there in the middle of the road was a brand new corpse, still bleeding.
The unfortunate man was obviously dead. A body asleep, drunk or just unconscious is somehow…different. I told Racine to stop so that we could go back and at least cover the poor chap. He refused, and drove on faster. No Haitian would ever touch or rearrange any Tontons’ handwork for fear of suffering the same fate. That was why those bullet-scars across the airport walls had been left uncovered.
So all the cruise passengers in their motorcade which followed us down the mountain had to drive solemnly and in procession around that corpse. What the blue rinses from Pasadena made of this holiday demonstration I cannot imagine, but it surely did nothing for the Tourist Board’s “Come to Happy Haiti” promotion.
Haitians have seldom been able to summon up more energy for imported Christianity than was required to bury their dead, Tontons permitting. They may be 90 per cent Catholic, as the reference books say, but they are 100 per cent voodoo. In Haiti the supernatural is still alive.
When a peasant dies, before being placed in his coffin he may be dressed in his best clothes—if he has any—and seated at a table with food and a lighted cigarette between his lips or, if a woman, a clay pipe. When friends and neighbours arrive the feasting and dancing of the wake begins. Although by law the corpse is supposed to be buried within twenty-four hours, decomposition is often allowed to set in. This ensures that sorcerers will not dig him up and make a zombie, a work slave, out of him. The heavy stone slabs with which Haitians cover their graves are added insurance that the dead will not rise to slave as zombies for the rest of time.
Papa Doc angrily denied to me that he was a houngan, a voodoo priest—or even a follower of Baron Samedi, the most powerful and dreaded god in the voodoo pantheon. Baron Samedi personified death itself. He was always dressed in black and wore dark glasses. The President’s choice of wardrobe may not have been accidental.
In 1963 President Duvalier received information that one of his few political opponents still alive, Clément Barbot, a former Commander of the Tontons Macoutes but now in hiding, had transformed himself into a black dog. Papa Doc quickly ordered that all black dogs in Haiti should be killed. Barbot was later captured and shot to death by Tontons; he was still a man.
Certainly there were many stories about the brutal President, some terrible, some silly. It was said that he sought guidance from the entrails of goats, that he lay meditating in his bath wearing his black hat; that he had the head of one of his few enemies still about, Captain Blucher Philogènes, delivered to him in a pail of ice. He then sat for hours trying to induce the head to disclose the plotters’ plans…
He was merciless, despotic, malign; yet he received me in his study with eerie amiability. Behind him were signed portraits of the men he admired: Chiang Kai-Shek, President Lyndon Johnson, the Pope and Martin Luther King.
He told me he blamed the world-wide loathing he had earned on an “international conspiracy set up by several white nations who spent many millions of dollars to destroy our Fatherland, sending the North American 6th Fleet to violate our national sea”.
He then muttered darkly, “The USA has been sending uncapable ambassadors so there is no talk between them and the President of Haiti. It is a question of men. The FBI is doing a good job, but the CIA not. It makes much trouble and must be blamed for the bad impression the world has of my country.”
He dismissed the insurgents’ bombing of his palace: “They are crazy. They will never reach their aim because I know who I am and I can’t be killed by anyone. I have faith in my destiny. No other President of Haiti could stand up and do what I did in the past eleven years—facing eight armed invasions and three hurricanes.”
Though he was President for Life and apparently convinced of his immortality, I wondered whether he had thought of a successor. He had not. “All of them are at school now—they are the young people.”
His only son Jean-Claude was sitting beside us in the presidential study. What he would do with his life? The fat moon-faced 17-year-old was embarrassed. “That depends on him,” said Papa Doc, regarding his son with pride. “I hope he will follow the advice of his father, of his mother, and become a medical doctor.”
As I grew more familiar with the President, I became more convinced that nobody’s all good or all bad. He had been a mild little country doctor looking after the peasants and earning his famous nickname. This non-smoking teetotaller who loved his family now saw himself as a poet. He presented me with Copy No. 892 of his Breviaries of a Revolution, and inscribed a collection of his poems, Souvenirs d’Autrefois, “to a friend of the first Black Revolution, Mr Alan Whicker, in souvenir of his short stay in the Island of Quisquetya, Sincerely, François Duvalier”.
It was said that after dinner in his palace he would sometimes go down to the dungeons to watch some political prisoners tortured, and on occasion might torture them himself. He was certainly known to slap ministers around his study, under the protective gaze of the Presidential Guard. A man of moods, he was sometimes almost playful and anxious to make a good impression, then glowering with suppressed fury at a critical word.
I had played myself in tactfully while getting to know him, leaving the tougher questions for a later visit. Then half-way through one conversation, I caught him regarding me balefully during a long silence. With a low menacing rasp, he said, “Mr Whicker, you are talking to the President of the Republic of Haiti.” It seemed a telling rebuke.
My crew had caught the distant clang of cell doors slamming, so when I turned to less sensitive matters there were audible sighs of relief from behind the camera. On a following day I reverted to my critical questions, about which he was matter-of-fact. It seemed that his occasional moods might be medically induced.
On one of these jollier days he even decided to show us his capital—and certainly one of the best views of Port-au-Prince had to be from the President’s bullet-proof Mercedes 600 limousine.
Papa Doc settled on the back seat alongside his gloomy bodyguard, Col. Gracia Jacques. We had no radio mikes in those days so our recordist Terry Ricketts rigged the unprotesting President with a neck mike and a long lead hidden around his body. Upon jumping out of the limo he several times did himself a slight injury, but without complaint.
He obviously wanted to show how popular he was, and certainly knew how to attract and hold an audience. A breathless cheering crowd chased us as we drove slowly through the town. Then I noticed Papa Doc was throwing handfuls of money out of his window. Our pursuers, scrambling in the dirt, were going frantic. When we stopped the President increased the excitement by bringing out packets of brand-new notes, peeling off wads and handing them out to anyone who seemed to have the right attitude.
In this land of destitution, the arrival of the black Mercedes amid a shower of free banknotes caused far more ecstasy than Santa Claus. With an annual income in every crisp wad handed out, it was well worth trying to keep up with the Duvaliers.
It seemed unreal to be riding around with one of the world’s most feared men, discussing subjects none of his countrymen would dare think. I asked how he felt about Graham Greene and The Comedians. He brushed the novel and the gory film aside. “He is a poor man, mentally, because he did not say the truth about Haiti. Perhaps he needed the money, and got some from the political exiles.”
He was far more bitter about a predecessor, Major Magloire, then living in New York but threatening to return, because he had got away with the money: “He took $19 million from the National Bank of Haiti and used this money to finance armed invasions and to bomb the palace. He tried to kill me when he was president. I was in hiding for several years. Why did he not come here himself instead
