25

Sólda Rouge

Cap Haitien

Northern Haiti

Tuesday, 21 August 1888

The sun peered over the fort’s entryway when Rork roused me from a cramped slumber. Rising from the pile of stone ammunition, the solar rays seared my eyes, stunning me into temporary confusion as to my exact locale. I looked around, remembered regretfully where we were and proceeded to stretch my body. A searing throb in my back reminded me of the previous night’s wreck. That damned leg also protested when I attempted to stand, making me stumble onto Cynda, who lay next to me. She let out a cry of pain and swore a most unladylike oath.

Dan stood next to Rork, scowling at a figure approaching at the head of a line of men in uniform.

“Company’s comin’ an’ methinks it’s official,” Rork advised me.

“All right, get everybody up.”

Dan went around and woke the rest of our number, so that by the time the man and his detail of soldiers arrived at the doorway to our decaying quarters, he faced an expectant group of six white faces and one black. Unlike the other Haitians we’d encountered, this one didn’t seem fazed by our appearance in his country.

He was attired in a uniform that showed its French antecedents by the red trousers and blue cutaway coat with brass trim, topped by a black shako with red plume. His sleeve had the three thick chevrons of a senior sergeant. The other soldiers were coatless and wore simple faded fatigue uniforms that probably were once dark blue. Two of them had rifles—old Springfields from our Civil War twenty-five years earlier. Modern for Haiti.

“I understand that you are Americans, so I will speak in English. I am Sergeant-in-Chief Vladimir Noel Yablonowski, second assistant to the aide-de-camp to General Florvil Hyppolite, commander-in-chief of the Department of the North. I want you to know that you are safe and under the personal protection of the general, who sincerely laments your tragedy.”

To say I was shocked is beyond an understatement. Not only did Yablonowski have a decidedly un-Haitian name, but he was speaking in fluent American-accented English. His face was in shadow at first, then he turned toward the east and I could fully study it, which only added to my surprise. The sergeant’s skin was not the dark-black of Africa, but coffee-colored, and unlike everyone we’d encountered so far, he had deep blue irises set in oval eyes, along with the high cheekbones of his Slavic ancestry. Under his kepi was not the black nap of a Negro, but curly brown hair.

I spoke for the crew. “Sergeant, please accept our heartfelt thanks for the assistance. We are in dire need of decent food, water, clothing, and medical attention.”

“And a bath,” added Cynda.

He smiled. “We will all travel into the city of Cap Haitien now. Regrettably, there is no road from Fort Picolet worthy of the name, so we must go by foot along the coastal path until we get to the road at Fort St. Joseph, where we have wagons waiting. At Cap Haitien, you will be taken to the hotel for rest and food. Clothing will be arranged. A doctor has been notified.”

“So how do you speak English so well?” asked Dan, rather too bluntly.

Yablonowski executed a half left-face, looked at Dan, and said, “Baptist missionary school, years ago, sir. Unlike many, I am a true Christian.”

“Baptist?”

“No, that was just for school. I am a Catholic.”

Roche, sat halfway up on his litter, looked coldly at Yablonowski, and uttered, “Dobrahyee ootro.”

The sergeant’s head swiveled to Roche. “Thank you, sir. Good morning to you, as well. But I am not Russian. I am one of the Polish-Haitians. It is a long story and we do not have the time right now. Come let us get going before the sun gets too strong.”

Roche grunted something and lay back down. Corny shot me a dubious glance. At that point Cynda spoke up softly. “Claire and Henri need to be buried.”

Yablonowski bowed slightly. “Yes, of course. We are very sorry for your loss, madam. I thought you would appreciate a burial in the Christian cemetery in Cap Haitien, rather than a place like here.”

He said the last with contempt, so much so that I inquired, “What exactly is this place, Sergeant?”

“This fort is very old. Adolfus put you in these ruins of the old French commandant’s quarters. His decision to put you here was bad. This spot has been used for the last sixty years as the hounfour of a malfacteur—the voudou place of a practitioner of evil doings. Over there is an altar to Ogoun, the warrior loa.”

He pointed to a small bottle in a debris-filled corner. It was surrounded by short knife blades and pikes. Red patches of clothing were scattered among the blades. Red powder was everywhere. When we’d arrived, I was dog-tired and had missed it in the dark.

“So the man was trying to send us a message?” asked Dan.

Yablonowski frowned.

“No, it was not a message to you—for you as blancs cannot really understand this. Adolfus either had too much to drink last night and did this as a joke to himself and his friends, or he did it as a gesture to the malfacteurs to show them the objects of his anger, which would be you. Ogoun the warrior is associated with the revolutionary war against the French, and sometimes now invoked against all blancs. And up there is the home of L’inglesou, the loa of wild places, who kills anyone who offends him.”

He gestured to the parapet above us, where the two soldiers had been perched, watching us in the night. “It is where the bokors, the sorcerers, conjure their concoctions.”

“What about Kalfu? Is he around here?” asked Corny. “The mambo in the cave by the sea mentioned him last night. She said that Agwè had told Kalfu about us and that he would be watching us.”

Yablonowski slowly let out a breath, looking none too happy with Corny’s remarks. It was obvious that the sergeant had been given personal responsibility for the blancs who suddenly arrived out of nowhere, probably because he spoke English. Now that task had become far more difficult.

“Kalfu is everywhere in Haiti. Everywhere you may go, people will have already heard that Kalfu is watching you.” His tone became more insistent. “You will be fine if you please do what I say and do not stray away from me. We will make arrangements to get you all out of Haiti as soon as possible on the first ship available.”

I judged it best not to tell the sergeant at that moment of our search for a missing fourteen–year-old—or of my infringement of the chamber of the dead the previous night. It appeared that I had inadvertently made quite an enemy in Adolfus. I am a Christian and therefore his pagan notions held no sway over me, but I did wonder if he would elevate his animosity from notions to actions.

Yablonowski, insistent to get under way, began issuing orders to his men, who then gestured to my people to get up and going. The soldiers had canvas army litters, and soon had the wounded and the mobile formed into a line. Ten minutes after the sergeant’s arrival, we walked out of the old fort.

As we walked east into the rising sun, none of us expressed regret that we were leaving Pointe Picolet, with its malevolent air and bizarre inhabitants.

***

The coast east of Picolet trended around to the south, toward the anchorage at Cap Haitien. The ship channel followed close inshore, where two more forts, obsolete batteries, really, covered the seaward approach to the city. St. Joseph was a small battery of half a dozen old French cannon, not maintained or guarded. We climbed onto three carts there, with a fourth carrying our dead. Passing the third battery, Fort Maydi, composed of equally ancient mortars, we rounded the final point of land and saw Cap Haitien stretched out before us.

It was a tropical sprawl with a touch of Old World elegance. A collection of formerly sophisticated stone and brick buildings, constructed with European architecture, extended along a curving coco-palmed shoreline for a mile. These crumbling structures were predominantly a faded whitewashed gray, appearing like a line of old men bent over by age and infirmity.

As the town’s suburban tentacles crept up a steep green mountainside, it changed from stone buildings to small wooden ones, some painted in the Caribbean’s ubiquitous pink, blue, and green pastels. At the upper edges of the place, physically farthest from the sea and symbolically farthest from the French cultural influence, were hundreds of thatched hovels, blending into the ever-present jungle.

Among the rooftops in the center of town, three church spires pierced the sky. A large blue and red national flag drooped in the airless humid morning from a tall mast in the center of the city, near the tallest spires. It reminded me of a corpse someone forgot to take down after a hanging execution.

The brownish-sand shoreline before us was a gathering point for careened native boats, scattered flotsam, piled cargo, draped fishing nets, rubbish, and lounging people. At the center of Cap Haitian’s waterfront curve stood a length of stone seawall, from which jutted a long planked wharf into the bay. A substantial building stood at its base, with another Haitian flag hoisted high. The only steamer in port was anchored just off the wharf. I couldn’t see it clearly, but spotted a strange apparatus at the stern, where a British red ensign hung.

Yablonowski proudly informed me that I was looking at the customs wharf. The steamer was a cable-laying ship—the company was finishing up the completion of a telegraph line that would connect northern Haiti with the world, another project of President Salomon. The apparatus was a cable drum. The ship lent a certain sense of industry to the otherwise bucolic scene.

***

The city’s quaint impression wilted rapidly upon closer familiarization. A strong stench first disabused my notion—a very unquaint combination of sewage in the streets and rotting fish on the beach. But we continued onward to our lodgings, located near the central plaza. When we arrived, Sergeant Yablonowski bowed and flourished his hand as we were helped down from the wagons.

“Welcome to your accommodations while here in Cap Haitien. They are the very best available, and I am certain you will find them to your liking. The account is being taken care of by the general as a gesture of our national goodwill toward the United States.”

Hotel Colon, otherwise known as the Travelers’ Hotel, stood at the corner of two streets. A run-down wood frame affair, it had seen its best days fifty years earlier. After what we’d been through, however, it looked like Eden. It was administered by a man we learned was famous in Haiti, of whom I’d never heard. With wild hair sprouting in confusion from his head, Oswald Durand was a politician and poet when he wasn’t busy being the general manager. Welcoming us graciously at the front door, he and Corny—birds of a feather if ever there were—became instant friends.

Durand, colorfully attired in a blue silk suit with an outlandish white cravat, gushed in cultured French his condolences at our loss, his delight in our survival, and his hope that we would enjoy the hospitality of the city—all in one sentence. Obviously, not everyone in Haiti despised the French and their ways.

Not to be outdone in the oratory department, Corny proclaimed in fluent French our admiration for the culture of Haiti and undying appreciation for Sergeant Yablonowski, General Hyppolite, and Oswald Durand. Too tired to muster up my own French, I just kept my mouth shut. Corny was doing fine without me.

In the resulting air of bonhomie, Durand sent fruit and chilled juices up to our rooms, arranged hot baths for all hands, and promised new clothing and a visit from a doctor later that morning. Promises are never expected to be kept in the West Indies, but, most notably at this hotel, they were actually fulfilled. The stench and local suspicion of us at Cap Haitien were off-putting, but there was no denying the general’s, and Durand’s, sincerity. To be fair, all the people of substance we had encountered within the city were uniformly accommodating to our needs, leaving us with a pleasant impression of middle and upper Haitian society. By noon, the entire contingent—fed, clothed, and medically ministered to—had fallen into bed.

Except for me, of course. With the exchange between him and Roche still in my mind, I cornered Yablonowski in the lobby and asked about his background. My suspicions that, despite what he said to Roche, he was in fact Russian turned out to be unfounded.

The sergeant enlightened me on the subject. It seems that when Napoleon sent forty thousand troops to recover Haiti from the rebelling slaves in 1804, they included over five thousand men in the famous Polish Legion. That veteran army was led by General Wladyslaw Franciszdek Yablonowski, the good sergeant’s great-great-grandfather, by way of a Haitian servant woman.

During operations in Haiti, eighty percent of the Polish Legion died of wounds and disease. The general himself died of yellow fever. By the end of the conflict, four hundred Poles, disaffected with the French, elected to join the revolutionary side and became Haitian citizens. Within a year, that had dwindled to 240, who intermarried and settled in five towns across southern Haiti, where their descendants still lived. Those Poles were the only white people allowed to become citizens and to own land in the new black country.

They were known as the Moun Rouge—the light-skinned people. The sergeant was commonly known as the Sólda Rouge—the “light-skinned soldier.” Yablonowski candidly explained that his general valued his inherent military skills, his lack of blood affiliation with anyone in the north, and his disconcerting appearance to the local population. Not to mention his language ability. “I am useful in unusual situations,” he said with a slight smile.

I learned from the sergeant that the American consul was in Port au Prince due to some political troubles there. I asked about sending a cable to Washington, my intention being to explain to my superiors the probable delay in returning from leave, but was told the new telegraph line was malfunctioning. Worried about my commanding officer’s reaction to us overstaying our leave, I wrote a letter to Commodore Walker explaining our predicament and asked Durand to post it. It may be fairly questioned why I didn’t send a letter to Delilah’s owner, explaining her loss. The candid answer is that I was exhausted and forgot. A regrettable omission, as I would later realize.

Finally, I requested to see the head man in the area, General Hyppolite, to present my appreciation for his, and his countrymen’s, generosity to us. Yablonowski went off to deliver the request in person, returning an hour later with an approval. I was to be guest of the general at breakfast the next day. Thanking the sergeant again, I wearily climbed the stairs to my bath and the ultimate refuge of that glorious bed.