A Wedding in Haiti (15 page)

Piti picked up the phone after one ring. Had he heard? Yes, he had heard. They had a little radio—I could hear it in the background, sirens, a Dominican newscaster with that inflated, telenovela reporting style, which usually seems over-the-top but not tonight. The earthquake was all over the news. Horrific reports were pouring in from Haiti’s capital city. Hundreds, no thousands, were believed dead—the count kept climbing.

Piti had not been able to get in touch with anybody back home: not his father in Port-de-Paix, nor his mother, nor Eseline’s family in Moustique. They were very worried.

This went on for several days. I’d call and ask if he’d heard anything. Then, I’d try to reassure him with what I was hearing stateside. The earthquake had been concentrated in the Port-au-Prince area. Northwest Haiti seemed to have been spared.
“Pas de nouvelle, bonne nouvelle,”
I quoted a saying Papi had picked up during his Canada years to keep up his own spirits when there wasn’t any news for weeks from home. No news, good news.

Piti did not want to contradict his
madrina,
but he was not so confident. Even if the earthquake had not been strong in Moustique, it doesn’t take much to bring down a mud house with a thatch roof on an eroded hillside. No news could mean that the unspeakable had happened.

It was almost a week after the earthquake when Piti heard from a Haitian friend also working in the Dominican Republic who had gotten through to his family that everyone was fine. Piti’s family. Eseline’s family. Leonardo’s family. Pablo’s family. But since Port-au-Prince has become the only place to go in-country for jobs, each of their families had someone living in the capital—just as each family had someone working abroad—and so no one could feel completely spared.

“We are thankful and we are mourning,” Piti told me. In the aftermath of the earthquake, those two feelings were so tightly woven in every Haitian heart, tears of relief could easily double as tears of grief. A sister spared but a cousin killed. A friend maimed but a brother whole. How can the heart encompass it all?

It was after the earthquake that I pulled out the journal of our journey five months earlier and read it over. I wanted to be close to Haiti in an intimate way, not the Haiti blaring all over the news, the Haiti of horrifics, the failed state, the death count rising. I wanted to hear the mango ladies laughing, and Charlie’s sister sweeping the yard with a straw broom in the early morning, and the six predicators and one pastor marrying Piti and Eseline. I wanted to hold Ludy and sing her to sleep with my old Dominican lullabies. To reenter the story as a way of being with Haiti after the cameras departed and the aid folks held their conferences in First World cities, sitting at roundtables with glasses of iced water refilled by waiters from the very countries whose problems these conferences were convened to address.
The future of Haiti
.
The remaking of Haiti
. I didn’t have any answers for Haiti or fix-it advice or even a high road to take or a moral stance for others to emulate
.
I just wanted to be with Haiti, and the line that kept echoing in my heart was the one from stations of the cross on Good Friday:
Walk with me as I walk with you and never leave my side.

I didn’t want to leave Haiti’s side. And so I reentered the story I had written of our journey the previous summer. To borrow a metaphor from my sister’s childhood nightmare, the door had reopened in the narrative I had closed, and a whole new load of beads had come tumbling in.

Wolves on both sides of the door: a very brief history of Haiti

The wolf at Haiti’s door had been there long before the January earthquake.

For years we’d been hearing the sad statistics: Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, one of the poorest in the world. What happens when a natural disaster occurs in a country ill prepared to survive it? The answer was all around us in the days following the earthquake, televised scenes to break the heart and add our own emotional and moral rubble to the dust and rubble of what was left of Haiti’s capital.

And the saddest part was that it was avoidable, not the earthquake itself, of course, but what had happened as a result of it. No matter how the facts were spun and the beads strung, this was not a story of a natural disaster. It was also not a story of a cursed nation whose freedom had been acquired by making a pact with the devil, as Reverend Pat Robertson unbelievably and heartlessly pronounced the day after the earthquake. It was a poverty story, a story of badly constructed buildings, poor infrastructure, and terrible public services. Just as a point of comparison: an earthquake of similar magnitude in the Bay Area in California in 1989 killed sixty-three.

How can this be? Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere? One of the poorest in the world? If you took a time traveler from the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean and plopped him down in today’s Haiti, he would not believe this was the same country. Saint-Domingue, as it was then known, was the world’s richest colony, the Pearl of the Antilles. (Ironically, Santo Domingo next door was a destitute little colony, having been virtually abandoned by Spain for its richer, gold-laden viceroyalties in Mexico and Latin America.) In the hundred years after France acquired the western third of the island from Spain in 1697, Saint-Domingue was producing two-thirds of the world’s coffee, almost half of its sugar, large portions of its cotton, indigo, and cocoa—in short, its exports accounted for one third of France’s commerce. And the fuel that powered this enormously lucrative, money-making machine was human slavery, upward of five hundred thousand enslaved West Africans, “owned” and overseen by forty thousand white Frenchmen.

Again, how can this be? How can a small fraction of a population enslave half a million people, who outnumbered them at least ten to one? In a word, terror. If we were to send a traveler from our own time back to Saint-Domingue to check out how the plantation system worked (I volunteer Pat Robertson for the mission), what a tale of horror he would tell.

Even by the standards of the day, conditions on those plantations were jaw-droppingly brutal. Field hands forced to wear masks to prevent them from eating sugarcane; recalcitrant slaves filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces. In his book on Haiti,
The Immaculate Invasion,
Bob Shacochis quotes a journal entry by a German traveler who was horrified when the wife of his colonial host ordered her cook pitched into the oven for a mistake in the kitchen. Another entry might seem trivial in comparison, but it shows how the slavery system trickled down and deformed the human soul, from a young age on. At breakfast one morning, a colonial child announced, “I want an egg.” When he was told there were none, he replied, “Then, I want two.”

Finally, in 1804, after thirteen blood-soaked years of fighting, the former slaves drove out their French masters. You’d think Haiti could at last begin nation building. That the world would breathe a collective sigh of moral relief. That all those French Revolution freedom fighters, whose example had inspired the colony, would rally to her side. But as the Haitian saying goes, “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” Nation after nation shunned Haiti, refusing it a place in the family of nations, making it a pariah state. France strapped her former colony with a huge reparation payment under the threat of another invasion and reimposition of slavery. Meanwhile, the United States refused to recognize Haiti. In part, this was due to pressure from France, an ally, but also to fears, particularly among Southerners, that a free Black Republic right in our backyard might influence their own slaves. It wasn’t until 1862, after the secession of our own slaveholding states, that Abraham Lincoln extended a hand to our neighbor to the south, and formally recognized Haiti’s right to exist.

Haiti’s own leaders seemed to have forgotten what they had fought for, and instead took a page from their masters, preying on their own people, declaring themselves kings and emperors, emptying Haiti’s meager coffers to fill their own pockets and fund their coronations, their castles, their revolutions, and, once in power, their military and their paramilitary militias to keep them there. Down the generations, many of Haiti’s rulers grew rich but left her poor—most recently and infamously the two Duvaliers, Papa Doc and his son, Baby Doc, who plundered the terrorized country for almost three decades from 1957 to 1986. Again a small detail captures the mindless decadence of their regimes: Baby Doc’s wife, Michele Bennett, had a refrigerated closet for storing her furs—in a tropical country, no less.

Externally, rapaciousness was also the rule. Most pernicious were the loans made at such exorbitant terms that the country’s financial hole just kept getting deeper and deeper. Two foreign occupations by our own United States, as well as dictatorships and military coups, often supported by the United States. Our fingerprints are all over the bruised body of Haiti.

Baby Doc was finally sent packing in 1986. From the ranks of the poor emerged a then Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, preaching the gospel of liberation theology. His wildly popular grassroots movement swept him into power in 1991, and then again in 2004. It seemed that Haiti would at last reconnect with her original revolutionary ideals and nationhood goals. But alas, both times, Aristide was ousted by coups that even by conservative analysis had the tacit approval if not outright help of the United States.

As for Aristide himself, opinions vary confusedly: from Haitians who championed him as “our modern Toussaint L’Ouverture” to Piti’s negative assessment: “He did nothing for us; we only got poorer, and there was more violence because of the arming of the population.” What is clear to supporters and detractors alike is that Aristide was the legitimately elected president of Haiti, and his populist agenda represented a threat to local and international beneficiaries of the old order.

It’s as if Haiti’s historical and political legacy were now operating on automatic, a juggernaut hurtling forward, running over the poor, the deforested countryside, the depleted economy, the disrupted nation. Add to this man-made legacy, the slings and arrows of climate and geography, including hurricanes, floods, and yes, earthquakes—though none so bad as this recent one—the wonder is that the Haitian people have survived with pride and soul intact.

That should give us pause. Notwithstanding a whole pack of wolves on both sides of her door, Haiti keeps bouncing back. After the world ends and the dust settles, heart broken, body bruised and maimed, Haiti stirs. Her spirit rallies, like that woman pulled out of the rubble after I don’t know how many days, weak and lying on a stretcher, white with dust, seemingly a corpse, except that she was singing. She was singing!

It’s as if Haiti
has
made a pact—with hope.

February 2010, a party and a plan

In early February, three weeks after the earthquake, Bill and I are back in the Dominican Republic. I’ve stayed in regular contact with Piti by phone, and through him have kept abreast of how our Haitian friends are faring. Everyone is still reeling with shock from the disaster. Some have returned to Haiti, hoping that the reconstruction will mean jobs. But so far, no one has had any luck, since, of course, the rebuilding will not be taking place in the countryside but in the capital city, which is already packed with desperate people wanting to work.

In our own Dominican countryside, jobs are scarce. A sparse coffee harvest, a bad economy. Pablo is out of work, so we hire him for odd jobs that Piti could easily do by himself. Leonardo is off to the cane fields near La Romana, where the work is grueling. Six days cutting cane, whose sharp stalks are like knives, so that at the end of the day, his arms are full of the equivalent of little paper cuts. All this under the sweltering lowland sun. It’s hard to imagine the smirking Leonardo, who didn’t want to get his clothes dirty by taking his turn riding in the back of the pickup, taking on this kind of job.

“Things are very difficult,” Piti admits with a sigh. It is now his habitual mode of verbal punctuation instead of the giggles of the past. The boy has become a man, a heavyhearted one.

In an attempt to raise everyone’s spirits, Bill and I decide to throw a party for our Haitian friends. We’ll prepare a meal, featuring a Haitian favorite, goat. Afterward, we’ll have music provided by Piti and friends.

We propose the idea to Piti. What does he think?

He giggles in reply.

And so it is that a month after the earthquake, almost to the day, we are partying in the little house. It’s the first time I’ve seen Eseline smiling since we arrived. She has been sullen, shaking her head whenever I ask what’s wrong, using a few phrases I’ve learned in Kreyòl. But tonight, she is in her element, partying like the girl she still is. All the young Haitian men want to dance with her. I can see what Eli meant. But Piti seems unperturbed as he sings away. Thank goodness he is not a jealous man.