An essay on Haiti by Langston Hughes who visited there in 1931, when under U.S. occupation, as part of a larger journey through the Caribbean.

‘White Shadows in a Black Land’ by Langston Hughes from The Crisis. Vol. 39 No. 5. May, 1932.

IMAGINE a country where the entire national population is colored, and you will have Haiti—the first of the black republics, and that much discussed little land to the South of us. To a Negro coming directly from New York by steamer and landing at Port au Prince, the capital, it is like stepping into a new world, a darker world, a world where the white shadows are apparently missing, a world of his own people. The custom officials who examine his baggage will be Negroes, the taxi drivers will be black or brown, his hotel keeper will probably be mulatto. In the shops, clerks of color will wait on him. At the banks, Negroes will cash his travellers’ checks and explain the currency of the country to him. Should he visit the Chamber of Deputies, he will find the governing body filled with dark faces, and even the president of the Republic will have a touch of color in his blood. In the country districts, the peasants who make up the bulk of the population, will smile at him from kind black faces, and the dark visitor from America will feel at home and unafraid.

It is doubly disappointing then, to discover, if you have not already known, how the white shadows have fallen on this land of color. Before you can go ashore, a white American Marine has been on board ship to examine your passport, and maybe you will see a U. S. gunboat at anchor in the harbor. Ashore, you are likely to soon run into groups of Marines in the little cafes, talking in “Cracker” accents, and drinking in the usual boisterous American manner. You will discover that the Banque d’Haiti, with its Negro cashiers and tellers, is really under control of the National City Bank of New York. You will become informed that all the money collected by the Haitian customs passes through the hands of an American comptroller. And regretfully, you will gradually learn that most of the larger stores with their colored clerks are really owned by Frenchmen, Germans, or Assyrian Jews. And if you read the Haitian newspapers, you will soon realize from the heated complaints there, that even in the Chamber of Deputies the strings of government are pulled by white politicians in far-off Washington—and that the American Marines are kept in the country through an illegal treaty thrust upon Haiti by force and never yet ratified by the United States senate. The dark-skinned little Republic, then, has its hair caught in the white fingers of unsympathetic foreigners, and the Haitian people live today under a sort of military dictatorship backed by American guns. They are not free.

But Haiti glories in a splendid history studded with the names of heroes like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and Christophe—great black men who freed their land from slavery and began to work out their own national destinies a full half-century before American Negroes were freed by the Civil War. Under the powerful leadership mentioned above, the French slave-owners were driven from the island, and Haiti became a free country of dark-skinned peoples. Then Christophe built roads and schools, factories and mills. He established laws and constructed a great Citadel on top of a mountain to defend the land and to create a monument in stone that could be seen for many miles away, so that his subjects might look upon it and be proud. That Citadel today, standing in lonely majesty against the clouds twenty miles from the city of Cape Haitien, is still one of the wonders of the New World, and one of the most amazing structures ever built by man. The story of its building, of how thousands of blacks labored at the task of dragging: material and heavy bronze cannons up the steep mountain slopes for years, and how the walls gradually began to tower against the sky, is most beautifully told in Vandercook’s “Black Majesty,” a record of Christophe’s life.

But after Christophe’s death in 1820, misfortune set in. Revolution after revolution kept the country in turmoil. Politicians and grafters gained control. The Citadel, the palaces, the schools, the roads were left to rack and ruin. The mulattoes and the few blacks with money set themselves apart as an aristocracy, exploited the peasantry, did little to improve the land, and held their heads high in a proud and snobbish manner, not unlike the French masters of old. They sent their children abroad to be educated in the futile upper-class patterns of European culture. Practical work became distasteful to them, physical labor undignified. If one wore shoes, one should not even be seen in the streets carrying a package. Business and commerce were left to foreign initiative. The white shadows began to fall across the land as the dark aristocracy became cultured, and careless, conceited, and quite “high hat.” Today, the Marines are there.

The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the end of the decade circulation had reached 100,000. The Crisis’s hosted writers such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina W. Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Jean Toomer, and Walter White.

PDF of issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_crisis_1932-05_39_5/sim_crisis_1932-05_39_5.pdf