Emerante de Pradines: The Birth of a Legend and the Making of a Tradition

From 2012 to 2016, I spent each July at the fabled Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, where I often sat and conversed with Madame Emerante de Pradines Morse ("Emy"), developing a friendship. Emy is the mother of Richard Morse, who with his wife, Lunise, fronts the popular Haitian roots band RAM and manages the Gothic gingerbread hotel. Emerante was born on September 24, 1918, to a mother of Haitian and Spanish descent and to a polio-stricken French father who had moved to Haiti with his family at the age of nine and became one of the country's most beloved singers—Ti Candio.

To know Emy is to enter a kaleidoscopic world of Haitian history, performing arts, New World postcolonialism, the supernatural, Vodou, and the formation of the Haitian folkloric music and dance tradition. With each summer that passed, Emy told me more stories, and I regretted not recording them. So this year I decided to sit down with Emy and interview her. At ninety-eight years old, she never ceases to amaze me with her mental acuity, although I couldn't help wishing I had done this type of interview earlier, when perhaps it wouldn't have been as much of an effort for her to "plug in" (as Emy refers to harnessing her powers). In the cool shade of her sprawling home perched on a mountainside above Port-au-Prince, we talked about her childhood and young adulthood, and how she played the pioneering role, in her own words, of "bringing Vodou to Port-au-Prince."¹

Emerante was one of eight surviving children born to her parents; she was the eldest girl in the family, second in line after her older brother and following four other children who had died prematurely. Describing her mother as a very religious woman who disliked leaving the house, Emy tells the story of how her mother implored Notre Dame of Mount Carmel to give her a child, a girl, promising that in return she would devote this child to the virgin saint. Not unlike the birth of Jesus, Emy's own birth purportedly occurred in a mystical way. "My birth happened very strangely. Instead of being at the doctor or the midwife, [my mother] was on vacation at Rivière Froid. She went to the bucket to urinate and I got out. I just dropped out. She screamed. Someone from the yard came in, put her to bed, took me and cut the umbilical cord, and took me out to bathe me," recounts Emy. Throughout Emy's childhood, her mother told her the story of this day, saying that the midwife prophesied, "This one will be something because of the way of her birth."

Figure 1.

Emerante de pradines holding a poster from a Stanford University multicultural dance concert she helped organize in 1981. Photo by Stephanie Scherpf

From an early age, Emy began to have experiences with the occult, experiences that she did not fully understand until a later age. "At age seven, a strange thing happened to me. In Haiti, there is always a guy on a corner somewhere breaking stone, from a big stone into a little [piece of] gravel, for people to build houses. A little chip of stone flew away and hit me on the head. I screamed, and [then] I saw a vision of a man with a top hat. He put his finger over his mouth. He passed his hand, wiped the blood, and disappeared. That was a visit of a spirit," says Emy. While her mother thought she was "crazy" and her father told her "not to dream for him," Emy says, "Vodou started to show in me. I would tell them exactly what was going to happen and it would happen."

Meanwhile, it was also from a young age that Emy's artistic inclinations and talents were being nurtured by both of her parents. Her mother taught her to recite poetry: "I was introduced to...