All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  Thirty minutes later we were standing in a grove of pines and scrub just off U.S. 1 in South Miami, standing over a little green plant that looked like a cross between a mushroom and a pineapple.

  “Looks like it,” he said.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, what?” he said.

  “Take its damn picture.”

  “They’ll never run it,” he said.

  “Take it anyway.”

  He took a few shots and we went home. That night, I wrote the prettiest story I could on the plight of the deltoid spurge. Faulkner couldn’t have done it better. My newspaper ran it across the top of the Tampa Bay and State page, and Bill Cooke had to buy me dinner.

  “You may be the only man I know who could get twenty inches out of the deltoid spurge,” he said. “You are a poet.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The spurge lives, to this day.

  For more than two years the newspaper left me alone and let me find good stories, except for one week when they sent me to cover Operation Desert-whatever-it-was, the part before they actually did any serious shooting and renamed it Desert Storm. I didn’t even have a passport, when they told me I could go, but I was thrilled. “I will kiss a camel, if you will let me go,” I told the editors. I wrote one good story—Jewish soldiers in Saudi Arabia were forced to pray in closets and had the Star of David removed from their dog tags—and about four truly bad ones. It was the first time I had ever gone outside the country to write a newspaper story. The next time would rearrange my soul.

  I had come to believe that I was good at one thing, writing about people in trouble, about misery. As it turned out, I was a rank amateur. I didn’t know what misery was, but I would learn.

  26

  Tap-tap

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti,

  October 1991

  I had always wanted to go to Haiti, the same way I’d wanted to touch my mother’s hot iron. The resilience of its people amazed me. But in truth, what drew me to this place was its capacity for evil. A bloody coup gave me a reason to come, and write of it.

  “The dead disappear into the muddled minds of old caretakers,” I wrote, “in a graveyard where roses rust. The funeral flowers are made from tin so they can be used over and over again. Vilason Dorvilier wanders the cemetery searching for his father, but there have been so many dead since September the caretakers can’t remember where they put them all. The ground is full, one old caretaker said.

  “Crypts rise from the old graves, four to eight caskets high. Dorvilier steps to the top of one and climbs the concrete cross, hoping he can find his father’s crypt from there, but all he sees is his future. The cemetery stretches for five acres until it blends into the stink and swelter of the slums, where naked babies stand in sewage and old women hide from view because it is shameful to starve. He sees the yellow army barracks, where illiterate young soldiers play with guns the rich people bought for them, guns used to murder his father two weeks ago. Higher up, up into the cloud-capped mountains, are the homes of the light-skinned aristocracy, who live clean and have too much to eat. But Dorvilier can’t see that far, even standing on the coffins of generations.

  “It was less than a year ago that a savior came into the murk of Haiti, an angry avenger for the poor who warned the aristocracy to share the wealth or watch the peasants take it. He reminded them of the Père Lebrun, a car tire soaked in gasoline that the people use to burn their enemies alive. The poor loved Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but in the end all he brought to Haiti was a return to darkness. Aristide, the first Haitian leader elected in a legitimate democratic process, watches in exile as his divided nation edges toward chaos and Haitian soldiers enforce the status quo with bullets.”

  Nightfall of that first day in Haiti caught me sitting on a crypt in the biggest boneyard I had ever seen, waiting for the young man Dorvilier to locate his father. Here and there, between the old crypts, gray bones jutted out of the gray dirt, where grave robbers tossed them aside. I had told my momma not to worry if she tried to call me in Miami and couldn’t find me. I told her I was on vacation “somewhere in the islands.”

  I was thirty-two and divorced, could have lost a few pounds—a few dozen—and I felt the beginnings of arthritis in my knees and ankles. The woman who said she loved me, at the time, was beginning to think that she might not be able to improve me sufficiently after all; the rest never had. I was not in debt but I didn’t own anything, either. One good friend had said I was the only man he had ever met who just might glide all the way through life without leaving “one single lasting footprint in the sands of society.” But I had a hell of a story to do, and I would be happy for as long as it lasted.

  I was working with a towering Haitian named Daniel Morel, my photographer and interpreter and one day to be my friend. He had met me at the airport, standing a full head taller than the mass of gesticulating, shouting men who offered to drive, to interpret, to—I would later learn—try and sell me the location of dead bodies. A shooter for the AP, he had heard of my newspaper—“good, good photographs”—and agreed to show me Haiti, all that I could stand of it.

  I was no kind of foreign correspondent. I begged the foreign desk at my paper to let me do it; I didn’t know then that I had none of the qualifications to join the club. I didn’t even look like one. You can pick an FC out of a crowd at a hundred yards. They can talk without moving their jaws—it is a genetic thing that, I believe, comes from generations of speaking through teeth clenched around a pipe stem—and they speak French a lot, even when they don’t have to. I don’t speak French—I know how to say, “Señorita, how beautiful you are” in Spanish—and the only Creole I had picked up in Miami was “Git mou mou,” which I think is something dirty.

  But I wanted to come here, because it was a story unlike others I had done. A whole country, ruled forever by despots and murderers and low-rent sons of bitches, had been promised something better, and seen it yanked away. I wanted to come here because I had read about it my whole life, not just as a place of misery, but magic.

  The foreign desk let me do it, mainly because reporters were not exactly lining up to volunteer. I was barely better than nothing, but I was still better than a blank page.

  I told Daniel what I needed. I wanted to talk to Aristide’s people, and he just said, “Of course.” I told him I also needed to speak to the rich, and a shadow passed over his face. When I was safely gone, he would still be living here. I should not have worried, though. He just said, “Of course.”

  Daniel, I would learn over days, over years, could fix almost anything.

  That first day, the images of poverty and cruelty whirl through my head one after another after another, but the smell seldom changes. It is a mix of flowering plants, charcoal smoke, human waste, rotting garbage, crushed sugar cane, old sweat, death.

  I had rented a car but, because I had no idea where I was and Daniel couldn’t hold my hand the whole time, I took a long taxi ride. As the rusted, dented, smoking thing hurtles around a blind curve on the road to Pétionville, where the people with money live, the driver almost hits a little girl with a big bucket of water balanced on her head. She stumbles back, and the water spills. The taxi driver is not concerned. She is only a restavik, a slave for one of the middle-class families. Her life is an afterthought, a pothole, a speck on his bumper.

  In Cité Soleil, where people live in huts the size of outhouses with sewage creeping between their toes, a boy with a distended belly sits with the flies. Vedlin Severe’s two naked babies play in muck near the docks as her son, Presnoc, begs. An old woman who looks like she hasn’t eaten in weeks sits half-hidden in the door of a tin shack. She hides her head when people pass. Aristide’s symbol, a red rooster, is painted on the wall. These are Aristide’s people.

  “God sent him to us,” said Celeste Georges, who sells chicken cooked in hot oil on the street. She won’t say where she lives because soldiers are killing people who talk. She said it broke her heart when t
hey made Aristide go. “Titid will return to us,” she said, using Aristide’s pet name. “He won’t leave us like this.”

  They waited two hundred years for him, and they got less than a year of relief, respite, before the return to darkness.

  The more I read about Haiti’s history, the more fascinated I became. I learned that Haiti was rich once, a lush French colony with 95 percent of its people in chains. “In 1791,” I wrote, “a voodoo priest named Boukman drank the blood of a sacrificed pig and led the first slave rebellion. When Haiti finally seized independence at bayonet point in 1804, slavery ended, but oppression was only beginning. The poor stayed poor and the upper class stayed rich under a succession of cruel, inept leaders. People starved as Haiti’s resources vanished, turning it into what would be called the Hell Side of Paradise, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Then, in a questionable election in 1957, Haiti found its man to rule over hell: François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a doctor and dabbler in voodoo who once tried to converse with the head of a dead enemy, who sought the future in goat entrails, who beat an enemy to death and then had his doctor perform emergency brain surgery in an effort to revive him. (We didn’t know what cruelty was, back home. When we buried somebody, at least we made sure they were dead. Duvalier put them in the ground alive, wrecked their minds, and left them to wander, as a lesson.) He declared himself president for life, and unleashed the Ton-tons Macoute, named for a mythical giant who walked the mountains stuffing unfortunate children in his sack. They crushed resistance until Papa Doc died in 1971 and his son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, took over. Food riots became so violent that he fled Haiti in 1986. One leader after another tried to stay in power by terror. The Duvaliers were gone, but the Macoute lingered on, under other names.

  “Hope manifested itself in an unlikely savior. In September 1988, thugs walked into Mass at St. Jean Bosco Church and killed 12 people and wounded 70. They missed the man that military president Gen. Henri Namphy most wanted dead: the troublesome young priest named Aristide. He had been heard speaking of a Haiti where the soldiers didn’t slaughter civilians and the poor shared in the fat of the wealthy Creoles’ pocketbooks. Haiti must be reborn, he said. A speech is a powerful thing in a place where 65 percent of people can’t read. When caretaker President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot set up a transitional government to oversee fair elections in 1990, Aristide was on the ballot. He won the presidency on Dec. 17 with 67 percent of the vote. On Dec. 18, soldiers fired into a crowd of supporters, killing a pregnant woman. On Jan. 7, before Aristide’s inauguration, thugs seized the government in a short-lived coup. Aristide, a small man with glasses too large for his head, finally took over. The poor danced in the street as the aristocracy stared down from their mansions.”

  I had seen him just once, in Miami. He had come to be feted by the Haitians who had escaped their homeland and settled there. “We meet to celebrate a victory,” he said in a speech to thirteen thousand Haitians. “Come home. The terror is over.”

  Aristide tried to govern the nation of seven million on popularity alone. The soldiers feared him, afraid he would take away their small privileges even though he promised a marriage between them and the people.

  On September 30, just three days after his speech in Miami, Haitian soldiers mutinied and opened fire on his home. The savior went into exile.

  And that gave me an excuse to see firsthand if the stories, the horrors, were true. I had no idea.

  “The soldiers who guard the city hospital carry Israeli machine guns,” I wrote, “in case some one-legged man should hop out and try to kick them to death.” There is little else to fear within the walls. Half the patients have been shot to pieces and the other half are dead, they just haven’t been moved yet. I walked up to one man, lying on his side, and noticed too late that he was beyond talking ever again. The distance from the hospital to the morgue is only a few yards, so the old nuns don’t have far to push the gurneys. In the morgue, the bodies are piled haphazardly, to no particular scheme or order. The air conditioning and coolers have broken down, and the smell of rot is so strong it chases away all other living things, except a man called Presnel, who has no money and family. He squats in the dirt of the courtyard, waiting to die.

  “Crazy man,” Daniel explains, but not unkindly. The man is truly dying, and waits there, to be expedient.

  Hearses—really station wagons with the windows painted black—wait near the hospital. The people in the morgue are the ones no one wants, so hearse drivers wait near the front entrance of the hospital for a fresh body. “One will be ready soon. No problem,” a driver says. He is eating a Popsicle.

  Inside, the hospital stinks from the fouled sheets and the smell of the morgue, which wafts in through the window. The afternoon slips by, and no doctors, medicine or relief come to this dormitory for the poor, only the nuns, who take a dead man off one bed and place a new patient there without changing the sheets.

  The row of beds has one horror after another. One man’s face is missing. Flies peck at twelve-year-old Inus Lundi’s leg, shattered by bullets three weeks ago. His parents are missing, so he has no food. He will surely starve, surely die, surely walk on sticks the rest of his life if by some miracle he does live. His brother, younger, older, I can’t tell, sits beside him, silent.

  Jean-Claude Flankin was shot in the knee by soldiers. “It was a little boy who shot me,” a smiling teenager with a machine gun, he says. He says they shot him for sport, for practice. They had been told to shoot anyone in known Aristide neighborhoods.

  These are Aristide’s people, too, I learn. They are the poor that the army knows it can slaughter without repercussion. They shot women and children. I stood in the middle of it, and tried not to cry like a baby. At one point, a young soldier with a rifle slung low, the muzzle pointing at my stomach, steps so close to me that the tip of the gun bores into my ribs. He is not threatening, only playing, the way the soldiers had been playing when they shot Franklin’s leg. I hate this. I hate this place.

  We are told we are not supposed to be here, and leave, but Daniel motions to the boy, the one with the shattered knee. “You can give him something,” he tells me, but at first I shake my head. We don’t pay for stories. He just looks at me. I gave the boy fifty dollars, enough money to feed him for months. “Merci,” he said, but his expression didn’t change.

  Up in Pétionville, where the air smells better, people concede that they gave the army money, food and even new guns, at least partly financing the coup. They say it was necessary to head off the chaos that Aristide encouraged from the pulpit. Pétionville is a place where restaurants serve lobster pizzas and pear sorbet and fancy beer, where people drive European sedans and have other people scrub their floors. The refrigerators are full.

  “Aristide told the poor people, ‘If you are hungry, then eat. If you are thirsty, drink,’ ” said one woman. “Why shouldn’t we give the soldiers money to protect what we have?”

  In a jewelry shop in Port-au-Prince, a rich man sits surrounded by gleaming gold. The store is small, but there are three men with pistols in the front room.

  “Aristide thought he could rule without us,” the rich man said. “You heard what he said, about the Père Lebrun? ‘I like its color. I like its smell.’ ”

  What a life, to cruise a city searching the sky for plumes of smoke. Men had been burned alive in the past few days, and Daniel has told me we will likely see it happen again, before I am done. The joy of the story has been beaten out of me by what I have seen. I know it will return, when I sit down to write. It always does. But for now, I am tired and a little sick. The meanness of the place does not jab at you, now and then, it hammers, constant.

  We see a column of smoke rising from a hilltop slum and we rush there, to see a crowd circling some kind of commotion in the center. But there is no fire. They have gathered to watch a three-legged dog try to keep company with another dog, which is as good a show as you’re gonna get in Port-au-Prince, between killing
s.

  The Père Lebrun, I thought, was some exotic name for the “flaming necklace.” If I had known any French, like a real FC, I would have known better.

  It was named for a man who sold tires. Jean-Claude Lebrun used to run radio and TV commercials, calling himself “Père (Father) Lebrun.” So when people thought tires, they thought of him.

  After Duvalier fell, the people burned Macoute wherever they found them, soaking a tire with gasoline, wedging it over their shoulders and head and setting it on fire. Aristide supporters had revived the tradition, but now the soldiers are cruising the slums, killing again. Killing. Someone. Always killing.

  There is no stark line between good and evil here, I learn.

  On October 23, hundreds of middle-class Haitians gathered for the funeral of the Reverend Sylvio Claude. He had talked badly of Aristide, and a mob of the poor attacked him. He fled to a police station, which was surrounded. The two policemen did not have to weigh the odds for long. They gave Claude to the mob, which hacked him to death with machetes.

  His funeral, which I saw, told me much about this place.

  The middle-class Haitians, friends and supporters of Claude, mill around under the protection of a company of soldiers outside the service. From inside comes the wailing of women. The casket is open, and the undertaker has not been skillful. Middle-class mourners file inside and come back outside with flame in their eyes, shouting to each other. And all around us, for I am standing in their midst, is a circle of poor Haitians in rags, looking on in hatred.

  “Aristide is an assassin,” bravely shouts one man in the crowd of the middle class, in English, so I can write it down.

  A barefoot young man in the group of poor stares at him. His English is not good, but he makes himself clear to me, later. He came to watch the crowd, to catalog their faces in his mind. He would remember them, if Aristide ever came back. He would remember.