Choucoune
“Your visa, Mesye,” said the officer at the terminal.
I fumbled for it in my suit pocket, cursing myself for not having done so while I was waiting on line. Everything surprises you, my mother once said, even the things that shouldn’t, and I’d been so absorbed in the noises and smells of the ship terminal that it never occurred to me I might need my papers.
I found it at last, seconds before the officer gave voice to the annoyance that was spreading across his face, and handed it over. He took it in thick fingers and made a show of scanning its pages. “Issa el Saieh?” he asked.
“Yes, Mesye.”
“A citizen of the south?”
I sucked in my breath. Yes, it was all arranged, all legal. But it was only this year that the Kingdom of Haiti would even let southerners on its soil, and I was carrying a legacy of much bitterness. I was a citizen of a country that had fought three wars with this kingdom, and it was barely twenty years since the Black Prince had spread his destruction into the Artibonite. It was one thing for peasants to sneak across the border for trade or work, but for a southerner to present himself at the port of Cap-Haïtien and ask to be welcomed in as if he were an American or a German…
But when I said my second “yes, mesye” and looked into the officer’s eyes, they held no hatred. Maybe it was because I was an Arab, not really a southerner: a man whose family had lived in Bethlehem when the Republic and the Kingdom went their separate ways. Maybe he couldn’t guess that I had served in the Republic’s army in the last war six years past, and that I’d stood in line and fired when the King’s troops charged the trenches north of Saint-Marc.
Or maybe, like me, he truly wanted to see a new day.
“Welcome to Okap,” he said, and stamped my visa.
I accepted it back gratefully and made to pass through the checkpoint. “Not so fast, Mesye,” said the officer; he was not done with me yet. “What do you have in your trunk?”
“Musical instruments. And clothing.”
“No jewelry? Gold? Watches? Pornography? Perhaps you are a smuggler?”
“Of course not, Mesye.”
“Then you will not mind if I check…”
It cost a hundred gourdes for him to decide that my saxophone wasn’t contraband and that I was no threat to the Kingdom’s safety and morals. He let me through the checkpoint at last, and I was out on the plaza among the food-sellers and touts, the men promising to take me to the best hotel and the boys competing to show me the places where the Black Prince had made his human sacrifices. I passed them, and went to look for the men who would take the stage with me when I played.
“Issa!” shouted Oswald Durand, throwing his arms open. “I’d hoped that I’d live to see you come to Okap, and here you are!”
He looked older than I expected; I knew him from photographs ten and twenty years old, and the white in his hair was startling. But there was no way I could mistake him; no way anyone in my profession could. Oswald was poet, musician, teacher, a man of song even during the Black Prince’s darkest days, and now, since the revolution, a member of the chambre des deputes. He was the one who’d got me my permit to come here, the first southern musician to play in the north for almost sixty years.
I returned the embrace, and he led me to the taxi stand at the end of the plaza on the Boulevard Henri-Christophe. Somewhat to my surprise, I saw that the cabs here were motorcars; in Port-au-Prince, even in Bois Verna, they would still be horse-carriages. By the magic that taxi drivers have, one of them marked us out as passengers and opened the trunk of his car; I heaved my belongings in and took a place beside Oswald on the back seat.
“Welcome to Okap,” he said as the car pulled away from the terminal; unlike the customs officer, he demanded no bribes. He leaned against the door and turned his head to look at me. “You’re here, you’re really here. Will we play Choucoune together tonight?”
“Of course.” What other answer could I give? Choucoune was Oswald’s song, and I was the one who’d made it popular in the south. I’d played it in Petit-Goave when I was not yet twenty, and in Port-au-Prince after I’d been noticed; I’d played it for soldiers in the trenches of ’07 and for society matrons in Bois-Verna. It was the first thing the people asked for when I took the stage. There was Oswald’s Choucoune and my Choucoune; there were no others.
“Excellent, excellent! We’ll stop at your hotel and drop off your things, but then we’re going to meet the band. I’ve got the best men in the north for your show, and they’re all waiting to meet you. Henri Lafaille, René Mayard…”
I recognized those names. I’d heard their music, seen their faces on records and player-piano rolls. Music traveled from north to south even when people could not; so did letters and novels, photographs and numbered prints. In Port-au-Prince, we said that we knew the north by its artists and its bullets. No doubt they said something similar about us.
Maybe I would find out.
My hotel was just off the Place d’Armes in the old city, surrounded by two and three-story houses with long balconies and wooden shutters over the doors. Not far away, construction crews were knocking down such houses, making room for stores and offices as other neighborhoods had once been cleared to make room for factories. The houses needed a coat of paint, as they might in Port-au-Prince, but here, the streets in front of them were clean.
“Look there,” Oswald said, pointing at one of the houses. The line of bullet-holes had been covered over very cleverly, and I had to look carefully to see them. The marks of fire were only slightly clearer.
“The revolution?” I asked.
“That, or the Black Prince, or maybe even before. Some of these houses were built when this was still Cap-Français. They’ve seen everything, even the things we don’t talk about.”
“Was it bad, in the Black Prince’s time? I was only a child then, but we heard…”
“It was worse.” He looked toward the house again; he’d known someone there, or maybe it had even been his. “It was a look into another place, a glimpse of what the dark spirits are like when they show themselves. But I didn’t realize until then, how much of our song comes from that place. Choucoune is really a southern song, you know, for all I wrote it in Kreyol. It’s too light for the north.”
“The south is hardly carefree.”
“No, it isn’t. But you’ve put away the loa, kept them in a place where no one can see them. You’re priest-ridden, but in this they may have the right idea.”
I looked at him, surprised. “Most northerners would say that we’ve stopped listening to the land. That we’ve let the mulattoes make Frenchmen of us, given up what makes us Haitian. The noiristes at home say that too.” I stopped suddenly, realizing I’d said we. I was an outsider in the battle between the noiristes and the pétionistes… but I was born in Petit-Goave, and there was something in this land that called to me too.
“I’d have said the same thing, before the Black Prince. Now… I don’t know.” He hefted my trunk, waving off my protests, and carried it into the hotel. “The land is power, the loa are power. If you get too close to it…”
“Music,” I said. “That is power too. In the south, when we live to play, to tell our stories… we’re like moths to a flame.”
“A flame, yes.” Oswald’s expression told of being singed by the same fire. “Our songs will burn you.”
The bar where we met the other musicians was called the Vastey, and had a mural of the old reprobate splashed across one wall. “Baron Vastey,” I almost said, before I remembered that “baron” was a bad-luck word in the Kingdom. How else could it be, when they’d been ruled by a prince who was Baron Samedi in the flesh? And in the flickering light, shadows played across Vastey’s portrait.
We exchanged greetings, all of us; Oswald and I, Henri and René, the others who had come from across the north to join me in song. We all laughed about how little we looked like our pictures, and how different our voices sounded in person. We ordered rum and drank it; we ordered more and drank that too; we lowered our voices and told scurrilous jokes about the King; we raised them and told even more salacious ones about the politicians in the south.
Henri was the first one to take out an instrument, a guitar. He strummed a chord and looked a question at the others; they all recognized it and nodded. René drummed on the table and Oswald began singing, and I listened to learn the words.
“What is this? I’ve never heard it before.”
Henri left off playing. “It’s something I wrote to one of Vastey’s old poems. La fille africaine.”
“About the girls, and in French? Another southern song?”
“Southern?” René asked. “Not much more northern than Vastey. What have you been telling him, Oswald?
“The same he’s been saying to everyone,” another man answered – Hervé, I thought his name was, but I wasn’t certain. “He sees the darkness in the land, but he doesn’t see the love. Love is power. It comes from deep under us too.”
“Sex?” asked Henri. He laughed, more than a little drunk.
“That, even more. Vastey sang of it before we were ever born. Even the loa sing of it.”
I listened, half-drunk myself. It was the kind of discussion that I might have had in a coffee-house in Port-au-Prince, but here, it was set to music and fueled by rum. These were the intellectuals of the Kingdom; it could be dangerous to speak here, even after the revolution, so they sang.
“Play Choucoune now,” I said to Oswald. “Play it in the northern way, with all the power in its soul. And I will follow.”
The stage was outdoors, on a field where one of the Black Prince’s houses had stood, and the people who filled it were welcoming. When the applause died down, I gave the beat and Oswald played. He played Choucoune, the song of north and south, and he played it as the prince might have, with no limits, as if the world were burning around him.
And on the second measure, I joined him.
“Your visa, Mesye,” said the officer at the terminal.
I fumbled for it in my suit pocket, cursing myself for not having done so while I was waiting on line. Everything surprises you, my mother once said, even the things that shouldn’t, and I’d been so absorbed in the noises and smells of the ship terminal that it never occurred to me I might need my papers.
I found it at last, seconds before the officer gave voice to the annoyance that was spreading across his face, and handed it over. He took it in thick fingers and made a show of scanning its pages. “Issa el Saieh?” he asked.
“Yes, Mesye.”
“A citizen of the south?”
I sucked in my breath. Yes, it was all arranged, all legal. But it was only this year that the Kingdom of Haiti would even let southerners on its soil, and I was carrying a legacy of much bitterness. I was a citizen of a country that had fought three wars with this kingdom, and it was barely twenty years since the Black Prince had spread his destruction into the Artibonite. It was one thing for peasants to sneak across the border for trade or work, but for a southerner to present himself at the port of Cap-Haïtien and ask to be welcomed in as if he were an American or a German…
But when I said my second “yes, mesye” and looked into the officer’s eyes, they held no hatred. Maybe it was because I was an Arab, not really a southerner: a man whose family had lived in Bethlehem when the Republic and the Kingdom went their separate ways. Maybe he couldn’t guess that I had served in the Republic’s army in the last war six years past, and that I’d stood in line and fired when the King’s troops charged the trenches north of Saint-Marc.
Or maybe, like me, he truly wanted to see a new day.
“Welcome to Okap,” he said, and stamped my visa.
I accepted it back gratefully and made to pass through the checkpoint. “Not so fast, Mesye,” said the officer; he was not done with me yet. “What do you have in your trunk?”
“Musical instruments. And clothing.”
“No jewelry? Gold? Watches? Pornography? Perhaps you are a smuggler?”
“Of course not, Mesye.”
“Then you will not mind if I check…”
It cost a hundred gourdes for him to decide that my saxophone wasn’t contraband and that I was no threat to the Kingdom’s safety and morals. He let me through the checkpoint at last, and I was out on the plaza among the food-sellers and touts, the men promising to take me to the best hotel and the boys competing to show me the places where the Black Prince had made his human sacrifices. I passed them, and went to look for the men who would take the stage with me when I played.
*******
He looked older than I expected; I knew him from photographs ten and twenty years old, and the white in his hair was startling. But there was no way I could mistake him; no way anyone in my profession could. Oswald was poet, musician, teacher, a man of song even during the Black Prince’s darkest days, and now, since the revolution, a member of the chambre des deputes. He was the one who’d got me my permit to come here, the first southern musician to play in the north for almost sixty years.
I returned the embrace, and he led me to the taxi stand at the end of the plaza on the Boulevard Henri-Christophe. Somewhat to my surprise, I saw that the cabs here were motorcars; in Port-au-Prince, even in Bois Verna, they would still be horse-carriages. By the magic that taxi drivers have, one of them marked us out as passengers and opened the trunk of his car; I heaved my belongings in and took a place beside Oswald on the back seat.
“Welcome to Okap,” he said as the car pulled away from the terminal; unlike the customs officer, he demanded no bribes. He leaned against the door and turned his head to look at me. “You’re here, you’re really here. Will we play Choucoune together tonight?”
“Of course.” What other answer could I give? Choucoune was Oswald’s song, and I was the one who’d made it popular in the south. I’d played it in Petit-Goave when I was not yet twenty, and in Port-au-Prince after I’d been noticed; I’d played it for soldiers in the trenches of ’07 and for society matrons in Bois-Verna. It was the first thing the people asked for when I took the stage. There was Oswald’s Choucoune and my Choucoune; there were no others.
“Excellent, excellent! We’ll stop at your hotel and drop off your things, but then we’re going to meet the band. I’ve got the best men in the north for your show, and they’re all waiting to meet you. Henri Lafaille, René Mayard…”
I recognized those names. I’d heard their music, seen their faces on records and player-piano rolls. Music traveled from north to south even when people could not; so did letters and novels, photographs and numbered prints. In Port-au-Prince, we said that we knew the north by its artists and its bullets. No doubt they said something similar about us.
Maybe I would find out.
My hotel was just off the Place d’Armes in the old city, surrounded by two and three-story houses with long balconies and wooden shutters over the doors. Not far away, construction crews were knocking down such houses, making room for stores and offices as other neighborhoods had once been cleared to make room for factories. The houses needed a coat of paint, as they might in Port-au-Prince, but here, the streets in front of them were clean.
“Look there,” Oswald said, pointing at one of the houses. The line of bullet-holes had been covered over very cleverly, and I had to look carefully to see them. The marks of fire were only slightly clearer.
“The revolution?” I asked.
“That, or the Black Prince, or maybe even before. Some of these houses were built when this was still Cap-Français. They’ve seen everything, even the things we don’t talk about.”
“Was it bad, in the Black Prince’s time? I was only a child then, but we heard…”
“It was worse.” He looked toward the house again; he’d known someone there, or maybe it had even been his. “It was a look into another place, a glimpse of what the dark spirits are like when they show themselves. But I didn’t realize until then, how much of our song comes from that place. Choucoune is really a southern song, you know, for all I wrote it in Kreyol. It’s too light for the north.”
“The south is hardly carefree.”
“No, it isn’t. But you’ve put away the loa, kept them in a place where no one can see them. You’re priest-ridden, but in this they may have the right idea.”
I looked at him, surprised. “Most northerners would say that we’ve stopped listening to the land. That we’ve let the mulattoes make Frenchmen of us, given up what makes us Haitian. The noiristes at home say that too.” I stopped suddenly, realizing I’d said we. I was an outsider in the battle between the noiristes and the pétionistes… but I was born in Petit-Goave, and there was something in this land that called to me too.
“I’d have said the same thing, before the Black Prince. Now… I don’t know.” He hefted my trunk, waving off my protests, and carried it into the hotel. “The land is power, the loa are power. If you get too close to it…”
“Music,” I said. “That is power too. In the south, when we live to play, to tell our stories… we’re like moths to a flame.”
“A flame, yes.” Oswald’s expression told of being singed by the same fire. “Our songs will burn you.”
*******
The bar where we met the other musicians was called the Vastey, and had a mural of the old reprobate splashed across one wall. “Baron Vastey,” I almost said, before I remembered that “baron” was a bad-luck word in the Kingdom. How else could it be, when they’d been ruled by a prince who was Baron Samedi in the flesh? And in the flickering light, shadows played across Vastey’s portrait.
We exchanged greetings, all of us; Oswald and I, Henri and René, the others who had come from across the north to join me in song. We all laughed about how little we looked like our pictures, and how different our voices sounded in person. We ordered rum and drank it; we ordered more and drank that too; we lowered our voices and told scurrilous jokes about the King; we raised them and told even more salacious ones about the politicians in the south.
Henri was the first one to take out an instrument, a guitar. He strummed a chord and looked a question at the others; they all recognized it and nodded. René drummed on the table and Oswald began singing, and I listened to learn the words.
“What is this? I’ve never heard it before.”
Henri left off playing. “It’s something I wrote to one of Vastey’s old poems. La fille africaine.”
“About the girls, and in French? Another southern song?”
“Southern?” René asked. “Not much more northern than Vastey. What have you been telling him, Oswald?
“The same he’s been saying to everyone,” another man answered – Hervé, I thought his name was, but I wasn’t certain. “He sees the darkness in the land, but he doesn’t see the love. Love is power. It comes from deep under us too.”
“Sex?” asked Henri. He laughed, more than a little drunk.
“That, even more. Vastey sang of it before we were ever born. Even the loa sing of it.”
I listened, half-drunk myself. It was the kind of discussion that I might have had in a coffee-house in Port-au-Prince, but here, it was set to music and fueled by rum. These were the intellectuals of the Kingdom; it could be dangerous to speak here, even after the revolution, so they sang.
“Play Choucoune now,” I said to Oswald. “Play it in the northern way, with all the power in its soul. And I will follow.”
*******
The stage was outdoors, on a field where one of the Black Prince’s houses had stood, and the people who filled it were welcoming. When the applause died down, I gave the beat and Oswald played. He played Choucoune, the song of north and south, and he played it as the prince might have, with no limits, as if the world were burning around him.
And on the second measure, I joined him.
-- 1913
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