1954–1956, 1957–1967, 1978: (Chapter 14 Footnotes — The Apparatus of Terror: Duvalier’s Maquis in a Priest’s Library, the $7 Million Cane-Cutter Peonage, the…

1954–1956, 1957–1967, 1978: (Chapter 14 Footnotes — The Apparatus of Terror: Duvalier’s Maquis in a Priest’s Library, the $7 Million Cane-Cutter Peonage, the Tonton Macoute Etymology, the CIA’s Astrology Investment, Fort Dimanche’s Oubliettes, and the Pen in One Hand and the Gun in the Other): The footnotes to the Duvalier chapter illuminate the hidden machinery of the regime. During his years underground from 1954 to 1956, Duvalier first hid with neighbors on the Ruelle Roy within a few doors of the Clément Jumelles — who gave him food, shelter, and money — then disguised as an old market woman moved to the home of père Jean-Baptiste Georges, where in the Canada-educated priest’s library he spent long hours reading and writing. Other notable army Duvalierists included Colonel Georges Danache, Majors Frédéric Arty, Edner Nelson, and Franck Romain — the last being the original for Graham Greene’s Captain Concasseur in The Comedians — as well as Lieutenants Monod Philippe, Jean Tassy, and Gracia Jacques, the last an oungan, boko, and former mess sergeant. The hulking Jacques, who stood at the president’s side on every public appearance holding a cocked .357 Magnum revolver, signalized his assumption of command by surgical removal of a huge mole dominating even his Himalayan nose; his one humane trait, fondness for animals, prompted a brother officer to say he treated animals better than human beings. An AFL-CIO official asserted in 1964 that every year since 1957, Duvalier had supplied 30,000 cane-cutters for the Dominican cane fields, receiving $15 per head plus a fifty-percent cut of wages — realizing some $7 million annually from this peonage. The etymology of tonton macoute was itself revealing: in Creole, Uncle Knapsack was the Haitian child’s antiperson to Tonton Noël — good children received presents at Christmas, while bad ones were whisked away into the cavernous macoute and never seen again. The CIA, learning of Duvalier’s fervent belief in the Paris astrology journal Horoscope, put up a substantial sum to buy space in an astrological forecast column the president avidly read. One particularly awful feature of Fort Dimanche was the special cells — oubliettes a yard wide, five feet high, and six or seven feet deep, used to confine as many as four persons simultaneously; in February 1978, Amnesty International asserted that the mortality rate of political prisoners in Haiti was the highest in the world. One afternoon in 1967, holding discourse with young officers of the Garde Présidentielle, Duvalier asked: do you know why I have succeeded where other intellectuals, such as Firmin and Bobo, failed? — then answered his own question: I was the first to have a pen in one hand and a gun in the other. The Alliance for Progress reported at the end of 1966 that Haiti had the lowest life expectancy in the hemisphere at forty years, the lowest per capita caloric intake at 1,780, the lowest per capita income at $73, the lowest literacy, and the lowest percentage of children in school at six percent.