An earthquake opens a waterfall that becomes sacred ground

A strong earthquake shook Haiti's Central Plateau in 1843 and left a waterfall standing near the village of Ville-Bonheur. People named it Sodo, from Saut d'Eau. It became sacred ground almost at once, a shrine for Danbala Wedo, the serpent and rainbow spirit, and rainbows do appear in the spray most days. By 1844 Haitians were already speaking of the falls in connection with the Virgin Mary. The priest and historian Adolphe Cabon tied that to the separation of the eastern part of the island in the same year, which closed the road to Higuey. Haitians had been walking to Higuey since the sixteenth century to venerate Our Lady of Altagracia on and around 21 July. A pilgrimage lost behind a new border came back on this side of it, at a waterfall five years old that had not yet had an apparition.

Haiti occupied the eastern side of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, and Dominican writing came to call those twenty two years the black years. The Dominican Republic keeps 27 February as its independence day, and what the date marks is separation from Haiti. Spain governed the same territory for three centuries and the end of that rule carries no comparable holiday, which is the point: the celebration expresses a wish to claim a European legacy and to be free of an African past. Before the French Revolution the French held western third of the island had a much larger black population than the Spanish held east, and the Spanish speaking inhabitants of Santo Domingo had long feared a more numerous and militarily stronger French speaking black society on their border. Haiti invaded three times. In the early 1900s Haitian labourers, many of them undocumented, crossed the other way to cut cane and to live in the bateyes, and scholars date the sharpest growth of anti Haitian feeling to that migration.

In 1841 Charles Baudelaire, newly twenty, was put aboard a ship for Calcutta by his stepfather. He got as far as Mauritius and Bourbon, then part of France's plantation empire, and the voyage fed poems that later appeared in Les Fleurs du Mal. Back in Paris he began a relationship with an actress known as Jeanne Duval, widely reported to be of Haitian descent, whom he called his Black Venus. It ran more than twenty years. She is the subject of many of his own drawings and of a canvas by Edouard Manet, and visitors described finding him reading unpublished work aloud to her. Emmanuel Richon showed in 1998 that scholars had never established her origins and had repeated without evidence that she infected the poet with syphilis, when the transmission more likely went the other way. Slavery was abolished in Bourbon and the other French possessions less than seven years after his visit, while Paris argued about the equality of the races.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843 and reunified the whole island under his presidency in 1820. Contemporaries and later historians called his rule obscurantist, since it opposed the instruction of the mass of the population, and also military, autocratic and racially exclusive. Black officials were pushed out of administrative work and out of power. Schooling stayed with the light-skinned families of the elite. Under him the mainly mulatto fraction of the old free population consolidated itself as the ruling group and as the local relay of foreign commerce, taking hold of the port trade, specialising in ground rent and urban property, and leaving agriculture to blacks of every class. When the crisis came the sides failed to line up by colour. Against Boyer stood mulatto liberals speaking for landowners and merchants, black domaniers attacking mulatto hegemony as such, northern separatists, old followers of Christophe, and disappointed Boyerists inside the civil service.