Amy Wilentz

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

People whose dead have enemies resort to all sorts of tricks to stop their deceased relation from being turned into a zombi. They build strong graves of stone; often the construction begins long before the death—the costs are high, but it’s worth it to avoid becoming a zombi. The dead man’s people throw rice into his casket, so that the deceased will have to count each grain, and because he is concentrating on the counting he will not respond to the bokor’s call to arise. They seal the corpse’s nostrils to stop his soul from escaping. But if, by some ruse, the bokor manages to trap the dead man’s soul, the game is up. The zombi rises, and thenceforth he must serve the bokor, or whoever has commissioned the zombification, as a virtual slave.

The brigades had erected barricades throughout her neighborhood to stop the Macoutes and the Army from driving through at unsnail-like top speed and spraying the houses with machine-gun fire, as they had done in other neighborhoods and in other towns. We got to one barricade, and I couldn’t go around it. Worse, I was suddenly unable, in my panic, to put the car into reverse. It was a new car. My colleagues in the backseat were screaming, “Journalis! Journalis!” at the boys at the barricade, but the boys had seen a car where there should have been no cars, and they came around the barricade with their rocks, and it was only seconds that I found reverse and got us out of there.

My colleagues were not pleased.

“Learn to drive,” said the Chicago Tribune.