All Over but the Shoutin' (30 page)

“Hope manifested itself in an unlikely savior. In September 1988, thugs walked into Mass at St. Jean Bosco Church and killed 12 people and wounded 70. They missed the man that military president Gen. Henri Namphy most wanted dead: the troublesome young priest named Aristide. He had been heard speaking of a Haiti where the soldiers didn’t slaughter civilians and the poor shared in the fat of the wealthy Creoles’ pocketbooks. Haiti must be reborn, he said. A speech is a powerful thing in a place where 65 percent of people can’t read. When caretaker President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot set up a transitional government to oversee fair elections in 1990, Aristide was on the ballot. He won the presidency on Dec. 17 with 67 percent of the vote. On Dec. 18, soldiers fired into a crowd of supporters, killing a pregnant woman. On Jan. 7, before Aristide’s inauguration, thugs seized the government in a short-lived coup. Aristide, a small man with glasses too large for his head, finally took over. The poor danced in the street as the aristocracy stared down from their mansions.”

I had seen him just once, in Miami. He had come to be feted by the Haitians who had escaped their homeland and settled there. “We meet to celebrate a victory,” he said in a speech to thirteen thousand Haitians. “Come home. The terror is over.”

Aristide tried to govern the nation of seven million on popularity alone. The soldiers feared him, afraid he would take away their small privileges even though he promised a marriage between them and the people.

On September 30, just three days after his speech in Miami, Haitian soldiers mutinied and opened fire on his home. The savior went into exile.

And that gave me an excuse to see firsthand if the stories, the horrors, were true. I had no idea.

“T
he soldiers who guard the city hospital carry Israeli machine guns,” I wrote, “in case some one-legged man should hop out and try to kick them to death.” There is little else to fear within the walls. Half the patients have been shot to pieces and the other half are dead, they just haven’t been moved yet. I walked up to one man, lying on his side, and noticed too late that he was beyond talking ever again. The distance from the hospital to the morgue is only a few yards, so the old nuns don’t have far to push the gurneys. In the morgue, the bodies are piled haphazardly, to no particular scheme or order. The air conditioning and coolers have broken down, and the smell of rot is so strong it chases away all other living things, except a man called Presnel, who has no money and family. He squats in the dirt of the courtyard, waiting to die.

“Crazy man,” Daniel explains, but not unkindly. The man is truly dying, and waits there, to be expedient.

Hearses—really station wagons with the windows painted black—wait near the hospital. The people in the morgue are the ones no one wants, so hearse drivers wait near the front entrance of the hospital for a fresh body. “One will be ready soon. No problem,” a driver says. He is eating a Popsicle.

Inside, the hospital stinks from the fouled sheets and the smell of the morgue, which wafts in through the window. The afternoon slips by, and no doctors, medicine or relief come to this dormitory for the poor, only the nuns, who take a dead man off one bed and place a new patient there without changing the sheets.

The row of beds has one horror after another. One man’s face is missing. Flies peck at twelve-year-old Inus Lundi’s leg, shattered by bullets three weeks ago. His parents are missing, so he has no food. He will surely starve, surely die, surely walk on sticks the rest of his life if by some miracle he does live. His brother, younger, older, I can’t tell, sits beside him, silent.

Jean-Claude Flankin was shot in the knee by soldiers. “It was a little boy who shot me,” a smiling teenager with a machine gun, he says. He says they shot him for sport, for practice. They had been told to shoot anyone in known Aristide neighborhoods.

These are Aristide’s people, too, I learn. They are the poor that the army knows it can slaughter without repercussion. They shot women and children. I stood in the middle of it, and tried not to cry like a baby. At one point, a young soldier with a rifle slung low, the muzzle pointing at my stomach, steps so close to me that the tip of the gun bores into my ribs. He is not threatening, only playing, the way the soldiers had been playing when they shot Franklin’s leg. I hate this. I hate this place.

We are told we are not supposed to be here, and leave, but Daniel motions to the boy, the one with the shattered knee. “You can give him something,” he tells me, but at first I shake my head. We don’t pay for stories. He just looks at me. I gave the boy fifty dollars, enough money to feed him for months. “Merci,” he said, but his expression didn’t change.

U
p in Pétionville, where the air smells better, people concede that they gave the army money, food and even new guns, at least partly financing the coup. They say it was necessary to head off the chaos that Aristide encouraged from the pulpit. Pétionville is a place where restaurants serve lobster pizzas and pear sorbet and fancy beer, where people drive European sedans and have other people scrub their floors. The refrigerators are full.

“Aristide told the poor people, ‘If you are hungry, then eat. If you are thirsty, drink,’ ” said one woman. “Why shouldn’t we give the soldiers money to protect what we have?”

In a jewelry shop in Port-au-Prince, a rich man sits surrounded by gleaming gold. The store is small, but there are three men with pistols in the front room.

“Aristide thought he could rule without us,” the rich man said. “You heard what he said, about the Père Lebrun? ‘I like its color. I like its smell.’ ”

W
hat a life, to cruise a city searching the sky for plumes of smoke. Men had been burned alive in the past few days, and Daniel has told me we will likely see it happen again, before I am done. The joy of the story has been beaten out of me by what I have seen. I know it will return, when I sit down to write. It always does. But for now, I am tired and a little sick. The meanness of the place does not jab at you, now and then, it hammers, constant.

We see a column of smoke rising from a hilltop slum and we rush there, to see a crowd circling some kind of commotion in the center. But there is no fire. They have gathered to watch a three-legged dog try to keep company with another dog, which is as good a show as you’re gonna get in Port-au-Prince, between killings.

The Père Lebrun, I thought, was some exotic name for the “flaming necklace.” If I had known any French, like a real FC, I would have known better.

It was named for a man who sold tires. Jean-Claude Lebrun used to run radio and TV commercials, calling himself “Père (Father) Lebrun.” So when people thought tires, they thought of him.

After Duvalier fell, the people burned Macoute wherever they found them, soaking a tire with gasoline, wedging it over their shoulders and head and setting it on fire. Aristide supporters had revived the tradition, but now the soldiers are cruising the slums, killing again. Killing. Someone. Always killing.

T
here is no stark line between good and evil here, I learn.

On October 23, hundreds of middle-class Haitians gathered for the funeral of the Reverend Sylvio Claude. He had talked badly of Aristide, and a mob of the poor attacked him. He fled to a police station, which was surrounded. The two policemen did not have to weigh the odds for long. They gave Claude to the mob, which hacked him to death with machetes.

His funeral, which I saw, told me much about this place.

T
he middle-class Haitians, friends and supporters of Claude, mill around under the protection of a company of soldiers outside the service. From inside comes the wailing of women. The casket is open, and the undertaker has not been skillful. Middle-class mourners file inside and come back outside with flame in their eyes, shouting to each other. And all around us, for I am standing in their midst, is a circle of poor Haitians in rags, looking on in hatred.

“Aristide is an assassin,” bravely shouts one man in the crowd of the middle class, in English, so I can write it down.

A barefoot young man in the group of poor stares at him. His English is not good, but he makes himself clear to me, later. He came to watch the crowd, to catalog their faces in his mind. He would remember them, if Aristide ever came back. He would remember.

I
was warned by one of the foreign editors not to predict in my story a judgment day acoming for Haiti. It would be premature. But it is hard not to expect some cataclysm. How can it go on and on like this? But like I said, I was ignorant of the place.

“The black market can supply what the wealthy people need. They keep their assets in U.S. banks,” I wrote, “and they can wait out the crisis in Miami or Santo Domingo. The corrupt military has its own sources of income, contraband, drugs and protection rackets. The embargo only inconveniences the rich. But a missionary said he had seen the number of people in line for food double in just two weeks at his mission. The army shoots people who break in line for gasoline. The migration already has started in Port-au-Prince. The people are walking out of the city, into the mountains, to get closer to the food. From the air, they look like a caravan of rags, with buckets on their heads and babies in their arms. Trucks that carry food from the docks and fields don’t reach the poor of the cities because the trucks don’t have fuel. Aristide wants a complete embargo to force his return, but the hungry and the well-fed agree it won’t happen that way. The embargo already has cost an estimated 5,000 jobs, as plants close. Another 10,000 were lost over the past year as the political tension grew. Many people with jobs can’t get to their work because there is no gas. Stalled cars block the roads. Blackouts silence the music in the bars. Sirens sound at 10 and 11, warning people to go inside. At 11:01 sharp, gunshots break the silence, and people hope it’s only the soldiers firing warning shots into the air. Haiti’s society is disintegrating. Aristide waits. The soldiers play with their guns. Ask Haitians what they think will come of all this and they shake their heads. Haiti’s story, the religious say, is pulled straight from the Book of Exodus. The poor Haitians wandered in the wilderness for 200 years, and found the man who promised to lead them out. His exile is just part of their wandering, their suffering.”

I hint—against the editor’s advice—that surely something profound is coming, some great change.

“Louis Bolivar, a woodworker in the downtown, knows the future,” I wrote. “He turns rough lumber into sturdy tables, chairs, whatever the people want. The tap-tap-tap of his hammer has been constant, seven days a week, well into the night. He is making coffins.”

I
chartered a plane and flew to Santo Domingo, and from there, home. When I got home to Coconut Grove, it was Halloween night. People filled the street, in rubber masks, covered in fake blood, waving toy knives. People might have wondered why I was laughing.

27
Snow in a can

I
came home for Christmas that year, like every year, to tiny houses ablaze with Christmas lights, twinkling islands of red, green, yellow and blue separated by acres of pine barrens and dark, empty miles. People who know they don’t have enough money in their coffee cans or bank accounts to pay even their usual electric bill will string them for fifty yards across rain gutters and peach trees and hog-wire fences, lighting my way home from the airport in Atlanta. I smiled every time I passed a particularly garish neon garden, happy and proud that my people had not given in to the pretension popular among people in town, who called such displays tacky.

I love this time. The air, after the balm of Miami, was chill, delicious, but it would be stretching it to call it really cold. It just felt like home, like Christmas. Christmas does not mean snow to me. I have never seen it snow on December 25 in my life. Snow came in a can. We sprayed the tree with it before we put the lights on. If we didn’t have the store-bought kind, Momma just used spray starch.

Momma never strung a lot of lights on the little house we lived in. But through the window, all my life, there has been a weak glow from a single strand of lights on a simple, small cedar tree. I looked for it as I pulled into the driveway, and it was there.

Momma was the same, still worried to death about Mark, but otherwise solid. I asked her when she wanted to go back to the dentist and be fitted for her new dentures, but it was a warm winter and so I had little hope. Mark was the same, still oblivious to the pain he caused her. I told him I wished he would try to do a little better, but he only grinned at me. He said he planned on coming to see me, down in Miami, maybe live with me. I told him it would be fine, but I knew he would never come. It was just as well. Miami would have consumed him, like a puddle of gasoline consumes a lit match. Sam was the same, still working, days, nights, weekends. My aunts and uncles were the same, still asking me when I was getting married, still two or three girlfriends behind.

Only my grandma was different. She was quiet now. She had never been quiet in her whole life.

I know there is nothing special about getting old. Everyone gets old. But you had to know my grandma, had to see the child in her that grinned when we were bad, that would have created the mischief with us if her old bones could have stood the strain, to understand the pain of it, seeing her that way.

If I had been coming home more regular, more often, I would have seen the change coming over years, as she grew older, more frail. As it was, it was as if she suddenly just got very tired. She had never been tired before, either. I would stick my head in the door and she would squeal out my name, year after year, and jump to her feet, or at least she would come as close to jumping as her age and slowly healing broken hip would permit. In minutes, she would have out her harmonica or banjo. She would announce to me, like she was calling a tune on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, that we would now have a little bit of “Boilin’ Cabbage Down.” She plucked the strings a little clumsier every year. It still sounded sweet to me. She would tire of one instrument and grab up another, and sometimes I would sing if I knew the words.