It was Holy Thursday night in 1993, and Chantal, Phenel, and I were out recording and filming a Rara band in the narrow back streets of Port-au-Prince. We were dancing down the dark hilly streets at a good clip, on our way to a small cemetery to try to get some zonbi to "heat up" the band for the season's climax on Easter. We stopped while the band paid a musical salute to the invisible guardian of the cemetery gates in Vodou. I looked up and noticed a straw dummy sitting on the roof of the house across the street. It was a Jwif (Jew). He was sitting in a chair in the open air, on top of the one-story tinroofed house. Made of straw and dressed in blue jeans, a shirt, suit jacket, and sneakers, this "Jew" wore a tie and had a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket. His legs were crossed, and over them sat what looked to be a laptop computer fashioned out of cardboard. A cord seemed to run from the computer down into a briefcase that sat by his chair. I asked around for the dummy's owner. An older man missing a few teeth came forward, offering a callused, muscular handshake that revealed a life of hard physical labor. He was from the countryside in the south of the island, a migrant to Port-au-Prince. I found myself in the ridiculous position of having to compliment him on his work. "Nice Jew ya got there," I said. "Ou gen yon be` l Jwif la, wi.""Oh yes, we leave it up for the Rara band to pass by. Tomorrow afternoon we'll burn it," he said. "Aha...well...great...,"said my research partners and I, flaring our eyes at each other. I guess nobody told the guy that Jean-Claude Duvalier banned the practice in the 1970s, around the time of a rush of tourism and foreign industrial investment. I bet other people still "burn the Jew," here and there.