1907–1957: (The Man Behind the Black Suit: Duvalier’s Education, the Failed Michigan Studies, the Maquis Years, Machiavelli in His Pocket, and the Cerements …

1907–1957: (The Man Behind the Black Suit: Duvalier’s Education, the Failed Michigan Studies, the Maquis Years, Machiavelli in His Pocket, and the Cerements of Bawon Samdi): Dumarsais Estimé had taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycée Pétion, and like Dessalines, the doctor married a mulâtresse — Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, who bore him four children: Marie-Denise, Simone, Nicole, and one son, Jean-Claude. He had worked with American public-health missions in the 1940s, had taken and failed public-health studies at the University of Michigan in 1944, had followed Estimé into politics as director general of public health, then Under Secretary and finally Minister of Labor and Public Health. With Estimé’s fall he went over to opposition and stayed underground — in the maquis, he often later called it — from 1954 to 1956. As seen by the world and not a few Haitians, Duvalier was a bourgeois professional man of modest tastes, innocuous habits, and something of an intellectual who had left office no richer than he started — a civilian, no soldier, a fact that immediately endeared him to Washington and the men shaping the Alliance for Progress. His very dress — always a black suit, white shirt, dark tie, black shoes, and black homburg, together with owlish thick-rimmed eyeglasses — gave him the look of a conservative family practitioner. But Duvalier was deeply steeped in Haitian history and folk culture, committed to wiping away French veneer and proudly acknowledging African origins — his mentor Lorimer Denis was dead, but in Duvalier even more than Estimé the griots had finally come into their own, and he was determined that his government would become the political expression of the Africanist mystique, négritude. He was of course an adept of Vodou, almost certainly an oungan and most believed a boko, deeply versed in spiritualism, astrology, and onomancie — a Haitian kind of magical numerology from whose divinations Duvalier became convinced the number 22 would confer sinister powers. He was a student of Machiavelli — Clément Barbot said he kept a tattered copy of The Prince in his pocket during the years on the run — and he admired Nasser, Lenin, and Nkrumah, subsequently comparing himself with Dessalines, Mao, Atatürk, de Gaulle, and Christ. His complex, multifaceted, paranoid personality had above all a need for violence that the inaudible voice and halting manner still masked in 1957 — it was not for nothing that he often reminded Haitians they had become a nation only through violence. As for those conservative black suits and black hat, those unblinking eyes behind heavy spectacles — they were, as any peasant instantly recognized, the very cerements and earthly trappings of Bawon Samdi, that most feared lwa who kept the gates of the grave.