Ouarization

With 12,000,000 Negroes at hand. U. S. doctors have seen only two who turned completely white during life--one in Boston, one in Cincinnati. Last week a third specimen, Jean-Joseph Dauphin, arrived in Manhattan from the black Republic of Haiti. Blanched M. Dauphin carried a letter from Dr. Rulx Leon, director general of Haiti's public health service. The letter commended M. Dauphin to the attention of U. S. scientists. But immigration officers detained M. Dauphin at Ellis Island because he is illiterate. Later they let him proceed to the Chicago meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science.

Haitians call deliberate blanching "ouarization." They call darkening "haitianization." Jean-Joseph Dauphin "ouarized" himself by accident last summer. He asked his father, a brewer of herbs, for some "ouarit" beans to cure his asthma. The ouarit, sometimes called sea bean, is an oval, black-striped red bean about the size of a large lima bean. Jean-Joseph Ysmeon Dauphin's father told him to take only a speck of ouarit at a time, because the bean was an aphrodisiac. Jean-Joseph is 57. Suffering, he decided to kill or cure. He took a whole bean each day for five days. On the sixth day he took two ouarit beans. Soon after, he swears, he became unconscious, remained that way for some days. When he regained consciousness, he was stone blind and "swelled up like a dead pig." His skin was an itching, burning rash. For two months he stayed in that condition. Then his sight returned and he began to improve. But, to his shame as a good Haitian, he was entirely white, not the sallow white of the albino, nor the blotched white of the syphilitic, but the white of the true Caucasian. His hair remained kinky.

President Stenio Vincent of Haiti called on "ouarized" Jean-Joseph Dauphin. Haitian doctors examined him and the ouarit bean. They suspect traces of cyanide in the bean, hope U. S. investigators will discover the cause of the transformation.

Black Haitian patriots hope that the man will turn black again. Otherwise, argued President Vincent, "if by virtue of the ouarit we were able to choose the Caucasian race, our history evidently would have no meaning to our descendants. Our legitimate pretension to march one day at the head of a great black civilization would fall by the wayside. . . . Henceforth, on this planet there would be nothing but white."

Last week Jean-Joseph Dauphin was loyally struggling to "haitianize" himself by exposing himself to the sun. The tips of his ears were beginning to turn black again.

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