I said, “Johel, I thought UN personnel had immunity here in Haiti.”
He looked over his shoulder at me. “Well, they do, technically speaking. But it can be a long while before the court orders his release.”
Whatever internal censor deployed in response to Terry’s reproach was lifted, and the judge began to discourse on the history of United Nations Peacekeeping in Haiti, and the Status of Forces Agreement under which the government of Haiti accepted the presence of ten thousand foreign troops.
Terry said, “These aren’t billable hours, are they?”
The judge chuckled good-naturedly. “Alas, no. Those were beautiful, bountiful days.”
“You miss it?” I asked.
Now he was serious, and I liked him for his earnest face. He said, “Just look at it, how beautiful it is out there. This is some kind of beautiful country.”
The peasants had burned the hillside the year before, and it had grown back in tender shades of green and lilac. Bright flowers, as red as poppies but broader-leafed, broke through the new foliage. The sky was a blue just a shade darker than any sky I had ever seen. In the gap between hills, there was the sea.
* * *
(All that keen, nerdish enthusiasm on the subject of the vegetables of the Grand’Anse—this was Johel Célestin at his very best. If anyone ever asks me one day to tell them all about Johel Célestin, that’s where I’d start—with the vegetables.
(By no vegetables, the judge meant no tomatoes, no eggplant, no zucchini, no cucumbers, no lettuce, no spinach, no broccoli, no chard, no snap peas, no green peas, no snow peas, no green beans, no corn, no arugula, no endive, and certainly no radicchio. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and garlic were imported on the weekly boat from Port-au-Prince, usually arriving bedraggled, mildewed, rotten, and nasty. Otherwise, we had the occasional okra, plantains, sweet potatoes, many varieties of beans, breadfruit, manioc, yam e basta.
(Let me now eliminate the hypothesis that local farmers did not grow vegetables because they were not to the taste of the population. These vegetables were all for sale in the markets of Port-au-Prince and other provincial cities: a cook in Cap-Haïtien would have found an eggplant or a tomato as commonplace as you would. I think it’s fair to say that the absence of vegetables was in the most literal sense a failure of the market, as in: no vegetables in the market, despite demand.
(The effect of the dearth of vegetables was twofold: on the one hand, the diet was impoverished, both from the point of view of taste and nutritional diversity; but it also created greater poverty, because vegetable gardens in other places in Haiti were tended by women as a supplemental source of income. Generally speaking, food in Jérémie was in short supply and incomes limited. Vegetable gardens would have helped to resolve both issues.
(The absence of vegetables from the market was in fact just the last link in a catena of market failures. Begin with seeds—if you can find them. You won’t find vegetable seeds in Jérémie, however. A small farmer who wished to supplement his meager income by growing tomatoes was immediately foiled: no shop or merchant in Jérémie sold seeds. This is so astounding a fact it requires repetition: no shop or merchant in the leading city of a province subsisting exclusively on agriculture sold the sine qua non of life. Not even in Port-au-Prince could one easily find vegetable seeds: nobody was importing seeds on a commercial scale to Haiti. And why was this? Because just about every year I was in Haiti, bureaucrats from the WFP and the FAO and USAID, reproducing the glory that was Soviet agronomics, would launch some new program giving away bushels of seeds to farmers, hoping to stimulate local production of vegetables. Somehow the programs inevitably faltered—either failing to produce marketable goods or failing to produce goods for which there was demand, or by providing the appropriate seeds, but not fertilizer, or by providing seeds for a hardy bean that tasted like cow dung—but succeeded in choking the market for seeds. Who would buy tomato seeds when mung bean seeds were being given away freely? And who would import seeds and invest in a distribution network when in competition with the immense resources of the international aid community?
(Suppose, however, you did find seeds. Then you were faced with the triple problem of fertilizer, insecticide, and water. Fertilizer and insecticide could be found in Jérémie, but both were expensive. The absence of a road from Port-au-Prince meant that everything imported was imported on the boat by small merchants, buying from middlemen in Port-au-Prince who themselves imported from the States or the Dominican Republic. Moreover, fertilizer distribution in Haiti has been as compromised by the interference of central planners, both in the form of Haitian state and foreign aid, as seed distribution. Depending on the whims of foreign bureaucrats (in this case, largely Japanese bureaucrats, offering Japanese fertilizer to Haitian peasants) the government of Haiti has either subsidized or failed to subsidize the price of fertilizer: the price rises and lowers dramatically from year to year. As a result, honest fertilizer importers are driven out of the market in bad years, producing a country of peasant farmers for whom it is frequently impossible to buy fertilizer. Anyone who has ever attempted to grow a tomato will testify that without fertilizer or insecticide, your results are probably going to be sad. The tomato is a heartbreaking plant.
(Then there was the problem of good old H2O. Basically, water in the Grand’Anse was what fell from the sky or what you carried on your head. A cement cistern to catch rainwater was to the Haitian peasant a luxurious dream. Even if you lived in that rare community serviced by a well, most of the population still needed to lug water in a plastic bucket the last kilometer to the house; lots of people lugged water much, much farther. So agriculture in the Grand’Anse depended exclusively on rainwater. Vegetables, to a far greater extent than coffee, say, or cocoa or plantains, require regular irrigation.
(Even in the city, water was undependable, mercy to the whimsy of one Monsieur Theobald Augustin Darcy, an employee of the municipal water company. If sober, for a bribe of one hundred gourdes, or about three dollars, Monsieur Darcy would unlock a cement cabinet up the hill from us, turn a little knob, and replenish our water tank. This was high luxury: the average folks in Jérémie sent their children out with five-gallon buckets. But left to his own devices, Monsieur Darcy would forget to do his duty and our house would be dry. Our tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants were promising until Monsieur Darcy went on a monumental bender one late-summer weekend, in the course of which he lost his key ring. I am not exaggerating when I say that a goodly portion of the population of Jérémie was enlisted in the hunt for Monsieur Darcy’s keys, and by the time they were retrieved, the hot sun had killed our tender tomatoes.
(Last but not least was the absence of decent roads. Here the judge’s speech, which I was to hear in its entirety many times, mounted to a manly peroration. Lack of a road massively inflated the price of all commodities entering the Grand’Anse and made it impossible for perishable goods to exit the province. Should a small farmer in the mountains, suffused with entrepreneurial zeal, through industry, luck, talent, and foresight produce a brilliant green salade of a garden, brimming with bloodred tomatoes and magnificent aubergines, he still had no way to transport his wares to market but on the back of his donkey.)
* * *
Père Samedi’s ecclesiastical residence, if the grandest house in Bonbon, was nevertheless modest: a bungalow of stucco and cement, receded from the dirt road and surrounded by a high wall. On earlier visits, the cottage was abuzz with visitors and life. The curé was well tended by a flock of servants: the toothless gardener who opened the broad gate and would send me home with a bag of fresh mangoes or limes; a washerwoman who sang hymns as she hung linens; and a housekeeper, a fleshy, bosomy young woman with the placid, tranquil face of a being unequivocally secure in His love. There was in addition a large herd of children, the older ones in school uniforms, the younger ones naked, shrieking maniacally and darting about like geckos.
The house, which I had always thought a cheerful place, see
med now infected by some sorrow. The gardener had opened the gate for us with a forlorn tread. When I asked the washerwoman how she was, she had replied with a stoical “Nou là”—we’re there. She seemed to expect some gesture of commiseration, and when none was forthcoming, she shambled off on heavy legs to dunk dirty clothes in gray wash water.
We were ushered into the house. There was a crucifix on the wall and ceramic knickknacks on the bureau shelves. Other rooms and a staircase were hidden by lace curtains that ruffled and waved in the gentle breeze. The place smelled of incense and rice. The highly polished mahogany table in Père Samedi’s parlor reflected four faces: my own, looking confused; Terry’s, still looking distinctly irritable; the judge’s, solicitous and intelligent; and finally the cadaverous reflection of our host.
The old priest stared now for a long time at his own reflection in the dark table. He was unshaven, his light gray beard sparse on his dark skin. The judge inhaled deeply, held his breath a moment, and exhaled. The room in which we sat was close and humid and uncomfortable.
There was a sepia photograph on the wall that on my earlier visits had aroused my curiosity. It depicted two young men standing on the steps of the Sénateur’s mother’s house. One man was dark-complected and the other light; both were handsome. They looked as if they might have been wrestling on the front porch or playing lawn tennis when someone called them to the camera: there was a high sheen to their skin, and a bit of color in the cheeks of the paler man. Their faces were creased with smiles.
I had asked Père Samedi about the photo.
“This was me,” he said. “And this was Maxim Bayard.”
Then I could start to see the faces: where the wrinkles had set in or the ears drooped or the nose, in the case of the Sénateur, had elongated. The Sénateur over the years had acquired jowls, and from Père Samedi’s neck had swollen out a large, bobbing Adam’s apple. Père Samedi then was thick across the shoulders. But the change that haunted me was in the men’s eyes, although just what changed and how escapes my vocabulary of adjectives. They were not deadened now, nor had they grown somber—I would in fact have noted a zestful glint in the Sénateur’s current eyes. The eyes in the photograph did not shine with youthful innocence now dimmed, because they were not innocent then. But drastically changed they were, proving once again the wisdom of proverbs and clichés, such as the one that describes the eyes as the windows to the soul.
2
Abraham Samedi first met Maxim Bayard early in his career at the Lycée Saint Louis. Abraham was the discovery of a Jesuit missionary in Dame Marie who had noted the young boy’s intelligence and discipline and arranged for this son of an illiterate fisherman to be educated in Jérémie, as the Jesuits did every year for two or three of the brightest children of the remote provinces, particularly those whom the fathers suspected of harboring a vocation.
Abraham would not have survived the first weeks of school at the intimidating lycée were it not for the assistance of Maxim Bayard. At the beginning of every week, students at the lycée were given ten cards. Any student who caught another speaking Creole had the right to demand his card. At the end of the week, students with the most cards would be rewarded, while the student with the fewest cards would be flogged. Young Abraham could read and write French with all the fluency of his wealthier classmates, but never having been exposed to French as a living language, he found himself spontaneously bursting into Creole when attempting to address his peers and teachers. Nobody in Samedi’s family had ever spoken French or understood the language, and during the first month of Samedi’s career at the lycée, he suffered the double indignity at the conclusion of each week of watching his classmates cheerfully eat rich slices of homemade chocolate or komparet, the spicy ginger cake that was the town’s specialty, while he himself was struck a dozen times across the knuckles with the rigoise.
With every passing week, Abraham Samedi found it more difficult, not easier, to speak French. He was utterly unsure what language would come out of his mouth at any time, so great was his anxiety. Even when he had composed and practiced a sentence in French, under the stress of performance a Creole word was capable of emerging, and that would be sufficient for one of the students or another, ever eager to amass another card, to spring up and shout, “Donnez-moi vot’ cat’!”
The tension of the situation so overwhelmed young Samedi that after six weeks or so, he considered leaving school and returning to his father’s fishing boat. The past week had been particularly difficult. Nine times he had been caught speaking in Creole; the other boys sat staring at him now like the hungry vultures who circled the fields, waiting for him to slip up so they could pocket one more card. At night in the dormitory, Abraham remembered the days on the fishing boat with his father and brothers, telling stories and jokes about the sea, and the pleasant evenings with his mother and sisters, mending lines and salting fish, the hours passing swiftly in a babble of words.
Abraham begin to pray for deliverance morning, afternoon, and night. He imagined his heavenly Father as a kindly village father, and he spoke to him in Creole, certain the Lord spoke all languages with equal facility. He demanded that his Savior remove the terrible stones that had been placed in his mouth, which prevented him from expressing himself in the language of the blan and threatened to impede a life in His great service. He asked the Lord for the gift of simple speech.
It was just before school began, the hour when the Jesuit fathers demanded that each student present his cards to be counted, when Maxim Bayard first approached Abraham Samedi.
Although the two boys shared a common nation and a common language, they might have been from different continents, so different were their childhoods. Maxim was a product of Haute Ville, the elegant old mulatto aristocracy. His father owned a guildive, a distillery, producing the raw clear rum called taffia; he traded in coffee, cocoa, and rubber. The Bayard men dressed in English twills imported directly from the manufacturer and cut by the best tailor in Jérémie. The future Sénateur had been the middle child of six, four daughters and two sons, all living in a riotous confusion of amateur theatricals, declaimed bits of homespun poetry, or the scratching of the Sénateur’s brother’s ill-tuned violin, accompanied by Maxim’s mother’s far more accomplished performance on the piano. The garden was a profusion of the Sénateur’s mother’s roses: every marriage, feast, and burial in Jérémie was garnished with her ‘Paul Néron,’ her ‘Frau Karl Druschki,’ or her ‘Radiance.’ In the evening the children gathered on the terrace at the feet of Maxim’s father, who read aloud in his mellifluous tenor from Balzac, Zola, or Hugo.
The two students, in the course of the still-short school year, had hardly spoken: Maxim was the center of a social whirl, effortlessly charming and witty, but a terrible student, flogged as often for inattention as Abraham was for speaking Creole. Maxim, however, did not seem to take the teacher’s whippings with the air of humiliation that so tormented Abraham. Maxim winced as the beef tendon came down on his knuckles but thereafter laughed with the Jesuit fathers, who seemed no less immune to his carefree charms than were his peers.
“How many cards do you have?” Maxim said in Creole.
Abraham looked at Maxim, wondering if this was some trick.
“Two,” he said.
“I have nine,” Maxim said, still in Creole.
Abraham stared at his classmate until Maxim, still speaking Creole, said, “Ask me for my card.”
“Give me your card,” said Abraham, so flustered that he was not sure if he had asked in Creole or in French.
“Here you go,” said Maxim, and handed Abraham not one card, but his whole stack of them. That morning at the habitual assembly, Maxim allowed the priest to strike his knuckles, and later, Abraham’s eleven cards were sufficient to allow him to taste komparet for the first time.
* * *
Young Père Samedi, nearly graduated from seminary, was consumed by a singular ambition: to instruct his illiterate parishioners in the art of rea
ding, that they might read for themselves in their maternal language, Creole, the Testament of their Lord. To this end, he labored very nearly day and night. It was known that any man or woman who stopped by Père Samedi’s modest hut might receive a simple lesson in the art of literacy; he organized not only a school for children but schools for adults as well. The bookish priest, with his thick neck and bull-like body but strangely fine and thoughtful features, was a familiar face on the trails and mountain byways of his parish, hectoring his parishioners not only to receive Mass in the whitewashed churches that dotted the countryside but to remain thereafter for an hour or two of instruction.
In 1964 Père Samedi’s modest life intersected with history when a band of thirteen idealistic adventurers calling themselves Jeune Haiti arrived on the shores of the Grand’Anse. These young men were all exiles from the dictatorship of François Duvalier, and they proposed, beginning first in the distant villages of the Grand’Anse, to spark a revolution.
Haiti was absolutely in the madman’s grip now: he had been eliminating his enemies (they were everywhere) and consolidating his power (it was at once absolute and insufficient) since his election seven years earlier. The results of his political work could be seen in the excellent results of his reelection, in which three million of his subjects voted in his favor, only 3200 opposing him. Even 3200 was too many: a worrisome and hostile trend, to the One and Absolute ruler of the state. François Duvalier bayoneted, shot, bludgeoned, electrocuted, eviscerated, and starved his opponents, real and imaginary; he divided them one against another and pursued power, more power, and still more power with a monomaniacal zeal no preceding Haitian dictator, king, emperor, strongman, or president had ever considered possible.
The Doc came to power after a career as a country physician, a champion of the doctrine known as Noirisme—the power of black. Haiti was a nation divided between the descendants of slaveholder and slave, between France and Africa, French and Creole, Catholic and vodouisant, pale skin and dark, urban and rural, a few very wealthy and the vast majority very poor. Noirisme was Duvalier’s radical untying of the complex knot of Haitian life, the favoring of the latter over the former. If in campaigning he had been motivated by his vision of social justice, in power he was motivated by a single transcendently important goal: the elimination of his enemies. Like all evil men, Duvalier knew that he had enemies everywhere. But there was no place where he suspected that he had more enemies than Jérémie, that town like an island off the edge of Haiti, where the poets wrote in French, where the commerce was direct with Le Havre, and where the wealthy families were pale-skinned. They represented all that Noirisme and the Doc abhorred.
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