Science From Away: Voodoo-Science?

I greatly suffered from a painful sinus infection and an impending lonely holiday season as Christmas 1983 was approaching and as my fall term of teaching was ending. A month earlier, several of us stood around listening to a former colleague, Gerald Oster, (http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/11/obituaries/dr-gerald-oster-75-who-found-op-art-in-eye-experiments.html) telling us about buying a ranch near Jacmel, Haiti and inviting us to come and visit.

Thirty years ago there were still travel agencies, and on Montague Street in Brooklyn, near the campus, one of these now relics had a sign in the window for cheap round-trip flights to Port-au-Prince. Blazing heat – what a great way to cure my painful stuffed up infected sinus. Within a few days, I found myself in the Prince Hotel in Port-au-Prince, without air conditioning and (!) without a painful sinus. The heat cure was a greatly welcomed suddenly draining nose. After a few days in Haiti’s biggest city, drinking beer with several expatriate members of the Guinness family, I looked into travel to Jacmel and discovered the packed-with-people taxi mode of travel in Haiti, where I being Monsieur Blanc, sat alone with the driver in the front seat while the rear doors could barely be closed from the pressure of the crowded occupants. I was deposited at a sea side café in Jacmel where I was immediately surrounded by barefoot boys inquiring about what I wanted in a language I could not understand. However, the word Oster seemed to do. In exchange for a few American coins they ran off. The other Monsieur Blanc showed up about an hour later in a World War II jeep and off we bounced to a ranch a few miles from Jacmel, a ranch on a hill with a wide ranging view of the Caribbean.

Within a day or two of my arrival at the ranch, we were visited by a young woman accompanied by two older ladies who, from their behavior, appeared to be her relatives, perhaps her mother and aunt. Gerald and his wife Selmaree, a black woman from Philadelphia known locally as Madame Blanc, greeted the newcomers with a friendly know-you wave. They had come with a deal in mind. Apparently, the gambling houses in Port-au-Prince favored mulatto croupiers as a means to make the European visitors most comfortable. The young woman was there as an offer to me to make it possible to sire a child with her, an investment in the financial future of the family. Although I admit temptation, I did not take the offer, perhaps saving my life considering that the early 1980s and Haiti are thought to have been involved in the genesis of the AIDs epidemic.

Haiti and voodoo are closely intertwined and I was intimately exposed to this connection when one day Gerald and I, accompanied by several local men, left on horseback to enter the surrounding jungle. No women came along. The memory is not perfectly clear, but enough to remember stopping at a clearing where we passed around the continuously filled cap of the whiskey bottle until in my woozy state, I noticed a goat tied to a tree nearby. The goat’s fate was to have its neck slit while voodoo chants erupted from the men who surrounded the scene and forcefully blocked my view. In this way, I knew what was happening but could not see the grisly event unfold. Was a spell being cast that had to do with me, the newcomer, and even with Gerald – with our futures? Why was I there? No one told me, but shortly after returning from that trip into the jungle, I met a local painter, Pauleus Vital. He had two recently completed paintings for sale. One showed people rising from their coffins into the sky and the other showed a wedding scene.

Vital’s work, I was told, was widely known in the United States including in a recent show at the Brooklyn museum. I needed no convincing – the two paintings, in the naïve style were wonderful. I considered both but finally settled on the wedding scene. Perhaps considering the path my life took after returning from Haiti in early January 1984, it might have been a fateful choice – life over death. Vital, whose paintings can be found on the web under his name and sell in the range of thousands of dollars, was interested in voodoo. He asked me for one hundred dollars, which I readily paid and he offered, for no extra cost, to make the frame himself. Vital, whose large and powerful hands I still remember, seemed weakened and later I learned he was to die of cancer in June of 1984. I had no idea of the true value of what he offered to me, but did send him, when I returned to New York, another couple of hundred dollars, but still far less than what I now know the painting is worth,. I could have realized the value of what I had purchased: two men who lived near the ranch offered to drive me to the airport in Port-au-Prince. On arrival at the airport they tried to wrench the package away from me, which I successfully resisted only because of the police presence.

Within two months of my return to New York in January, in early March 1984, I met Anne, my wife now of 28 years and mother of our two children. The wedding scene, which hung prominently in my Brooklyn apartment, took place on a grassy lawn. The lawn was cut in the shape of the letter A. Anne rejects the connection but I treasure the painting not only for its beauty but also for its possible connection to my life and marriage.

Gerald Oster was murdered in a robbery at his ranch not long after my visit. Had he purchased the funereal scene, the painting I left behind?