Vooudoo drums. 

Haitian Voudou drums. 

Haitian voudou drums that I brought back from Port au Prince in 1952 when I was 14.  The designs on the drums are of the various loa, the spirits of the Voudou pantheon.  I knew their names and images by heart:  Damballah, Papa Legba, Erzulie Freda, Agway ‘Woyo…

Sometimes, when I walk by these drums, now in our living room in Pine Plains, NY, I see swaying dancers, feel throbbing drums, smell clarin, smoke and sweat thick as a texture. 

I hear the chant  of the houngan inviting Damballah to take possession of one of the congregants as he calls out, “Damballah, Damballah, koté ou ye?”

The ceremonies started around midnight on Saturday and continued into Sunday morning.  My parents would have me nap until around 11 PM and then let me go off — alone — in one of the peoples’ camionnettes for the half-hour coast down the mountain from Petionville where we lived.  I would tell the driver I wanted to go to Telegraph Sans Fil, one of the poorest sections of Port au Prince, where he would hand me off to be guided by the compass of throbbing drums in the night.

Eventually, dawn would come, and with it the Twentieth Century and Western Hemisphere.  I would find a camionnette to take me back up the mountain, this time with the engine running, exhausted but fulfilled, while the others shuffled to Sunday mass and prayed to the same spirits but with different names and images.

So.  An American teenager was allowed by his protective Boston parents to attend voudou ceremonies in the middle of the night in one of the poorest slums of Haiti by himself.  And he also spoke Creole?

But that is only half the story. The following week, I would go back down to Telegraphe Sans Fil and search out the houngan whose hounfor I had visited.  I was curious.  He was curious, too, but he had the answers.  I only had my father’s Argus C3 35mm rangefinder camera, This might be the strangest part of this story.  Haitians did not want their pictures taken. A photograph was an ouanga, the voudou doll that held part of the subject’s soul captive and thus subject to manipulation. 

So this American kid is expecting to get pictures of a Voudou priest?  We are on the verge of weird here.

The houngan must have sensed that the American boy was genuinely interested in learning about his religion and sincerely curious that he spoke Creole and was using the camera to aid his learning.  The priest drew the designs of the loa on the ground just the way he did during the ceremonies, dipping his hands in a bowl of cornmeal and letting the white powder sift through his fingers like a brush onto the dirt floor.

But I was not TAKING photographs; He was GIVING them to me as part of his answers. And that is all the difference.

I was learning the cornerstone of what would eventually be my career, taught by a voudou priest in the slums of Port au Prince. 

Through detours as a surgical technician at the Lahey Clinic, a researcher in the Neurochemical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, work experiences in professional theatre, and training in Vienna, I finally found my life’s calling at WGBH in Boston as a documentary filmmaker. 

A documentary, as I define it, is the exploration of reality with the intent to convey it to others.  I became recognized for being able to get at the truth — “If Stan shot it, it happened”.

And it all started in voodoo temples in the slums of Port au Prince.  And I still have the drums to prove it.

This Photo is one of many taken of the disorder and chaos raging today in Haiti.  It is dangerous for anyone to walk those streets that a 14-year-old American explored in the middle of the night some 70 years ago.

How and why has that dream paradise changed into a nightmare of Hell?

Group behavior and culture became the focus of my careers both as an organizational consultant and as a filmmaker.  While Haiti was churning through military dictatorships, I was trying to unravel the dilemmas of group life at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, The Washington School of Psychiatry, the Tavistock Institute in London, teaching in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Columbia.

Fancy places, but embellishing skills learned in voodoo temples in Haitian slums.

The puppy picture?  Always good to have plenty of puppy photos.  People love them.  These are our Icelandic Sheepdogs.  Another thing about me.