by Nick Lake
Papa would say:
— The sea, it’s a kind of freedom. But you two must do your schoolwork, OK? Then maybe you can have a better freedom.
Marguerite would say:
— Yes. See those big houses on the hill, for the rich? I’ll have one of those one day. I’ll have a swimming pool and a car, and you’ll all live with me.
And we believed her. We believed in her dream. Of course we did. When Marguerite said something, it was real.
So, that day, we were walking to the sea. We were on one of the wider streets; there was more room to avoid the sewage, and there were even a couple of carts with colorful umbrellas, selling fruit, but we weren’t the kind of people who could afford fruit. The sun was high above us and it was brutal hot, like a hammer on the skin. We saw this old guy who had a monkey on a chain – it leaped at us and screamed as we went past. Marguerite squealed and grabbed my hand, and the old guy cursed and pulled the monkey back – but not before we’d seen its big white eyes, the teeth in its wide-open mouth.
— I bet you wouldn’t feed that monkey if you found it, I said.
— The monkey’s OK, she said. It just doesn’t enjoy being chained like that.
Marguerite was famous for that kindness. She’d take a pigeon that had broken its wing and she’d make it better, no matter that Manman said pigeons were rats with wings.
That was Marguerite. You could stab her and beat her and steal her money, and she’d say that she understood, that you were hungry, that you didn’t know any better. Not that anyone would do such things to her – she was like an angel in the Site. Grandmothers would touch her for luck, I’m not fucking kidding. Really, we both should have been lucky. We were Marassa – I was just as much a twin as her, just as much maji. But ain’t no one ever touched me and looked happy about it, I’m telling you.
After the monkey, we walked for another block. Then we heard a sound. It was a crying sound, low and miserable. We both looked around. Marguerite spotted it before me and she walked over to this trash heap that was right at the side of the street. I followed her and suddenly we were looking down at a baby.
— Wow, I said.
This baby, it was just lying in the trash, crying, but in a kind of weak way. It was moving its limbs, too, but sluggishly, slowly. It had an enormous head, all swollen and sore-looking.
— It’s alive, said Marguerite.
That sounds a kind of stupid thing to say, but the way she said it had all this wonder in it. You have to imagine her saying it in this hushed voice and that there are, like, angels flying around and violins playing.
Course, this baby being alive was a big deal. Truth is, it wasn’t that uncommon to see babies in the trash in the Site, but mostly they were dead when you saw them. You’d clock them sometimes, from the corner of your eye when you were walking by, or when you were throwing something in the trash, and you’d try not to look. You didn’t blame the mothers. I didn’t blame the mothers anyway, though I think Marguerite did. Me, I know it’s hard enough to feed yourself if you live in the Site. Gen surprise that not many women want to feed a baby, too.
It was a crazy thing, those dead babies. Sometimes you’d go back the next day, or whatever, and they would be gone. Just disappeared. No moun knew what happened to them. Some people said that Dread Wilmè stole those babies away and ground them down in a big pestle and mortar, used them to make a dust that protected him. They said that that was why he was always coming up alive, always indemne, no matter how much the UN and the other gangs tried to kill him. They said Dread Wilmè used some serious black maji, and there wasn’t anyen that could give as much power and protection as a ground-up baby.
I should explain something here. Thing is, people like to say bad stuff about vodou. The Kretyens, they have often made out that vodou is violent and dangerous and evil, when really it’s a religion like any other and it can be beautiful. So when I say this about the babies, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It’s not like it’s normal in vodou to grind babies up into powder. It’s pretty far from normal, in fact. It’s fucked up. But where I come from, it’s the same as anywhere else: there are always some people who are ignorant and superstitious. Those people, they thought the babies could be used for black maji, and that was why the babies would disappear.
Anyway. This baby. No one had made it disappear. This baby was alive.
— What’s wrong with it? I said.
— Her, said my sister.
— What?
— It’s a her.
I looked at the baby. I couldn’t see how she knew what it was. All I could see was it was ugly, with that big head like a great boil full of pus. Noisy, too. It was still crying. I turned to her, like, huh?
— Pink clothes, said Marguerite. Dumb-ass.
— Oh. Yeah.
Marguerite bent toward the baby and I grabbed her arm, asked her what she thought she was doing.
— She’s sick, said Marguerite. Hy— hydro— something. Her head is full of water.
— Serious? How do you know that?
Marguerite shrugged.
— From Manman, I think. She touched the baby’s face. I’m going to find someone to help her. Someone from outside the Site.
I stared at her.
— You’re kidding?
But Marguerite wasn’t the type for kidding. She picked up the baby and, for a moment, it stopped crying. It looked up at her with its piggy eyes stuck deep in that fat head. Then it started to cry again.
— Hush, said Marguerite. Hush.
She carried the baby and I followed behind, of course I did. You didn’t have any choice but to follow Marguerite. I don’t know if I can really explain that without you seeing her. It was like . . . It was like her personality went in front of her, bright, like a reverse shadow. You felt the force of her from meters away.
So I followed her, and I guess we both knew where we were going. It was the only place we could go. At that time, the Site was not closed off. I mean, there were no checkpoints, no MINUSTAH troops to stop you leaving – those are the soldiers from the UN who came to bring peace to the Site by making it into a prison. It was still closed off in a way, though, you understand, cos it wasn’t like you could just walk out and get a job and not be a slum-rat anymore. There’s no McDonald’s in Haiti, there’s no Burger King, nowhere that a person with no real education can get a job. Mostly, if you went out, you got picked up by the police, or a gang. The police would return you to the Site, but a gang might just kill you, or worse.
And yet . . .
If you did want to leave you could – if you were determined. You just walked to the end of the street and you kept on walking till you were past the shacks and the mud. So that’s what we did, me and Marguerite, her carrying this little baby, its swollen head bobbing, crying all the way.
I said:
— I’ll carry it. I mean, I’ll carry her for a bit.
But Marguerite shook her head.
That walk, it must have taken a couple of hours. We didn’t have any water with us, nothing, and it was hot. Even thinking about it is making me feel thirsty, and I have more than enough reason to feel thirsty already, what with being trapped underground in a baking oven.
Anyway, the sun was battering down on us, like a sledgehammer. We were sweating, and anpil times we had to stop and sit down. But you know what? I never once said to Marguerite we should stop. She had this look in her eye, see. People didn’t ask her to stop.
We passed the long wall with the painting on it. Everyone knew this wall. Someone did it years and years ago during the break-bones time, when Aristide was gone and the Lavalas were trying to bring him back and the attachés were shooting protesters in the streets of Site Solèy. It’s of a load of kids playing, and underneath there are some slogans:
Aba lavichè. Down with poverty.
Pa fe vyolans. Don’t commit violence.
Aba kidnaping. Down with kidnapping.
Nou vle lape. We want peace.
Nou gen dwa pou nou edike tout moun. We want to educate everyone.
These slogans are a big joke, cos there’s only poverty in the Site, and violence is everywhere. Peace is the biggest joke of them all. The education thing is pretty funny, too – me and Marguerite, we were pretty rare cos we could actually read that wall.
The only thing on the wall that had actually happened was that the kidnappings had stopped. The kidnappings belonged to the break-bones time, when the attachés would come into the Site and take Lavalas supporters away. No one ever saw them again.
Eventually we saw the runway, and we knew we were close then. We turned onto the big road that led from the airport to the town. Marguerite looked around, then sat down in the dirt below a billboard with an advert for Coke on it, with these people on a beach, taking bottles from a cooler full of glistening ice. I thought that was unbelievable. Absolutely fucking unbelievable.
Cars were going past, some of them beat-up taxis, some of them private vehicles. A few, coming from the airport, on our side of the road, were bringing people in – aid workers, adventurous travelers, diplomats, UN with blacked-out windows, air con.
Marguerite, she scooted till she was as close to the road as she dared. Then you know what she did; you know it already. She lifted that baby and she held it up. She fixed her eyes on those cars going past, the ones going to and from the airport, and she just sat there. After a while, I could see the muscles trembling in her arms.
— Hey, let me, I said.
Then she looked at me. She nodded, and I took the baby from her. I held it up so the people in those cars would see its head. I managed, like, ten minutes, man. Marguerite, she could hold it for an hour. She took it back, and that’s just what she did. She didn’t move for one minute, not to go pee, nothing. It was so hot, man, but she didn’t move. Her skin was all honey in the sunlight, frizzy hair on her head like heat haze, so you didn’t know where Marguerite ended and the light began. She just sat there, so beautiful, perfectly still, and she held up that baby.
And nothing, anyen at all, happened.
Nothing.
The cars, they just kept chugging by, clouds of dust with wheels, and the smell of diesel was a live creature in our nostrils, breathing black air. The sun kept beating down like a weapon, deadly. I was worried we were going to die out there, that we’d run out of water in our bodies and go like raisins, that someone would find us there with that big-headed baby and they’d have anyen idea what the hell had happened. I was so thirsty, I thought I was going to die.
I know what real thirst feels like now.
The sun began to go down, and we were handing the baby back and forth when I saw that Marguerite was crying. But I didn’t say anything. I’m a boy – what do you want from me? I didn’t touch her, either. She had holes in her; the world could get in. She wasn’t protected enough to be touched – she would just melt down in tears, I knew it, and that would be it, the day would be over. So I just looked away and said I’d hold the baby for a moment.
I guess we were both looking down when the car stopped, so we heard it before we saw it, the crunch of the tires as it pulled off the road and onto the dirt, the clunk of the door opening. Then there was this woman coming toward us, quite old I thought then, but I guess she was kind of young, really. She had on a T-shirt, with Médecins Sans Frontières on it. She had blonde hair, too – I’d never seen women with blonde hair before. And blue eyes! She crouched down beside us and someone in the car shouted to her, but she waved back at them and said something short, something angry.
She peered at the baby. Me and Marguerite, we kind of averted our eyes, like we might ruin this if we said anything, like this woman was a wild animal who could be scared away.
— She has hydro-encephalitis, the woman said in French. By her accent, she was from somewhere else, though. She looked at Marguerite. Do you know what that is?
Marguerite shrugged.
— She’s sick, she said. My sister’s voice was kind of croaky and dry, cos she was thirsty. Will she die?
— That depends, said the woman. Not if she’s treated. Is she yours?
Marguerite blinked. We were, like, seven.
— No!
— Your sister?
— No.
The woman ran her hand through her hair. It was loose, but some of it was tied in this clip that looked like a bird. I thought that was amazing, the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. There was a fine down of blonde hair on her ears; I loved her ears. Manman, she would talk about the lwa Erzili Danto and how she was the most beautiful woman, the most beautiful goddess, how anyone who looked at her would fall in love with her. I thought this woman must be Erzili Danto in that case, or possessed by her, or something.
— Then what . . . ? she said, hesitant.
— We found her in the trash, I said.
The woman stared at me, then put her head in her hands and kicked the dirt. Some of it went in my face, but I didn’t say anything.
— Fuck, she said.
From the car behind her came this man’s voice, pretty loud now. It sounded like he really wanted her to get in the car. The woman turned around and shouted something back, and she was doing this twisty thing with her hands.
— Fuck, she said again. Wait.
She went to the car, and for a moment we thought, yes, she’s going to take the baby. But she came back with two little bottles of water. She handed them to us and we opened them straight away, drank them down.
Till then I didn’t know water had a taste. I thought it was like air: flavorless. But this water that the woman gave us, after we had been walking and sitting in the sun all day, it tasted of a thousand things – sunshine, shadows, bananas, mangoes.
I finished my bottle and saw that Marguerite had, too. We put them down.
— Thank you, we said.
The woman nodded. I thought she was going to turn and leave, that she had given us water and that was all we could hope for. I think I would have cried if I wasn’t such a boy.
Then the woman held out her hands.
— Give her to me, she said. Quickly.
Marguerite handed over the baby and the woman glanced all around, like someone was going to jump out and grab her, like anyone in Port-au-Prince cared about a sick baby, unless they were going to grind it up for vodou or something. She glanced back at us and made this funny expression that was halfway between a smile and a frown. She got in the car, closed the door, and it peeled off in a cloud of that diesel smell. Then it was gone. Just like that. We never even knew if the baby survived or not.
Marguerite stood up, brushed some dust from the seat of her pants, then staggered and swayed. I caught her just before she fell, before she fainted. She was like a thing made to resemble a person, but with all the bones taken out, just soft stuff put in instead, like a toy animal. I thought I’d better get her to the shade, to some water.
— OK, she said. OK, let’s go find Papa.
That was Marguerite.
Then
On the night that rebellion caught like a flame in Haiti, the slave named Toussaint swung down from his horse. It was a good horse – it had been a gift to him from his master, Bayou de Libertas, and despite its age it still served him well. It was, Toussaint reflected, a fitting horse for him to ride. He, like his horse, was old and had served his master well.
Soon, though, there would be no more masters, and no more slaves. Or so Boukman hoped.
As always, one or two people flinched when they saw Toussaint. He suffered the misfortune of having been born hideous, with a face so ugly that even his wife had called him the Ogre. His nose was both flattened and swollen, an unusual combination, whilst his eyes were small and deep-set. He carried this face around with him everywhere; it was like a calling card, a badge. He was known by it.
But, he reasoned, perhaps it was better to be known than not. Then no one could say that you had never existed; no one could turn you into a ghost. Since an early age, Toussain
t had held the conviction that one day he would achieve something great, that one day everyone would know his name. Yet, until now, he had done nothing but heal the occasional sick person and tend his master’s horses (which, for the most part, lived in conditions markedly superior to those of the sick people). He did not even know how to read and write, and it struck him as he stood in that marshy place, with the torchlight flickering through the trees, that it was too late. He was too old.
Toussaint looked over at Boukman. The man was nearly as aged as Toussaint himself – in his late forties, at least. His face was a criss-cross of incisions. His pride and his tribal belonging had been cut into his skin when he was a child, and now he was on the other side of the world, and was allowed no pride and no belongings.
The ground underfoot was spongy and wet. This was marshland, the Bois Caiman, and Toussaint could see in the darkness to the west, silently slithering, the alligators that had given the wooded depression its name. He shivered, although the air was warm and humid.
What are we doing? he thought. This is madness.
Toussaint had always felt out of place – he was too clever for his confrères, but too black to truly socialize with his master. His twin sister, born one minute after him, had died of diphtheria before she could walk, and he could only remember her now as an indiscriminately visaged ghost, a blur on little chubby limbs, giggling. He had never had friends. He had never considered himself as belonging to a society of slaves, only as an individual – and this ceremony was no different. He couldn’t totally give himself up to this hysteria, but nor could he repudiate it. Africa was in his blood, even if he wasn’t of the Dahomey race that had been primarily responsible for bringing vodou to Haiti.
He slowly made his way over to the assembly and Boukman greeted him warmly. They had first met many years ago, for Boukman was a close friend of Pierre-Baptiste, Toussaint’s godfather, who had taught Boukman his smattering of Latin and theology. After Pierre-Baptiste had died, Boukman had continued to come to Toussaint’s home, had drunk with him, played cards with him, talked with him. He was a great friend and confidant, even if his zeal was sometimes excessive.