Haiti nan Route

Jean Jacques

From Soul in a Bottle by Madison Smartt Bell

What if Haiti, and the ideals of its First Revolution, were to come out of that two-hundred-year-long enchanted sleep? There were some real advantages to this place: a culture with integrity, a religion that worked at all levels of society... Haiti was the only country in the Western Hemisphere where black slaves had made an end to their own slavery; it was the only country in the world, so far as I knew, to have theoretically abolished the concept of race. The crossroads where the cultures of Africa and Europe and aboriginal America all met was found both in Haiti and the United States. The U.S. too had been stuck at that crossroads, for roughly the same two hundred years. From the height of the Citadelle, it was possible to imagine that the Haitians might be able to lead our way out.