Free The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich Page A

were taking travelling a relatively unmarked and little-respected border between the two countries.
    I had my own bizarre relationship with Papa Doc. The little country doctor had walked into the office of my newspaper on 5 September 1956. He sat across my desk with his hat on and stared at me through his thick glasses. He wore a thick serge suit and a bow tie and spoke in French. When I picked up a pen and a pad he raised his hand slightly and explained he was only making a courtesy call in preparation for announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the republic.
    â€˜What do the Americans think of me?’ he asked. By Americans he meant the US embassy. Any candidate needed the support of the Americans ever since the 1915—34 Marine occupation. The Embassy, he appeared to think, could be an obstacle to an ambitious Haitian politician. Despite his early anthropological writings, earlier career in politics and service in the Estimé government, Duvalier’s style had not brought him great public notice.
    I told him that the Americans working with the Inter-American Cooperative Public Health Service (known by its French abbreviation initials SCISP) spoke well of him. I admitted that I was not privy to the Embassy’s thinking.
    He smiled, revealing a gold tooth. But what I didn’t say, although he probably already knew it, was that the US Embassy looked kindly on the candidacy of Senator Louis Déjoie, who had actively courted them with his upper-class sophistication, charm and success in agribusiness.
    Duvalier did not appear to be a strong contender for the presidency. He had trouble with newspapers misspelling his name. He wouldn’t discuss his own childhood or personal life and gave no hint of his origin. Not even his close associates could furnish any details of his private life.
    Watching him being driven away that day, seated alone in the back seat of a Buick, I could not help thinking that, while he had none of the charisma of populist Daniel Fignolé, none of the expertise of technocrat Clément Jumelle and none of the flamboyance of Déjoie or the other minor candidates, he had a confidence and a quiet determination about him. Still, he hardly seemed presidential material.
    I covered the 1957 election and Papa Doc’s rise to power. The mild-mannered country doctor, François Duvalier, became Haiti’s all-powerful and feared Papa Doc. By early 1963 his gratuitous brutality had generated headlines around the world. Much of the reporting was mine. Every day Ichronicled how the by now well-entrenched Papa Doc faced down the Kennedy administration in Washington and the newly elected Juan Bosch in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
    Papa Doc’s bully-boys were, at the beginning, recruited by Duvalier from the city’s demi-monde of thieves and other criminals. They soon became known as the Tontons Macoutes, after the Haitian folkloric bogeyman who strides over mountains snatching up misbehaving children and tucking them away in a
macoute,
a large sack he carries on his back. These street criminals had no conscience, and in their acts of brutality they were always sending Papa Doc’s message: conform and collaborate — or else. The most notorious Macoutes sported Runyonesque names such as Boss Paint, Ti-Bobo, Ti-Cabiche, Boss Justin and Madame Max (one of many female Macoutes). Haiti had become the land of ‘look behind’. No one began a conversation without first looking over his or her shoulder. In a land that was once uninhibitedly fun-loving, paranoia was now universal. The country had become a tropical psycho ward. Some referred surreptitiously to Papa Doc as the
zombificateur
— zombie-maker.
    The quiet, seemingly moderate and pliable physician who had championed the middle class as an early proponent of the concept of
noirisme —
blacks in power — was proving to be more interested in becoming the absolute mystical master of Haiti. He had