For someone who has read many books about Haiti, having lunch at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince can bring on a multilayered sense of déjà vu. The Oloffson, "with its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork," appears as the Trianon in Graham Greene's The Comedians, set in the days of Papa Doc. Greene's narrator owns the place, in fact, and to him it seems "fragile and period and pretty and absurd." Some years before Greene, the novelist Herbert Gold arrived at the Oloffson, "then a rundown gingerbread mansion, catchall home for an international collection of wildballs--drunks, criminals, the sexually obsessed, crazies, remittance folks, mistresses and gigolos and bemused adventure-seekers." In his memoir Best Nightmare on Earth, Gold claims to have shown Greene around the city and to have introduced him to the people who became Greene's characters.

Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season, also headed to the Oloffson as soon as she arrived in Haiti. Wilentz, who came just before Baby Doc was forced into exile, was carrying a copy of The Comedians in her luggage, a banned book that she expected to be confiscated at the airport. Seeing the moon reflected in the Oloffson's swimming pool, she recalled the scene in The Comedians where the narrator "discovers the bloody body of the Minister of Public Works in the hotel's empty pool, a suicide in the moonlit shadow of the diving board." From my own table on the gingerbread veranda of the Oloffson--not far from where the Minister of Education was eating with friends--I could see the famous swimming pool through a screen of palm fronds. It was empty.

When the group of eight people in which I was traveling--we had signed up for what was billed as a "Reality Tour"--drove north from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien, the shocks of recognition went off like a string of firecrackers. Haiti's history has been harsh and dramatic, and scene after violent scene came to mind as I saw the settings where they had taken place. The presidential palace was almost as Brian Moore described it in No Other Life: "a replica of the American White House, but twice as large, a cluster of blindingly white buildings surrounded by formal gardens and high, ornate gilded railings." Here, on the "vast empty square" before the palace, Moore staged a confrontation between the aging dictator of his fictional island, in shabby black suit and Homburg hat, and a fearless young priest clearly modeled on Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

We passed the notorious Dessalines Barracks and threaded along the narrow road through Cabaret--once known as Duvalierville--where the tonton macoutes murdered with impunity. Not far from the city, between the hills that rose up on the right and the glittering ocean on our left, our guide pointed out Titanyen, the featureless sloping plain where bodies were dumped during the years of terror. The French-Haitian writer Anne-christine d'Adesky describes it in her novel Under the Bone: "There was a length of razor wire, scraps of leather and metal, what looked like industrial waste. The place smelled of dankness and decay, but not too strongly.... Leslie saw it first, part of a jaw, with only two teeth in it. She picked it up.... Then she began to find more teeth, and what looked like slivers of shale, which she now recognized were fragments of bone."

My interest in Haiti grew out of my interest in Africa, where I lived and worked for a time, and my first reaction on arriving in Haiti was a strong, warm feeling of being home again. The banana palms, the breeze-block architecture, the foraging goats and painted shop signs seemed very familiar. Once again there were old women in kerchiefs squatting behind pyramids of oranges, and pickup trucks rumbling by with a dozen people in the back.

Before I left, friends had made nervous jokes about machetes, or Bosnia, or how they hoped they would see me again. Yet despite the many reminders of past conflicts, and although my whiteness made me conspicuous, I felt nearly as safe on the streets of Port-au-Prince as I did in my own neighborhood. What happened near the town of Gressier, then, felt as if the fears of my friends, or my own half-buried fears, were fulfilling themselves with a kind of dream logic.

My group left Port-au-Prince in our van one morning, heading south for Jacmel. The leader of the trip, a Haitian named Max Blanchet, sat in front with the driver. Max was a retired chemical engineer who had lived in the US for many years but returned to Haiti periodically and kept in touch with events by telephone and Internet. In Carrefour, the chaotic strip of repair shops, barber shops, charcoal sellers, numbers parlors, and bordellos just outside the capital, we threaded past dozens of tap-taps, the covered pickup trucks used everywhere as buses. Their wooden sides were elaborately carved and brightly painted, and over each windshield was a motto, usually religious, spelled out in carnival lettering: L'AMOUR DE DIEU, DIEU AVANT, or TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL.

Outside the city, fields of corn and sorghum stretched to either side. Our driver weaved constantly to avoid potholes, sometimes dropping onto the gravel shoulder to skirt one of the bigger craters. Traffic began backing up, and I looked ahead to see that a big commercial truck had stopped in the opposite lane. A small crowd of peasants, their white shirts brilliant in the sunshine, were milling around.

"This is going to be an ugly scene," Max said. He already seemed to know what was going on. As we got close to the truck the crowd was thicker. Faces looked agitated and preoccupied. A few people glanced at the van full of blans--the term for foreigners, regardless of color. A tense young man stepped forward to wave us through.

"Don't look," said Max, and I obediently stared ahead, down the road. I assumed that Max thought it was dangerous to take too obvious an interest. It was only later that I realized he was trying to spare us an unpleasant sight.

Some of the others did look. They saw a man standing, tied up, by the side of the road. He was big and powerful-looking. Blood covered his chest, and a gash was visible on the back of his head.

"What's going on here?" someone asked. As we pulled away, Max called out questions to passersby in Kreyòl.

"That man was a zenglendo," he said, turning to us. The term meant a thug, a macoute, perhaps a death-squad member.

We drove past a white coupe with a crumpled hood, and a black Ford pickup lying on its side. Not much farther was a body by the side of the road--a thin man in a limp gray shirt, the rope used to tie him trailing in the dust. A car tire rested almost flat where his head should have been, a splash of red inside it.

My feelings seemed muted. I was in emergency mode: watching, listening, ready to react, but thinking only with the surface of my mind. Seeing the crowd and the body through the windows of a van helped put events at a distance, as if I were looking at them on TV. I felt chilled but not shocked at what was happening.

A convoy of white UN vehicles went past in the opposite direction. "Too late, guys," someone said.

For connoisseurs of irony and incongruity, Haiti is an embarrassment of riches. A man herding cattle down a dusty road wears a T-shirt that reads "I Love This Place." Two women perch on the concrete ledge of the family tomb while one does the other's hair. It didn't seem strange, just a few hours after the incident at Gressier, to be sitting with a rum punch and a plate of fried goat at a hotel overlooking a private cove.

We spent only one night in Jacmel, and on the drive back to the capital I began to feel more troubled by what had happened, and by our apparent acceptance of it. When we reached Gressier again, I stared as a tap-tap called FLEURS DU MAL rolled by. The message was unusual, and weirdly appropriate.

How would I have felt, I wondered, if I had seen the face of the wounded man, or someone standing by with a bloody machete? To personalize the killing in that way, to give it a face and eyes, might add a level of horror that I hadn't reckoned with. What if one of the victims had been white? A process of racial distancing might have been at work in me, dulling my response and preventing me from identifying with the victims. What if we had arrived on the scene a little earlier, when the zenglendos had just been captured, before any blood was shed? No one, I noticed, had said anything about trying to stop the killings, and I wondered what it would have taken for us to try.

A battered truck passed by, once the property of the Ginsberg bakery of Atlantic City. Showgirls and Sudden Death were playing at a crumbling concrete cinema in Carrefour. Haiti, it occurred to me, is one of those places where American debris washes up: our old trucks, our bad movies, our cheesy T-shirts, our failed policies. What happened at Gressier had links to the US, too. Bandits were killed on the spot because for years there was nowhere to take them, no functioning justice system to deal with criminals. The army, the police, and the rural section chiefs, corrupt and brutal, had been sheltered by a series of dictators who enjoyed the support or the passive acceptance of the United States. Now, two years after the return of President Aristide, the army had been disbanded and the police force was being reorganized. In the meantime the country policed itself.

Despite the terrible events of the country's history, the violent episodes I had read about in novels and memoirs, and the episode I had witnessed myself, I found that I liked being in Haiti, and was reluctant to leave. Just to roam the streets for a while was to see a succession of little dramas. A woman walked by with a bundle of live chickens trussed up on her head and another chicken under her arm. A coffin made of pinkish wood lay across trestles, a man leaning into it with a hand plane. A bedraggled turkey, looking thoroughly out of place, stood tethered on a street corner.

On my last evening in Haiti, I left my hotel in Pétionville to take a few pictures and was hailed by a man of about thirty whose English was so good I thought at first he was American. He was an artist, he said, and had worked for ten years for the US Marines. We talked about Michael Jackson's peculiar skin, and about travel. He had been to Germany and wanted to see the US but was worried about his safety. Was it true, as he'd gathered from movies, that all Americans carried handguns?

"I'd like to see some of your work," I said, thinking he probably had an apartment or studio in the comfortable neighborhood where we were talking. We set off down the Rue Villatte, then downhill some distance and onto a rutted road to a sprawling shanty settlement that I'd never seen before. The sun was setting and it had started to rain. We climbed a hill, scrambled down a slippery packed-dirt slope, and ducked into a shack the size of a toolshed: his home. The interior was pitch-dark because the electricity hadn't been paid. "This is my daughter," he said, but I couldn't see the little girl until he lit a couple of candles. She was afraid of me. Paintings covered the walls, uneven in quality but different from the tourist work I'd seen.

I hadn't meant to buy anything, but we had come a long way and he obviously needed the money. I offered to pay him something for letting me photograph him among his work, but his crestfallen look made me sorry I'd spoken. "I'm not a beggar," he said. "If you want to help me you can buy something small." I picked out a little rural scene with delicately rendered grass and trees. "You like this one?" he asked, watching my face. He wrapped it for me, and we went out into the rain to look for a taxi. When we reached my street I got out and shook his hand. "Do you really like it?" he asked again.

"I used to think the Haitian people were indomitable," wrote Herbert Gold at the end of Best Nightmare on Earth. "Now everyone knows that all peoples are domitable. Yet some innocence of hope still survives here, just because the air can be sweet in Kenscoff, or fragrant with charcoal smoke and flowers in the hillside neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, or salty and seaborne in Jacmel and the other villages sloping up from the jagged harbors of this island. The sun is strong, gardens grow on the steepnesses, the children clamor on their way to school, if there is a school, and their parents proudly take them by the hands."

The survival of hope and pride in Haiti is a moving thing to witness, and it is one of the reasons why I hope to return.

Geoffrey Wisner lives in Cambridge and frequently reviews books on African and Caribbean topics. His trip to Haiti was sponsored by Global Exchange in San Francisco, California.

This article first appeared in the March 1997 issue of the Boston Book Review.