by Nick Lake
He had put into motion an idea that would spread over the country quicker than the fire that even now was consuming the wooden shacks of Cape Town, licking its way closer by the moment to where he stood, turning the three ships in the bay into three torches, pouring upward in the form of black smoke their hulls and sails, their wood and canvas and coil rope into the star-scattered sky above Haiti.
And the idea was this:
The whites had to free the blacks to save their own skins.
He turned, exhausted but satisfied, and he pointed his horse toward the jungle of the interior.
— Home, he said.
He melted into the darkness.
Now
I’ve been singing songs in the darkness. I sing the rebel songs from the time of Aristide, which my manman taught me, the songs they sang at the funeral of Dread Wilmè.
— Grenadye alaso, sa ki mouri zafè ya yo.
Soldiers attack. Those of us who die, that is their business.
This has been a battle cry in Haiti since ancient times – since Toussaint, at least. After Dread Wilmè died, the supporters of Lavalas changed the words; they started singing:
— Sa ki mouri vanje ya yo.
Those of us who die, we will avenge them.
I wonder how that worked out for them. In my experience revenge doesn’t help anyone, least of all the dead.
I wonder if the people out there can hear me singing. I wonder if there even are people out there. I’m still not 100 percent convinced that I’m not a ghost, that this is not the land under the sea, where the dead go.
But if I am a ghost, then who am I haunting? Everyone here is dead, too.
The smell from the bodies is very bad now. It’s been a long time since I reached out and touched the hand that lies near me. I think if I did it would be bloated now and slimy. It smells slimy. I have a fear that keeps coming back that the hand will crawl toward me, like a fat spider, and cling to my face. When I close my eyes, that’s what I see, when I’m not seeing ships and burning houses.
I’m getting weaker, I can tell. To begin with, I would crawl around, try to find a way out. Now I just lie here, mumbling to myself. I try to remember what they say about survival. I know that you die quicker from not drinking than from not eating, and I guess that I’m only alive cos of drinking the blood.
I’m not a ghost, I think. I’m a vampire.
I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth, which is something I did in my dream, when I was someone older in a different version of Haiti. Don’t worry, I’m aware that I’m going mad. I’m in this hospital and, in my dreams, I’m commanding an army. Or the other way round, maybe. I know that’s not normal. Soon, I think, that hand-spider will come for me, and if they do dig me out of here it won’t be me they dig out. It will be some crazy person.
To stop the madness, I see if I can remember Biggie’s lyrics again. Biggie always wanted to be a rap star, like Biggie Smalls. He would drive around the Site in his car – no moun had a car in the Site, apart from the chimère bosses – and his arm would be out of the window and he would spit along to his CD of beats.
There was this tune he recorded once. He put it on a CD and he tried to sell it in the Site, but people had anyen to eat; they weren’t going to buy a CD when they were starving. Biggie sent the CD to some record company in New York, too – he got the name from Stéphanie, I think. He said that guns wouldn’t help us forever and if we wanted help for our country then the only way to get it was with music. He did the song in English. That was the thing about Biggie – the man was a gangster, but he wasn’t stupid. He could speak French and Kreyòl and English and even a little German, cos before he was fucking Stéphanie he was fucking a German chick from Médecins Sans Frontières.
In the darkness, I recite the lyrics to his song:
— Mwen thug, mwen gangster, mwen bandi,
Think I care, think you can hurt me?
You start this war, but I’ll be here when it’s over,
Livin’ in yo’ house,
Drivin’ yo’ fuckin’ Range Rover.
Casques-bleus, attachés,
Get your asses out my Site –
Don’t come in here wit’ yo’ forces
Cos I got gangsters ridin’ whips like horses,
I got mad guns like Toussaint and his slaves,
I fuck you up, no one gonna be saved,
Fifty rounds semi-auto in the head,
We keep shootin’ till you all be dead.
We chimès, we ghosts,
We got fire to make you roast.
We take your hands off,
We take your heads off,
We leave you helpless, like a baby.
You kill us? We come back like a zombi.
Me, I never saw how lyrics like that would help Haiti, but I never said that cos that would have made Biggie mad. He was always writing songs about how the government had screwed him over, how MINUSTAH arrested him for being a gangster even though he had been forced to kill people, cos the government gave him no money, only weapons. For ages he was part of Aristide’s private army, and he never seemed to get over the shock that this didn’t make the UN love him.
The truth was he liked killing people – that’s what I thought. You see why I never showed him or Tintin my silver half-heart that I got from Marguerite? They would have said it was lame. Biggie would’ve taken it from me and mocked me for being a pussy-boy.
But Biggie could be a good man, too.
After Papa was killed, when we ended up in Solèy 19, it was Dread who sorted everything, but it was Biggie who actually did the work, who looked after us. He found Manman a job putting petrol into tin cans to sell to people as fuel. Me, I would sit out in the mud and watch the world go by. Mostly what I liked was to watch Biggie in his car. He would drive slow, always stopping to talk to people, to find out what their problems were. He would hand out money: to kids, so they could go to school; to mothers, so they could feed their kids.
He was a good man, sometimes.
It wasn’t Biggie that I liked so much, though; it was his car. He called his car a whip – that was something he got from his rap songs. I had a car that I had made from sheet aluminum and the wheels from a shopping cart, but it wasn’t so fly as Biggie’s whip.
I was always inventing things – that was what I liked doing. After Dread died, Biggie continued to pay for me to go to school and I learned lots of things, but what I loved was to make maps and diagrams. I would make a map on my notebook of where all the pretty girls were in Solèy 19. I would make a map of Boston, only I didn’t know anything there so it was a very blank map, and in the middle I would put a cross and mark it, Marguerite. I had not forgotten about her, you see. I was going to get her back.
One day, I was sitting in the mud, and in front of me I had two bowls of ice. I had made something to help my manman, and I was feeling proud. Suddenly I heard the rumble of a car engine. Biggie stopped in the street right by me. I looked around to see who he wanted to talk to, but he beckoned to me. I turned and looked behind me. He laughed.
— Come, he said. Ride with me.
I stood up and went over to him. I saw that in the back of the car there was a blanc, a white girl. I had seen her with Biggie before, but I didn’t know her name, and she didn’t much look at me anyway.
— What is that you’re doing? he asked.
I glanced at the bowls. I had baked them from mud, a bit like the cakes that people eat, only with no butter. One of them had just ice. The other had a smaller bowl inside full of ice, and there was wet sand between the two bowls. Manman was always complaining that when we did get food, which was not often, it would soon perish in the sun. I’d thought about this and I’d seen the way that the dogs in the slum panted and their tongues steamed. I thought that maybe when water burned into the air, it took some heat with it. So I thought to myself, if there was a way to surround food with wet sand, maybe the water would dry from the sand and take the warmth from the food
away with it. That was the story with the bowls – and it worked, cos the ice in the normal bowl was half-melted and the ice in my sand bowl was still frozen.
— Nothing, I said to Biggie. Just a game.
Biggie nodded, like he understood, but he didn’t cos it wasn’t a game – it was a fridge. I didn’t tell him, though.
Biggie put his head out the car window. He had his hair in cornrows and his face had a scar that ran from the forehead across the nose and all the way to the jaw. They said he was hit with a machete during a fight. He was good-looking all the same, though. He had sharp eyes that sparkled. I liked his eyes right from the start. They were clever and they said he liked to laugh.
— I hear you’re good at maps, he said.
I shrugged.
— I’m OK.
He leaned over and popped the passenger door, then he gestured for me to get in. I couldn’t believe it – Biggie was going to let me inside his whip.
I climbed in. The car smelled like weed and sweat, and it was the coolest place I’d ever been. Biggie was wearing jeans and a baseball cap with the cap pointing backward. He had no shirt on and I could see that he had grand muscle, ripped, like we say. He had a blunt in his mouth and he was breathing smoke out his nose. Between the seats there was a shotgun. Biggie pressed a button and a beat came out of the speakers, anpil loud. It was MVP Kompa by Wyclef Jean, which is the song where he talks about zombis. I’d heard it before. There’s a bit where Wyclef goes, like, you disrespect us, you’re gonna be put in the ground. Biggie, he shouted it out alongside Wyclef, and right then I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard, so I started singing, too. Course, now it’s me that’s in the ground, I have a whole other perspective.
— Wyclef, he’s representing the Site, Biggie said. He’s a real gangster.
Me, I’d heard that Wyclef came from Croix-des-Bousquets, which is kind of a nice place, or so they say, outside Port-au-Prince, but I didn’t say anything, cos it was so cool to ride in that car, shouting that we weren’t scared.
We rolled out of there and onto a wider street. I was laughing and laughing. Biggie thought that was funny, too.
— You’re the kid that Dread Wilmè saved when he was dying, he said.
It wasn’t a question.
— Yes, I said. That’s what my manman says, anyway.
He gave a long slow nod. He didn’t seem to remember me from when Manman and me went to see Dread, after Papa died.
— Dread Wilmè was a hero, man, he said. A true Haitian. Rebel spirit, man. I was in his crew back when we were just Solèy 19, you know, before we became Route 9? Yeah, I ran with those Aristide soldiers when I was a shorty. Dread saved your life; that’s some fucking powerful maji.
I shrugged. I didn’t know then that Biggie had sprinkled Dread Wilmè’s bones on his ownself to make himself proof against bullets. Maybe he thought cos Dread saved my life, nothing could kill me, either, so I’d make a good chimère. A chimère who couldn’t die; it would be a special thing, like a gun that never runs out of bullets, like a wallet that’s always full.
— I want you to make a map for me, he said. He gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper. The teacher says you’re good at that kind of shit. I want to be able to see where everyone lives. Customers, aid workers, school kids. Those who owe me money, those who don’t. Who has guns.
— Tu ne penses pas qu’il soit un peu jeune encore? said the girl in the back.
Biggie replied in French. I was kind of surprised. It sounded like he had been to school and had actually paid attention, which went against the image I had of him.
— Le gosse est anpil intelligent, c’est ce qu’on me dit. Et bientôt ça sera la guerre. On aura besoin de soldats comme lui.
The girl sighed.
Even though they were speaking in French, not Kreyòl, I understood some of it. I understood that Biggie had said I was intelligent, and it made me proud. I understood that Biggie had said there would be a war, but I didn’t really think about that.
— Stéphanie is UN, he said. From Paris. She worries too much. She should mind her own zafè.
She flipped him a finger.
— When you give guns to kids, that’s my zafè, she said in Kreyòl.
I was surprised again. I’d never heard a blanc talking in our language before. Also, I thought the UN were all soldiers.
— You’re UN? I asked her. For real?
— Yeah, but from the office, she said. Not the troops. My job is to protect people, to help. You understand?
I shrugged. I didn’t know what Stéphanie was doing in Biggie’s car if she was UN, but I didn’t say anything.
— Here, he said. For your map.
We drove around Solèy 19 for many hours, never going out of Route 9 territory. We drove past stalls with VCDs on them and banks that Manman said weren’t banks, only money lenders. There was no moun selling food.
It was slow, cos Biggie always had to stop and talk to people. There was a woman who told him that the chimères were fighting every night outside her house, and she could no longer rent out rooms cos people were too scared. Biggie said he would sort it. Also, he and Stéphanie were handing out tins of food and medical kits that were stacked in the trunk. Stéphanie had brought them from the UN, I guess.
— We can’t get our trucks into the Site, Stéphanie said to me in Kreyòl. That’s why we work with the chimères.
I didn’t really care about any of that. I was thinking about the map. As we drove, I filled in streets and houses. I marked the things Biggie told me to mark – people’s names, what they did. Pretty soon the map filled the whole page. Down one side of the map, there was a big dark line, and I wrote under it, Boston. Sometimes, I looked at the shotgun between me and Biggie.
I thought, Biggie is Route 9. If I can become Route 9, too, then maybe I can fight Boston and get my sister back. I was sure she was still there in Boston, cos it was the Boston crew who had taken her, who had killed Papa. Besides, I knew she wasn’t in Route 9 cos I’d never seen her, and I was sure I would recognize her, even now, four years later. She was more than my best friend. I wondered if she would recognize me, though.
— How can I become a chimère? I said to Biggie.
I wanted a whip, too. I wanted everyone in the street to like me how they liked Biggie.
Biggie laughed.
— It’s easy, he said. Just ride with me.
The next day, Biggie picked me up again. It was evening, in fact. Stéphanie was in the passenger seat this time, riding shotgun. In the Site, riding shotgun isn’t just an expression – she was holding the gun. I was surprised by that, cos I’d seen aid workers before and they didn’t usually have guns. I noticed that she was pretty, much prettier than I had realized the previous day. She had blue eyes and kind of light-brown hair, and her face was a little oval. She was young, also. Mid-twenties, no older.
— Salut, she said over the boom of the bass.
I said hello to her, too. My face was burning, cos looking at her made my skin tingle. Biggie turned and grinned at me, and I began to shake cos I was sure he knew what I was thinking.
— You still want to be a chimère? he said.
I nodded.
— Bon. Bon. Route 9 till you die, yeah?
— Yeah, I said.
— Those Boston motherfuckers, they killed your papa, n’est-ce pas?
I was surprised he remembered that, cos the day before it didn’t seem like he knew me from when me and Manman went to Dread for shelter.
— You remember that? I said.
Biggie laughed.
— I remember everything, he said. I know you were pulled from your manman by Aristide, too. I know Dread Wilmè lifted a tank off you to save you, even though he was full of bullet holes.
I didn’t tell Biggie that Dread didn’t pull any tank off me, he only got me out of the way of a tank, but it didn’t seem important, and anyway, I was pleased that Biggie knew who I was. It was like a famous person took the
trouble to stop and talk to you when he noticed you. Like that. Back then, I thought Biggie was awesome. I thought he was a stone-cold gangster, g-star, cooler than the other side of the pillow. I was, like, Biggie’s groupie; it was fucking embarrassing, looking back.
Stéphanie sighed. It was something she did a lot, I came to know.
— Fucking UN, she said. Dread Wilmè distributed more food and medicine than we ever could, and they fucking kill him.
I don’t know what surprised me more. The way she could swear in Kreyòl, or the way she was criticizing the UN. I thought the UN and the blancs were the same thing. But I thought of the way that Stéphanie brought those tins of food and medical supplies into the Site and helped Biggie to give them out, and I thought she was pretty cool for a white person.
— If you want to be Route 9, you have to prove yourself, said Biggie. Do you know what I mean?
I didn’t know, but I nodded.
— We just got one thing to do first, he said.
Biggie continued to drive. As we turned onto different streets, I saw my map in my head, so when we pulled up outside a shack, I knew it was the address of a Route 9 chimère called Tintin.
Biggie got out and told us to follow. We went inside. Tintin was sitting on a petrol drum. He wasn’t much older than me. He was rocking back and forth, making a whimpering sound. I saw that there was blood on his chest, and he was clutching it as if he wanted to stop it leaving his body, or to push it back in.
— Aiie, said Biggie. That’s got to hurt.
— It’s not a party, said Tintin.
Biggie laughed.
— And the Boston guys?
— I took them by surprise. Two of them are dead, for sure. The other, maybe not. I shot him in the hip, not the stomach.
Stéphanie made that sighing noise again.
— You were attacked, yes? she said. By militias loyal to the new government? They hate you cos Route 9 used to fight for Aristide. Yes?
Tintin looked at Biggie.
— Just say yes, said Biggie.
— Yes, said Tintin.
— Good, said Stéphanie. Right, you were wounded in political violence, so the blancs have to treat you.