Frederick Dupoux

Richard Morse '79 with his band, RAM, in concert.

Frederick Dupoux

The Hotel Oloffson, with a statue of Baron Samedi, a Vodou deity, in front.

Frederick Dupoux

Richard Morse ’79.

Richard Morse ’79 stands at the bar of the Hotel Oloffson in downtown Port-au-Prince, elbow resting on the counter, chatting with a guest who sips the hotel’s trademark rum punch. It’s a typical spot to find Morse, manager of Haiti’s most famous hotel, on a weekday evening. But tonight his usual detached cool is ruffled.  

His wife, Lunise, is still getting ready. The bus with the other band members left for the concert in remote southwestern Haiti hours ago, while it still was daylight. Now Morse will have to drive in the dark. But years of marriage and playing music together have taught Morse one thing about his lead singer and principal talent: Lunise can’t be rushed.

Morse asks for a glass of water. He is a portrait of marital and managerial despair. Not exactly what you’d expect from the leader of one of Haiti’s best-known bands. The two near-identical portraits of Haitian revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines that bracket the bar seem bemused.

By day Morse runs one of the handful of hotels in Haiti’s capital left standing after January’s earthquake. By night he crisscrosses the island in an SUV to play his signature Creole spirituals set to rock music. He’s got four gigs this week, another four next. It’s Haiti’s summer festival season, and while the drives are long and the weather is oppressive, he accepts every offer he can.

It’s been this way since the earthquake. Song and dance, so much a part of the cultural life in a nation where half the people can’t read or write, were all but absent from Haiti in the aftermath of the quake. The 53-year-old Morse helped to   bring it back. He was among the first musicians to hold a concert — three months after the quake, on the hotel’s front lawn, free for all. Thousands came to sing and cry. It was as if the island itself shuddered in pain and ecstasy, in profound release. Since then, Morse’s band has toured tent camps playing free concerts.

Morse cuts a striking figure. At 6 feet 4, he stands head and shoulder above most locals. His long salt-and-pepper hair is often braided to the middle of his back, and he wears bushy sideburns and black-framed glasses. Though his mother is black and Haitian, Morse’s skin is light, inherited from his white, American father. Morse is a U.S. citizen who has made a home in Haiti, when thousands each year fling rafts into the perilous straits to make the opposite journey. For years, he’s been among the few figures in the devastated island nation to say publicly what everyone thinks: that the Haitian government, American foreign policy, and international intervention have catastrophically failed the Haitian people. His people.  

After an hour, Lunise emerges, wearing a striking yellow dress and head scarf. Morse straightens from the bar. He calls for his 19-year-old son, William — named after Richard’s grandfather, Princeton Class of 1902, football player, president of Cottage Club — and says it’s time to go. The five of us — Morse, Lunise, Will, a photographer, and I — walk down the main staircase, past the statue of Baron Samedi, a Vodou lwa — or deity — of the dead, and pile into a Toyota Land Cruiser for the four-hour journey to the concert venue, a remote village called Saint-Louis-du-Sud.

With the collapse of     the presidential palace and the Notre Dame Cathedral, the 115-year-old Hotel Oloffson — owned by the powerful Sam family, which boasts two former Haitian presidents — is perhaps the most famous building left standing in Port-au-Prince. The gingerbread mansion teeters on a hillside overlooking downtown, its tree-lined circular driveway an oasis of tranquility in a city of dust and dirt. It is in a state of decades-long decay, “supported on the back of its termites,” novelist and frequent guest Herbert Gold wrote in The Hudson Review. An interior staircase slants perilously; the walls are cracked and frayed. Gold says that the way you know something is broken in the Oloffson is when it falls down.

That this hotel, of all places, withstood an earthquake that flattened the city and killed an estimated quarter-million people is both remarkable and, somehow, fitting. It’s a magical place. Graham Greene best captured that magic in his novel The Comedians: “With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of The New Yorker. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.” Little has changed in the nearly half-century since that was written, or the quarter-century Morse has managed the hotel, except perhaps the witches have been replaced by lwa.

“I don’t even know how I got into the hotel business,” Morse says. His first love always has been music. Twenty-five years ago he came to Haiti with a vague plan to learn his mother’s folk music and adapt it to modern ears. Back then he imagined himself as an international rock star. Now he prefers to play his music for Haitians. “I came to Haiti for the rhythms,” he says, “and I learned the rhythms don’t walk alone.”

Post-apocalyptic Port-au-Prince is filled with piles of the concrete remains of buildings. Yet during the day, hundreds of people swarm the streets. They’re part of massive open-air markets that are the only economy left downtown. Vendors hawk bruised cabbages, handicrafts, and donated goods. Cardboard containers tossed into fetid canals are lit on fire. People cram aboard brightly colored Tap Taps, jitneys that take them back and forth to the tent camps they now call home. Death is taken for granted. One evening at dusk, my driver swerved to avoid the body of a young man freshly shot in the head, lying in a pool of cherry-red blood.  

Tonight, as we drive through downtown toward the concert, the city streets are pitch-black. There are almost no street lamps or electricity of any kind — just flames from kerosene lamps and burning trash. The city’s permanent sheen of dust diffuses the opposing headlights. It feels like we’re driving into a cave.

We drive southwest, toward one of two narrow peninsulas that extend from the mainland like pincers on a beetle. “We’re headed toward the epicenter of the earthquake,” Morse says. Fissures scar the two-lane road headed out of the city. Pockmarked pavement suddenly gives way to gravel, then just as jarringly is paved again. I say it feels like we are driving on the surface of the moon. Morse laughs.

This is the main road in southwest Haiti, one of the poorest parts of this poor country. The alternate paths are by foot or by donkey. It is unclear whether the patches of gravel in the road are from decay, natural disaster, or corruption.

We have the radio on, and it plays the latest song by hip-hop star Wyclef Jean. Jean’s brief run for Haitian president was cut short when the nation’s electoral council ruled him ineligible because he hadn’t lived in Haiti for five consecutive years prior to the election. Jean wrote a protest song that had become a runaway hit among his many fans. In the song, the Haitian-born Jean addressed the criticism that he was a blan, a word that literally means white but is used in Haiti to mean non-Haitian, by singing in poor Creole, the country’s indigenous tongue. Morse listens intently. Though Morse writes his songs in Creole, he sings with an American accent. Suddenly, Morse bursts into laughter. “Wyclef sang douce makoos instead of douce makoss,” he says. “He’s just memorizing the lines. He really can’t speak Creole.”  

“That was the worst song ever,” his son Will cracks from the back. “I bet Wyclef wrote it on the plane back to the U.S.”

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