by Nick Lake
Manman, though, she loved all of it, and she believed in it all, even if she knew me and my sister were frauds, were bullshit. She had a houngan she went to. That’s a kind of priest who knows all the songs to bring down the lwa, and the foods they like to eat, and the veves – the symbols to paint on the ground to draw them to you. Like, if you want to be possessed by Baron Samedi, the lwa of death, you got to give him whiskey and cigars, stuff like that.
Right now, I’d be happy if Baron Samedi came for me and took me away from this place to the land under the sea where the dead go. At least then I wouldn’t be thirsty and hungry anymore.
But Baron Samedi is not coming.
Manman used to go to the houngan, but none of that stopped us losing the farm and ending up in Site Solèy. None of that stopped my papa being chopped up with machetes, my sister Marguerite being stolen.
Biggie said his houngan took a bone from Dread Wilmè after Dread was shot by the UN soldiers. He said the houngan ground that bone up and sprinkled it on Biggie, and that meant bullets couldn’t touch him, cos Dread died for Haiti, like Toussaint. So Biggie was proof against bullets, immortal, cos he had Dread’s bone powder on him. That’s what he thought, anyway. I even saw the bone dust in a jar when Biggie took me to see the houngan. Sure, I saw Biggie live through shit that no person should be able to. But I also saw Biggie take a full clip from a machine gun and those bullets tore him to dog food in the end, bone powder or no bone powder.
I don’t see what I got to thank vodou for. Anyway, Dread Wilmè didn’t die for Haiti. He died cos they shot him. I don’t think he wanted to die at all.
I don’t want to die, either.
I was born in blood and darkness. That’s how Manman told it, when I joined Route 9, when I started to roll with Biggie.
— He was born in blood and darkness, and that’s how he’ll die, the houngan told her.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I will die in blood and darkness. Maybe she would be happy if she saw me here.
Probably not.
The year I was born, it was when Manman had just moved to Port-au-Prince. They told her there’d be jobs there, electricity, running water. Well, she got the electricity from a line someone hooked onto the public cable, but the only running water was the sewer in the middle of the road and there were no jobs, not for anyone. Me, I was brought into the world as a symbol; I was marked from the beginning. There were some, even before the world fell down, who believed I was meant to do something special. It started right from the time I was born.
This was 1995. That makes me 15 now. See? I can do math, just like I can read. My papa taught me both, before he was killed. After that, Dread Wilmè put me in school, gave us a home to live in, too, cos Manman was Lavalas to the bone. Sometimes, I think, if it wasn’t for Dread Wilmè, none of this shit would have happened. But then I say to myself, no. Dread Wilmè was not there when your papa died and they took your sister away. He tried to help.
Anyway, Manman was at a Lavalas rally. She had a great big belly and in that belly was us. She said she could hardly stand up she was so big. She was frightened by what might come out. But she went to the rally anyway cos she thought Lavalas would change everything in Haiti.
This was Aristide’s new party, the ones who were going to keep him in power. Manman loved Aristide – he was a communist and that meant he believed everyone should have ègal money, ègal houses and jobs. At that time, Aristide had been in power for about five years and no one in the Site had any jobs, but Manman said that was cos it was hard for Aristide. The Americans and the French had made such a mess of the country it was going to take him a long time to sort it out. Me, I think maybe Aristide was just a liar, but I didn’t say that to Manman – she would have been anpil upset to hear me say so, even later, when everything had gone to shit and it was obvious to everyone Aristide was not such a great guy.
Papa was somewhere else, working, I think. So Manman went to the rally alone, even though she was eight months pregnant and big-bellied like a swollen, starving donkey. That’s what she said, not me.
Aristide was standing on a chair at the back of this little meeting hall. He used to be a preacher, so he was accustomed to shouting at people. He was saying:
— Ever since it was discovered by Christopher Columbus, this nation has been enslaved. Columbus was a slave-driver. The French and then the Americans are his successors – and they more than equal him in cruelty and injustice. But we do not bear their yoke lightly! For five hundred years they have robbed us, but for five hundred years we have defied them!
He said:
— The Americans would like the people of Haiti to vote in a new government. They would like to get rid of me, as I have become inconvenient for them. They would like to control our companies and make us slaves again for their own profit.
People cheered. My manman cheered. She had worked in an American company and they had paid her piti-piti money, and then they fired her when she missed a day cos she was sick. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, how can I know this? How can my manman have remembered Aristide’s words? And I answer you – she didn’t. But Aristide wrote them down in a book, and I have that book still. Manman threw it away, and I picked it up out of the trash cos I thought it might have some power. Aristide signed it for my manman, you see. He put his name in it, and that’s serious vodou.
I used to look at his signature and think how sad it was that a man with such good ideas turned into such a monster. Biggie was like that, too, I think. And me. I had a big idea to get my sister back, but all I did in the end was get a lot of people killed, get a bullet in my arm.
But I’m telling you about the day I was born – I’m sorry, I keep getting distracted. It’s crazy – it’s not like there’s anything here to distract me.
So on his chair at the back of the church, Aristide said:
— Put Lavalas in power and we will throw the Americans into the sea. We will invoice France and America for all that they have stolen from us. They took our freedom, our labor, the fruits of our land. They must be held to account! Two hundred years ago, our coffee beans and sugar cane turned to gold in the coffers of merchants from Paris, while the French slave masters here in Haiti turned our people into animals, trammeled with chains, lashed by whips.
The people shouted:
— Yes! Yes! They made us animals.
Aristide laughed. He always knew how to make people shout and chant, though toward the end they were chanting for him to go away, to leave the country alone, to stop his chimères killing his enemies.
— And what happened when we had our independence?
— Tell us! Tell us!
— Once we had set aside their chains, once we had stayed their whips and stood up on our own two legs, beasts of burden no more, the French sent an invoice to us, demanding that we pay for our freedom in taxes and in trees. We were forced to cut down our forests to provide France with wood for building, and the rains that followed washed away our farming land. Everything that was left is being taken from us even now.
Aristide touched the cheap wooden table that served as an altar.
— The colonial powers have been enjoying a banquet at our expense, he said. They sit at the table, which is dressed with indigo cloth exported from Haiti, set with bowls of sugar taken from Haiti, and cups of coffee robbed from Haiti. And where are the Haitians?
— Where are they? Where are they? called the people in the church.
— The Haitians are under the table, eating the crumbs like mice! The rules of the UN, of the IMF, are devised to keep the mice under the table, to stop them from joining the banquet. But we must not be made into animals again. We must upset the table! We must rise up!
At this, Aristide put his palms under it and threw over the wooden table.
— We must overturn the table! he shouted, as it clattered to the ground.
Everyone cheered, cos all the people in the Site loved Lavalas and Aristide. They loved the idea of r
eceiving money and land from the rich. Later, of course, they just started to take it. And that’s when all the trouble began.
But this was before all that. So, everyone was cheering, when suddenly there was a shaking and the power went out and the lights stopped. This happened a lot in Port-au-Prince – it still does. On that night in 1995 there was no moon and it was very dark. People started to scream. Manman knew it was an earthquake and, like the others, she panicked a bit at first, turning to run out into the street, but then the trembling stopped and she heard Aristide call out:
— It’s OK! Nen inquiet!
He took a lighter from his pocket and lit a small candle. Then he showed the congregation where there were more candles in the church. Soon people began to calm down.
But Manman was not feeling so good. She stood there in the darkness, with only the candlelight flickering, and she felt a great pain in her stomach. She had a sick feeling in her spirit. She knew something bad was happening. When she had been to the houngan some months before, when she knew she was pregnant, he drew a veve in the ground and called up Papa Gede, and Papa Gede said the baby in her belly had a fierce soul and would begin and end in darkness and blood, but it would live forever, too.
At that moment, the earth shook again – an aftershock – and Manman was afraid the beginning and the end of her baby would come at the same time. She screamed. She looked down and her legs were wet; she thought her waters had broken. But when she touched her fingers to her thighs she found them sticky with blood. She felt faint and she sank downward to the ground – which was just earth, the church built right over it.
— Souplè, she called. Souplè, mwen ansent.
Please. Please, I’m pregnant.
Someone caught her. Someone else said something about a doctor. But then there was a commotion and Aristide was suddenly there, standing over her, in his glasses and his western suit. He smiled down at her, and he knelt on the ground. With gentle hands, he helped her to lie on her back.
— In my time as a priest, he said, I did this many times. In rural places.
Manman stared up at the roof of the church, and she saw that there was a hole in it. Through it, the stars shone out of the blackness, as if to say that darkness is never complete, that there is always hope.
She felt a tearing and she screamed again and again, and soon the screaming was a symphony, higher pitches joining her voice. She hauled herself up on her elbows to see first the big flaque of blood between her legs, and then Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Prime Minister of Haiti, holding two babies, one in each arm.
He had delivered her children.
— A girl and a boy, he said. Twins! The Marassa Jumeaux made flesh. This is a sign. These are the first babies born in a free Haiti. They will never be slaves. They’re like a new Adam and Eve.
Everyone cheered, even my manman, though at the back of her mind she was thinking of the houngan. He’d said I – we – would be born in blood and darkness, and that had turned out true. But he’d said we would die in blood and darkness, too.
Years later, when Manman told the story, I said to her:
— Manman, everyone dies in darkness. Most people, anyway. And in the Site, a lot of people die in blood, too.
She said:
— I know.
But it didn’t make her any less sad.
It’s so hot in here, it’s like I’m in an oven, like someone is baking me. Some giant, maybe, so I can be his dinner.
Me, I’m trying not to think about food and drink, but have you ever tried to not think about something? It’s a joke. The more you don’t think about it the more you do think about it.
So, I’m making a meal in my imagination. I lay it out in front of me, and in the absolute blackness it’s easy, cos you don’t even have to close your eyes to picture anything you want. Actually, that’s half the problem, cos that’s how you stop knowing what’s real anymore and go shit-crazy. But, yeah, there’s a steak in front of me and chips and a big glass of Coke.
I’ve only ever had steak once. My papa brought it home one day. I never knew how he got it. He just came home all proud and smiling – he had a good smile, my papa, a bright one – and he laid this bag of steaks on the table. They were sweating blood; it was coming right through the plastic of the bag.
— For dinner, he said to my manman.
She gave him this look, like, what, are you serious? Where did you get them? She could say a lot with one look, my manman. He just laughed.
— Only the best for my lady and my twins, he said.
Before we ate the steaks, he took me outside and we threw a ball back and forth, back and forth. It was lame really, but it was fun, too.
Now I take a bite of my steak. In my imagination I have overcooked it a little, but it’s all good – it gives a little crust to the meat. I have put anpil salt on my chips, so I drink a great gulp of my Coke, and that’s good, too. Then I stop, cos I hear something. It’s a scrabbling sound, but it’s too small to be people digging, too delicate.
I turn toward it very slowly.
Skish, skish, skish. Tatatatatatata. Skish, skish, skish.
My hand snaps out toward the sound and I feel the smooth swish of a tail, hear something fast and skitterish disappear into the darkness.
Rats.
I take a long, slow breath. I can hear a gnawing sound now, or maybe I’m just imagining it. I need to get out of here. For a moment I’m on the verge of real panic. I start praying, like, get me out of this fucking place right now; there are rats eating the dead people, there are rats eating the dead people. Suddenly I can’t breathe, but then I think about Marguerite, my sister. I force myself to think about Marguerite.
Marguerite had curly hair and a smile as big as the moon, and she was my best friend. We were twins, but we didn’t look the same. I was big and strong, and she was a small thing, like a ghost already.
Marguerite, she had this necklace. I am holding half of it in my hand now. I should explain – it was a silver necklace with a heart pendant. The heart you could pull in half, and it would go into two jagged pieces. Papa got it for her from some mystery place. As soon as she got it she broke the heart in two and gave one half to me.
— Maybe you should keep it, give it to a boy one day, I said to her.
— We are twins, she said. We are the same person broken in half. So you have half my heart.
So I kept it and always carry it with me, even now, as I lie trapped in the darkness.
Marguerite was my twin, but she wasn’t like me, not at all. I was into machines; anything that had an engine, or electrics, or gears, I wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. I collected stuff from the street, from the garbage, from everywhere. My papa said I would be an engineer one day, but I don’t think even he really believed it.
Marguerite, she was different. She looked different, too. She had this tiny constellation of freckles on her nose, these enormous gray eyes. She was something too beautiful for the Site, everyone could see it. Looking at her, you felt like someone should come along and put her in a bulletproof case and just keep her safe, keep her happy. But then, you’d think, well, being in a case wouldn’t make her happy. Cos she loved everything, man. She wasn’t like me, with my bikes and my radios and my wires. She would walk around and it was like everything was fresh to her and new-made and wonderful, even the rats.
Yeah, even the rats. She loved those things, just like she loved the sky, and the sun, and bits of rubbish floating down the street when they made pretty patterns in the air. She saw some beauty in those filthy creatures that the rest of us could not recognize. Once, Manman found a nest of baby rats in one of the walls. This was when we were seven or something, I guess. Before Marguerite could stop her she killed the mother rat, whacked it dead with a broom. She wanted to kill the babies, too, but Marguerite would not let her.
— No, Manman, she said. I want them.
No one ever refused Marguerite anything. There was anyen that the people of
the Site would not do for her, especially the older ones. It was this glow that she had inside, this way of lighting up like a lamp when she saw something that made her happy. So Manman let her gather up the nest, carefully, and take it to a place in the corner of our dirt yard, where she made a wooden box and filled it with newspaper, and that made her happy. She would just lie on the ground, right in the dirt, on her front with her elbows propped up, and I would watch her as she watched the rats. She brought them food; I don’t know where she found it, we never even had food for ourselves, not really. But the stuff Marguerite found was not food a person would eat – it was always moldy stuff, old, perished. The rats didn’t care; they loved it.
One day, though, the box was gone.
— The rats, are they OK? I asked.
— Yeah, she said. It was time for them to go and explore.
— Oh, I said. OK.
And she looked at me with those eyes like the ocean at dusk.
— I’m going to explore one day, too, she said. I’m going to get out of this place, and I’ll take you and Manman and Papa with me.
You know what? I believed her. You get me? I believed that shit. Cos when Marguerite said something, you listened. She was that beautiful, see, and that special, you just knew that whatever she wanted to be, she could be. She was like . . . like someone who had lived many times before, and knew how to be grateful. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. It’s like she had a soul that was much too big for her; it filled her to the brim till there was no more space, so then it flowed out through her eyes. It made her care for people, for animals, too.
Tintin was also like that – sort of, anyway. But with Tintin, what was inside was rotten, and it made him crazy, made him hurt other people.
But I’m talking to you about Marguerite. It wasn’t always rats with her, you have to understand.
This other time, not so long afterward, I was with her and we were walking to the sea to try to find Papa, see if he would take us out on his boat. He did that a couple of times; he would let us drop lines into the water, and we would wait for the fish to bite, and as we did we would look back at Site Solèy, rising up squalid from the ocean, and it would seem smaller and like a place you could escape from.