After our sleepless wedding night, we went back to work. We were in the middle of a school term, and I had black-lung hearings to attend. Two months later, we finally had a honeymoon in Acapulco, an unusual one, with Hillary’s whole family and the girlfriend of one of her brothers along. We all spent a week together in a beautiful penthouse suite, walking on the beach, enjoying the restaurants. I know it was different, but we had a great time. I adored Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, and enjoyed spending time with her father and brothers, playing pinochle and swapping stories. Like me, they were storytellers, and all of them could spin a good yarn.
I read one book in Acapulco, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death— heavy reading for a honeymoon, but I was only a year older than my father was when he died, and I had just taken a big step. It seemed like a good time to keep exploring the meaning of life.
According to Becker, as we grow up, at some point we become aware of death, then the fact that people we know and love die, then the fact that someday we, too, will die. Most of us do what we can to avoid it. Meanwhile, in ways we understand only dimly if at all, we embrace identities and the illusion of selfsufficiency. We pursue activities, both positive and negative, that we hope will lift us beyond the chains of ordinary existence and perhaps endure after we are gone. All this we do in a desperate push against the certainty that death is our ultimate destiny. Some of us seek power and wealth, others romantic love, sex, or some other indulgence. Some want to be great, others to do good and be good. Whether we succeed or fail, we are still going to die. The only solace, of course, is to believe that since we were created, there must be a Creator, one to whom we matter and will in some way return. Where does Becker’s analysis leave us? He concludes: “Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead…. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.” Ernest Becker died shortly before The Denial of Death was published, but he seemed to have met Immanuel Kant’s test of life: “How to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man.” I’ve spent a lifetime trying to do that. Becker’s book helped convince me it was an effort worth making.
In December, I had another political decision to make. Many of my supporters wanted me to run for Congress again. The debt was paid off, and they wanted a rematch. I thought Congressman Hammerschmidt would be harder to beat this time, even if Jimmy Carter won the party’s nomination. More important, I had lost my desire to go to Washington; I wanted to stay in Arkansas. And I was getting more interested in state government, thanks in part to the opportunity Attorney General Jim Guy Tucker had given me to write a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of our state in an antitrust case involving the setting of interest rates on credit cards. Jim Guy was running for Congress, for the seat vacated by the retirement of Wilbur Mills, so the attorney general’s job would be open and it had a lot of appeal for me.
While I was mulling it over, my friend David Edwards, who was working for Citibank, called and asked us to go to Haiti with him. He said he had enough frequent flier miles built up to pay for our tickets, and he wanted to give us the trip as a wedding present. Barely a week after we returned from Mexico, we were off again.
By late 1975, Papa Doc Duvalier had passed from the scene, succeeded by his son, a portly young man whom everybody called Baby Doc. We saw him one day when he drove across the big square from his official residence in Port-au-Prince to lay a wreath at the monument to Haitian independence, a statue of a powerful freed slave blowing on a conch. His security force, the infamous Tontons Macoutes, were everywhere, and intimidating with their sunglasses and machine guns.
The Duvaliers had managed to dominate, pillage, and mismanage Haiti until it was the poorest county in our hemisphere. Port-au-Prince was still beautiful in places but had the feel of faded glory. I remember especially the frayed carpeting and broken pews in the National Cathedral. Despite the politics and poverty, I found the Haitians fascinating. They seemed lively and intelligent, and they produced beautiful folk art and captivating music. I marveled at the way so many of them seemed not only to survive but to enjoy life.
I was particularly intrigued by the voodoo religion and culture to which I had had some limited exposure in New Orleans, and that existed alongside Catholicism in Haiti.
The name of the traditional Haitian religion comes from the Fon language of Benin in West Africa, where voodoo originated. It means “God” or “spirit,” without the connotations of black magic and witchcraft attached to it in so many movies. Voodoo’s central ritual is a dance during which spirits possess believers. On the most interesting day of the trip, I got the chance to observe voodoo in practice. David’s Citibank contact in Port-au-Prince offered to take him, Hillary, and me to a nearby village to meet an unusual voodoo priest. Max Beauvoir had spent fifteen years outside Haiti, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and working in New York. He had a beautiful blond French wife and two bright young daughters. He had been a practicing chemical engineer until his voodoo-priest grandfather, on his deathbed, chose Max to succeed him. Max was a believer, and he did it, though it must have proved a challenge for his French wife and westernized kids.
We arrived in the late afternoon, an hour or so before the dance ceremony, which Max opened to paying tourists as a way of covering some of the costs of his operation. He explained that in voodoo, God is manifest to humans through spirits that represent forces of light and darkness, good and evil, which are more or less in balance. After Hillary, David, and I finished our brief course in voodoo theology, we were escorted back to an open area and seated with other guests who had come to witness the ceremony, in which spirits are called forth and enter into the bodies of dancing believers. After several minutes of rhythmic dancing to pounding drums, the spirits arrived, seizing a woman and a man. The man proceeded to rub a burning torch all over his body and walk on hot coals without being burned. The woman, in a frenzy, screamed repeatedly, then grabbed a live chicken and bit its head off. Then the spirits left and those who had been possessed fell to the ground.
A few years after I witnessed this extraordinary event, a Harvard University scientist named Wade Davis, in Haiti searching for an explanation for the phenomenon of zombies, or walking dead, also went to see Max Beauvoir. According to his book The Serpent and the Rainbow, with the help of Max and his daughter, Davis managed to unravel the mystery of zombies, those who apparently die and rise to life again. They are administered a dose of poison by secret societies as punishment for some offense. The poison, tetrodotoxin, is extracted from puffer fish. In proper doses, it can paralyze the body and reduce respiration to such low levels that even the attending doctor believes the person is dead. When the poison wears off, the person wakes up. Similar cases had been reported in Japan, where puffer fish is a delicacy if properly prepared, and deadly if not.
I describe my brief foray into the world of voodoo because I’ve always been fascinated by the way different cultures try to make sense of life, nature, and the virtually universal belief that there is a nonphysical spirit force at work in the world that existed before humanity and will be here when we all are long gone. Haitians’ understanding of how God is manifest in our lives is very different from that of most Christians, Jews, or Muslims, but their documented experiences certainly prove the old adage that the Lord works in mysterious ways.