extraordinarily tall negro who was known to wield great political power among the masses. Meanwhile the helpless little urchins within the circle rolled their white eyes in despair and frantically waved the tickets clutched in their little black hands, until they went down under the bare feet of those fighting forward behind them.

The native gendarmes in their uniforms so like that of the American marines were preserving order much as the pessimists had predicted. One of them, starched and ironed to the minute, approached an American distributor and asked, with the sweet-faced courtesy of a Southern lady of the old school, for one of the riding-whips which some merchant had contributed. “Here’s a fine fellow,” said the unadorned Santa Claus to himself, “a real soldier. He wants a whip to use on mounted duty, and so gentle-mannered a chap will make only proper use of it.” The gendarme accepted the gift with a polite bow and a grateful smile and marched back across the ring—to strike full in the face with all his force a pitiful old black woman who was being forced forward by the crush behind, and to rain blow after blow on her bare head and breast and on the naked infant she had brought on the invitation of the ticket clutched in its tiny hand. What was the good of protesting? He had been ordered to hold back the crowd, and as he had been forbidden to use the revolver strapped at his side, how else could he do so? If he had been checked in his onslaught, he would have spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what these strange Americans wanted, anyway.

By dint of superhuman exertions the white distributors succeeded in exchanging something or other for every ticket. But it was a sadly mis-gifted swarm of children who finally rescued themselves from the maelstrom. Tiny tots who had set their hearts on a cake or a package of candy held up the neckties they knew no use for with a “_Pas bon pour moi! Donne gateau!_” The greatest demand was for shoes. “_Non, non, papa! soulier, soulier!_” came incessant shrieks from the urchins who waved unwelcome gifts before the weary distributors. The gentlemen of color had continued to strew armfuls of presents upon the throng beyond the ropes. The minister with the lanky confederate had tossed him assorted wares enough to break the back of a Haitian donkey—a feat verging on the impossible. When there was nothing else left, he flung him several huge native baskets which a lady of the committee had loaned for the occasion. These he followed with the decorations snatched from the tree. Then he took to unscrewing from their sockets the electric light bulbs belonging to the company that had contributed the useless illuminations. This was too much even for the benevolent-featured man who had been cast for the rôle of Santa Claus. He gathered the slack of the minister’s immaculate trousers in one hand and set him down out of reach of further temptation.

The festivities were entirely over by the time the blazing-red tropical sun sank behind the mountainous range to the westward. The throng streamed out across the Champs de Mars like a lake of molten lead that had long been dammed up and had suddenly broken its dikes. Not a scrap even of the tickets that had been canceled by being torn in two remained. In Haiti everything has its commercial value. For days to come little heaps of these bits of cardboard would be offered for sale by the incredibly ragged old women of the more miserable market-places, to be made use of the voodoo gods know how. Among the last of the gentlemen of color to leave the platform was a pompous being resplendent in Port au Prince’s most fashionable raiment. He was a graduate of the Sorbonne, a political power in the Black Republic, an officer of the Rotary Club, and the editor of Haiti’s principal newspaper. In one hand, which he held half concealed beneath the tails of his frock-coat, he grasped a dozen bright-colored hair-ribbons and several silk handkerchiefs which he had filched from the basket of presents that had been intrusted to him for distribution.