Boozehound (28 page)

There is at least one “h” rhum, however, that is not AOC controlled: Rhum Barbancourt from Haiti. And every time I see the fifteen-year-old bottle sitting on a liquor store shelf in the States for $44, it makes me sad and conflicted. I usually buy it, out of a sense of pity and remorse. Probably no one can taste Haitian rum and not think of the devastation and human tragedy of the earthquake in January 2010.

For me, it runs deeper. I can’t ever taste it without thinking of my own visit to Haiti, back in 1999. I was visiting along with two friends, Kevin and Míchel. We’d all been greeted by the creaky brass band on the tarmac at the airport, and then by the construction sign at customs that read, “We Are Sorry To Welcome You In This Condition.” We loved that bottles of Barbancourt cost only eight dollars. And we found it intriguing that everyone sitting beside us at the blood-red blackjack table in the El Rancho Casino in Pétionville was a “businessman” from Colombia with bodyguards. But our first evening eventually turned squirrelly when Míchel won eight hundred dollars in a slot machine and then was told by the cashier he’d be paid not in dollars or gourdes, but in something called “Haitian dollars”—a nebulous denomination that amounted to less than one hundred dollars. When he started to protest a little too loudly and drunkenly, several guys with machine guns came over and escorted him out. As I followed, a faded pink five-dollar chip fell out of my pocket, and a teenage prostitute dove to the carpet in front of me to grab it.

The next day, as we puttered along in the bumper-to-bumper Port-au-Prince traffic, rolling over occasional streams of raw sewage, Saintil, our driver, explained to us that his favorite actor was Shaquille O’Neal. He particularly liked Shaq in the movie
Steel
. Saintil made a quick shortcut through a dodgy alley, and we passed a mangy dog fighting with an enormous pig—literally paw and snout—over the right to eat a pile of garbage. After the shortcut, we were back to a standstill, surrounded by the vibrant reds and blues and yellows of the crazy
tap-taps
carrying sardined passengers in the overcrowded streets, windshields emblazoned with “Christ Is The Big Captain,” “Lamentations 3:26,” and “Sylvester Stallone.”

As we pondered Shaquille O’Neal’s thespian work, Saintil surprised us again by saying he often longed for a day when Papa Doc Duvalier—with his voodoo mysticism and his murderous secret police, the Tontons Macoutes—would be returned to power and end the utter chaos and lawlessness. Saintil said this even though, at forty-nine, he was certainly old enough to remember firsthand the violence of the Duvalier regime. “Many people believe that Papa Doc is still alive,” he said. “No one actually saw him buried in his coffin. People say they’ve seen him, late at night, walking the streets of Port-au-Prince.”

We were on our way south to Jacmel and needed to exchange dollars for gourdes, so Saintil cut out of traffic and sped through several backstreets. He eventually pulled the truck through a metal gate at a gray, nondescript warehouse, passed several armed guards, and parked. The four of us entered a dimly lit backroom where a woman and two men were counting piles upon piles of money—gourdes, dollars, and any number of other currencies. Without a word, the woman quickly took our twenties and fifties, counted out gourdes, and handed them to us. The two men never looked up as they continued to wrap piles of bills in rubber bands. Three minutes later, we were escorted back outside and straight to the truck by one of the armed guards. “Let’s just not ask questions,” someone said. Back in the truck, we all took big swigs of Barbancourt.

The trip to Jacmel, which was only about forty-eight miles away, took over five hours, on pockmarked roads through parched, treeless, eroded mountains. After an early detour through the slums of Cité Soleil—which the U.N. has called “the most dangerous place on Earth”—we were all a little rattled and in need of another drink. When Kevin and Míchel requested a stop, Saintil pulled over at the Snack Bar de l’Immaculée Conception.

By the time we arrived in Jacmel, it was early evening. Guides, guys guarding over our truck, and people selling fruit and wooden sculptures swarmed outside our hotel. We hired a boy no older than twelve to take us around town, and almost immediately, he tried to also interest us in the services of his slightly older “sister.” Guides would continue to press many services on us over the next several days. At one point, when we needed to find a telephone, we had to hire three guides, one for each of us; then when we entered the neighborhood where the telephone office was, we had to hire another local guide for our guides. When we finally did arrive at the telephone office, we hired another guide to open the door and lead us into the building. So in the span of about six blocks, we’d placed five guides on our payroll.

Walking past the colonial buildings in the main square that night, one could almost imagine the port in the days when orange peels were exported to France to make top-shelf Cointreau. The town was Haiti’s major port in the nineteenth century—more important than Port-au-Prince. But that was all long ago. Gone from Jacmel was the sweet fragrance of orange peels drying in the sun on flat rooftops. Those citrus smells, according to Saintil, created a powerful, exotic aphrodisiac. Years ago, as a boy, he lived in one of the rural villages near here, before he moved away to Port-au-Prince. He told us this as we lounged at a beachside bar and drank fifteen-year-old Barbancourt rum and watched garbage wash up in the surf. In Jacmel’s soft breeze, you smelled something less than promising, something you couldn’t quite place: Burning garbage? Sweat? Diesel exhaust? Simply the smell of things falling apart?

Carnival began at breakfast the following day. We watched a parade of children in costumes pass by our hotel’s patio. Boys in purple tunics and fake swords danced in circles. Children with face paint and men with huge papier-mâché masks of dragons and lizards and spirits zigzagged down the road. A girl of about five danced on a stick that was levitated by a half dozen teenage boys while an older man pounded on a drum. Three men who’d doused themselves with motor oil as makeup and donned bull’s masks cracked long black whips in the middle of the street. After each performance, we placed gourdes in the dancers’ outstretched hands.

Later, we walked to the beachside bar, and my friend Kevin purchased, for a simple glass of rum, a straw hat painted fluorescent green and orange. Our bartender, the same one who’d run out of rum the night before and charged us for using our own, told us that cruise ships would soon be returning to Jacmel, calling there as they did thirty years ago. When we scoffed and pointed out all the garbage and metal debris littering the harbor, the bartender said, “Cruise ships already call at Cap Haitien in the north. The cruise companies just don’t tell the Americans that they’re coming to Haiti. They say it’s a ‘secret Caribbean island.’ ” It’s true about Cap Haitien. If your cruise ship has stopped for a boozy afternoon on a “private island” called Labadee … well, you’ve actually been in Haiti.

Saintil suggested we go see a Carnival cockfight that was happening on the outskirts of town, and we reluctantly agreed. As our truck approached the cockfight pit, a fight had already begun. Under the thatched roof, men cradled roosters, and each of the birds’ heads was covered with a sock or a rag so they wouldn’t be provoked to bare their talons before the fight. We bought tickets and squeezed past barefoot spectators who spilled off the wooden benches and leaned on one another to see two roosters tearing each other into a bloody mess. The fight took an agonizing twenty minutes, with the crowd cheering each time one of the cocks staggered backward after a blow. Finally, one of them fell, and we watched money change hands.

We waited in the sun for the second fight, watching a friendly, toothless old man and his son sharpen their rooster’s claws with a rusty knife. We stood trying to decide if we wanted to continue to sunburn ourselves or squeeze back under the roof. We watched a woman ladling a red homemade liquor out of a huge washtub. Nearly one hundred men drank out of the same rusty metal cup. We broke open our bottles of Barbancourt and passed them around.

Finally, as the hot stench of sweaty bodies stuffed in tight quarters under a sunbaked thatched roof reached its peak, the two cocks began fighting. But just as one rooster lunged for the other, the friendly toothless old man leaped into the ring and stood screaming with outstretched hands. The whole pit erupted in Creole curses and yelling. Saintil translated the argument to us as if this sort of thing happened every day: The old man who jumped in the ring shouted that the opposing rooster was under a voodoo spell and that a zombie walked among the spectators at the cockfight. The old man declared that he was a powerful man and insisted upon standing in the ring to ward off the effects of the zombie. Of course, the other men around the pit didn’t like the idea of the old man standing in the middle of the cockfight and took issue. Another half hour of arguing ensued, with a lot of shoving and pointing. Finally, the fight was canceled. A young boy walked through the crowd, carefully counting bills out of a paper bag, paying back those who’d gambled. Judging from the tenor of the now-angry cockfight crowd—and in tune with my sudden desire to join PETA upon return home—we decided to return to Jacmel before the next match started.

Later that evening, Kevin, Míchel, Saintil, and I sat at our hotel’s patio bar with more Barbancourt and listened to a ragtag band consisting of ten men and only three instruments: a bongo, a homemade banjo, and a pair of maracas. The old man with the maracas, the band’s leader, danced and sang haunting Creole ballads. His white belt, cinched tight around his frail waist, looked as though it could never keep his baggy pants from falling down. Later, when he was drunker, the bandleader would fall down, backward, over his own wooden chair.
“Donnez quelque chose pour la musique”
(Give something for the music) read a handwritten sign.

As we ordered more rum, Kevin innocently requested a once-popular song he only half remembered from when he’d honeymooned in Haiti in the late 1970s. But when the band suddenly broke into the chorus of “Duvalier, Duvalier,” nearly half the bar cleared out. The only one still dancing was a prostitute in a dirty brown dress. A dozen boys who loitered in the street kept tapping us on the shoulder, over the patio railing, with their palms out.

Our twelve-year-old guide returned. Míchel told him to get lost, but Kevin had another idea. This boy was barefoot, and for a couple days we’d all noticed how raw and injured his feet looked. Kevin took out four twenty-dollar bills, gave the boy one of them, and told him to go buy a pair of shoes with the money. “If you come back tomorrow at breakfast wearing a new pair of shoes,” he said, “I’ll give you the rest of the money.”

The next morning, over mangoes and coffee on the hotel patio, we saw the boy clomping across the square. He was wearing a brand-new pair of what must have been size-thirteen basketball shoes. He could barely walk in them without tripping, and at one point he walked right out of them. But he was beaming, and he stomped up onto the patio and toward our table. He tapped Kevin on the shoulder and put his hand out. Kevin counted the bills into his hand.

When we returned to Pétionville, we attempted to visit the Barbancourt distillery. Saintil drove us, in the morning sunshine, high above Port-au-Prince to the stone ramparts of the Jane Barbancourt Castle. The thick, wooden door was locked, and so we banged with the huge metal knocker. After three knocks, the castle door slowly opened, and we were met by … a woman in pink curlers and a nightgown. “You want to taste rum?” she said. There was a flurry of activity, and the woman’s clearly hungover (or strung-out) boyfriend served us a huge plate of mangoes and coffee while the woman searched the castle for the key to the tasting room. She handed us a brochure that had to have dated from the Duvalier-era 1960s—with oversaturated photos of lush green mountains that now were totally deforested. The tasting room looked like a cheesy midcentury version of Medieval Times, with chairs and a bar cut out of barrels. The couple dusted off a few ancient bottles of
Jane
Barbancourt rum—not at all what we’d been drinking. Of course, this visit had been a big mistake. We later learned that there are two branches of the Barbancourt family that split many years ago. Some got the distillery, while others got the castle.

After I returned home from Haiti, I tacked a quote above my desk that has hung there for over a decade. It’s from the seventeenth-century English churchman Thomas Fuller: “If an ass goes traveling, he’ll not come home a horse.”

Lately, I’ve been drinking Rhum Barbancourt again, because I think it’s important to remember that some spirits, particularly rum, often come from troubled places. If we think about the terroir of spirits, we should also think about the people who struggle in that terroir. The Barbancourt distillery suffered major damage, losing around four million dollars in the January 2010 earthquake. But within six months, I was glad to hear that the distillery, with its 250 workers, is back up and running—optimistically hoping to recoup its loses within a few years. As for the Jane Barbancourt castle, I have heard nothing.

Years after I visited Haiti, I was tasting with a young Calvados producer from Normandy named Guillaume Drouin, who told me he’d worked for two years at the
real
Barbancourt distillery before he took over his father’s Calvados distillery. Drouin was then an oenologist and he followed his girlfriend to Haiti. “The guy at Barbancourt said to me, ‘Well, I don’t have a job for you. I don’t know what you’d do. But we only get an oenologist on the island about once a century, so I’d be foolish not to find something for you to do.’ So I started working there.”

I told Guillaume my story about Haiti as we were tasting his family’s very rare and expensive apple brandy. I told him I’d always felt very conflicted about that trip: about how I’d wanted to help, at the very least by bearing witness, but how in the end I’d just been a ham-handed visitor. “I felt the same way,” Guillaume said, who said it was extremely awkward to be the boss, as a
blanc
from the former colonizer. “After I came back to France, I was depressed. I left there and returned to my comfortable life. But how was I supposed to forget about what I’d seen in Haiti?”