As she walked through another checkpoint, this one a pile of tires as tall as she was, she raised both her hands over her head even though no one was there. Clutched in her right fist was a white handkerchief, which she waved back and forth to show that she was unarmed. The UN patrols and the gangs’ checkpoints were separated by only a few blocks, leaving room for someone like her, who just happened to be on the street at the wrong time, to be shot by both sides.
The sun had risen and a few people were beginning to venture out of their houses. She was trying her best to blend in, walking slowly as though she were just strolling and not going anywhere in particular, but she was also sweating, soaking her cotton blouse and skirt. Not since those long days between hearing the news of Marius’s death and waiting for his body to come home had she felt so frightened.
A UN tank was parked a good sprint away, down the hill, near the Lycée Pétion. She and Uncle Joseph had only to make it there before they could consider themselves safe, at least from the gangs. She’d have to find the right trail, perhaps the muddiest, the least-frequented path, through the maze of alleys that would deliver her there.
Filing down the pebbled alley leading to Man Jou’s house, Tante Zi alternated between walking too fast, then too slow. Just as she and Man Jou had agreed on the phone, Man Jou was waiting for her out front. They wanted things to seem as normal as possible, just a chance early-morning encounter.
“Would you like to come in?” asked Man Jou.
“Wi, mèsi, but I can’t stay,” Tante Zi said.
My uncle was sitting on Man Jou’s bed, calmly reading his Bible. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on under the muumuu since Monday. His face appeared hollowed, his high cheekbones—so much like my father’s—sticking out a lot more than usual. Looking up and seeing Tante Zi, he seemed relieved but also sad.
“Frè mwen.“ Brother, Tante Zi said, kissing him on the forehead.
He raised his shoulders and shrugged, which she understood to mean, “Oh, well, things are what they are.”
“He doesn’t want to do it again,” Man Jou said. “He won’t wear the disguise.”
“Frè mwen,” Tante Zi said.
My uncle shook his head no.
“I’ll borrow a towel, then,” Tante Zi said. “We’ll cover his head, at least. If anyone sees us, they’ll think he’s a sick person, someone we’re taking to the hospital.“
My uncle was tired of hiding, but most of all he wanted to stop imposing on Man Jou, so he agreed to the towel.
When they stepped out into the early-morning sun, my uncle, even with part of his face covered by the towel, winced from the light. Tante Zi grabbed his hand and pulled him down yet another series of winding corridors and back alleys, their feet splashing in the mud as they went. Though she was yanking hard, dragging him at times, he put up no resistance, catching up as much as he could.
“He was so tired,” Tante Zi recalled, “it’s as if he had surrendered.”
She tried to stay as close to the road that was being patrolled as possible. There would be fewer people down those alleyways and certainly very few gang members. Still, every face seemed menacing. Even the oldest woman peering out from her porch. Even the youngest child jumping rope next to her. Her grip tightened on my uncle’s fingers with every step. They had only to make it to the Lycée, to one of the patrolling tanks, she kept reminding herself.
While still in the alleys, they got as close to the road as they could, then Tante Zi dashed across an empty street, still tugging at my uncle. Walking quickly, they followed the footpath by the square in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, just in case they had to run inside the church for shelter. Within a few short minutes, they were in front of the Lycée, but the UN patrol was no longer there. Racing past the old cathedral, they merged into the crowd of vendors and slow-moving cars.
That wasn’t so hard, Tante Zi remembers reading on my uncle’s face. Why hadn’t I tried it myself?
“You couldn’t have, brother,” she said, reassuring him. “They didn’t just take your things. They took your legs. They took your heart. You could have walked out of Man Jou’s house alone and dropped dead from the shock of seeing the few people who did not want to kill you.”
She held him by the elbow as they walked to her stationery stand. She hadn’t been able to work every day in the weeks since the demonstrations had started. Catching his breath, my uncle removed the towel from his head. He sat down on a footstool in front of her stand and began wiping the mud off his shoes with a piece of newspaper. Tante Zi offered him water that she was using to clean her own feet and he accepted some. He turned down the food she offered him when they were done. He was suddenly full of plans. He needed to go to the police’s anti-gang unit to report what had taken place, to the UN to file a complaint. Maxo was even now traveling from Léogâne and was going to go with him to Miami. My uncle had to stop by a bank to get some money, then a nearby travel agency to confirm that his flight was still leaving, then buy a ticket for Maxo. Were the flights even operating? he wondered. But then again, chaos in Port-au-Prince was often restricted to certain areas only. There could be a war raging in some neighborhoods, while others were as peaceful as…usually one might say as a church or perhaps a cemetery, but peace was hard to find now in some churches and cemeteries too.
He also had to stop at a pharmacy for a refill of the medications he was constantly taking for his inflamed prostate and high blood pressure. That same pharmacy had herbal remedies too, tree-bark-soaked tonics mixed with liquid vitamins that, he believed, if not cures, helped the body fight certain illnesses. While there, he picked up a large bottle for my father and another one for himself. These were not very different from the types of hope-laden potions my father’s New York herbalist might have prepared, but my uncle, having used such potions all his life, was certain that they would work better simply because they were homegrown.
Once he’d picked up his medication, he took a taxi to the anti-gang unit across from the white-domed presidential palace. During the early Duvalier years, in the late fifties, early sixties, you were not supposed to stop even for a minute in front of the presidential palace or you might be suspected of plotting against the government and risk being shot. Also at that time, if your hair was not closely cropped or if you had something that was beginning to resemble an Afro, you could be arrested. You could also be put in jail for walking around barefoot, like a vagrant, even if you were too poor to buy shoes. These so-called chimères, these young men, some of whom were dying at home from their bullet wounds, and others who were even now crammed into a nine-by-nine-foot holding cell inside the anti-gang building, would not have survived that era either.
Inside the building, the noise was deafening, the cries of complaints from the overcrowded holding cell, the police officers marching in, some of them still wearing balaclavas over their faces even while inside. My uncle quickly walked to a desk manned by one of the special forces officers who was not wearing a mask. Like his masked colleagues, this man was tall and large, larger than most Haitians. Sometimes he’d hear his parishioners say that the CIMO officers were not really Haitian or even human at all. They were machines created by the Americans who trained them to kill and destroy.
“Can I help you?” asked the giant officer at the desk, who looked rather kind and mild, not like a brutal killer at all.
“I’d like to make a report,” he said.
His mechanical voice probably echoed throughout the dim room. He may have looked around to see if anyone was watching, anyone who might recognize him, then go outside to wait for him, to kill him.
The officer told him to sit down.
“What are you reporting?” the officer asked, pulling out a form from a folder on top of a desk already cluttered with piles and piles of papers. The officer grabbed a pen from under another set of papers and readied himself to write.
At the top of the form were the words:
POLICE NATIONALE D’HAITI
SECTION DE DOLEANCES
The last line indicated that my uncle was in the grievance section of the national police’s investigation and anti-gang unit. And as if to remove any hope that the matter he was complaining about might actually be looked into, the word “investigation” was misspelled on the department letterhead.
The nature of the incident in question was summarized as “pillaging, theft and incineration.” My uncle’s declaration to the officer recounted what had happened that Sunday at the church as well as the following day. Among the many things he said he lost were “nos papiers important,” our important papers. He was asked to pay the officer forty Haitian dollars, the equivalent of five American dollars, for a photocopy of the original document, which the officer then laid on top of another large pile of such documents on his desk.
Could someone be sent to his house in Bel Air now to examine the situation? my uncle asked.
The officer said it was a bad time. They were too busy, but they would look into it later.
What about a justice of the peace, an examining judge, or an investigative judge, who was usually sent to the scene of a crime?
If he could find one to go at his own expense, the officer said, he was welcome to send one there, but good luck to him, since no one was going into Bel Air right now, including CIMO officers and the UN.
But if the gangs took over his compound and he needed to eventually get it back, wouldn’t he need a report from a justice of the peace?
“We’re in a war now,” the officer calmly explained. “We’ll see what happens after the war.”
But how much longer could this war go on? How many more would have to flee? How many would have to die? Wasn’t the UN, the MINUSTAH, there to help end the war?
How could he file a similar report with the UN about the MINUSTAH? he asked.
The officer told him to go up to Bourdon, a small neighborhood up the hill, on the road leading to Pétion Ville, one of the city’s suburbs. The headquarters of CIVPOL, the United Nations’ Civilian Police Unit, were housed at the Villa Saint Louis, a twenty-five-room, sixty-U.S.-dollar-a-night hotel with spacious balconies overlooking parts of Port-au-Prince.
He left the anti-gang unit around noon, carrying his copy of the police report. It was scorching outside and he could feel the sun warm his face through the fuzz of a short beard that had grown there these last couple of days. He hadn’t had a chance to shave at Man Jou’s. He’d have to remember to buy a razor before he went to Tante Zi’s so he could be clean-shaven for his flight the next day.
He then took another taxi to the Villa Saint Louis. At the entrance, he asked some soldiers in camouflage where he might file a complaint. The soldiers shrugged, not speaking any Creole or French.
“Português,” they said, motioning for him to go farther inside.
In contrast to Bel Air and the anti-gang unit, the hotel seemed extremely luxurious with its swimming pool and sundeck, crowded with umbrella-topped tables. Before the raids began, he’d heard some of his parishioners joke that the MINUSTAH were actually TURISTA, tourists on an adventurous exploration. He wondered what these parishioners would say now if they could see this hotel.
Milling around the bar and lounge area were a large number of CIVPOL officers. As bewildering as life had suddenly become, there were now all these acronyms to remember. CIMO. SIAG. MINUSTAH. CIVPOL.
Unlike the MINUSTAH “peacekeepers” or soldiers, the CIVPOL officers all wore the uniforms of their own countries’ police force with blue UN helmets and matching bulletproof vests. My uncle quickly recognized the scarlet tunic and breeches of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police French-speaking officers, who seemed to outnumber the other groups chatting in several different languages around him.
Approaching one, he asked in French if he could file a complaint.
The officer had trouble understanding his machine, so he had to repeat himself several times. The officer, a man whose face seemed as red as his tunic, perhaps from sunburn, took him aside to a quiet corner near a staircase, and as his eyes wandered toward some other officers having lunch around the pool, my uncle tried to tell him what had happened.
Had he filed a report at the anti-gang unit? the officer asked.
He answered yes and handed the SIAG report to the officer.
The officer took the report to him and told him to wait. He was going to make a copy.
The hum of multilingual chatter momentarily distracted my uncle as he waited. Soon the officer was back. He’d made a copy of the report, he said.
“Merci,” my uncle said, not even certain himself why he was saying thank you.
Would some action be taken? my uncle asked. Would the UN soldiers who’d shot from his roof be disciplined? Would the people who’d been wounded be helped? Would the Red Cross go in and take them to the hospital? Would the families of the dead be compensated? Or at least assisted with funeral expenses?
It was likely that Haitian police officers had shot from his roof, the officer said. MINUSTAH and CIVPOL were simply there to assist the Haitian police. If his neighbors were wounded and killed by Haitian police, there was nothing the UN could do.
Had my uncle contacted any Haitian human rights organizations? he asked. The Haiti branch of the New York–based National Coalition for Haitian Rights, la Comité des Avocats pour le Respect des Libertés Individuelles or the Lawyers Committee for the Respect of Individual Rights?
He didn’t know where these groups were located, my uncle said. Besides, he was leaving the country the next day. He realized how arrogant that must have sounded, how privileged, how lucky. There were so many others who were indefinitely trapped in the crossfire between the police and the UN and the gangs. He planned to come back, he said, which is why he wanted to have all these reports filed, so he could have his place back, live again where he had spent most of his life.
Good luck, the officer said.
Later, after leaving Léogâne and before going to Tante Zi’s, Maxo would travel the same path as his father, neither one knowing that the other had gone to the anti-gang unit to file a report that he’d then carried to the UN. Maxo had gone to another building near the Villa Saint Louis Hotel, a place that also housed some UN offices. There he ran into more Brazilian officers and more corporals with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These men (there were very few women among these forces), and everyone else who wore a uniform, wielded a baton and carried a gun, inspired both awe and fear in Maxo and my uncle, for they were part of a constant pull and release, or what my uncle might have in Creole called “mòde soufle,” where those who are most able to obliterate you are also the only ones offering some illusion of shelter and protection, a shred of hope—even if false—for possible restoration. In Maxo’s SIAG report, as part of his “declaration de perte,” or declaration of losses, he too listed “nos papiers importants,” birth certificates, old report cards, family photos, school diplomas, the kind of things one might need to restore even the smallest fragments of a life.
I only learned of my uncle’s predicament that Thursday night. Tante Zi had called her daughter in New York, who had passed the news on to my father.
During our nightly phone conversation, my father calmly said, “You’re pregnant, so don’t upset yourself too much, but your uncle’s had some problems in Bel Air.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know all the details myself, but I hear there’s a gang in his house right now.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He and Maxo are at Zi’s house. They’re coming to Miami tomorrow. You’ll see them before any of us will.”
After sharing the news with my husband, I called Tante Zi’s cell phone. In her usual exuberant way, in things both good and bad, Tante Zi detailed as much of the story as she knew, as much as my uncle had told her.
I asked her if I could speak to my uncle.
“He’s asleep,” she said.
“Maxo?”
“Him too.”
She didn’t have the heart to wake them, she said, because they’d been through so much and had slept so little these past few days, plus they had to get up early the next morning to catch their flight.
“Please tell them to call me in the morning,” I said. “Tell them my husband and I want to know what flight they’re on so we can pick them up.”
One of my uncle’s minister friends was picking them up, she said. My uncle had already arranged it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’ll call you when they get there.”
No Greater Shame
The next day, Friday, my father’s health took a turn for the worse. Worried about my uncle, he hadn’t slept the night before. His voice was so hoarse from coughing that he could barely speak when I called. His eczema and psoriasis had returned and he’d completely lost what little appetite he had.
My daughter had just begun to kick at night and her fetal acrobatics left me totally exhausted in the morning. I was in bed fighting a fainting spell when Bob called to tell me about Papa.
“Maybe you should take him to the hospital,” I told Bob.
“He doesn’t want to go,” Bob said. “He says they’ll just send him home like all the other times.”
As Bob spoke, I could hear my father coughing and moaning loudly in the background.
“He’s getting worse,” Bob added. “And this thing with Uncle’s not helping.”
I wanted very much to be in New York with my father, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself there. I am sitting on the edge of his bed and we’re watching my father’s favorite game show, The Price Is Right, on television. Unsure of the answers, we guess wildly but still get all of them right anyway. This makes my father so happy that he rises out of bed and starts to dance. At first he dances like a ballerina in slow motion, but then he increases his pace, until he’s jumping up and down, bouncing on and off his bed.
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