Authors: Nick Lake
Like the night I was born, it was very dark. It seems like it’s always dark when the big things go down in my life – when we were born, when my papa was killed, when Dread Wilmè died.
This was after Aristide had gone, like I said. The Americans made him leave, except Biggie said it was them who put him in the palace in the first place. I never understood that. I asked Manman about it and she said it was complicated. She said that about everything. Then when I asked too many questions she would say, chita chouter yon jour wap fait goal.
Careful, or
you’ll get what you’re looking for.
I think she meant that some answers are dangerous.
So, Aristide was gone. Some moun said he was in Africa, some moun said he was in South America. Others, they said he would come back one day, when he was ready. Maybe he’s come back now. Maybe he was so pleased to see Haiti again he jumped off the plane and
pouf
, the hospital fell down. The way Manman talked about him, you’d think he was some giant, some magical big guy from a story, more powerful than any ordinary person, so that when he jumped up and down, you could imagine the buildings shaking.
But Dread Wilmè still lived in the Site. Before, he would send his chimères to fight the rebels. After Aristide left, it got worse. The new government gave more guns to the Boston guys, the rebels, and told them to go after Dread Wilmè, cos he had been Aristide’s man. Also, the police would come into the slum and hunt for Lavalas supporters. With them were the attachés – they were like police, but they wore black masks and no moun could see who they were. Usually they made people they didn’t like disappear, but sometimes they had the chance to kill people, and the best time for them to do that was during the demonstrations. There were lots of demos and Manman took me on some. You have to understand: the Site was the biggest base for Aristide. He said he’d make the poor rich, so the poor loved him. It makes sense, right?
When the military kicked him out, and the UN came, the Site fucking exploded. It stands to reason.
I remember one demo. It was Haitian Flag Day, and thousands of us went out on the streets of the Site, singing songs in support of Aristide, calling for him to come back, singing songs against Latortue, who was the prime minster of the government that replaced him.
— Trop de sang a coulé, Latortue doit s’en aller.
Too much blood has flowed, Latortue has to go.
We sang in French, so the reporters could understand, which was a joke, cos
there were no reporters there anyway, even though we must have been, like, 10,000, minimum. We were all carrying Haitian flags and it was like a big party, all these people, all this color.
The attachés came when we were close to the sea, on the main avenue. There were UN soldiers behind them in armored trucks, but they didn’t do anything. The attachés were in jeeps, and they got out with their black masks on and their rifles in their hands. Manman and me, we were near the front of the crowd, so we saw them, and we started to back away. People were shouting out in fear, and then the shooting began. One guy in front of me, he went down on his knees, and he was crawling toward me like a zombi, man. I was screaming and screaming. I wanted to get away from him more than I wanted to get away from the bullets.
You, maybe you live in a world where people don’t get shot. I know what you’re picturing. I’ve seen anpil movies. You think bullet holes in a person look like little circular holes, like red coins. They don’t. What a bullet does, it goes into a person and it tears, it rips them open, makes them into a monster. They’re not human anymore.
This guy in front of me, he’d been hit in the face, and his whole cheek, the whole side of his face had been, like, blown out about half a meter from his body, like a horn, like a trunk, like some kind of awful animal thing. You have never seen shit like this in your life, mwen jire. He was like a zombi, I’m telling you, like something out of a horror movie. And he was still crawling toward me, this massive bloody growth out of his head, making this animal sound, too.
I don’t remember much of what happened after that. It was all running and screaming. Eventually we found ourselves in an alley with lots of other people and we couldn’t hear gunfire anymore.
The UN soldiers came and locked everyone into the slum so they couldn’t escape. That’s what they did to people in the Site during the break-bones time.
We called the UN soldiers casques-bleus, cos they wore blue helmets. They put cargo containers on the entrances and exits to the Site, and they built checkpoints and put soldiers on them. They’re still there – sometimes, me and Tintin, we drove as close as we dared and showed them our asses.
It was a dog fight and the Site was the pit. Manman said 3,000 people died in twelve months.
But in those twelve months, there was one person who didn’t die. One person who moved around constantly, sleeping in a different place every night, evading the men sent to kill him.
Dread Wilmè.
We had moved to Solèy 19, thanks to Dread, and for a long time, our part of the Site had been safe, cos Aristide paid Dread Wilmè to protect the people. Manman knew Dread Wilmè from her time with the Lavalas party. She respected him. He sold drugs, but he didn’t tolerate crime. He didn’t let anyone steal, or commit murder for no reason.
It was bad under Dread, but it was good at the same time.
Now Aristide was gone, though, Solèy 19 was no longer safe. Some of the men who worked for Dread Wilmè had taken their guns and become chimères, working for no moun but their ownselves. Also, there were many men who wanted to kill Dread cos they didn’t like Aristide, and that included the government, who were handing out guns like they were lottery tickets. Plus, the UN wanted to kill all of them, so there would be no more guns in the Site. Manman was always frightened during the break-bones time, which was basically the whole time after Aristide was banished for good, cos the people from the Site, they just wouldn’t give up on him, on the dream he’d sold them.
OK, so now you know the lowdown on everything that was going on at that time, when I saw my second man get killed.
That night, Manman was outside, too, cos it was so hot. She had an old radio and she was listening to it, sitting on a chair outside the shack. She was keeping an eye on me, as I worked on my bike.
With no warning, the radio went off and all the lights.
I heard someone scream. That wasn’t unusual in the slum, but then I heard another loud noise. A sort of rumbling. It was a little bit like the noise I heard when everything fell down.
Rrrrrum, rrrrrumm, rrrrruuuum, rrrrruuuuum.
I’m trying to show you the noise. I’m making it here in the dark and I’m not doing it so good, but still, if you could hear me, you’d understand.
But you don’t hear me, do you? I hear your voices less and less often now – the voices asking if there’s anyone alive down here – but you don’t hear mine. You don’t hear me when I shout back.
So, I have to describe the noise. It’s hard to do. You’ll have to use your imagination.
OK, you’re in the dark. There’s piti-piti light coming from the rich houses on the hill, but in the slum it’s preske pitch-black. You can hardly see a thing except for candles, matches, the glow of cigarettes. You can just smell the salt of the sea and the fish. You can smell oil from the bike chain in your hand. But mostly you can smell sewage. From somewhere in the darkness this rumbling sound is coming, and then from somewhere above you another sound is coming, like,
thwup, thwup, thwup, thwup
, incredibly loud, a million bees overhead
.
That was what it was like – and also not. I can’t put it into words.
I dropped the chain. I thought I’d better run from whatever was making that noise, so I started to move.
But suddenly there was bright light everywhere, and I froze. A spotlight on an armored truck came on, blinding white. Fire was spitting from guns.
A bullet went,
fwwwwiiiiiip
, and pinged into the corrugated iron behind me.
I was terrified. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in my chest to move, like I was just eyes, watching, and ears, hearing the boom of the gunfire, and all of the rest of my body had disappeared.
I thought, very clearly, I’m going to die.
And I knew – really knew – for the first time that I didn’t want to.
I saw UN helmets and under them machine guns, rattling fire. That sound above turned out to be a helicopter and it was shooting down into the shacks on the other side of the street.
There was more gunfire coming from the shacks. A man was running away down the street. I didn’t know if he was a chimère or not, but it didn’t matter cos one of the soldiers shot him in the back. I saw a little girl standing very still and screaming, screaming, on the other side of the street from our shack, till something hit her and the top of her face was taken off, and she swayed on her legs for a moment, then fell in the mud.
There was a door open and through it I saw Jeanne. She was this woman who lived opposite us with her little baby Willie. I never knew where the papa of this baby was; maybe he was dead, or maybe he’d just left her cos he couldn’t afford to look after Willie. Anyway, she was lying on the ground in anpil blood, Willie on top of her. I wanted to see if he was alive, cos I liked Willie – he would smile when he saw me – but I couldn’t cos there were still bullets flying all around.
I went down on my knees. I couldn’t run; I could only stay there. I saw Manman standing outside our shack, shouting and shouting at me to run, but I couldn’t – I was seeing these bullets flying everywhere and I was convinced that if I moved, one of them would hit me. I thought if I crouched, very still, then maybe they would stop shooting, and I would be OK. I turned around and there was this enormous tank coming toward me, still a little way off, but it wasn’t steering away from me.
And the guns just kept firing. Dread’s soldiers, they were trading fire with the casques-bleus, but I didn’t see many MINUSTAH go down – they were all wearing armor and their guns were better. A couple of the gangsters dropped their guns and put up their hands, then the UN guys grabbed them and dragged them into an armored vehicle, a Humvee. I didn’t know it then, but one of the people they arrested was Biggie. He spent, like, a couple of years in prison after that night. They said he killed a soldier. Maybe he did, I don’t know.
Finally I saw Dread Wilmè come out of a shack. I had no idea he was sleeping so near to us, but the chimères were always moving around, especially after Aristide was deposed. They never stayed in one shack for two nights running, in case someone found them.
Well, I guess someone found Dread Wilmè that night. His dreads were swinging crazily and he had a gun in each hand. I didn’t know what his guns were then, but I do now. They were Uzis.
Dread Wilmè hit one soldier in the leg. But they were shooting him from the helicopter, they were shooting him from the tank, they were shooting him from the ground. Something hot exploded in my leg and I looked down to see a blossom of red on my jeans. I knew it was blood. The thing that shocked me was how much it hurt. I was already on my knees and now I fell down altogether.
Time slowed.
My leg pulsed with pain.
Lying there, I saw the ground stretching out before me, an endless muddy plane, and I saw my manman leave the shack and start moving toward me.
— No, I tried to say. Stay –
But then I must have fainted, cos I don’t remember anything else. The rest is what my manman told me.
Manman was moving toward me and then something seized her tight. She was being held by a soldier – he’d come out of the blackness and grabbed her arms, and she was struggling to get away, to run to me, but he wasn’t letting her go. Me, I was lying in the mud, unconscious, and Dread Wilmè was between me and Manman. Coming toward me from the other side, still not stopping, was an armored vehicle, and Manman could see that it was heading straight for me, was going to crush me without hesitation to get Dread.
There were so many holes in Dread Wilmè, Manman said, you could see the light from the trucks and the torches on the soldiers’ guns shining through him. I never believed that, but she swore it was true. Now, I kind of believe her. Now, I’ve seen shit that makes me think she was telling the truth. All these bullets in him, through him, my manman said, and he was still standing there, filtering the light, like that was his destiny.
Then – and this is the crazy bit – Dread Wilmè turned to me, and Manman said it was like he saw something holy, something that could save him. He started to move toward me. Bullets were still slamming into him, but he staggered toward me, the light flickering through the holes in him, like his body was the night sky and the bullet holes were the stars. And all the time that tank was continuing toward me – toward Dread Wilmè especially, but it was going to have to run me over to get to him.
Dread Wilmè did not want that to happen, it seemed. He staggered toward me without stopping for anyen, even as they shot him.
Dread Wilmè was still dying, still moving toward me, the tank approaching. Manman couldn’t believe how long it was taking, and she was screaming the whole time for the tank to stop. Manman said it took Dread minutes to reach me, not seconds, and he kept shouting: