The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Graham’s anti-tourist bias and his thrift drove him away from pricey tourist guides and chauffeurs and into the crowded backs of the taptapbuses. He and Catherine squeezed in with the chickens and produce and wares of the marchands (market women). Catherine was resourceful in avoiding the throngs of vacationers in other ways. Both had about them a spirit of mischievous glee that summer.

  Years later, in search of the perfect rum punch in Panama or Central America, Graham often spoke with fondness of the diminutive Oloffson bartender Caesar’s superb rum punches, which he served with an ear-to-ear smile just visible above the hotel’s huge mahogany bar. The Oloffson’s long, wide veranda served as an elevated dining-room.

  One afternoon, as a soft reddish glow illuminated the veranda while the sun dipped into La Gonave Bay, Graham began to ruminate about his family’s having had a Caribbean connection. As he had never mentioned his family before, I credited Caesar’s punch with exerting special powers, as if the hotel’s playful bartender had planted some Voodoo powder in the drink. I was intrigued by Graham’s surprising airing of his ancestral linen.

  ‘According to Greene family lore,’ he said, ‘the Greenes have roots in the Caribbean.’ As he told the story of his family link to this tropical sea I felt it might explain why he was so at ease with Caribbean people. A branch of the Greenes, he continued, had had sugar plantations on the island of St Kitts in the last century; Great Uncle Charles had died there at age of nineteen of yellow fever. (It could have been cholera.) But he had accomplished what most men don’t do in an entire lifetime. He had fathered, said Graham after a brief pause, ‘thirteen children’. The siring, he went on, savouring his rum punch, took place after the emancipation of the slaves on St Kitts. (Graham gave no details of the mothers of the thirteen children, leaving that to the imagination.) Two years before Charlie died of the fever, Graham’s grandfather, William Greene, then only fourteen years old, sailed across the Atlantic to help his brother Charles run the plantations. Grandfather William went back to England after Charlie’s death but later returned to St Kitts, where he, too, died and was buried on the island near his brother. Graham clearly relished telling the story of his forebear’s sexual exploits. (He had at one time mentioned the fact that he was a distant cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he obviously admired, but it was Uncle Charlie he respected.) He told the latter story matter-of-factly but with a certain amount of irreverent humour. Catherine had heard the tale before and was talking with an artist at another table down the long veranda. She looked towards us and smiled as Graham delivered his punchline about the thirteen offspring.

  During Graham and Catherine’s last evening in Haiti, the Centre d’Art’s founder and director, Dewitt Peters, held a farewell cocktail party for them. The next morning I drove them from the Oloffson to the airport. They took the Delta flight, this time non-stop to Havana.

  Graham had two paintings that the Haitian artists had given him and four bottles of five-star Rhum Barbancourt, my gift to them both. (He would try unsuccessfully to reproduce Caesar’s rum punch in England with the recipe the little Oloffson barman had confided to him.) I remarked that Haiti was a quiet place, ideal for him to write, and suggested he return. He showed interest in the idea but worried about how to finance a much longer stay. He made no promises but asked about renting a house and the cost of living. As he drained his last rum punch at the Bowen Field airport bar, gripping his battered leather briefcase in one hand and his paintings in the other, I knew he would be back.

  However, instead of returning to Haiti in the late 1950s Graham went to Cuba, which had a rebellion of its own. Fidel Castro had been released from jail, gone into exile in Mexico, and on 2 December 1956 had returned at the head of an invasion force of eighty-two men. Their arrival was anticipated by the regime, and they were almost wiped out by Batista’s army. With a dozen survivors Fidel reached the rugged Sierra Maestra, the brooding mountain chain in eastern Cuba visible on a clear day from north-west Haiti. From there he launched his guerrilla war. It turned out that the book manuscript Graham had been carrying in his battered briefcase during his 1956 visit to Haiti was one spoofing the British Secret Service. He ultimately adapted it to Cuba. Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, a few months before Castro came to power, and made into a film in 1959 starring Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Ernie Kovacs. The Cuban revolutionaries were not amused. It was not comedy hour in Havana — nor was it in Haiti.

  7 | BLOOD IN THE STREETS

  Following our border trip Graham flew back to England. Bajeux went back to his exile in the Dominican sugar-mill town and to questioning his God. I went back to my reporting assignments. I wrote a story about the journey and then decided against sending it to Time as I had not consulted Graham. I didn’t wish to hex his book project. We all went our separate ways, but a nightmare — Papa Doc’s Haiti — tragically remained with us. I was certain Graham would write a book and it would be the end of our friendship, as he would move on to other places and other books.

  I wrote to Graham reporting that the day following his departure my Beetle suffered a flat tyre and I had discovered that the spare was also flat. How lucky we had been, I noted; the gods had truly been good to us. We might still be in the mountains if we had punctured another tyre.

  Graham greeted the news with characteristic concern. ‘I always suspected that that tyre was no good,’ he wrote. ‘I tried to point out a hole in it to our friend the priest, but he didn’t seem to think it mattered!’ Then he added, ‘How much I enjoyed our time together and how grateful I am to you for giving up two days to the trip.’ To me that was a good sign that the trip hadn’t been boring; it had actually lasted three days. There was no news from Graham himself or of any book in progress. He did write to tell me he had sent me a copy of his new play, Carving a Statue. ‘I hope you won’t find it as boring as the critics did.’

  Closer to home it was a busy time for my family and hard times for the Dominican people. There were endless strikes and anti-government demonstrations as well as rumblings of coups d’etat. Our second son, Phillippe, had been born. The exiled Haitian priest, Father Jean-Baptiste Georges, had taken time out from planning his next invasion of Haiti, this time from Miami, to baptize our new infant. Father Bajeux attended the church ceremony as Phillippe’s godfather before departing for New York. I read Graham’s most recent book, A Burnt-Out Case, and couldn’t help feeling that Querry, the central character in the novel, which is set in a leper colony in Africa, was Graham — or at least his alter ego. I felt this despite the fact that there are a lot of seeming disclaimers in the book, as for example when Querry tells Maria, the wife of the disgustingly pious Rycker, the palm-oil factory manager, ‘No, you mustn’t draw parallels. They always say a novelist chooses from his general experience of life, not from special facts.’ And again when Querry insists, ‘You mustn’t accuse a storyteller of introducing real characters.’ I also found a warning to those who would seek to influence writers in what they write. Querry tells Maria, ‘You are like so many critics. You want me to write your own sort of story.’

  We wanted Graham to write our sort of story on Haiti. But A Burnt-Out Case, which I thought was one of his best works, reassured me that if and when he did take up Haiti he would treat the country and the people right. After reading the passage in A Burnt-Out Case, ‘He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent,’ I knew Voodoo would be portrayed with the understanding it deserved. Graham obviously understood Africa (the book had been conceived during his fourth sojourn there) and the creative imagination and spontaneity of the Africans. A Burnt-Out Case also illustrated Graham’s eternal struggle with faith, belief and disbelief. The book evokes no outright laughter, but Graham dabbles with a certain dark humour, and I wondered whether he would carry this over to his next work. Although the backdrop he chose was the worst disease then known to mankind, leprosy, Graham managed to lighten t
he tension of the tragedy with subtle sarcasm. Querry says, ‘A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable.’

  There also appeared during this time a slim volume Graham called In Search of a Character, first published in 1961, containing two of his African journals. ‘Neither of these journals,’ he wrote in the foreword, ‘was kept for publication, but they may have some interest as an indication of the kind of raw material a novelist accumulates.’ In it he hinted that A Burnt-Out Case might be his last novel. ‘As one grows older,’ he wrote, ‘the writing of a novel does not become more easy, and it seemed to me when I wrote the last words [of A Burnt-Out Case] that I had reached an age when another full-length novel was probably beyond my powers.’ I did not believe it. He was not the type of person to stop putting pen to paper. Writing was his life.

  Graham proved that he kept promises, no matter how inconvenient and time-consuming. He wrote to me in April 1965:

  I have failed utterly to find a copy of Blood in the Streets in England, but a bookseller unearthed one copy in the United States and after reading it I am posting it to you. You will find that the account of the [1937] massacre is very brief and I should have thought deserved a whole book in itself if you ever had the time and opportunity to write it. How are things with you and your family? I hope all goes well. Since Feb. 13 I have been having one attack after another of the flu and have only just got rid of the beast (touch wood!). I’m hoping to go out to Indochina again during the summer if I can procure my visa to Hanoi.

  It was ironic that he should write that he had found Blood in the Streets. Only four days later, and long before the letter reached me, the Dominican capital erupted in violence. Eventually the blood of more than two thousand Dominicans, and a dozen Americans, was to be shed in the streets.

  The revolt caught me en route home from New York City where I had gone to sign a publisher’s contract for a book about Haiti’s François Duvalier entitled Papa Doc. The idea for the Haiti book was that of a colleague, Al Burt, then the Miami Herald’s Latin American editor. I had been hesitant about writing such a book, fearing it might bring reprisals against my wife’s relatives in Haiti. While I was pondering the idea, a representative of McGraw-Hill happened to be in Santo Domingo and made an offer on the spot. ‘You can always blame your co-author,’ he suggested when he saw I was hesitant. I sent word to Haiti about the project; my wife’s family did not scare easily. They made no objection. They would take their chances. Their family history since Haiti’s war of independence had been one of taking chances. They came from a long line of distinguished fighters, not least General Laurent Bazelais.

  While I was in New York I warned my foreign news editors that a coup against the Dominican triumvirate, headed by Donald Reid Cabral, was imminent because Cabral had made it clear that neither ousted Liberal President Juan Bosch nor former Trujillo aide and ex-President Joaquín Balaguer would be allowed to return from exile and participate in forthcoming elections. The military was divided. One section favoured a return to constitutionality by permitting President Bosch to complete his term of office, while the other was loyal to Balaguer. Lieutenant Hector Lachapelle, who had been cashiered by General Elias Wessin y Wessin for opposing the military coup that ousted Bosch, was now running a petrol station in Santo Domingo and had warned me to be watchful, saying that ‘things’ were about to happen. They did, and Lachapelle was soon back in army uniform as commander of an area of the capital seized by the Constitutionalists, as the rebels called themselves.

  I had hardly proffered my warning to my editors when Ginette called me from Santo Domingo to advise me to hurry home. The coup was about to happen. The food shops were swamped by customers fighting to stock up on provisions. Events exploded while I was on my way back. I reached San Juan, Puerto Rico, just as the coup unfolded. Commercial air traffic to and from the Dominican Republic was suspended. I interviewed ex-President Bosch, who was in exile in Puerto Rico, and filed as best I could on the situation in the Dominican Republic, with my wife now playing the role of reporter, monitoring the radio and passing along vital information by telephone. But with Ginette and our two infant sons caught in the turmoil in the capital, I became desperate. I managed to hitch a ride on a US Marine landing ship, the USS Wood County, a modern LST (landing ship tank) heading to the Dominican Republic to evacuate American citizens. It was the night of 28 April 1965, exactly two years to the day since I had been booted out of Haiti.

  Other newsmen and I joined the US Marines enjoying the evening movie aboard ship. Just as the actor William Holden disappeared from the screen for the love scene, the ship’s public address system boomed, ‘Now hear this, now hear this. Darken ship.’

  The Marines on board buckled up for war. They began breaking out live ammunition. I couldn’t believe what was happening. This was 1965, not the early part of the twentieth century when the US, exercising its doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’, sent Marines ashore in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

  ‘It can’t be!’ I exclaimed to the ship’s captain. ‘It’s not that serious.’

  ‘Tell that to President Johnson.’ He laughed.

  Maybe matters were worse than my wife’s reports. Once again I became deeply concerned about their safety.

  There was little sleep aboard ship that night as the Marines prepared to land, but we newsmen couldn’t file our stories about the imminent invasion because the ship’s commander told us he could not authorize the use of the ship’s communications facilities.

  It was a clear and beautiful Caribbean night as we sailed, blacked out, listening to President Johnson over the Voice of America explaining in his Texas drawl that he had ordered Marines ashore in the Dominican Republic to ‘protect American lives’. Johnson’s doctrine of ‘no more Cubas’ was being put into practice. More than twenty-seven thousand US servicemen would be involved and would remain until the crisis was over in September 1966.

  The day after we landed Dick Duncan of Time, Louis Uchitelle of the Associated Press and I ventured into the rebel-held ‘Constitutionalist zone’ in downtown Santo Domingo, just off Plaza de la Independencia, and came upon an old bakery, busy and alive with the sound of Haitian Creole. The Kamoken were working away, not baking bread but repairing an ancient machine-gun. With their knowledge of firearms, the Haitians had been quickly integrated into the Dominican Republic’s new Constitutionalist army, now at war with both the Dominican status quo forces and the American troops. At the outbreak of hostilities, Fred Baptiste, his brother Renel and most of the other Kamoken fled the lunatic asylum at Nigua and joined the Dominican Constitutionalist side. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that Haitians and Dominicans had joined to fight a common enemy on Dominican soil. On entering the bakery we found the Haitians in high spirits. They announced that their side was winning the battle and that the landing of the US troops had been a terrible mistake. As soon as the war was won, they added, they could resume their war against Papa Doc; meanwhile they were perfecting their urban-guerrilla tactics.

  A few days later I was in the Constitutionalist sector at the cable office when the gunfire had died down, sending a story. Suddenly I heard a commotion in the street and ran to the door. Fred Baptiste, a bazooka over his shoulder, was moving his troops down Calle el Conde on his way to blow the door off the historic Forteleza (Fortress) Ozama. The US-trained Cascos Blancos (White Helmets), Santo Domingo’s tough, loyalist riot police, were still holding out there. It was Fred’s and his men’s finest hour. The fortress capitulated. Fred was getting a reputation as a tough disciplinarian — far too tough for Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, who had been made leader of the Constitutionalist forces. One day Caamano told me he had received reports that the Haitians were executing some of their own men for unknown reasons. He was angry and concerned, declaring that all he needed was for word to leak out that people were being executed in his zone.

  I confronted Fred about
this, but he denied that anyone had been executed. ‘Let me tell you what happened,’ he said. ‘Puma [Jean-Claude Romain] died playing Russian roulette.’

  The other Kamoken backed up Fred’s story. With a revolver loaded with a single bullet, they said, Puma shot himself in the head and died instantly. I thought of Graham’s stories about how he had played Russian roulette as a bored youth.

  The American forces laid siege to the Constitutionalist-occupied area of Santo Domingo, while junta forces continued their fight against rebels in the northern part of the city. There were fierce firefights. My little Volkswagen with ‘Prensa’ (Press) taped on its windows became a familiar sight throughout the city. Reporting the war meant covering all three sides: the daily US Army briefings in the Embassy Room of the Hotel El Embajador; the Constitutionalists at the Copello Building on Calle el Conde (after passing through US Marine and Army checkpoints and driving rapidly across streets receiving fire from the Palace, where loyalist troops were holed up); then on to the fairgrounds, where the new right-wing Government of National Reconstruction had its headquarters. There was a good deal of dangerous travel every day, but my hardy Beetle sustained only minor war damage. In fact, I credited my manoeuvrable and speedy little ‘Bug’ with getting me out of the line of fire a number of times. My colleague Al Burt of the Miami Herald was not so fortunate. While travelling in a taxi with a photographer he became a target for skittish US Marines at a roadblock. The Marines believed they had received incoming fire and opened a withering barrage on the taxi. Both newsmen and the taxi driver were badly wounded.