Before heading downstairs, my uncle removed the suit he’d had on since the day before and changed into a maroon pants and gray jacket ensemble he sometimes wore on long trips to the countryside. He put on a pair of old brown leather shoes, which, like all his other shoes, had been repaired and resoled many times. I’m not going anywhere, he wanted his clothes to say. And up to that point he wasn’t sure he was.
As soon as he walked down to the courtyard he heard one of his neighbors hissing at the side gate, trying to get his attention. It was barely light, but the streets were already full with vendors hawking their wares and people walking back from Mass, children heading to school and camions and taxis dropping off and picking up fares. His neighbor Darlie, a tall and skinny girl with long braids dangling past her waist, quickly slipped through when he opened the gate and pulled it shut behind her.
“Pastor,” she whispered, “last night they took the church’s generator and when Gigi tried to stop them, they picked her up and threw her off one of the terraces.”
“O bon dye,” My God, he mouthed, raising both his hands to his head. How could Gigi, another kind neighbor, have put herself between an armed gang and a generator? And how could he have not heard her screams from his room?
“Is she alive?” he mouthed. He knew better than to use his voice box, which would draw attention.
“One of her legs is broken,” the neighbor continued. “She’s in the hospital.”
My uncle reached into his pocket where he had his passport and plane ticket, and into his jacket pocket where he often kept his Bible, on the off chance there might be a few dollars left. All his money was gone.
“But this is not what I came to say. Pastor, you should leave now. They’re coming. Go away quick. They’re coming.”
She unlatched the gate and slipped out. My uncle was trying to close it behind her when a man’s large hand reached in and yanked the metal latch away from his fingers. A short, beefy youth with a small Haitian flag wrapped around his head quickly stepped into the courtyard. He had a face pockmarked with what looked like lines of razor scars. He was followed by another man, this one taller, thinner, with a thin, uneven beard and a white fishnet cap covering an abundant head of long dreadlocked hair. A bald-headed man followed. The last one opened the gate wider to allow in a few others. Then followed another group, then another, all their faces quickly merging into one angry haze. Suddenly he understood the true workings of a mob, one infuriated body morphing into another until they all became limbs to one raging monster.
The courtyard was soon filled with young men. And when he looked up at the balconies and terraces, they were crammed too.
“Pastor,” the chief dread shouted, his voice strained and hoarse. “Thanks to you, we lost fifteen guys yesterday and we have six with bullet wounds. Because you let the fuckers in, you need to pay or we’ll cut your head off.”
The chief dread particularly cited the cases of two young men my uncle knew, both not yet twenty years old. During the raid, a bullet had fractured one’s ribs. The other had been shot in the stomach. Their families were afraid to take them to the public hospital, the chief dread said, because, assuming that they were all criminals, the police routinely shot young men with bullet wounds there. They needed money to find a doctor for these men and others, a doctor who would come to them.
The amount he was asked to pay was too impossibly high to even remember. It might as well have been a billion dollars. Hoping to bargain, reason, my uncle reached over and tried to touch the dread’s burly arm. The dread shoved his hand aside with enough force to make him nearly lose his balance. As he steadied himself on his feet, my uncle raised his voice box to his neck and said, “Tande.”
The chief dread motioned for quiet from the growing crowd.
“I need time,” my uncle continued. “I need to make some phone calls. I need to get in touch with my family in New York. I need to ask them to send me some money. My phone is not working. I have to find a phone. Come back this afternoon, at one, and I’ll have something for you.”
The chief dread looked over at the crowd, then up at the classroom balconies, eyeing those gathered for their approval. He then raised his sizable hands in the air and like Moses parting the Red Sea, signaled for them to scatter. But they didn’t go far. Splitting into smaller groups, they stormed the terraced classrooms and began grabbing whatever was within reach: the blackboards, benches. Some detached the doors from the hinges and took off with them. The top dreads moved aside, allowing more people into the courtyard even as they stepped out.
My uncle was completely surrounded, but no one was touching him. Everyone was heading farther into the compound, toward his apartment, the church. From where he was standing, totally frozen in a spot near a small outdoor grill that Maxo’s wife sometimes used to cook their meals, he could see many of his neighbors scurrying off with his things: Nana, an old woman limping with a cane, carrying some of his dinner plates, Danielle, a small girl whose mother sold water to him now and then, joining strangers as they walked by with a handful of Maxo’s children’s clothes. He could now see the navy blue cotton and Lycra suit he’d worn to his wife’s funeral, the one in which he wanted to be buried, walking away on some boy’s arms. As the crowd rushed back and forth around him—there went the charcoal grill and his windup alarm clock—he did not dare move to the other side of the courtyard, where a plume of smoke was rising outside the church.
They’re burning the altar of the church, someone yelled, and some of the direksyon, that is, the school principal’s office.
The crowd began heading that way, but he remained in place, not moving. He wanted to go to the church, to see it, to defend it, to reclaim the altar. But what if the crowd decided at that moment to burn him too?
What he couldn’t see was the pews and altar being dragged into the middle of the street and set on fire. Part of his office, which was directly beneath the church, was also burned, his papers, including the dozens of notepads in which he’d jotted down words and sentences, his observations about the neighborhood, in good times and bad, they were all scattered now, all over the streets, being trampled, carried away, or burned.
The courtyard was nearly empty now, with everyone’s focus shifted to the church. The few people who were still milling about shamefully avoided his eyes as they walked by, one with a handful of new toothbrushes that he’d kept on the night table in his bedroom upstairs.
He had to get out now, finally leave the neighborhood for good. But how would he get through the barricades, where surely the dreads had people waiting, watching for him? As he moved toward the gate, he spotted Anne, the niece of his old friend Ferna, standing there across the alley, watching him. Had she turned against him too? Had her aunt? Anne held out her empty hands, showing that she was carrying nothing. She had not stolen from him.
“Vini,” she said. Come.
He went without thinking, letting her drag him by the hand. Walking the slippery incline that separated his house from another small courtyard, he kept his face down, his chin as close as he could to his chest without blocking his tracheotomy hole. He did not dare look back toward the church as a new wave of looters brushed past him, heading there. He might have been tempted to follow them, to try to stop them, reason with them. He thought about all the wounded who might be lying somewhere dying. He thought of their mothers, fathers, standing over them unable to do anything but watch. The country was once again losing a generation of young people, some violent, some bystanders, but all in the line of fire, dying.
The courtyard he and Anne stepped into led to a series of narrow alleyways, some haphazardly paved in slippery concrete, some packed with dirt and mud and others dotted with pools of stagnant dirty water. The neighborhood’s labyrinth of corridor-sized alleys was like tunnels, leading everywhere, but alas, only within the neighborhood. He was not too familiar with the path Anne was leading him on now. New houses, shacks, were being built all the time, creating newer and narrower trail
s. Finally, she opened a corrugated iron gate, pasted together from several rusting pieces, and stepped inside.
The yard was only large enough for a latrine and a concrete water basin capped by a rusting faucet. Without saying a word, Anne’s aunt Ferna, a beautifully portly young woman, motioned for him to enter the crowded darkness of her house. Hot and sweaty now, he felt his way past a beaded curtain to a corner between a small dining room table and her bed.
“Pastor, you can stay here until dark,” she said. “Then we’ll find somewhere for you to go.”
The wicker chair she gave him to sit on was much too low and his back ached as he shifted now and then, hoping to find a more comfortable position. But he had to remain there, she insisted. In case someone walked into the house, he could easily slide under the table and remain out of sight. Crouched there, he could hear the normal sounds of the day, a woman chiding her maid for a lunch that had been burned, a father cursing the school master who had sent his son home because the father had not been able to pay that month’s tuition. At the same time, some people were walking by saying, “Did you hear, they nearly killed Pastor?”
He heard many variations of this, people dashing to the church to see, to his apartment to find out what they could get. His entire life was now reduced to an odd curiosity, a looting opportunity. He was grateful, however, that no one seemed to know he was there, hiding. Some thought he had actually been killed. Others seemed certain he had fled.
The neighborhood talk soon moved on to other things. Again the more mundane details of daily life. The egg seller came to collect a debt from Ferna. A friend stopped by to braid Anne’s hair. The visitors were greeted at the door and not allowed inside. He tried to think of where he might go next. Surely the dreads had now gone to look for him. Perhaps they’d only wanted him to flee, to leave the compound so they could confiscate it. Ferna and Anne had no news. They, like him, had no landline or cell phone. They were even afraid to turn on their radio, afraid that might draw someone’s attention. Had they turned on the radio, they might have heard that the Haitian riot police and the MINUSTAH were out on another sweeping operation. This time it was in nearby Fort National, not far from the country’s national archives, where twelve young men were shot and killed.
Later that afternoon, my uncle somehow managed to drift off to sleep. Thankfully he had always been able to sleep no matter what. Perhaps it was because he was constantly busy, waking up early and going to bed late. He also liked to walk, often overexerting himself. No matter what, his body could always shut itself down, forcing him to rest.
When he woke up, Ferna was shaking him. He could feel her breath on his face, but could not see her in the dark.
“Pastor,” Ferna said, her voice dragging with worry and sleep, “you should go now. You should leave.”
“What time is it?” he asked, making sure that his voice box was at the lowest possible volume.
“Three thirty a.m.,” she said. Nearly the same time, he remembered, that Maxo, his aunt and uncle and the children had left. Where would he go now? He could go to Léogâne and join them, but would he make it through the barricades and to the bus depot? He could also go to Tante Zi’s in Delmas, but would he have the same problem?
He could think of only one solution. Tante Denise had a cousin who lived right on the fringes of the neighborhood, near the perimeters of the gangs’ barricades. Her house was somewhere between the Lycée Pétion and Our Lady of Perpetual Help church, where the UN tanks often gathered. If he could make it to her place, then they could wait for an opportune moment when the tanks were there to slip out of the neighborhood.
“You know Man Jou?” he asked Ferna.
She did.
“I’ll go to her house,” he said. “She has a telephone. I can call Maxo from there. I don’t want him to try to come back for me. They might kill him.”
Now he could also hear the shuffle of other feet in the dark—Anne’s. Anne lit a small kerosene lamp and moved it toward his face.
“You can’t go out in your own clothes,” Ferna said. “We need to disguise you.”
Reaching into an open suitcase laid out by his feet, Ferna pulled out a dark, curly, shoulder-length wig, a wide-rimmed wicker sun hat and a long flowered muumuu large enough to fit over his clothes. He couldn’t figure out why she had all these things packed in the suitcase like that. Maybe she was thinking that one day she too might need to escape.
“You must disguise yourself,” Ferna insisted again. “It will be light soon and someone might see you.”
What choice did he have? He could not let himself be captured. He could not surrender either, to be butchered, to die. So he let Ferna and Anne slip the muumuu over his clothes. As they placed the wig on his head, the hair fell against the side of his face, itching, just as his wife’s wigs had when he would kiss her long ago. Though she wore wigs for a long time, he remembered how she often found them intolerable, yanking them off her head as soon as she got home.
Wearing the wig and with the muumuu over his own clothes, he stepped out into the alley with Anne and Ferna at his side. There was an odd stillness to the neighborhood, the houses merging with the murky shadows in the dark. As they guided him up and down the hills and inclines of the winding neighborhood alleyways, he felt like a blind man being led through a labyrinth. Walking briskly, they would occasionally come across a boy stumbling home, drunk. A girl heading to sleep after a night of selling her body. A man, or was it a woman, who, following a furtive look at his very male shoes, quickly hurried past them, head further bent, face further hidden, this person perhaps also a fugitive, perhaps also fleeing.
Man Jou bore the balloon-shaped jowls of Tante Denise’s clan as they aged. She was often ready with a smile, but even readier with a scowl. She was known for her quick temper, but also for her generosity and sense of humor. So when Uncle Joseph showed up at her door dressed in drag, she opened the door, laughed, then let him in. Her house, like Ferna’s, was small, a living room and one even smaller bedroom. However, she had a large bed, with enough room for someone to disappear under it without suffocating.
My uncle spent the next two days at Man Jou’s house, sleeping on a twin mattress at the foot of her bed. As he lay there, often after attempting a series of phone calls through which he’d been unable to reach either Maxo and the children or Tante Zi, he would listen to Man Jou’s accounts of an increasingly dismal state of affairs. In nearby Rue Saint Martin, the police had ordered four young men to lie facedown on the ground and had shot them at close range in the back of the head. Their bodies were left to rot on the street for more than forty-eight hours, as a gruesome deterrent. In the meantime, the gangs had constructed new barricades near his church with trash and burnt-out cars. Only residents who were on good terms with the gang members were being allowed to enter his street. The gangs had set up residence in his apartment, the school, the church, establishing a base from which to operate on his premises.
“If he ever comes back,” the chief dread was said to have declared, “we’ll burn him alive.”
Limbo
My uncle was able to reach Maxo and Tante Zi on their cell phones the following Wednesday night. They’d exhausted their minutes calling all over town, trying to track him down. Finally they’d refilled their cards and waited for his call.
Once his children were safely settled in Léogâne, Maxo had decided to travel with his father to Miami and planned to meet up with him at Tante Zi’s as soon as his father made it out of Bel Air. When my uncle called Tante Zi, whose stationery stand was on Grand Rue, only a few minutes’ walk from Man Jou’s, Tante Zi decided to go and get her brother.
“Don’t come,” my uncle pleaded. “Not now, Zi. Not yet.”
“We can’t just leave you there,” Tante Zi said. “You have your ticket. You can leave the country tomorrow. We have to get you out.”
The next morning, Thursday, Tante Zi got dressed in one of the all-white outfits she’d been wearing since 1999, when he
r oldest son, Marius, died of AIDS in Miami at the age of thirty.
At the time of Marius’s death, he’d left no trace of his more-than-five-year undocumented stay in Miami. No note for his mother. No bankbooks or jewelry, nothing that could be placed in a sealed pouch and mailed to his family. Because of the void out of which Marius had been shipped to her in a shiny American coffin, Tante Zi always carried pictures of his corpse with her wherever she went and wore only white clothes, as a daily reminder of his passing.
Tante Zi was wearing her mourning garb when she approached the first barricade in Bel Air that morning.
“Son,” she called out to one of the many armed young men guarding a narrow path between two shelled-out yellow school buses. One of the men bore an eerie resemblance to Marius, her dark, broom-thin, beautiful boy. She held out a hand to him. He reached back. She quickly pressed a Haitian twenty-dollar bill into it, turning away before the others could see.
“Pray hard,” he mumbled. Maybe he thought she was on her way to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to attend early-morning Mass.
He motioned for her to walk past and she did, moving farther into the neighborhood.
This was the first time she’d been in Bel Air since Sunday’s operation. She had never seen it so bad. The streets were cluttered with trash. There were empty tear gas canisters, hollowed grenades, spent cartridge and bullet shells and other garbage everywhere. Some houses were missing entire sections from the bulldozing by UN earthmovers.