Rainy Season: Haiti-Then and Now

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Introduction

My city is gone, the one I built this book on, the one I built this book in. The ravine where I stood watching at an open window one afternoon, as a sudden storm during the rainy season rattled the palm fronds and washed everything that it could down to an unexplorable abyss—shit, slop, and banana leaves; chicken pickings, glass shards, and orange peel; mango pit and shredded sugarcane and cat carcass and garbage of every kind—is now churning with the cascading rubble of my old neighborhood and the rubble of my imagination. The National Palace, where I saw four governments installed—one a junta, two elected, one reinstated—has collapsed. Its three preposterous domes are sunken and deflated. Indeed, it looks almost ridiculous in ruin, as if someone had suddenly sucked the air out of a fat and pompous politician in the midst of a sonorous peroration. My moto-driving friend Sonsonn says the palace looks as though it’s had too much kleren, the raw, supercharged, home-brewed rum Haitians drink. Every time I look at it I have to look away quickly. My old companion is gone, and with it the rest of recognizable Port-au-Prince. In its stead, wreckage, ruin, destruction, debris, detritus. Death, too, so much of it. I’m dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented, and I wonder, over and over, was it all leading to this?

Was it all leading to this seismic end, this sekous, as the Haitians call the 2010 earthquake? When the slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture was pondering over the merits of revolution in 1790, was it all leading to this? As Jean-Bertrand Aristide debated running for president two hundred years later, was it all leading to this? An earthquake of this size seems fraught with fate. All the splendor of Haitian history and its raw indecency, too; all the lacy beauty of Haitian architecture and its deadly brutalist creations, too; all the market ladies selling charcoal and mangoes, and the late voodoo priest Bienaimé working through the night at Souvenance, and my beloved Senatorial Candidate on his rickety bicycle, and all those mosquito-infested interviews with Aristide in his little office; and Denise in the Nazon shantytown peeling potatoes for my dinner, and Mimette’s corn-rows, and Loune’s fan and her Malta drinks, and the little boy who used to kiss me on both cheeks (he was so well brought up); and that gentleman I danced with in Jean-Rabel, and all the conch I ate, the fried pork, all the rum we all drank, and the roosters in the trees in Bombardopolis, and the school of sculptors down in the slums near the market, and the faulty plumbing at the Disco Doctor’s apartments, and my brilliant, cynical American anthropologist up in the hills, and all the total and unassailable wonders I experienced here in this generous and labyrinthine city—the miracles, and especially all the lessons and stern rebukes to my romanticism, and all the cruelty, too? And me writing this book, too, with all that material stuffed inside it?

Was it all leading here, to this wasteland?

Of course it was.

History happened in between; between the revolution in 1791 and the earthquake last month. History happened, and so did everyday life, love and babies, politics and elections, gossip, sewing, cobbling, prayer, paintings, floods. Even news reporting. Even book writing. But history, politics, and even love and art seem quaint and tiny in the face of geological power. Great ideals like liberty and democracy are dwarfed, wizened. When you stand in the rubble of Port-au-Prince, of Carrefour, of Leogane, of Grand Goave and Ti Goave, of Jacmel, you begin to wonder where a country’s soul resides. What is its actual address? Is Haiti still here? How much do place, architecture, and monument figure into a country’s psyche? How much does culture? How many people can die in one event without destroying national identity? (As many as 200,000 died in the Haitian earthquake.) Is a country a map, as we reflexively believe? What happens, then, when that map is erased?

This is the book from before all that.

I thought I had a map of Haiti when I wrote this book; I thought I had a compass. In the beginning, my true north was Aristide, the liberation theologian around whom this narrative began to take shape. I was lucky to find him: when I was first writing about Haiti and imagining this book, in late 1985, at the end of the Duvalier dynasty’s rule, I had plenty of sources: an army general, friends in the elite, a bunch of families down in the shantytowns, people involved in politics. But what I didn’t have was the Church—the archbishop didn’t speak to the press and my understanding of whom else to talk to in the Catholic Church was, I confess, limited. But my trusty friend and fixer at the time, Milford Bruno, looked at me hard one day when I was complaining about this problem, and told me he could get me someone. He drove me down boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines to St. Jean Bosco Church, and led me to Aristide. I waited and waited that first time, as I waited and waited after, and I was not disappointed.

As you will see, he was everything a fresh foreign correspondent could have wanted: articulate, passionate, deeply committed, outspoken, visible, and accessible. Perfect. I couldn’t know it at that first interview on the balustrade of the courtyard and in his small office, but Aristide was already poised to hijack my book with his story, to my historic benefit. We were both young then (he’s two months older than I am), and both of us had a lot of romantic ideas in our heads. I remember him asking me, as we watched young men running through the streets and armed thugs following them, shooting, Is this your first revolution?

Yah, it was. His too. But it turned out that it was also his own revolution. Not that he led it, but he certainly co-opted it to achieve his own goals and ambitions. A middling figure on the Haitian national scene when I met him, his reputation continued to grow. His brilliant, fiery sermons were nationally broadcast. Personally, he was charming, funny, bubbly, endearing. He risked death repeatedly, and survived several assassination attempts, many documented in this book, and more after this narrative came to its conclusion.

As the second set of post-Duvalier elections drew near (the first having been attacked by Duvalierists and aborted), Aristide—who had always claimed such elections were an American imposition, and untrustworthy—toyed with the notion of running, and then, to my shock (because I was naïve, oh, so naïve) he ran. He won, of course (he’s still the most popular man in Haiti, today, even though he’s not in Haiti), and that was the beginning of my disillusionment. Unless you were a suck-up or a fool, it was impossible to be undeviatingly admiring of someone in the Haitian National Palace. Even for a good man, the job was too hard, the elements arrayed against him too vast, too complicated, and the possibilities for political and financial corruption too present, too tempting. Eventually, although I had admired Aristide, and continued to be impressed by many of his actions, I had to kite-l tonbe. I had to drop him. And yet I mourned and continue to mourn his ouster, as well as the failures and shortcomings that allowed it to happen. Now he lives in Pretoria. We haven’t spoken for a decade. For a long time, he wouldn’t take my calls, and then I stopped calling.

Frantz Benjamin Raymond didn’t have a job before the sekous, but now he has a job. Grace à dieu, he says. Grace à the earthquake, I think. Frantz has a big smile. Well, he should. He’s making forty dollars a month, a small fortune. Now he’ll be able to feed his wife and his three-year-old son, if he can find food to buy and if he can supplement the money with little jobs here and there. Frantz is twenty-nine years old and right now he is perched at the top, the precarious top, of a pile of earthquake rubble near rue des Fronts Fort, downtown. Everything’s gone so it’s hard to tell just which intersection you’re standing at (even in the best of times, the signage was lax in Port-au-Prince, and streets also often have both formal names and nicknames). Frantz is looking down at me with his head cocked to the side. He finds me peculiar but amusing, a foreigner walking around in the detritus in what he must think are extremely nice sneakers. They are new, though dusty. It’s noon. It’s hot. Frantz is in his uniform, blue policeman-style trousers and a matching blue short-sleeved shirt. The red and blue badge of his employer, a private security firm, is sewn onto his left sleeve. He’s wearing a jaunty camouflage-pattern baseball cap; he’s holding a big old shotgun.

The pile of rubble he’s standing on is not just any pile of rubble. He’s chosen it well. It’s high enough to serve as a lookout: a small mountain made from the shards of metal, pieces of brick, hunks of concrete, and long arteries of rebar that once were the material of pharmacies, banks, beauty salons, stores, small hotels, and also miscellaneous tiny enterprises, all fallen into the street now in a chaotic series of disorganized humps. Behind Frantz, who presents a heroic silhouette against the blue sky, you can see a chain-link fence protecting nothing anymore, and zigzagging off at unreasonable ninety-degree angles from the street. Who knows what purpose it used to serve? From a room on the second floor of a hotel—a room that opened up to the world when the building’s facade collapsed—a double bed slants down toward the street at a disturbing tilt, a thin pink blanket flapping from it like a flag.

I ask Frantz what he’s guarding, who he’s working for. He gives me the name of a famous Haitian family who owned several businesses along this street. I climb up next to him on his pile to take a look. In front of us, everything is in ruins, everything. Only two fluted columns that once held up a second floor or a balcony still stand, off to our left, nodding half erect like lost junkies with no memory. The smell of concrete particulate—a dry, ancient, invasive smell, as if this were a desert where man had once dwelled—rises up from the detritus. As far as Frantz and I can see, there is nothing. And at the very edge of nothing, tiny at the horizon of the rubbled world, a bulldozer is rumbling in a cloud of dust, operated by the U.S. Army’s Eighty-second Airborne Division.

There is another guy just like me at the opposite end of the street, Frantz tells me. I cannot see anyone through the dust. Frantz is protecting his boss’s property from scavenging, salvaging, and looting. His is an odd job: you’d think it would be dangerous, because his very presence signals to would-be looters that something valuable lies behind him, and yet no one comes near. In the distance a man is dragging a mattress behind him over the debris in the road.

The earthquake has unleashed a desperation I recognize from my long education in Haiti as the desperation of extreme poverty. A few blocks away, I heard an elderly Haitian arguing with an officer of the Eighty-second over a piece of rope or bungee cord the man needed to tie up a bundle of stuff. The man had no teeth and gray sprouts of hair and he held the cord in his hand and was trying to get back to his bundle. But the officer stopped him. The man spoke no English, the officer no Creole—but the officer knew that all scavenging had to stop now (as he said repeatedly), because the bulldozers were coming in and the Eighty-second did not want to bulldoze any scavengers. Finally though, the officer—rolling his eyes and shaking his head slightly, and looking up to the heavens in a combined gesture of impatience and resignation not uncommon among people new to Haiti—let the old man leave with his piece of rope.

The officer turned his attention next to another scavenger who had clearly broken his shinbone in the wreckage. The man was wincing and limping but would not accept help and would not agree to be taken anywhere for medical attention. No, no, no, he said repeatedly, waving off suggestions and helping hands. The man had a single mission. And although the officer was supposed to stop the scavenging now, he was moved—you could see it—by the injured man’s determination, and so he also let this man go with his find—three huge, enormously heavy, (doubtless) hundred-year-old wooden beams that he’d inched out bit by bit from the collapsed building we all were standing in front of. He could barely walk and yet he managed to heave those beautiful beams onto his back. Upper-body strength, I suppose. The beams dragged behind him on the roadbed, each about fifteen feet long, pulling up dust. And so he simply limped away from us down the dusty street like a defeated savior carrying his heavy cross, and the officer watched him go, shaking his head again. That scavenged wood will build someone’s house now. The rubble is Home Depot for the homeless Haitians.

Frantz watches the distant bulldozer approvingly. He says, What I am tired of is Haiti. What I am tired of is Haitians. I’ve gone to school. I have technical training. I believe in God. Look, I speak some English [he says in English]. Why should my life be like this, and my little son’s? You know what would be superb? An American governor of Haiti. I look for a thing sometimes and I pray to God, and then sometimes, I get it.

How has it come to this? An American governor for Haiti—superb?

Only the day before, Jean-Robert, an old friend of mine who owns a radio station in the south of the country, shook his head in despair as he looked around at the nearly complete destruction of the town of Ti Goave. It looked as if we’d landed on another planet in the aftermath of a cosmic collision. Jean-Robert popped into the one place still standing, a corner variety store with columns and a portico dating from the late 1800s—as does so much that has remained upright—to find out if his Ti Goave friends had survived. They had. In the early days after the quake, a lot of time was spent going from place to place asking after people.

A convoy of dark green American armored cars and earth-moving equipment drove past us, taking up almost the entire width of the main avenue. A few minutes before, we’d seen an enormous U.S. helicopter landing on a field, bringing in gigantic packages of food. Jean-Robert watched the convoy.

Dependence, man, he said. He shrugged. You know, we complain about our dependence all the time, dependence on the U.S., on France, the UN. Right now I am going to say this: Hooray for dependence. Bring it! I am ready to be totally dependent right now. And you ask any other Haitian. In the middle of all this, we are ready.

Jean-Robert and I both know too much about Haitian history to take his ranting at face value. We know he’s joking, but at the same time, he’s not joking. Tou sa ou we, se pa sa. It’s a good Haitian proverb for right now, and for all time, although it translates awkwardly. Literally it means All that you see: it’s not that. But to do it justice one would have to say, Everything you see before your eyes is not what’s really there. So what Jean-Robert is really saying is that he hates dependence, loathes charity, is proud to be a Haitian, but look what has happened, look where we are!! And so he is welcoming American intervention in Haiti, an intervention that, as any reader of The Rainy Season will discover, has been a feared and despised possibility since the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. In all coups and unrest in Haiti since then and even before, the long fiddling and fixing fingers of the U.S. have been detectable. The embassy is one of Port-au-Prince’s biggest employers, biggest office buildings, longest-lasting institutions. (Whenever I think of Haiti I think of the famous joke: Why are there no coups in the U.S.? Simple: No U.S. Embassy.) Haiti’s stuck in an uncomfortable position now: the earthquake has opened the country up to all sorts of interventions, speculations, and exploitations, but unquestionably the help is needed. There’s very little room for resistance in this disaster. The country’s lying there like a rape victim waiting for further onslaught.

I have another old friend, a longtime observer of the Haitian scene. He’s gone pretty native over the years, as the State Department calls it. He has some Haitian family. He speaks fluent Creole, and if you saw him you’d think he was a very light-skinned Haitian mulatto. He walks like a Haitian, his attitudes are Haitian. He smokes cigarettes like a Haitian (or a Frenchman). He taught me everything I knew about Haiti after I first arrived—or at any rate, he made me understand what I was seeing. Tou sa ou we, se pa sa.

Now his view is very dark, and not just the earthquake has turned it that way, but also Haiti itself, the upturns always followed in swift succession by the downturns. A friend of his was killed a few years ago—that was hard—shot in his own driveway. But then, friends of mine were killed, too, shot in their own driveways… In Haiti you cannot plead death as a reason for despair.

After I say something noncommittally hopeful about the future, sounding like Gidget or Pollyanna, my friend looks at me with a sour moue, and says, Come on, Amy! He shouts it, really. All around Le Bistrot in Petionville, the city lies quiet. Since the earthquake the popular merengue music that is Haiti’s ambient noise has gone dead. At a table near ours are a half dozen development and humanitarian aid workers in Haiti for the first time, from the U.S. and Canada.

My friend lights another cigarette. "You and I know how this will turn out! he shouts, leaning in toward me. We’ve all had a little too much rum. My friend nods at me, giving me a special look, very familiar to me and not just from him, a look that signals that a kind of paranoid analysis is about to follow. It’s a secret look of understanding and significance. He makes a familiar Haitian gesture of resignation and repudiation, repeatedly sliding the back of one hand off against the palm of the other in slow succession. Everything’s wrecked, he says. Sure, sure. But out of it all will rise—and here he gives dramatic pause… and raises his voice—the same old shit, because—another dramatic pause… THIS IS HAITI! The humanitarians at the next table look over, startled by the expletive, the loudness, and worse, the dark thoughts expressed. Moved by his own nihilism, my friend puts his head on his girlfriend’s shoulder and begins to weep. A woman from my table goes over to placate the humanitarians and to inform them that what they are seeing is not what it seems: he’s a genius, she tells them. But unhinged by the situation.

We’re all unhinged by the situation. I also feel unhinged and like crying. Haitians who’ve lost everything and everyone in the earthquake aren’t crying but they too are unhinged. They’re walking around hunting for rebar, instead. At the Doctors Without Borders clinic in Leogane I met a little boy, a two-year-old, both of whose hands were chopped off in two seconds during the earthquake by the crashing walls of his house. How can this not unhinge you? His name is McKenley Gédéon. His seven-year-old sister was crushed to death. I saw McKenley sitting on his mother’s lap, waiting in a long line in the clinic’s driveway at ten in the morning. I thought about him all day, as I went from one leveled town to the next, and on my way back to Port-au-Prince, I stopped again at the clinic. There he was, still sitting on his mother’s lap—it was 3 p.m. now. She’d moved to the other side of the driveway to get out of the sun. No doctor had seen him. McKenley had run out of pain medication. Yet McKenley with his two stumps and poor bandages was another Haitian who was not crying. Unhinged. His mother was another. My friend’s voice echoed in my head: the same old shit because this is HAITI! but then I cast that thought aside.

Something—some little thing—can always be done. I packed McKenley and mother into my car and took them to Port-au-Prince to a better facility where the boy had what’s called a refining operation, and where a friend of mine could look after them.

McKenley has no hands, and his future is bleak, but at least for the moment he’s alive and being looked after. The other little boys I’ve known in Haiti did not fare so well. A week after the earthquake, I was sitting on the terrace at the Hotel Oloffson with Filibert Waldeck Janvier, known as Waldeck in this book. Waldeck was one of the original orphan boys who hung around Aristide the way the Artful Dodger hung around Fagin. They were a swirl of little boys, ages seven through about twelve, who lived near Aristide’s church and ran errands for him and got some schooling and supplies from him, and were taken care of by him and his people. The boys taught me Creole, how to say suck-up, and cheap and broke, among other things. They led me around by the hand through the Port-au-Prince shantytowns, my guides and rescuers through so many of the riots and demonstrations in this book. Eventually Aristide built a car wash for them to work in, and eventually, people said these boys were his gang, his enforcers. Today Waldeck was having a Prestige beer at the Oloffson, courtesy of a friend. He has a motorbike—also courtesy of a friend—which he uses as a taxi, and he’s now a self-made man. One of Waldeck’s two little sons sat quietly on a chair next to me. The mother’s dead.

Waldeck and I did a quick survey of Aristide’s original band of boys. How many were alive, how many dead. Ayiti, dead, said Waldeck, touching a finger. Ti Johnny… dead. Another finger. In our final count it seemed to us that fully 50 percent, if not more, of the original crew were dead, from AIDS or overdoses, in motor accidents, or assassinated. Some had simply disappeared, or were unaccounted for. Death is what poverty does to children.

I have other friends who are hopeful in their way. This is what Jocelyn McCalla, a top advisor to Haiti’s special envoy to the United Nations, says, and McCalla’s been watching Haiti for more than three decades (he’s Haitian-born):

Unfortunately, for Haiti to go forward you need a functioning state, strapped with a modern-minded civil service that works in accordance with unencumbered rules, procedures and systems. You need to make working for the public good in the government an attractive proposition, so that the do-gooders don’t join the leeches in the NGO and private sector. You need the brains and the brawns of young, dynamic folks as well as the wisdom of some old geezers. Dysfunction nurtures inertia and inefficiencies, which in turn lead to shortcuts and corruption as routine rather than exceptional behavior. When political leadership is wrong-headed, it’s a recipe for disaster since there’s little check and balance.

This is not a sexy thing to say, but it’s crucial now that reimagining Haiti is the phrase that Haiti’s international friends and allies have on the tip of their tongue. Some hard decisions will have to be made soon. Their impact will reverberate for the next twenty years or so. They can spell doom or resurrection.

It’s what is needed: a reimagining of Haiti and of Port-au-Prince, politically, judicially, constitutionally, socially, culturally, medically, agriculturally. But the problem is this: What would a reimagined Haiti be? Would it be like Levittown; like Lakewood, California; like Co-op City? And who would re imagine it? My friend on the hill would erupt with chortling laughter at McCalla’s technocratic tone. Haiti’s deeper than that, my friend would say. He would say that Haiti’s truth lies at a level so profound, so entwined in the Middle Passage of the slave trade, so infused with the culture of two continents, so twisted by history and modernity, that puny little you cannot reimagine it.

Instead, as it always has done, Haiti will reimagine you. And after it’s done reimagining you, you’ll be like my friend, smoking, drinking, and sobbing at the top of the hill, or like me, thousands of miles away, dreaming and writing, and reimagining nothing, unless to reimagine means simply this: to imagine it all over again.

When I arrived in Haiti in at the end of 1985, Duvalier was about to fall and my life as a writer was about to begin. That’s where this book begins. Now, looking around at what is in my office, I see my old in-box, decorated with Haitian flowers and leaves. There’s a sequined voodoo flag pinned to the bulletin board. On the wall over my computer is an old photograph of Aristide surrounded by Waldeck and the other orphan boys, and in a corner, a pinned-up recent twenty-gourde bill—worth about a penny—featuring the bust of Toussaint, who’s wearing a braid and looking wistful. My library is Haitian, my walls are Haitian, so many of my friends are Haitian, and this book—with its slice of history that still matters, even now, even in the postquake chaos and forgetfulness—is my tribute to Haiti’s majesty, Haiti’s singularity, Haiti’s grandeur. Haiti is a place on the globe and also a place in the human imagination. It’s the place where black men and women in the Americas first took charge of their own fates, and shook the underpinnings of the white man’s world. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution—these are the triplets that changed global politics, reimagined global economics, and created the modern world. Haiti made me. Once again, I salute her.

—Los Angeles, February 7, 2010

To the memory of my mother and father

Acknowledgments

In the past few years, I have been fortunate to meet and get to know many people who have helped me to begin to understand Haiti, both en gros and en détail. I owe nonetheless a deep debt to a few who are in more distant ways associated with this book. My profound and affectionate thanks are due Victor Navasky, Ben Sonnenberg, Ed Epstein, Françoise Shein and Christopher Hitchens, without all of whom this book would not have been written.

Among the friends in New York who offered their advice and time were Kate Manning, Carol Gerstman, Jake Lamar and Ruth Liebmann. I’d also like to thank Gary Hoenig and Howard Schneider for the lessons they taught me at Newsday. And many, many thanks to Andrew Wylie, Alice Mayhew, David Shipley and Christine Morgan.

In Haiti, I was grateful for the guidance and shelter of Jacques Bartholy, Ira Lowenthal, Alexis Gardella and Carole Kraemer, for the inestimable assistance and wisdom of Bernard Diederich, and for the companionship and emotional support of the almost unflappable photographer Maggie Steber. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Don Guttenplan and Robert Friedman, both formerly of The Village Voice, and to my former colleagues Walter Isaacson, Jason McManus and Henry Muller, at Time magazine, who were exceedingly liberal about my hours—and days and weeks.

Greg Chamberlain’s and Josh DeWind’s careful readings of parts of this manuscript were of great assistance in its preparation, as were those of Haitian friends. The Haitian collection at the Schomburg Center in Harlem and the support of the many people associated with the Schomburg who helped answer my historical and political questions were invaluable.

For the historical background used in this book, I am indebted to the following accounts: Histoire d’Haïti, by Thomas Madiou; Description de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, by Moreau de Saint-Méry; Les Blancs débarquent, by Roger Gaillard; The Black Jacobins, by C. L. R. James; Written in Blood, by Robert and Nancy Heinl; From Dessalines to Duvalier, by David Nicholls; and Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes, by Bernard Diederich and Al Burt.

With things as changeable as they are in Haiti today, it might be risky to list those without whose protection, counsel and friendship I would have been lost. Some I can mention, however. Among my mapreaders were the schoolteacher in Jean-Rabel who told me he would never vote in sham elections; the Belgian priest who ran a radio station in the north until he was summarily fired by the Archbishop there; Peter Welle, the CARE agroforester who was caught in the middle of the controversy over foreign aid; the kind priest then on Delmas who was so helpful to me in my early days in Port-au-Prince; friends at the Centre Karl Lévêque in Port-au-Prince; Alix, Milford and Wilson, three of my guides, as well as Ducé, Destouches, Hérold, Charlot and Martial at the Oloffson; Lucy and Abner in Duverger; Mimette, my friend with the kite in La Saline, and all the peasants and slum-dwellers who caught hold of my pad or my tape recorder and told me their tales of penury and injustice, and who fortified me—and themselves, their children and their country—with their open and revivifying spirit. I am grateful to Denise and Simone and Margot, as well.

Many thanks also to the wise man from Gonaïves, for all the hours of instruction and interpretation, to a certain young woman who knows who she is (and to two of her friends, B. and B.), to Marcus and Lyliane and Marcus, to a number of brave priests who know who they are and must go nameless; to the parishioners of St.-Jean-Bosco; to my friends among the November 1987 candidates; to the complicated memory of Charlemagne Péralte, and to his not yet vanquished héritiers: Ayiti and Waldeck and Johnny and Claude and all the other street kids who were kind and generous to me, even if they didn’t know it, even if they didn’t mean to be.

Of course, I cannot forget the patience and understanding of my father and my two brothers.

And finally, special thanks to Nick Goldberg for his unflagging support and tolerance throughout, as well as for his sympathetic yet critical readings of this manuscript in its many stages.

AMY WILENTZ

New York

March 1989

Contents

Dreaming

Bringing Down Baby

Boutilliers

Unrest: July 1987

Words of Deliverance: 1

The Beast of the Haitian Hills

Words of Deliverance: 2

Cutting Down Trees

Duverger Dancing

Ruelle Vaillant

The Flood

Pulling Away: January 1989

Bibliography

Index

Se lè koulèv mouri, ou konn longè li.

Only when the serpent dies can you take his measure.

—HAITIAN PROVERB

Dreaming

It must have been a mistake. Certainly, no one in the village thought the packages were meant for them. More than a hundred had fallen from the sky late one afternoon—hard, compact squares wrapped in brown paper. The little plane that dropped them kept on going; it flew straight over the plain toward the mountains. The sound of something flying overhead woke a gravedigger, who saw the blocks in brown paper fall near the cemetery.

The villagers soon discovered that the packages were filled with a hard translucent substance, like rock but easily breakable. If you took the blocks and cracked them with a mortar and pestle, one villager found, you could pulverize them. He mixed the white powder with water and whitewashed his hut with it; the results were not white like the powder, but hard and shiny, like the crystalline block. Other villagers were envious of the one man’s efforts, and from them he got a little money to do the same for their huts. Soon everyone who could get together the three-dollar fee had the job done. Others tried to use the powder as fertilizer, the way they had seen some white development workers do a few years before a few villages away, but it didn’t seem to improve the soil. Some of the beans even died.

The village voodoo priest was at a loss to interpret the packages. He had a dream in which he built a new house out of the blocks, a great white structure bigger than the church in town. The next day at the lottery, or borlette, he bet ten gourdes, or two dollars, on the number 45, the numerological translation for a dreamed house, and he won. Elated, he had his acolytes, seven young girls, gather up the blocks and bring them to his temple, where he stored them. Occasionally, he substituted white powder made from the stuff for the flour he usually used to draw vèvè, intricate designs on the ground that help call the gods to a voodoo ceremony. Flour was expensive, and he preferred not to waste it. The gods didn’t seem to mind the substitution.

Everywhere they went, the villagers talked about the strange blocks that had fallen from the sky. They wondered where the plane had been coming from, probably New York, because all the planes they knew of went to New York or came back from there. When they went to market south down the main road, toward the capital, village women would talk about the powder and how everyone was afraid to smoke it or taste it. They knew enough of their own powders—mixed by the priest to cure maladies or to inspire them—to fear that it was poison. In the market, the women told everyone how they had tried to use it as fertilizer. Eventually, some men who came through the market from the capital heard the talk of the odd powder in the village, and drove up in their jeep to see what the voodoo priest could show them.

He led them inside the concrete temple and back into one of the small rooms kept for individual gods, this one for Baron Samedi, Lord of the Dead, Keeper of the Cemetery, a spirit who dresses in black and often wears a top hat or a bowler and tails. The priest thought that Baron would keep the villagers away from his blocks. When the men from town got their eyes accustomed to the dark in the little chamber, they gasped and started to laugh. They turned to the priest and told him that he had here a product they needed very much in Port-au-Prince, and that they would be willing to pay him thirteen dollars for each package. That was a lot of money for something that had cost him nothing, and the priest said yes, although he was disturbed at getting so much for nothing, and thought that the packages must therefore be worth even more.

The next day, the street price of cocaine in Port-au-Prince went down 50 percent, to ten dollars a gram. Someone who said he was fronting for Freedom, the soccer team in the La Saline slum, bought fifteen grams. The Disco Doctor, a wealthy young physician who was addicted to the stuff, bought two hundred. He was the son of one of the doctors who had helped to save François Duvalier’s life back in 1959, after the dictator, only recently come to power, lapsed into a coma. The Disco Doctor felt the burden of that family legacy: Duvalier woke from the coma and lived on for twelve years.

The Disco Doctor has a pretty stucco house up in Pacot, a neighborhood in decline but still chic, and he rents out all his extra rooms to foreign development workers and anthropologists, and to Haitian friends who have been kicked out of their houses by their wives, or who have walked out on them. The Disco Doctor himself lives in the top apartment, and he sleeps there when he has to, under a white mosquito net in a king-size bed that sits just in from the terrace, where he has a view of most of the capital. But the Disco Doctor doesn’t dream, he says, and he doesn’t like to sleep alone, when he can manage to sleep. Even now that he’s off cocaine and has given up his crack habit, he needs someone nearby at night. Otherwise he gets panicky. Most people in Port-au-Prince feel that way even if they’ve never been addicted. The Disco Doctor is extreme, though. He’ll drive all the way to the northernmost city of Cap-Haïtien to find someone to spend the night with, if he has to. He has a friend with a place up there, with another king-size bed.

Sometimes people from Pacot and the other, better parts of town run out of drugs and they can’t find their usual dealers. Then, they have to go into the slums to get whatever they can find. A Mercedes will pull right up to a shabby concrete house on a main road in a slum, and a young mulatto will get out and start talking to the man sitting in front. That man turns and talks to a runner waiting in the road, and the runner talks to another runner, and in about fifteen or twenty minutes, after a few cups of very strong, very sweet coffee, the young mulatto has something like what he wants. He can go back to his house up in Pacot and stay up all night.

Sleeping habits vary in Port-au-Prince. They depend on where you live and what you do. The drug runners in the slums are poor, from among the poorest class in Haiti, the urban poor, often even worse off than their village counterparts, peasants like the ones who found the packages wrapped in brown paper. One runner I met, Djo, had too many people in his family to get a good night’s sleep: his mother, his three brothers, their girlfriends, his girlfriend, a cousin who lives with them permanently, two cousins who came to Port-au-Prince three months earlier to find jobs that weren’t there, and everyone’s kids; it seemed like about a dozen.

Djo’s house in Cité Soleil, the country’s most populous slum, doesn’t have the space for all these people, so usually when night falls they do a relève, or relay. First Djo and two brothers who have jobs that start early go to sleep; they sleep for four hours, maybe six, on the one bed in the one room of Djo’s house. Meanwhile, the other men sit up outside, playing dominoes and drinking herb teas at tables lit by candles or illuminated by the spotlight of a single, bare bulb working on electricity siphoned off from Electricité d’Haïti’s lines through cheap copper wires. When Djo and the two brothers get up, the other men go to sleep. The women crumple up on the floor in a corner with the children, almost on top of one another. Often one or two of them will stay up watching the men play dominoes, so that they can have more room when their turn comes, and maybe get some sleep. The relève gives visitors the impression that people in the slums never sleep, but in fact it’s just that at least half of them are always awake.

Then there are people who live in even more crowded conditions: they sleep upright. One man leans against the wall with his head on his arms, and another leans up against him, and so on, sometimes as many as three or four deep. That is how they sleep. There is an expression for it in Creole, the slave language that grew out of a mix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and African tongues: in Creole they call it dòmi kanpe, stand-up sleep. In this position, they dream the dreams that give them the inspiration for the numbers that they bet on in the borlette the next day.

Bringing Down Baby

When I went down to Haiti for the first time in the early days of 1986, I thought I knew what the place would be like: I would fly down and the Tontons Macoute, Duvalier’s personal army of pampered thugs, would search my bags, confiscate my notebooks and my copy of The Comedians, Graham Greene’s banned novel about Haiti in the 1960s. I’d walk through the cardboard slums in the daytime, shadowed by beggars. At night I would retire to the hotel veranda and drink ten-year-old rum. The Macoutes would spy on me, the rare foreign correspondent. On the walls I’d see cheerful, encouraging frescoes of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the young President-for-Life, and his beautiful wife, Michèle. A handsome voodoo priest would guide me to a temple in the hills, and I would watch as the peasants played the drums and Baron Samedi possessed his worshipers, his serviteurs. In shanties deep inside the slums, I would talk with Catholic priests pursued by the Macoutes; hunted and fearful, they would still refuse to accept exile, and would be hiding in a different hovel every night. Uzi-waving Macoutes would storm into my hotel and arrest the government official I was interviewing. The Venezuelan Embassy would be filled with dissenters fleeing Duvalier. After dark, government informers would sit on the hotel’s veranda, eavesdropping into the late evening while the bougainvillea turned as black as the night sky. Eventually, the Duvaliers would ask me to dinner. Champagne, cocaine, high heels.

I was wrong. By the time I landed in Port-au-Prince, the Catholic priests were openly at the vanguard of an uprising, the Macoutes were frightened, insecure, and the government informer was no longer sure who was bankrolling him. The Duvaliers were on their way out: no dinner. It seemed like a joke at my expense. I wanted to study tyranny and bloody violence; instead, I had a popular triumph on my hands. The Duvaliers fled, the Macoutes went into hiding. It took me a little while to realize that if you wait long enough in Haiti, and really not so long, the tyranny and violence is likely to return, and that a people’s victory is not always in the end what it seems to be in the beginning. When I passed through customs that first afternoon with a hundred journalists at François Duvalier International Airport, a three-man band was playing Haïti Chérie, Dear Haiti. The Macoutes barely searched my bags. I kept my copy of The Comedians.

After a few visits, I began to learn about the different neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, but that first time, the taxi driver took me everywhere, I now know. In his big old Chevy he drove me through one slum, and then another, and out along a stretch of shanties, and down past the Palais-National and up past the cathedral, and then round back behind another church through steep streets in what seemed like another complicated, hilly slum. All along his labyrinthine route, my taxi driver aimed at dogs and swerved in front of lazy jeeps with tinted windows and around tap-taps—small covered pickup trucks filled with stifling passengers and painted with cheerful scenes and happy mottoes: Smile, God Loves You, Je Sais Qu’Il Vit, Good Trip, Scoobydoo, Espérance, Sirop, Sans Problème, Wonderful, Ce N’est Rien, Lovely… It was a dizzying tour de force of evasion to get to a hotel that was just at the end of a quite straight, quite major street. No slums. He charged me what I later learned was an unthinkable fifteen dollars. Often these days, it occurs to me that he wasn’t just ripping me off. He didn’t need to take me so far off the main streets in order to charge me one-and-a-half times the going rate. No, now I think he must have been making a political point. But at the time, all those slums were lost on me.

Finally I arrived, exhausted by the shock of the heat, so many people, the dust, the dogs run down in the street, the children with kites on the roofs, and the screaming traffic, at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, the hotel Graham Greene wrote about in The Comedians. It was a more exotic choice than the Holiday Inn, where most American journalists stay if they can get a room. The Holiday Inn is a bland, efficient building a long way down the street from the Oloffson, right in the middle of things, not far at all from the National Palace. The Holiday Inn has a logo of a green palm tree and a bright-orange sun plastered across its stucco front. It also has telephones, and air conditioners that work.

But when I looked up through the palms at the Oloffson’s white gingerbread veranda surrounded by overgrown bougainvillea, I thought I had made the right decision. The place, unlike the swarming, noisy Port-au-Prince I had seen on that ride, seemed to hold a promise of that tropical mystery I was expecting. The swimming pool off to the side reflected the moon in the palms and I recalled the scene in The Comedians where the narrator, a Mr. Brown, 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. A statue of Henry Christophe—who had been a slave and a waiter before he became King Henry I of Haiti seven years after the country declared its independence from France in 1804—guarded the Oloffson’s door in a three-corner hat, and a dog slept next to him. I put down my bags at King Henry’s feet. Two slender women materialized to carry them away.

The veranda was crowded with journalists, evening was about to fall. Something sweet was in the air. The journalists were lounging around on the wicker and bamboo furniture, drinking rum. The whispered name Duvalier moved from table to table and back again, around the room, in French accents, in British accents, in Spanish accents, in American accents. If you weren’t careful, you tripped over photographers’ bags as you made your way to the bar, and their owners looked at you like the devil. I was disoriented after that taxi ride. It was hot out.

In spite of the reservations I had made months before, there was no room left for me. Everything was in chaos. Less than a week earlier, because of a slip-up on the part of the U.S. Embassy, everyone in the world had got the idea that Jean-Claude Duvalier was already on his way out of Haiti. The State Department had the story wrong, nothing new, announcing Duvalier’s departure a week before it actually was satisfactorily arranged. Perhaps the story helped encourage the President to leave. In any case, according to one account, the deal was almost done when the White House made its first announcement. But then the Tontons Macoute, fearing for their security if Duvalier left, backed out, Duvalier remained, and more negotiations had to be undertaken, during which the Army promised protection to the Macoute hierarchy. According to another story, a member of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s National Security Council team, in Haiti to collect Duvalier dollars for the Nicaraguan contras, had been wandering around the National Palace late one night when he noticed that all the lights were out in the living quarters. Hastily presuming that Jean-Claude had fled, he telephoned Washington to let them know the news. In the end, it turned out that Jean-Claude, who had been known as Baskethead since his schooldays, had been in the basement, playing Ping-Pong. But the mistake wasn’t rectified until too late.

After President Reagan’s spokesman Larry Speakes made the premature announcement, Baskethead himself went on Haitian radio to calm the ragged nerves. To say, uh, no, they were wrong. I’m right here, in the palace, and, as he so memorably put it, firm as a monkey’s tail.

By that time, however, the normally sluggish foreign press was alerted to his possible ouster, and they had all managed to make their way down to watch Duvalier crumble. They figured that even if the United States had blown the story the first time, something must be up. They knew that the United States was in on the deal. And some of them even remembered stories from the end of 1985, especially the incident in November in Gonaïves, in which three schoolboys protesting the Duvalier regime had been killed by the Army. Popular outcry over the killings had been the first concrete sign that Duvalier was losing control.

And if Duvalier left, it would be big news. Family in power for thirty years. Bloodthirsty dictatorship. Fall of the Tontons Macoute. Beautiful wife flees with millions in jewels. Chaos in the streets. All this, added to the regular Haitian features, made the editors back in the world’s capitals salivate: Plenty amid poverty. (Great.) Voodoo’s hold on the peasantry. Voodoo’s hold on the elite? (Maybe. How do we illustrate it, though? That’s my problem. You see?) Voodoo and the Catholic Church. Just plain voodoo. (Yeah, uhhuh. Good idea. Great pictures.) Deforestation. (Can we get art? I mean, face it. Tree stumps. Do they read?) Drought? Boat people. (Get me those bodies that washed up in Florida. Who took those pictures?) A refrigerated suite in the palace where wife and friends store their furs. ("Yeah, but has anyone ever seen it?") And now AIDS. The best. Even if Baskethead stayed on for another ten years, the journalists’ time would not be wasted.

Keith, the Oloffson’s manager, a Londoner, was the sort of opportunist who knew that at the Oloffson you had to take money wherever and whenever you could get it, and who experienced no qualms putting another American reporter—who had taken the same plane I took but not the same taxi, and had arrived at the Oloffson twenty minutes before I did—into the Chambre Mick Jagger, the room reserved for me. Keith knew he’d be able to juggle me in somewhere if I turned up in the end, and besides, I wasn’t his responsibility: I was late, that was life. I begged him to find me a rental car, and he promised he would, but I wasn’t convinced.

I had brought shorts to this place, and, looking around as the evening fell, I realized that everyone was dressed for dinner, in particular Heidi, a blond photographer in a black dress. She was wandering around the big bar room and swiveling to see who was there and whom to talk to. The man she had come down with, another photographer, followed pathetically in her wake, as reporters in their chairs toppled behind her. She would turn to her friend, occasionally introducing him or asking him to fetch a drink for her or whomever she was talking to. He obeyed. The Haitian waiters smiled at each other, nodding in her direction. Heidi was new to photography, and Haiti was a good place to photograph. She’d been in Guatemala already, with her boyfriend.

I love the houses in Port-au-Prince, Heidi was saying to an Associated Press photographer, who looked around his table, crowded with other run-down-looking photographers, and smirked. They had all been down now for a couple of days, and so had Heidi. They’re so colorful, she said. Isn’t it amazing? You can get a lot into one picture, the houses are so close together, all those pinks and blues. So many people.

That’s because it’s so crowded here, Associated Press said to her kindly, while the rest of the table went on smirking.

I’d like to get a lot into her, muttered the Englishman I was standing behind. The table laughed.

And the hats, she went on. "When they’re sitting in the market, and you’re on top of those hats, with the sun, and all the plastic stuff, you know, the buckets,