The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1985-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

In the summer in Haiti the spirits walk, and the people go with them. For weeks in July the roads come alive with pilgrims, and we followed them.

Leaving Gonaives, Rachel and I drove north across the mountains to the lush coastal plain, calling first at the sacred spring and mudbaths of Saint Jacques, and then moving on to the village of Limonade and the festival of Saint Anne. Here they had gathered, literally thousands of them dressed in the bright clothes and colors of the spirits, fused in hallucinatory waves that flowed across the plaza.

The seething edge of the throng enveloped us even as we stepped from the jeep. We were carried, flesh to flesh, by the collective whim of the crowd. It was like being pushed through the stuffed belly of a beast, and soon we were ploughing through the throng to the nearest refuge, the stone steps of the church standing firm like a jetty above the madness.

Our senses numbed, we entered the church and were well inside the nave before we realized what was going on. It was the Mass of the Invalids, and at our feet lay the most diseased and wretched human display imaginable. Lepers without faces, victims of elephantiasis with limbs the size of tree trunks; dozens and dozens of dying people, collected from the length and breadth of the country to seek alms and redemption at the altar of this church. It was a scene of such singular horror, we could think only of escape.

Rachel stepped ahead of me toward an open door, and then gasped. There in the shadow of a cross, her head covered by a black shawl, was a single woman, and draped across her legs was her daughter, a teenage girl whose shattered legs crossed like sticks. Her skin was jet black and her head a grotesque melon, so swollen with disease that you could see the individual follicles of hair. It was a sight so terrible that we could not pass. We turned back to wade through the brown-frocked beggars carpeting the front of the church, and as we passed they tugged at our clothes. There was nothing for them, and the real horror of the moment was less their condition than our fear.

Then, on the steps of the church, the scene turned into an epiphany. A healthy peasant woman, dressed in the bright-blue-and-red solid block colors of Ogoun, the spirit of fire and war, swirled through the beggars possessed by her spirit. Over her shoulder was slung a brilliant red bag filled with dry kernels of golden corn. She twirled and pranced in divine grace, and with one arm stretching out like the neck of a swan she placed a small pile of corn into each of the begging bowls. When she was finished, her bag empty, she spun around to the delight of all and with a great cry flung herself from the steps of the church. Rachel and I watched her flow into the crowd. Wherever she went the people backed away, that Ogoun might have space to spin.

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