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May 29, 2013The Trial That Gave Vodou A Bad Name

An engraving–probably made from a contemporary artist’s sketch–shows the eight Haitian “voodoo” devoteesfound guilty in February 1864 of the murder and cannibalism of a 12-year-old child. From Harper’s Weekly.

It was a Saturday, market day in Port-au-Prince, and the chance to meet friends, gossip and shop haddrawn large crowds to the Haitian capital. Sophisticated, French-educated members of the urban rulingclass crammed into the market square beside illiterate farmers, a generation removed from slavery, whohad walked in from the surrounding villages for a rare day out.

The whole of the country had assembled, and it was for this reason that Fabre Geffrard had chosenFebruary 13, 1864, as the date for eight high-profile executions. Haiti’s reformist president wished to make

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6/5/13 10:08 AMThe Trial That Gave Vodou A Bad Name | Past Imperfect

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President Fabre Geffrard, whoseefforts to reform Haiti ended indisappointment when he wasaccused of corruption and forced toflee the country by a violent coup.

an example of these four men and four women: because they had been found guilty of a hideous crime—abducting, murdering and cannibalizing a 12-year-old girl. And also because they represented everythingGeffrard hoped to leave behind him as he molded his country into a modern nation: the backwardness of itshinterlands, its African past and, above all, its folk religion.

Call that religion what you will—voodoo, vaudaux, vandaux,vodou (the last of these is generally preferred today)—Haiti’shistory had long been intertwined with it. It had arrived in slaveships centuries earlier and flourished in backwoods maroonvillages and in plantations that Christian priests never visited. In1791, it was generally believed, a secret vodou ceremony hadprovided the spark for the violent uprising that liberated thecountry from its French masters: the single example of asuccessful slave rebellion in the history of the New World.

Outside Haiti, though, vodou was perceived as primitive andsanguinary. It was nothing but “West African superstition [and]serpent worship,” wrote the British traveler Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard, who walked across the Haitian interior in 1899, andbelievers indulged in “their rites and their orgies with practicalimpunity.” For visiting Westerners of this sort, vodou’spopularity, in itself, was proof that the “black republic” could notclaim to be civilized.

It was hard to conceive of a case more likely to bring vodou, andHaiti, into greater disrepute than the murder that was beingpunished that Saturday in 1864. The killing had taken place in the village of Bizoton, just outside the gatesof Port-au-Prince, and—at least according to the newspaper stories that fizzed over the world’s telegraphwires that spring—it was the work of a wastrel by the name of Congo Pelé, who had sacrificed his own niecein the hope of winning favor from the vodou gods.

Little is known for certain of the affaire de Bizoton. No trial transcripts survive, and the truth (as KateRamsey observes in her study of vodou and Haitian law) was long ago lost in a miasma of prejudice andmisreporting. The most detailed account of the murder came from the pen of Sir Spenser St John, who wasthe British charge d’affaires in Port-au-Prince at the time—and St John’s account helped define Haiti as aplace where ritual murder and cannibalism were commonplace, and usually went unpunished. The chargeproved so influential that, as recently as 2010, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that leveled much of thecapital could still be blamed on a supposed “pact with the devil” that the country had signed by turning tovodou.

For St John, who said he had “made the most careful inquiries” into the murder, the affaire seemedstraightforward and hideous. Pelé, the diplomat reported, had been “a labourer, a gentleman’s servant[and] an idler” who had grown resentful at his poverty and was “anxious to improve his position withoutexertion on his part.” Since he was the brother of a noted vodou priestess, the solution appeared obvious.The gods and spirits could provide for him.

Sometime in December 1863, Jeanne Pelé agreed to help her brother. ”It was settled between them,” StJohn wrote, “that about the new year some sacrifice should be offered to propitiate the serpent.” The onlydifficulty was the scale of Congo’s ambition. While “a more modest man would have been satisfied with awhite cock or a white goat…on this solemn occasion it was thought better to offer a more importantsacrifice.” Two vodou priests were consulted, and it was they who recommended that the Pelés offer up the“goat without horns”—that is, a human sacrifice.

Jeanne Pelé did not have to look far for a suitable victim. She chose her sister’s child, a girl namedClaircine, who St John says was 12 years old at the time. On December 27, 1863, Jeanne invited her sisterto visit Port-au-Prince with her, and, in their absence, Congo Pelé and the two priests seized Claircine. Theybound and gagged her and hid her beneath the altar of a nearby temple. The girl stayed there for four fulldays and nights. Finally, after dark on New Year’s Eve, an elaborate vodou ceremony was held. At its climax—St John says—Claircine was strangled, flayed, decapitated and dismembered. Her body was cooked, and

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Sir Spenser St John, British charged’affaires in Haiti during the 1860s,compiled by far the most detailedaccount of the Bizoton affair, andbelieved implicitly in the reality of childsacrifice by “vaudaux” worshipers.

Vodou paraphernalia in a modern temple.Image: Wikicommons.

her blood caught and kept in a jar.

Writing a quarter of a century later, the diplomat spared hisreaders none of the unpleasant details of the bloody feast thatfollowed; perhaps he calculated that they would not wish to bespared. He also set out the evidence that had been assembledagainst the Pelés and their associates, together with details ofother cases that proved, he thought, that the murder was not anisolated incident.

Before askingwhetherClaircinereally wassacrificed toAfrican gods—let alonewhethercannibalismwas a normalpart of vodou—it may helpto know alittle moreabout theplace that thereligion heldin old Haiti.

Vodou was, to begin with, the faith of most Haitians. Aslate as 1860, the country was only nominally Christian;the urban elite may have been more or less Catholic, butthe mass of people in the countryside were not. Bibleteachings posed awkward questions in a slaveholdingsociety; thus, while the old French colony’s hated “NegroCode” had made it compulsory to baptize new slaves within eight days of their arrival, most plantationowners made no real attempt to Christianize them. Nor was it easy for any religion to take root in the brutalconditions in which most blacks worked. The climate, back-breaking labor and fever killed 10 percent ofHaiti’s half-million-strong population every year and severely curtailed fertility. This meant, as LaurentDubois notes, that fully two-thirds of the slaves in Haiti on the eve of the revolt of 1791 had been born inAfrica. They brought with them their African religions, and scholars of vodou believe that its Catholictrappings were implanted not in Haiti, but in the coastal regions of the Congo, where local rulers convertedto Christianity as early as the 15th century.

Matters scarcely improved after independence. Most Haitian rulers professed Christianity—they believed itimportant to identify with the free nations of the west. But they also insisted on a Haitian clergy, not tomention the right to appoint bishops. That the Catholic Church would not concede, with the result that in1804 a schism occurred between Haiti and Rome. Since there were then no more than three churches stillstanding amid the rubble of the revolution, and six priests in the entire country, little progress was made inconverting the people of the interior in the years before this breach was healed with a concordat signed in1860.

The handful of clergymen who did serve in Haiti during these years were mostly renegades, Dubois writes:“debauched opportunists who got rich selling sacraments to gullible Haitians.” Vodou thrived in theseconditions, and it was hardly surprising that when Geffrard’s immediate predecessor, Faustin Soulouque,was nominated as president in 1847, Haiti found itself ruled by a former slave who was an open adherent ofthe African religion.

Knowing a little of the effects of the schism, and of Soulouque’s dubious 12-year regime, makes it easier to

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Faustin Soulouque—better known asEmperor Faustin I (1849-1859)—was thefirst Haitian leader to openly support vodou.A former slave, he derived “mysticalprestige” from his association with thereligion.

A “sorcerers’ passport,” offering safe passage to

understand why Fabre Geffrard was so anxious to prosecutethe principals of the affaire de Bizoton—and to labelClaircine’s killers as vodouists. The concordat signed inMarch 1860 committed the president to making CatholicismHaiti’s state religion—and the executions of February 1864,which so clearly demonstrated Christian “orthodoxy,” tookplace just weeks before the priests of the first mission to thecountry arrived from Rome. The trial was followed up,moreover, by a redrafting of Haiti’s Code Pénal, whichincreased the fines levied for “sorcery” sevenfold and addedthat “all dances and other practices that…maintain the spiritof fetishism and superstition in the population will beconsidered spells and punished with the same penalties.”Under Geffrard, attempts were also made to curb othercustoms likely to upset the pope: the public nudity that wasstill common in the interior, and a 99 percent illegitimacyrate that was accompanied (Dubois says) by “bigamy,trigamy, all the way to septigamy.”

Geffrard was equally anxious to distance himself fromSoulouque, who in 1849 had made the country something of

a laughingstock by crowning himself Emperor Faustin I. He was not the first Haitian emperor—that honorbelongs to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had ruled as Jacques I between 1804 and 1806—and althoughMurdo MacLeod argues that he was a shrewder ruler than most historians allow, he is usually portrayed asa buffoon. Lazy and poorly educated, Soulouque, it was widely believed, had been hand-picked by Haiti’ssenate as the most malleable possible candidate for the presidency; unable to obtain a golden crown, hehad been elevated to the throne wearing one made of cardboard. Once in power, however, the new emperorderived (MacLeod says) significant “mystical prestige” from his association with vodou. Indeed, it waswidely thought he was in thrall to it, and St John noted that

during the reign of Soulouque, a priestess was arrested for having promoted a sacrifice too openly; whenabout to be conducted to prison, a foreign bystander remarked aloud that probably she would be shot.She laughed and said: ‘If I were to beat the sacred drum, and march through the city, [there is] not one,from the Emperor downwards, but would humbly follow me.’

What all this means, I think, is that vodou becamea fault line running through the very heart ofHaitian society after 1804. For most citizens, andespecially for the rural blacks who had borne thebrunt both of slavery and the struggle forindependence, it became a potent symbol of olddignities and new freedoms: a religion that, asDubois notes, helped “carve out a place where theenslaved could temporarily escape the order thatsaw them only as chattel property” during colonialtimes, and went on to “create communities of trustthat stretched between the different plantationsand into the towns.” For the local elite, who tendedto be of mixed race and were often French-educated, though, vodou was holding Haiti back. Itwas alien and frightening to those who did notunderstand it; it was associated with slaverebellion; and (after Soulouque’s rise), it was alsothe faith of the most brutal and backward of thecountry’s rulers.

These considerations combined to help make Haitia pariah state throughout the 19th century.

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vodou initiates, obtained by Albert Métraux during hisanthropological field work in Haiti in the 1940s. KateRamsey notes that the Haitian secret societies thatissue these passports are linked to vodou and stillform an active alternative (“nighttime”) system fordelivering law and justice to their adherents.

Artist’s impression of a “vodou murder”–a product ofthe sensation caused by St John’s book Hayti, or,The Black Republic, which included allegations ofmurder and cannibalism.

Dessalines and his successor, Henry Christophe—who had every reason to fear that the UnitedStates, France, Britain and Spain would overthrowtheir revolution and re-enslave the population,given the chance—tried to isolate the country, buteven after economic necessity forced them toreopen the trade in sugar and coffee, the self-governing black republic of Haiti remained a dangerous abomination in the eyes of every white stateinvolved in the slave trade. Like Soviet Russia in the 1920s, it was feared to be almost literally “infectious”:liable to inflame other blacks with the desire for liberty. Geffrard was not the only Haitian leader to look forways to prove that his was a nation much like the great powers—Christian, and governed by the rule of law.

With all that borne in mind, let us return to the Haiti of 1864 and the affaire de Bizoton. There is no needto assume that Spenser St John was a wholly unreliable observer; his account of the legal proceedings thattook place that year chimes well with contemporary press coverage. There are a few discrepancies(Claircine is stated in newspaper sources to have been seven or eight, not 12), but the journalists’ accountsare, for the most part, more purple and more partial than the diplomat’s.

What’s most interesting about St John’s account ishis admission that the trial was open to criticism.His chief concern was the use of force to beatconfessions out of suspects. “All the prisoners,” thediplomat observed, “had at first refused to speak,thinking that the Vaudoux would protect them, andit required the frequent application of the club todrive this belief out of their heads.” Later, hauledup before the judge, the prisoners “were bullied,cajoled, cross-questioned in order to force avowals,in fact to make them state in open court what theywere said to have confessed in their preliminaryexaminations.”

The beatings produced the evidence that Geffrard’sgovernment required, but also at least one disputedconfession. It came from one Roséide Sumera, whohad admitted to eating “the palms of the victims

hands as a favourite morsel,” and whose evidence was vital to the prosecution. Sumera, St John recalled,had “entered into every particular of the whole affair, to the evident annoyance of the others, who tried invain to keep her silent,” and it was thanks to her testimony that “the guilt of the prisoners was thus fullyestablished.” Yet even St John had his doubts about Sumera’s evidence: “I can never forget,” the diplomatconceded, “the manner in which the youngest female prisoner turned to the public prosecutor and said,‘Yes, I did confess what you assert, but remember how cruelly I was beaten before I said a word.’ “

The fact that Roséide Sumera fought for her life in court does not mean that she was innocent, of course. StJohn remained convinced of her guilt, not least because physical evidence was produced to back up witnesstestimony. A “freshly boiled” human skull had been found concealed in bushes outside the temple wherethe ritual had apparently occurred, and the prosecutor also produced a pile of bones and two eyewitnesseswho—it was claimed—had not participated in the murder. They were a young woman and a child, who hadwatched from an adjoining room through chinks in the wall.

The child’s evidence was especially compelling. It was probably at least as important as Sumera’s insecuring convictions, not least because it appeared that she had been intended as a second victim. The girlhad been found, according to St John’s account, tied up under the same altar that had concealed Claircine;had Pelé not been stopped, he wrote, the intention was to sacrifice her on Twelfth Night (January 5), themost sacred date in the vodou calendar. Even so, the child’s statement was not complete:

She told her story in all its horrible details; but her nerves gave way so completely, that she had to to betaken out of court, and could not be again produced to answer some questions the jury wished to ask.

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Haiti in the 19th century, occupying the western thirdof the island of Hispaniola (French Saint-Domingue).Port-au-Prince lies at the northeast corner of thesouthern peninsula. The village of Bizoton (notmarked) was directly to the west. Click to view inhigher resolution.

Port-au-Prince, photographed in the 20th century.

As for the young woman who had, for obscurereasons, accompanied the girl to the ceremony, hertestimony was at best equivocal. She confirmedthat the feast had taken place, but according to atleast one account, also confessed to eating leftoversfrom the cannibals’ meal the next morning. Thepublic prosecutor admitted to St John that “wehave not thought proper to press the inquiry tooclosely” in this woman’s case, adding: “If full justicewere done, there would be fifty on those benchesinstead of eight.”

If much oral testimony was debatable, then, whatof the physical evidence? That a human skull andseveral bones were produced in court seemsundisputed; that they were Claircine’s, though,appears less certain. Ramsey suggests that theymay have been the remains of some other person—who may have died of natural causes—prepared for some other ritual. And some accounts of the trial arecurious in other ways. St John states that the other bones were “calcined” (burned) but still intact, whereasNew Zealand’s Otago Witness—in a typical example of the contemporary news coverage—reported thatthey had been “reduced to ashes.”

As for the allegation, made by St John, thatcannibalism was a normal feature of life in 19thcentury Haiti: the evidence here is thin in theextreme. Writing in The Catholic Encyclopedia in1909, John T. Driscoll charged—without providingdetails—that ”authentic records are procurable ofmidnight meetings held in Hayti, as late as 1888, atwhich human beings, especially children,were killed and eaten at the secret feasts.” Closereading, though, shows that there are only twoother “firsthand” accounts of vodou ceremoniesinvolving cannibalism: one from a French priestduring the 1870s, and the other from a white

Dominican a decade later. Both are unsupported; both are suspect, not least for the claim that bothsupposed eyewitnesses penetrated a secret religious ceremony undetected, wearing blackface.Unfortunately, both were also widely disseminated. Added to St John’s accounts–which included thecharge that “people are killed and their flesh sold at the market” in Haiti, they profoundlyinfluenced Victorian scribblers who had never visited the island. In 1891, observes Dubois, “one writeradmitted that he had never actually seen a Vodou ritual, but he nevertheless described [one] in vividdetail–complete with practitioners ‘throwing themselves on the victims, tearing them apart with their teethand avidly sucking the blood that boils from their veins.’ Each day, he wrote, forty Haitians were eaten, andalmost every citizen of the country had tasted human flesh.”

This matters. Ramsey and Dubois, to name only two of the historians who see Claircine’s case as central toHaiti’s history, both argue that it helped to create perceptions that have lingered to the present day. Theidea that Haiti was uncivilized and inherently unstable was used to justify an American military occupationthat began in 1915 and ran for 20 years; many even today remain convinced that the depressing aspects ofthe country’s history were products of its innate “backwardness” and not, as scholars of Haiti argue, thereal problems that the country faced during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Much, certainly, can be attributed to the crushing burden of debt imposed by France in 1825 as a conditionof recognizing independence. This indemnity, which amounted to 150 million francs (about $3 billiontoday), plus interest, compensated slaveholders for their losses—so, as the Haitian writer Louis-JosephJanvier furiously observed, his people had paid for their country three times over: in “tears and sweat,” ascaptive labor; in blood, during the revolution, and then in cash, to the very men who had enslaved them. As

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Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, a notedadventurer and cricketer, visited Haitiin 1899.

late as 1914, Dubois notes, 80 percent of the Haitian budget wasswallowed up by interest payments on this debt.

All of which does make the executions of February 1864 atransforming moment in Haitian history–so much so that it wasperhaps appropriate that they were botched. Wrote Spenser StJohn:

The prisoners, tied in pairs, were placed in a line, and faced byfive soldiers to each pair. They fired with such inaccuracy thatonly six fell wounded on the first discharge. It took theseuntrained men fully half an hour to complete their work… [and]the horror at the prisoners’ crimes was almost turned into pityat witnessing their unnecessary sufferings…. They were seenbeckoning the soldiers to approach, and Roseíde held the muzzleof a musket to her bosom and called on the man to fire.

Sources

Anon. “Horrible superstition of the Vandoux heretics.” OtagoWitness, 29 October 1864; John E. Baur. “The Presidency ofNicolas Geffrard of Haiti.” In The Americas 10 (1954); JeanComhaire. “The Haitian Schism, 1804-1860.” In AnthropologicalQuarterly 29 (1956); Leslie Desmangles. “The Maroon Republics and Religious Diversity in Colonial Haiti.”In Anthropos 85 (1990); Leslie Desmangles. The Faces of the Gods. Vodou and Roman Catholicism inHaiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; John T. Driscoll. “Fetishism.” In The CatholicEncyclopedia vol.6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909; Laurent Dubois. “Vodou and History.” InComparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001); Laurent Dubois. Haiti: The Aftershocks ofHistory. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013; François Eldin. Haïti: 13 Ans de Séjour aux Antilles.Toulouse: Société des Livres Religieux, 1878; Alfred N. Hunt. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America:Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988; MichaelLaguerre. “The place of voodoo in the social structure of Haiti.” In Caribbean Quarterly 19 (1973); MurdoJ. MacLeod. “The Soulouque Regime in Haiti, 1847-1859: A Re-evaluation.” In Caribbean Studies 10(1970); Albert Métraux. Voodoo in Haiti. London: Andre Deutsch 1959; Nathaniel Samuel Murrell. Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural and Sacred Traditions. Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2010; William W. Newell. “Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice inHayti.” In Journal of American Folk-Lore 1 (1888): Pierre Pluchon. Vaudou, Sorciers, Empoisonneurs: DeSaint-Domingue á Haiti. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1987; Kate Ramsey. “Legislating ‘Civilization’ in Post-Revolutionary Haiti.” In Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (eds), Race, Nation and Religion inthe Americas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Kate Ramsey. The Spirits and the Law: Vodouand Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; Spenser Buckingham St John. Hayti, orthe Black Republic. London: Smith, Elder, 1889; Bettina Schmidt. “The interpretation of violentworldviews: cannibalism and other violent images of the Caribbean.” In Schmidt and Ingo Schröder (eds).Anthropology of Violence and Conflict. London: Routledge: Routledge, 2001.

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Posted By: Mike Dash — 19th Century,Crimes,Historiography,Mysteries,Rural,Scandals | Link | Comments (3)

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[what's this?]3 Comments »

1. RichStine says:May 29, 2013 at 1:37 pm

This was very intriguing, Doc.Thanks to you and Smithsonian, for this.

PS/ is it just me, or does Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, the man in the insert, above, resemble theAmerican actor, James Woods, as seen here: http://www.onceuponatimeinamerica.net/actors.html

:)

Reply

2. Sukie Crandall says:June 2, 2013 at 3:52 pm

What about the successful slave revolution in Suriname? Haiti was not alone on that score if memoryserves.

Reply

Mike Dash says:June 2, 2013 at 4:32 pm

This is, I think, a matter of definition. There was certainly plenty of marronage

in Surinam–and the maroons were successful enough to secure a peace treaty

that recognized them as “free bush negroes” during the 1760s; this was

certainly success, and the maroons lived semi-independently thereafter, even

receiving “tribute” from the coast to stop them raiding the plantations. On the

other hand, there was no widespread and successful slave rebellion in Surinam

resulting in the establishment of a replacement state, as this site very helpfully

explains. After Haiti, the closest thing to a successful slave revolt in the western

hemisphere that I’m familiar with was a rebellion by slaves on St John, in the

Danish (now US) Virgin Islands in 1733. They killed or expelled all the whites

on the island and held it for nearly 7 months before the rebellion was quashed

by a joint Danish-British-French and “Free Negro” counter-attack.

Reply

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