Because We Are: A Novel of Haiti

by Ted Oswald

  Officer Dimanche, dressed in jeans and an orange polo shirt, walked toward Touss, a scowl on his face. He growled something to Touss, but it was too quiet for Libète to hear from where she was standing. Touss looked alarmed, but only for a second. He turned back to his microphone.

  — My friends, these “police” have come to take me in.

  — No! shouted a young man. They can’t do that!

  — I know, I know. It is the tools of the opposition trying to hurt our campaign! Magistrate Bienaimé has sent his pet dogs to make trouble for us.

  — Get off the microphone! Dimanche said, his words picked up by the device. He pulled Touss off the stage, throwing him into the arms of his men. Dimanche stepped up to the microphone himself, taking it in hand.

  — Toussaint Laguerre is being arrested because he was in custody before the earthquake. The microphone gave a shout of shrill feedback that made Dimanche recoil and return it to its stand. When the quake hit, he escaped. We are returning him to custody. Dimanche addressed the entire crowd, but his eyes chanced upon Libète’s angry stare. Recognition registered on his face, but he quickly looked elsewhere.

  — That is all, Dimanche concluded. Please return to your peaceful assembly.

  The crowd started to boo, including Libète until she realized what she was jeering. On one hand was the gang leader who had used her to kill. On the other was a cruel martinet who unjustly arrested an innocent man and subjected him to prison. Both are my enemies. Should I feel happy?

  She watched as Dimanche turned away from the stage, and a rock was thrown anonymously from the audience. He turned and scowled, showing his disdain.

  — Don’t! Touss yelled as he was being forced inside the back of the SUV by one of the other policemen. Don’t resort to violence! This is a mistake, and I will be back with you in solidarity before long. I promise! Nothing can stop our progress as we march ahead!

  The policemen slammed the vehicle’s doors and they were off, kicking up dust and gravel.

  It takes three days for a truck to take away Aunt Estelle.

  She laid there, along with the other corpses, under Libète’s old sheet, baking under the Sun. Libète’s Uncle had told her to keep watch over the body while he and Davidson tried to salvage their possessions. And so she did, sitting in the narrow shade of a house along with the other bereaved, staring at the small clearing where the bodies had been brought to temporarily rest.

  She was near delirious with hunger and thirst, as was everyone. She had spoken little since the quake, the weight of all that had happened threatening to crush her. Meanwhile her Aunt just lay there, too big for the single sheet to cover—her toes poking out here, a forearm there, her broad forehead looking pasty and grim. It was all too much to fathom.

  The rumbling nearby did not stir her at first. Water trucks and other supplies had started trickling in, but the young men, those who were fit, pushed their way in first to lay claim.

  But this truck was different. Men in jumpsuits came around the corner, led by one of Libète’s neighbors.

  — Alright, everyone! Listen up! We’re here to take the bodies away! We have to bury them outside the city to keep the ground water clean and keep you from getting sick. Say your last prayers for them and help get them on the truck!

  — But where will they be buried? asked an old man. So that we may visit?

  — I can’t tell you because I don’t know. We’re putting them where there’s space. Someone will return to tell you where.

  — I don’t believe you! a woman cried out. You’re going to take my husband and I’ll never know where he rests!

  — Someone will return! We have to hurry—this is only a few bodies compared to what we’re seeing elsewhere. Illness will come if they don’t go. Please, help us put them on the truck!

  The people lining the walls stepped out reluctantly, calling others to join in and rushing to find relatives. Libète made the five minute walk to find Davidson and her Uncle, but they were nowhere to be found. Would her Aunt, so wide and heavy, be left out with no one to carry her away?

  By the time she returned, all of the bodies but her Aunt’s had been loaded and a circle of six men were looking at the corpse trying to figure out the best way to move her. They fashioned a makeshift stretcher from a few sheets of plywood and slid it under her, heaving to lift her up as the boards sagged. Libète trailed behind them, watching them dump her unceremoniously on its back end. The body now lay face down on top of other corpses as the truck trundled off. The other relatives began to weep, wail, and cry, saying goodbye for the second and final time.

  — Orevwa, tantie, she whispered. Orevwa.

  **

  — Food tickets! Show your food tickets! shouts the menacing Pakistani soldier as he paces up and down the line, the sole phrase in Kreyol he knows. He waves his black truncheon in the air as if a magic wand, capable of conjuring order out of chaos.

  Libète is squeezed tight, her chest pressed against the butt of the woman in front of her, pushed forward by the woman behind her, pressed forward by the man standing behind her and so on, up and down a line now hundreds of people long. Other U.N. soldiers keep watch from further away with machine guns on display while their friends march up and down the line, raining down blows on those who try to cut and throwing out those who have no food ticket to show. Libète makes sure to hold her ticket out far, wondering how she will carry the bag with her injured arm, worried she may be preyed upon by one of the rejected. If only Davidson was here instead, but he still sorts through the rubble of their home with Uncle.

  White people stand around the truck with clipboards, three men and one woman, watching the scene through dark sunglasses and under floppy-brimmed hats. They grimace each time a soldier delivers another blow, struggling with the contradiction of their work. Compassion is never as clean as the givers would like it to be.

  **

  — We’re leaving, Libète.

  Libète sat under a tarp slung from their neighbor’s home and staked into the ground. Since the day before, she and her Uncle had slept in the remains of their home under the grey tarp given in a shelter kit. Buckets, ropes, tools, wood. That’s what they were given to rebuild their lives.

  Libète was sipping a cup of tepid water in her lap, savoring each drop as it slid down her parched throat. What do you mean, Uncle?

  — I cannot stay here. We will go.

  She nearly dropped her cup. But…why? Our things are here! Where else will we stay in Bwa Nèf?

  — Bwa Nèf? No. We must leave here altogether. We’ll go elsewhere, to Twa Bebe. I hear they are building a camp on the open land. It will be better there. Food, water, everything will be provided.

  — But Uncle—our neighbors are here! Church, school, they’re all here in Bwa Nèf! Her thoughts also went to Jak, who would surely be returning to the slum soon. He would need her support once he finally forgave her.

  — School? Libète, there is no more school for you. There is no money for anything, no savings! We have nothing!

  Libète is silenced by this new blow.

  — Look around us, girl. It’s all gone! Crushed, broken, made dust. We lived on your aunt’s work and spent all the money from it! I have no trade! Nothing to give, nothing to offer!

  — You can’t take me away from here, Uncle! Please, it’s home. We must find a way to stay behind—I’ll go to Davidson in Wharf Soleil, he can help—

  — He can’t take you and I need you, her Uncle snapped. Twa Bebe is only a mile from here—it’s not another country. No, we go tomorrow, Libète. There is no choice here, no choice at all.

  The wall stands facing Route 9 and Libète faces it. It is Davidson’s refusal to help that has brought her here, her last hope.

  The wall is painted white, built with foreign charity and Haitian sweat. In recent months a battle for its control has taken place, proving no surface in Cité Soleil is safe.

  Young men come in the night and blanket the walls in a tapestry
of campaign posters. First, there are posters of the presidential candidates, all 19 of them. Several claim to be the heir apparent to Aristide’s own Lavalas party while Lavalas’ leadership has boycotted the elections. Jude Celestin is the dark horse candidate, current president René Preval’s anointed successor. Mirlande Manigat, a former first lady and law professor, seems the most respectable. Then comes the most famous and most strange, Michel Martelly. Better known by his stage name Sweet Micky, he is a singer known for lewd lyrics, wild performances, and dropping his pants on stage.

  There are two premier candidates in the senatorial race in Cité Soleil. Jean-Pierre Benoit, and a lesser known man who has run for the office three times prior and lost.

  This opponent is Stephen Bienaimé. A long-time magistrate and, if the quantity of posters is any indication, positioned to lose yet again. Where Benoit’s posters highlight his strong physique and good looks set against bold colors, Bienaimé’s feature only a disembodied head, his pudgy round face adorned with large glasses that cover his bulging eyes. His campaign slogan, recycled from past races, states “Bienaimé se Bon Zanmi,” a play on his name: “Bienaimé is a good friend.”

  Libète is not here to take in posters. She has come here often over the past months, always longing to walk up to the wall and again enter through its large metal door. She resolved that today would finally be the day.

  She proceeds across the road, rushing to avoid a passing water tanker but nearly colliding with an unseen man on a rusted bicycle, the helmet he should be wearing strapped to the back of the bike to tote a half dozen eggs. One of the eggs tumbles out and he curses the girl. She curses him back before continuing to the metal gate and knocking hard.

  A smaller door inset in the gate swings open, and she is met by a young man, maybe in his early twenties.

  — I must speak with one of the boys here. He is in the fourth year. It is urgent.

  The man looks her up and down, and lets her pass through. Go quickly. They’re at play. Look for him in the yard.

  She stepped over the door’s threshold and was shocked by what she saw. It was one of the most beautiful places she’d ever seen, the opposite of the misery witnessed the last time she stepped through that door. The buildings were an immaculate white—this was no surprise as their tops could be seen from the road. But the compound was clean, not a piece of trash anywhere. The yard was landscaped too, lined with bushes and flowers the likes of which Libète had never seen in Cité Soleil. The whiteness of it all stood in contrast against the darkened sky, rendered grey by an approaching storm.

  She was next struck by the sheer number of children, those who boarded at the school. They all wore beautiful uniforms with lavender shirts and navy blue pants and skirts. They played football and basketball, jumped rope, hopped-scotch, or even just sat around in the shade chatting and laughing.

  She had never stood out so much in her life, wearing a battered olive-green dress that looked more like a sack with holes, and her Haitian flag headscarf. Though it wasn’t the case, she felt all eyes were upon her, judging her inferiority and ugliness. She looked up only to find the one she sought.

  She spotted the boy, looking happy and playing a game with a bouncing red ball. He moved strangely as he tried to catch it, dragging one perpetually erect leg while the other flexed and bent normally.

  She walked up behind him, hoping that he might sense her there. One of his playmates finally pointed to her. The boy turned.

  — Hello, Jak.

  No reply came, his face hard and inscrutable. He clutched the ball.

  — Jak, I greeted you, she whimpered.

  He seemed surprised, maybe at her deterioration: her sunken eyes, her pallid and stretched skin, her bony chest.

  She sized him up, too. While he had grown only slightly taller, he otherwise looked like a new boy. His belly had shrunk to normal proportions. His arms and face were filled in. He appeared, for the first time since she had known him, healthy. Their reversal from the last time she saw him ten months before was lost on neither.

  — You shouldn’t have come, Libète. I told you not to come.

  She stands amid a field of the sick and dying. Fear, that dark creature, tries to break out of the recesses of her heart where she keeps it chained. She resolves to beat back that darkness, at least until she knows more.

  She looks for Jak at St. Sebastian’s hospital. It is only five days since the earth first shook.

  The bloody and broken spill out of the hospital doors, flooding every corner of the compound. The drama is high as children and adults hear that amputations are necessary, and there are rumors that medical supplies run low. Strung up grey, white, and blue tarps form a patchwork roof over the yard, shielding the ailing and injured from the Sun. Several rest in the shade dazed, newly wrapped stubs where an arm or foot once was.

  She first looks for Jak where she had last seen him, inside one of the hospital beds recovering from the wounds given by the murderer’s hands. She fails to find him.

  She goes outside and searches each miserable face in the yard, hoping to find the small boy with the large cast.

  He is not there. Busy orderlies, nurses, and doctors move about, rationing water, changing bandages, conducting triage assessments, and sometimes, noting that death has claimed another victim.

  — What the hell just happened here? Libète hears a woman yell.

  It comes from an older blan woman with short grey hair and large glasses. She goes into a tirade directed at a nearby male nurse. A lone child, a small girl, is dead at her feet.

  Is she a doctor? An American maybe? But the woman spoke French and Kreyol interchangeably. Of the Americans Libète had seen in Haiti, it was rare they spoke Kreyol. Or is she French? Libète caught herself, surprised at her callousness, that the woman’s nationality concerned her more than a child her own age dead not more than ten feet away. She offered up a short prayer for the little girl’s soul.

  The woman slumped and took a deep breath, lifting her glasses with her thumb and index finger at the bridge of her nose, rubbing her eyes. Nearly all watched the white woman and the nurse. Feeling the burden of their stares, she spoke.

  — I’m sorry for my outburst. I was wrong to shout. You’re doing a good job. It’s the stress, you understand? The nurse nodded, eyes still wide. Can you take care of this little one’s body? He gave another nod. She left him and returned to her rounds.

  Libète knew she risked much approaching the angry white woman, but she had to—fear of having lost Jak took hold. Libète stepped in her path.

  — Dokte, I have a question for you.

  — What’s that? she shot in impatient Kreyol.

  Libète swallowed.

  — It’s about a small boy. I’ve lost him, and I think you might know what happened to him.

  — There are many small boys here. Why don’t you look some more for him?

  — I have, dokte, but he’s not here. He came before the quake. His name is Jak, and his leg was broken badly. He had a big cast on it.

  The blan woman searched her memory. To her, those five days felt like a year.

  — Yes, I remember him.

  — Is he…is he dead? Libète couldn’t keep back tears at the thought. The doctor softened, summoning new warmth.

  — Dead? No, no, no. He’s well. We had him moved, after the quake, to free up another bed. They took him in at the St. Francis boarding school, I think. Check for him there.

  — Mèsi, mèsi anpil, Libète said, sniffing back the tears.

  — You’re welcome. Now go, my dear, with God.

  **

  She stumbled through the entrance into the boarding school. Its yard was filled with squatters come to seek a safe place to sleep in the open and tap the school’s water supply. A crowd congregated outside trying to force its way in, but an armed policeman, shotgun in hand, controlled the narrow entryway. Libète pushed and wiggled her way up to the front of the crowd and shouted to get the officer’s attentio
n.

  — Sir, my brother is there alone! Please you must let me in, you must!

  He gave her a slight nod, and she passed through the doorway, much to the gathered crowd’s dismay.

  It took some time to navigate the people inside and find someone who could help her. She was fortunate to find an elder groundskeeper, still dutifully sweeping the cement pavement despite the unprecedented disaster. He was able to take her to her friend.

  Jak lay upon a bunk bed within the student dormitory, his leg elevated by a rope that ran from the barred window to his ankle. He appeared listless as he stared out the window, its soft afternoon light bathing the stuffy room in a dim glow.

  — Hello, Jak.

  He turned to face her. His brow furrowed.

  — I’m glad to see you’re OK, she continued. I thought you were dead. When you weren’t at the hospital.

  — M’ la toujou. I’m still here.

  — I see. I have a lot to tell you. So much I can’t keep it in—

  — I don’t want to hear it.

  — But you need to. You must. It’s your grandmother…I checked on her, after the quake, and I don’t know how to tell you, but…she’s gone.

  There was a long silence, one Libète refused to intrude upon.

  — How…did she die? Jak asked, his voice wavering.

  — I don’t know. She was just dead. In your home. Nothing had fallen on her. She was just laying there. She’s been taken away now, with the others.

  He was silent again.

  — Then I’m alone, he said.

  — M’ la toujou, she whispered.

  No response came. She stifled a tear.

  — There’s more, Jak. So much has happened.

  She looked away from his unbearable stare.

  — Aunt Estelle is dead. My house is ruined. We don’t know what we’re doing now. And the man, Jak, the one who hurt you so—he came after me. Tears began streaming from her eyes and she choked. But he died when the earth shook. The fort, Jak, our fort. It fell, and he was buried under it. It’s in a million pieces.