ABSTRACT

my first and a coincidental meeting with André-Pierre Vilaire took place on a Panama Lines vessel, steaming southward along the North American coast from New York to Port-au-Prince, just ten years ago. I was bound for Haiti for a year of study in this odd paradox of an Afro-French nation in the Caribbean; he was simply bound home. I watched him pacing the deck, impeccable in a starched white tropical suit, appearing quietly distraught, the lid of control tightly fastened, an elegant tall black man with narrow features and no interest at all in the vague efforts at ship spirit on board the S.S. Harding. The other passengers—the ship was about a quarter full—were mainly dependent families of men working in the Canal Zone, so I couldn’t blame André-Pierre for his determined abstraction. After he was pointed out to me, I sought an occasion for conversation with him; he was one of the people I had been told to look up in Haiti, and the description I had been given made him seem a curious person. He was the friend of a world-famous harpsichordist whom he had met at school in Paris years before; he was the lover of an actress then popular on the New York stage, and it must have been to see her that he came to New York; he was a prosperous Haitian lawyer; and he had that typical élite Haitian inheritance of divergent ancestry poured onto the African roots—French colonists, a Jewish peddler (grandfather), and a Dutch businessman from Curasao—so that in his family there were those who sought to pass abroad as exotic Frenchmen and those who, like proud André-Pierre, flaunted their blood and color. To be sure, André-Pierre could not have passed, as one sister did, but also it was not in his nature to try; he even stretched out his long legs in a deck chair as the ship entered tropical waters and seemed to be searching the sky with his closed eyes for a deeper suntan.