Baron Samedi

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On the morning of the first of November the gates of the largest cemetery in Port-au-Prince stand open to a crowd dressed in black and purple, and the noise coming out of it is not the noise of mourning. At the crossing of the central paths rises a black cross, taller than a man, and someone has set a battered top hat on its arms. A bottle stands at its foot: raw cane rum gone the color of amber where the peppers have steeped in it. Around the cross the families are arriving with candles and rum and cigars, with basins of food for the dead, and by afternoon the drums will have found the hard, driving pulse of the banda and the hips will follow it, and the songs will turn frank and filthy in a way no funeral permits. They have come to feast their ancestors and to greet the one who keeps them. The cross is his seat. The hat is his. The man in charge of every grave in the ground is being served by the living, and the mood is closer to a wedding than a wake.

Baron Samedi’s black cross at the cemetery crossroads in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, photographed on the Vodou festival of the dead. Andrew Welch, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Most of the world met him elsewhere. It met him on a movie screen, a laughing top-hatted figure riding the front of a train into the closing credits of a spy film, and it met him behind the dark glasses of a dictator who wanted the country to believe he was death itself. Both of those are borrowings, and both invert the thing they borrow from. In the Haitians’ own Vodou he is not a monster on a poster. He is a guardian at a door.

The head of the Gede

Bawon Samdi — Baron Samedi, “Baron Saturday” — is the head of the Gede, the great unruly family of lwa who hold death, the cemetery, and human fertility together in one grip. Vodou does not split those powers apart. The spirits who receive the dead are the same spirits who preside over conception, and the family that governs the grave is the rowdiest, most life-drunk company in the entire pantheon. The Gede are the ancestral dead risen to the rank of lwa, a nation numbering into the dozens of named figures who arrive in service as a boisterous escort. At their head stand the Baron and his wife, Manman Brijit (Maman Brigitte), the female head of the Gede and the guardian of graves.

The Baron is not quite one person. He heads a small college of “Barons” who are treated, depending on the house and the rite, as brothers or as aspects of a single power: Bawon Lakwa, Baron of the Cross; Bawon Simityè, Baron of the Cemetery; and the terrible Bawon Kriminèl, the enforcer, invoked not for a gentle passage but for judgment and vengeance. Below them spreads the wider Gede family — Gede Nibo, a psychopomp who is patron of those dead before their time, of the young and the violently killed; Gede Masaka, the gravedigger; and a long roll of others who come cracking jokes when the drums call them. Which figure is a distinct spirit and which is a face of the Baron is not fixed and not meant to be. Vodou is a house-by-house religion, and the roster shifts from one lakou to the next.

Behind the Haitian Baron lies the long crossing of the Atlantic. Vodou crystallized in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue among enslaved Africans drawn from three great religious worlds — the Fon and Ewe vodun of the Bight of Benin (see West African Vodun and the Fon), the Yoruba orisha traditions (see Orisha religion), and, in enormous numbers, the Kongo and other Central Africans of the Kongo world. The Gede’s particular character — their command of the ancestral dead, their command of the cemetery, the “hot” Petwo register in which so much of their service moves — is traced by scholars disproportionately to Kongo cosmology, to a Central African tradition in which the dead do not depart but cross a water-line and keep their village on the other side of it (see Bakongo cosmology and the dikenga). The Baron’s dominion over the grave, and the whole idea that the living and the dead trade across a threshold that can be opened, are the Kongo dead reconfigured on new ground. The land itself had held the dead before: the Taíno of pre-Columbian Ayiti were long gone from the plantations, but their name for the island endured under the imported one.

The record of all this is thick and argued. It runs from the Haitian ethnographer Jean Price-Mars, who in Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) insisted that the peasant’s religion was a religion and not a disease, through the outsider ethnographies read now with care — Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1953), Alfred Métraux’s Le Vaudou haïtien (1959), Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991) — to the sociology of Laënnec Hurbon. The precise lines by which a Fon vodun or a Kongo ancestor became this named Haitian lwa are reconstructed, not documented; the reconstruction is contested in its details and honest scholarship says so. What is not contested is that the Baron is a creole spirit, born on the far shore of the Middle Passage, and that he is served today.

The corpse who tells jokes

When the Baron mounts a devotee — when he takes a body to speak and move through, and the person he rides becomes his chwal, his “horse” — he arrives dressed for his own funeral. The standard image is exact and unmistakable: a black tailcoat and a black top hat, dark glasses, and wads of cotton pushed into the nostrils, exactly as a Haitian corpse is dressed and plugged and laid out for burial. The face is powdered white or painted to a skull. The glasses often have one lens missing or knocked out, so that he can watch both worlds at once, the living through one eye and the dead through the empty socket. He speaks in a high, nasal, guttural voice, the voice of a man talking through a stopped nose, the voice of the grave.

And what he says with it is obscene. The Baron is a filthy old man. He tells jokes that would clear a church, he dances the banda with unmistakable thrusts of the hips, he propositions the living and mocks the dignified, and he is never far from a cigar and a drink. His drink is piman: clairin, the raw, high-proof cane rum of the Haitian countryside, steeped with fistfuls of the hottest peppers there are — scotch-bonnet or goat peppers, in a common recipe twenty-one of them dropped into the bottle until the rum turns to liquid fire. When the Baron is present his horse will drink it, or wash the eyes and the genitals with it, without flinching, and the crowd reads the immunity as proof of who has arrived. A man cannot do that. A lwa of death, who is past all injury, can.

None of this is irreverence to be excused. It is the theology. The Gede answer death with generation; they meet the one thing that silences everyone by refusing to be solemn about it. Their eroticism is not comedy relief laid over a grim subject — it is the argument that the power over the grave and the power over the cradle are the same power, and that the correct response to mortality is to laugh and to make more life. They are, for the same reason, the great deflaters of the powerful. A Gede in the peristyle will single out the wealthy, the pompous, the official, and expose them to ridicule, because the dead are past flattery and past fear and have nothing left to lose by telling the truth. The one spirit who cannot be intimidated is the one who is already dead.

The vèvè of Baron Samedi: a ritual ground-drawing of a cross flanked by coffins, traced in cornmeal or ash to summon the lwa. chris, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Lord of the cemetery

Every cemetery has a master, and the master is the Baron. The custom is concrete: in a Haitian burial ground the oldest standing grave of a man is designated his, and when a new cemetery is opened the first man laid in it becomes Baron Samedi and the first woman becomes Manman Brijit — the founding dead who take charge of all the dead to follow. The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology sets the Gede within the wider architecture of Vodou service; at the center of that architecture, for the dead, stands the kwa Bawon, the Baron’s cross. It is a black cross planted at the crossroads of the cemetery paths, often crowned with a top hat, and it is read two ways at once without contradiction. It is the Christian cross. It is also the crossroads — the place where the road of the living meets the road of the dead — and so it is the seat of the lwa who governs the traffic between them. That both readings are true at the same time is not confusion. It is the shape of a living Vodou-Catholic faith.

That faith gives the Baron his saints. Across much of Haiti he is served alongside Saint Gérard Majella, the patron of expectant mothers — a pairing that ties the lord of the grave straight back to the fertility the Gede hold in the same hand. The fierce Kriminèl aspect is served alongside Saint Martin de Porres, whose feast on the third of November falls the day after the festival of the dead. Manman Brijit, for her part, carries the name and the fire of the Irish Saint Brigid. To serve the lwa beside the santo is not to have mistaken one for the other; it is to hold both, the way this religion has held both for three hundred years.

The Baron’s authority over the dead is not honorary. In the tradition he digs the grave and receives the soul, and no passage into the ranks of the ancestral dead is complete without his leave — no death is fully final until the Baron has let it be. It is on this belief that the reports of the zonbi turn, and they must be set down at the distance of the public record and no closer. In the ethnographic and folk accounts, a body said to be made into a zonbi — a soul captured, or a person left without one — can be taken only because the Baron who guards the passage of the dead has, in that account, been made to permit it. This is a Kongo-rooted idea of a stolen soul, described here as the tradition and its scholars frame it, sober and undramatized; it is not a procedure and it is not the ghoul of the horror film. What the belief actually says is how total the Baron’s jurisdiction is: nothing gets past him, in either direction, without his hand on the gate.

All of this comes to its height once a year at Fèt Gede, the Vodou festival of the dead, kept on the first and second of November over the Catholic All Saints’ and All Souls’. On those days, as Visit Haiti records, the Vodouizan flood the cemeteries in black and purple, dress and paint themselves as the Gede, pour rum on the graves, feast the ancestors, drink the peppered clairin, and dance the banda until the ground itself seems to be celebrating. It is a day of the dead that grieves by rejoicing — the guardian of the threshold thronged by the living, the family come to sit with its own.

The screen and the dark glasses

Two other Barons have to be named, because the world has met them more often than the real one, and both are thefts.

The first is the Baron of the screen. In the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), the actor Geoffrey Holder played a flamboyant, deathless, top-hatted Baron Samedi who cannot be killed — shot, thrown into a coffin of snakes, and still laughing on the front of the train in the film’s final shot. He was fused there with staged serpent rites and shambling “zombies” into a single sinister spectacle, and the film cemented for a global audience a caricature of a whole religion as menace and horror. That caricature has a history and it is not the religion’s. The pins and dolls, the curses, the shuffling undead, the very word “voodoo” as a synonym for dark power — these were built up by hostile missionaries, by the pulp and journalism of the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), and by the tourist trade that came after, and then sold back to the world as if they were the faith of the Haitian people. They are not. The tradition’s name is Vodou; its powers are the lwa; and it is the living religion of a living nation, standing in the same relation to the movie “voodoo” that any faith stands in to its slander.

The second theft is graver, because it was done with power. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971, deliberately dressed himself in the Baron’s iconography — the black suit, the dark glasses, the slow nasal voice — to suggest to a terrorized country that he was one with the lwa, that he was death and could not be opposed. He drew Vodou leaders into his apparatus and built the militia formally titled the Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, created in 1959 and known to everyone by the Kreyòl name for a bogeyman, the Tonton Macoutes — turning sacred authority into an instrument of terror. This was not Vodou; it was Vodou stolen for tyranny, and Haitian Vodouizan and scholars reject the conflation of the faith with the dictatorship as flatly as they reject the pins and the dolls. The religion was, if anything, the regime’s victim: this was the same century in which the Church’s anti-superstition campaign of 1941–42, with state backing under President Élie Lescot, extracted renunciation oaths and burned hundreds of ounfò and their sacred objects, until the ethnologist Jacques Roumain and others publicly condemned it. That fuller record of suppression — the slave trade, the Revolution and the first Black republic of 1804, the crushing 1825 indemnity, the occupation, the burnings — belongs to the story of the Haitians as a people; here it is enough to say that the Baron’s own century was not kind, and that both men who put on his hat, the film villain and the dictator, made him into the opposite of what he is.

For in the cemetery he was never the monster. The Baron who deflates the pompous is the enemy of exactly the kind of man Duvalier played at being. Set the two images side by side — the deathless terror on the poster, and the filthy old joker in the graveyard who drinks the pepper rum and makes the widows laugh — and it is the joker who is the older and the truer. The families who come to the black cross on the first of November with their clairin and their cigars and their obscene songs are not courting a horror. They are greeting the gravedigger who will one day dig for each of them in turn, and betting — this is the whole wager of the Gede — that death can be met with a joke and a drink and a dance, and that the one who keeps the door can be, of all things, a friend.

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