[MUSIC PLAYING]
HAMILTON MORRIS: That morning, I wake to find a gaping burn
in my forearm oozing a purulent gleet.
I stir and begin to vomit, begging for an antidote.
I find Jean-Claude sitting next to me.
And he encourages me to remember that the
antidote is my mind.
Alex knows a bokor who knows a bokor, who knows a bokor in
Artibonite.
So we drive for many hours until the road disintegrates
and the wheels of our Mitsubishi Montero
will turn no more.
The peristyle is located over five miles
from the nearest road.
And we cross the path in the midday sun without water, each
step bringing me closer to heat stroke,
collapse, and death.
The ground is still wet from the previous night's rain, and
the air vibrates with bloodthirsty insects.
Alex tells me that this region is notorious for the use and
sale of zombie slaves and that the bokor we have come to
visit might even keep some in his rice fields.
After hours of walking, I enter the bokor's peristyle
surrounded by goats, mango trees, and a
fence of living cacti.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: I'm introduced
to the bokor, Crescent.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Unlike the last bokor, Crescent carries
himself with total confidence, like he has nothing to prove.
He's laid back.
And looks at me in such a way as to suggest not only that he
knows, but that he knows I know he knows.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Could I see the bottle?
ALEX: Not the powder, the bottle, right?
HAMILTON MORRIS: Yeah.
I hold the glass bottle with no more than 300 milligrams of
beige powder.
It's impossible to say anything about its potency or
authenticity just from looking at it.
But it's still exhilarating--
my first glimpse of the legendary powder.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Crescent dares me to try the powder.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Casually mentioning he is equipped with
a powerful antidote.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Ask him how confident he is that he'll be
able to reverse the effects with a lemon.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He said, yeah, he's sure that you
won't have any problem.
HAMILTON MORRIS: OK.
What is your thought on this, Alex?
ALEX: You know, for myself, I was offering to try it.
But if you are, too, you can go for it.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: When he suggests I use the powder, I'm
torn between scientific skepticism and the desire not
to die an agonizing death deep in the Haitian countryside.
I decide Crescent is offering me the poison as a test.
Should I demonstrate my strength, I will
have gained his trust.
And should I be wrong, Crescent assures me that he
has an effective antidote on hand, one half of a key lime.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Though the lime provides me with little
comfort, even the most well-equipped hospitals in the
world have no antidote for TTX, because thus far, one
does not exist.
Ask him what the dose is.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: Some of the feather.
The feather with take some.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Crescent frowns and leans away for me,
insisting that I do not let any catch wind
and blow onto him.
Some powder is on the end of the feather.
I dip the chicken feather into the glass bottle, allowing a
mote of beige poison to cling to a single barbule.
I brush the mote of zombie poison onto my arm.
I don't feel anything at all.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: That's going to be a lot.
Crescent changes his attitude and leans in towards me.
He grabs the bottle and pushes the mouth to my skin, turning
it upside down, revealing a ring of white powder the size
of a quarter.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Over the course of six minutes, I allow
the powder to dissolve on the wet, hot skin of my forearm
with two millimeters of skin between the powder and my
thirsty Russian capillaries.
I am not a hypochondriac, but there is nothing that will
make you more aware of your throbbing, roiling, bubbling
physiology than waiting for one of the world's most potent
neurotoxins to kick in.
Reeling through a mental checklist of symptoms, I am
still not experiencing anything.
ALEX: What do you feel like?
HAMILTON MORRIS: I don't feel anything at all, other than I
feel some mild terror that I'm going to
die, but nothing distinct.
The powder is ceremonially removed from
my arm with a lime.
The poison is encircled and then circumscribed with two
strokes forming a cross and that's all.
If the powder did contain TTX, the ascorbic acid in the lime
would have only increased its water solubility and helped it
cross into my blood.
But even then, not enough time has passed for the paralysis
to have set in, unless the dose was truly massive, in
which case, I will be dying shortly.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: As I wait for the TTX to present its
symptoms, I feel it an appropriate time to breach the
subject of zombie slaves.
Well, thank him for allowing me to
experiment with his powder.
Ask him if there are zombies in the building behind us.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: After negotiating a price with
Crescent, we agree to donate a generous sum to his peristyle
in honor of the Loa, Jean Zombie.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Entranced, Crescent begins a ritualized
door knocking and key jingling ritual, finally pausing before
a locked door I have looked at all day.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
-[MOANING AND MUMBLING]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Alex, can you ask him what's beneath the
cloth?
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
WADE DAVIS: The first thing you have to do when you start
thinking about zombies or vodou is step
outside of the cliches.
And this really forced me to realize that, you know, I
might be on the outside looking at the zombie thing in
a certain perspective.
But when you're on the inside, Narcisse, or a Haitian like
himself, wasn't sitting there thinking, do or
do not zombies exist?
I mean, he knew in the very fiber of his being since
childhood that zombies existed.
He knew exactly how one was created.
He knew exactly why one was created.
And so, that's sort of the template upon which all these
drugs are going to work.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: To our surprise, the Loa Jean Zombie
refuses to take the local currency.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Crescent is irate, but tells us he will
have prepared a new poison the following Saturday.
CRESCENT: [SPEAKING CREOLE]