Free Back of Beyond by David Yeadon

no sound as the line of bodies passed me like a funeral procession.
    They were comical and regal at the same time, mesmerizing in their measured movements. A delicate horizontal of pink and white against the purple lake and the soaring silver-gray crags.
    From way in the distance the chatter and singing of the bathing women were carried toward me in soft waves by the breeze. Smoke from charcoal fires in the village, hidden behind a hazy line of bushes and palms, curlicued into the evening sky. Children laughing; three women gliding between the trees carrying bundles of clean laundry home on their heads to a tiny kays among mango and banana trees.
    And the feeling that came so often to me in Haiti, when I saw the simple, enduring, self-sustaining rhythms of these secluded villages far from the clamor and flash point frenzy of the cities, was a feeling of wholeness and completeness. Ancient patterns. Still strong, still sound. Still Africa.
     
     
    “You won’t believe our history.”
    “I won’t?” I was back in Port-au-Prince, sitting on the verandah of Haiti’s most famous hostelry, The Grand Hotel Oloffson, talking to a thick-set, middle-aged Haitian who claimed to have once been “a pretty well-known opponent to the Jean-Claude Duvalier government.” He introduced himself obliquely—“They call me Jacques”—so I left it at that. In the ghostly gingerbread fantasy of the Oloffson, mystery and intrigue seem appropriate. Graham Greene captured it perfectly in his book The Comedians: “It had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of The New Yorker . You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.”
    The hotel has recently been saved from terminal decay by Richard Morse, a descendant of President Sam (ruler of Haiti for five months in 1915), whose brother built the place around the turn of the century. Now it sits in all its restored Victorian glory on a rocky hill shaded by a junglelike profusion of royal palms, banana trees, and flowering magnolias. Suites named after Mick Jagger, Sir John Gielgud, Marlon Brando (one of the largest beds I’ve ever seen), and Graham Greene reflect its celebrated clientele, and you can still sense its reputation as a center for whispered rumor mongering and revolutionary intrigue.
    “No—you won’t believe this little country,” Jacques continued. “You know how big we are? We’re about…we got about six million people. M’be more now. They coming back again. They coming back because things got quieter a bit—not much—never gets real quiet in Haiti. Not for las’ twenty years anyway.
    “We had everyt’ing—massacre, revolutions, more revolutions, dictators, generals, civil wars—thirty-five rulers since we got free in 1804, and almost every one of them executed, blown up, assassinated or kicked out in revolutions. Ev’n the Americans took us over once for thirty years, till 1934! We had starvation, corruption like nobody’s business, bankruptcy—I mean, the whole country’s been bankrupt since I was a kid and longer—every time the top guy gets kicked out—if he’s not dead—he takes all the cash he can grab. One guy—this minister—tried to carry off his own computer system—the whole thing, one hundred computers! Don’t know why he bothered, they never worked!”
    The mood at the Oloffson seems to encourage this kind of exchange. You feel safe here, even though you’re only a mortar shot away from the enormous Presidential Palace. Couched in this pretty neighborhood of old delicate gingerbread mansions, you sense neutral territory. Rare for a city that has had its fill of pèzé-sucé (“squeeze and suck” tactics of governments, a popular phrase named after a frozen stick of sweet-flavored ice) and when brigandes de vigilance still patrol the slum bidonvilles of La Saline and Cité Carton, seeking out informers and the resilient remnants of Papa Doc’s Tontons