Country doctor
CLARENCE BROWN
Papa Doc: Haiti and its Dictator Bernard Diederich and Al Burt (Bodley Head 42s)
As a schoolboy in the South Carolina of some years ago, I once attended an evening service at a tent in the Negro quarter of my small town. The occasion was momentous. An itinerant cultist named Daddy Grace—a shabbier version ad usum profanorum of the infinitely grander, even cosmic, Father Divine—had come for a session with his local wowsers. I found myself in a party of not more than four or five white people whose rather unexpected appearance had been hastily provided for in a ribboned area near the front, evidently meant for the sole occupancy of the busy treasurer, a young woman in the flowing white robe of all the followers.
Daddy Grace himself occupied a gorgeous easy-chair beneath a trellis of paper roses and beamed at the minions who approached him timorously to pin wads of dollar bills upon his robe. He was a genial and elegant little man with a radiant charm, of which he had precisely reckoned the cash value. As the ceremony proceeded, the chanting and rhythmic swaying of the faithful began to exert the usual mesmeric effect. The treasurer suddenly screamed and fell backwards from her chair into the sawdust at our feet in a transport of fervour known locally as 'speaking in tongues.' Daddy Grace would occasionally command silence for brief declarations. I recall only one: he said that he had just flown back from a con- ference with Hitler and Mussolini on an alp where he had exacted from them firm pro- mises to quit. Another woman fell writhing in the sawdust.
The point of this story is that I did not laugh. Later, perhaps—but not while I was gripped inside the farce itself, nor do I remember the straight face to have cost me the slightest effort.
This book about the Haiti of pr Francois Duvalier—or Papa Doc, as he has affec- tionately dubbed himself—is not even remotely the experience itself. It is merely an account of it in a fairly drab but serviceable newspaperese. The effort not to laugh is therefore nearly exhausting. At times, it is it-
resistible. The President of Haiti is the author of the following passage, which Graham Greene quotes in his introduction with a certain relish: `Our Doc who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the antipatriots But this is anaemic stuff when compared to the inspired slapstick of an event in July 1958, shortly after Duvalier's accession. An invasion of Haiti was launched from the American mainland by eight men: three Haitian army officers, three American mercenaries, and two Deputy Sheriffs of Dade County, Florida. They left their boat, the 'Mollie C', killed three patrolmen in a brief skirmish, hired a tap-tap (a pick-up truck fitted out as a public conveyance) and, under a slogan reading 'In Spite of All, God is the Only Master,' proceeded to the Palace, captured the garrison, and very nearly reversed the course of Papa Doc's happy life.
Two understandable little mistakes ruined them. They did not know that the President had taken all the garrison's ammo and weapons into his own house for safekeeping, and one of the Haitians sent a prisoner down to the corner for a pack of the cigarettes that he had been missing in exile (thus revealing the size of the invading force). They were shot and hacked to pieces. Dr Duvalier, whose example Castro must have studied with some diligence, used this burlesque foretaste of the Bay of Pigs to his excellent advantage, consolidated his theretofore uncertain grip, and has been exacting penance and tribute from the United States ever since.
Some two years later a contrite and, I sup- pose, nervously anti-Castro Florida made further amends. The county school board (I am not inventing this) of Fort Lauderdale presented Duvalier with two 75-foot patrol boats, thus increasing his navy by 20 per cent.
Bernard Diederich, a Time-Life journalist who once published his own English- language newspaper, the Haiti Sun, before being thrown out of the country by Papa Doc, lived in Haiti for fourteen years and is married to a Haitian. No one alive, writes Graham Greene, with a certain dire significance attaching to the adjective, is bet- ter qualified to tell the story. Al Burt, his co- author, is another experienced journalist whose credentials also include expulsion by the dictator.
Understandably enough, I think, they write without a trace of humour and have
evidently striven to make their account of Duvalier's incredible career as dry as possi- ble. What else could they do? The mere
routine of life today in this black Ruritania makes the imagination of our specialists in literary outrance look starved. There is a considerable risk of not being believed. I cannot independently verify their assertions, of course, and they assert without documen- tation; but I can testify to the veracity of their tone and the cogency of their argument. Detail piles upon detaiL The father of Duvalier exhumed by the son's enemies, the heart removed for purposes of voodoo, the remains scatologically dishonoured. Duvalier himself alone with the severed head of an enemy, trying to get in touch. The novelist Jacques Alexis, a communist and also, as it
chances, Haiti's most famous living novelist and poet, stoned to death by the peasants and urchins whom he had championed in his books and whom the dreaded Tonton Macoutes had rounded up for the purpose.
The impulse to leap from one's chair and read the incredible tale to the nearest listener for its bizarre hilarity gradually seeps away. The cumulative effect of blood is depressive. With great skill, the authors allow one to surmise the beautiful land and the gentle people who have been made into the personal deer park of this hallucinated little sadist and amateur necromancer. The flowers turn into paper roses and then into us currency notes, millions of which have been given—not lent, given—to maintain one exemplary Caribbean instance of law and order.
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