I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [87]
Back in Port-au-Prince, Haitian George announced, “We’re going to go to a vodun ceremony. Real—not for tourists.” In teeming darkness (no streetlamps), George drove us over twisting roads, seemingly drawn by distant drums, until we pulled into a dirt driveway before a one-story, tin-roofed house. Drumming rumbled from the open door of the house. George cautioned, “Wait. Stay,” and got out of the car. We heard him speaking to someone, but we couldn’t see whom—an occasional flash of teeth and white eyeballs glistened—and every once in a while, I’d recognize a word of something that sounded familiar, a sort of French, that sang. What would be, “Parlez-vous français?” came out, “Oom pah pahlee français?”—an “Oom pa pah,” and a “pahlee” in musical counterpoint to the drums.
“All okay,” George announced.
At the hut’s entrance, we tiptoed over symbols laid out on the ground—giant snowflakes sketched in powdered seashells, making delicate star-shaped designs. The markings’ significance and power would refuse entry to unwanted spirits, as well as offer a sort of welcome mat to good gods. Haitian George popped his eyes and whispered, “Or ghosts …”
Lit only by a few oil lamps and candles, the house was packed with some hundred bodies sitting in a circle, and several standing amid the shadows along the wall. Red dots twinkled on and off as everyone smoked. One side of the circle had a bit of space, where the houngan, the priest, stood near a table. The table held a clear bottle and a glass, both filled with rum.
Haitian George squeezed us in against the back wall. No one seemed to pay attention to us, two lone white people in the hut. A bottle was passed around, and everybody would take a slug and pass it on. We faked it. Two or three drummers sat near the houngan, who gradually began to chant and dance to their rhythms. As he was dancing and spinning, he launched into dialogue with the congregation, shouting out phrases (incantations? running commentary? gossip?), and they’d pick up his phrases and shout their own back. All the while, the drummers played, and the houngan gulped from the bottle. Maybe he was doing stand-up comedy, or advising on family health, “Your child is sick, he overate. You’re not feeding him the right food!” And so on. We were mesmerized. Soon, rather than swallowing the rum, he began to spit it out over the crowd, like a baptism, blessing us with sprayed rum.
In his dance, his body shifted and moved—all improvised. Wonderful! A few people got up to join, and then more and more, and the chanting grew raucous. Not everybody, but roughly eighty out of a hundred, were up and dancing. We three sat stuck to the wall.
Someone held up a live chicken, and cut its throat. The drums went wild. The houngan grabbed the bleeding chicken by its feet and whirled it over the crowd, as in the Roman Catholic ceremony when the priest flings holy water out of the aspergillum, the congregation is sprinkled—with this ceremony we were blooded.
The chanting crescendoed and, out of the dancers, a girl became the center, a teenager with caffe-latte skin. Though she wasn’t specifically dressed in anything special—no veil or fancy dress—everyone danced around her, the chosen one.
The houngan circled and spit rum in her face, and then the space around her began to open up, as the people backed away from her. I believe they improvised their dances, but all seemed to move in a counterclockwise direction. The chosen one’s eyes were wide, popping out, staring. She started to shake and tremble, and the music changed, throbbing louder and faster.
Suddenly, she started to flail her arms and legs, and propelled herself, flying as if she had been blasted backward. She would fall against