Page:Haiti- Her History and Her Detractors.djvu/389

Rh would be as miraculous as that of Lazarus. Yet St. John finds such a course not only quite natural, but he affirms that the resuscitated person is so much alive that he is killed afterward; and this is the fairy tale he wished to lead his readers to believe! With regard to the flesh of corpses which, according to the detractors of Haiti, is eagerly sought after, it suffices to have an idea of the tropical climate to be at once convinced of the impossibility of this loathsome idea and of the risk which those who would indulge in such practises would run. The intense heat of the Antilles is not long in decomposing dead bodies, and ptomaine would have quickly rid Haiti of the ghouls who would feed on them. In Haiti, as in France and in the United States, there are from time to time desecrations of graves. But cannibalism is not the motive for these occasional profanations; robbery, in Haiti as elsewhere, is the leading motive of such abominable crimes. The Haitians are accustomed to bury their dead in their finest apparel, the common people especially considering it their duty to clothe the dead in entirely new garments, from the shoes to the gloves. Some beggarly scoundrel who is in tatters will not scruple to strip a corpse of its clothes; and in order to conceal one crime he commits another by mutilating the body, thus provoking all kinds of superstitious conjectures. "At Jacmel," says Spenser St. John, "they found the cover of a coffin broken to pieces, the corpse resting on its side, an eye and a part of the face and the hair, and doubtless other parts of the body, carried away. The shoes had also been removed." Were he not so bent upon making out that the Haitians are cannibals, St. John might have seen in the removal of the shoes, and doubtless of other parts of the dead man's apparel,