by Rick Bragg
But it never happened, of course. Jimmy Carter came and brokered an unusual three-legged dog of a peace that spared the despots and absurdly married the U.S. military with the same soldiers who had been the instruments of torture and terror. I always liked Jimmy, until then. Aristide would return, but there would be no sweeping justice, no mass executions by flaming necklace, no satisfaction.
For two days I stood outside the military headquarters and watched them hammer out that arrangement, listening to the bought-and-paid-for government supporters sing and chant that “if you come, we will eat you.” Twice I got knocked down. It was bad theater.
The U.S. war machine landed and had to be careful not to shoot the cameramen who came to record it. U.S. officials paid Cedras money to rent a villa from him. Good Lord.
The killing didn’t stop right away. For a full day and part of another, the soldiers hid behind walls, and did not intervene as the police and military clubbed dancing, cheering Haitians who came to greet them. The Haitian soldiers bashed one man’s skull in with a stick of firewood and stole his body, to sell back to his wife.
I have seldom been so sick to my stomach in my life, but I guess diplomacy is complicated. All I know is that, in an effort to disperse the crowd, one Haitian soldier started firing tear gas into the masses. In most places in the world, you aim high and lob the grenade into the crowd. In Haiti, there is no such sensibility. The soldier fired it head-high, but it miraculously missed ripping anyone’s head off at the neck—including mine—and landed against a government building a hundred yards away, which caught on fire, briefly.
I interviewed the American soldiers I saw and time and time again they said they wanted to stop the beating and the killings, that it made them sick, too. But they had their orders. They were young, they were from places like Niagara Falls and Fort Smith and Pensacola, and they were completely unprepared, morally, politically, for this place. I guess you could say their view was simplistic. We had that much in common.
A day or so later, pro-Aristide Haitians unwisely attacked a pro-government stronghold with rocks. The people inside put up with it for a while, then came out and started firing into the crowd. The packed bodies turned and ran, and I ran with them, watching a senior foreign correspondent closely, to see when it was right to run and when you were supposed to stand. Later I would learn that another journalist had been shot in the head, just yards away.
When the U.S. soldiers finally moved out from behind their wall and tried to set things right, I talked one platoon into letting me go with them. I wrote it for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, at a dollar a word, but I would have done it for nothing. Hell, I would have gone along for the ride. It was the only time in Haiti I felt any hope.
“The heroes of Third Platoon fumble toward history with canteens full of grape Kool-Aid,” I wrote, “scanning the rooftops for snipers and trying hard not to run over their admirers. Their deep-green Humvees weave along streets packed with ragged but cheering people who believe these young men have delivered them from evil. ‘We go where they tell us,’ said Sgt. Paul Stevenson, a blond, blue-eyed 24-year-old from Midland, Mich., who enlisted in the Army to escape the inertia of his hometown. ‘But this is a place we need to be. The people want us here. They dance for us and serenade us. I’ve been in this Army since I was 18 and I’ve seen countries get their freedom in the Eastern Bloc: the East Germans, the old Czechoslovakia. But this … you ride through these slums and see people starving on the streets. The next thing you know they’re running beside you, cheering, making you feel like royalty.’
“How often in a black man’s life, asks Pfc. Vondrain Smith, does he walk through a crowd of people of his own color and see them throw flowers at his feet? ‘It’s a good feeling being cheered,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been cheered before.’ Smith, 19, has never been so far away from home and he did not expect to feel any love for Haiti. His kin in Hampton, S.C., said black people had enough to worry about at home. ‘I like these people,’ he says, looking out on a group of children who stare at him like he fell from the sky. ‘They like me back.’ The others echo him. ‘We’re doing good,’ says Pfc. Paul Brady, from Billerica, Mass., who is 19 but looks 15. ‘We know what they’ve done to people here. We’re here to make sure that it doesn’t happen anymore. It stops now.’ Brady, a recruiter’s poster boy, is well spoken and mannerly, from middle-class parents in a nice, peaceful middle-class town. When he goes home, he will probably go back to college. But he has the sense that, whatever happens after Haiti, this will be the most important thing he ever does.
“They patrol the city in Humvee caravans of two, three and four, guns loaded but not cocked and ready to fire, since this is a peacekeeping mission. The gunners in the turret, the most exposed and most at risk, wear two bulletproof vests. The drivers and navigators keep one eye on their windows, afraid someone will drop in a grenade. And always there are the Haitians pressing in on them, curious and friendly but so many and so close that the men know they would never see an attacker coming in time. Ask Richard Rice, the 38-year-old platoon sergeant, what he thinks of the morality of his mission and he barks: ‘Sir, I don’t think. I react. If my Government tells me I am here to do good, I’m here to do good.’ He has enough trouble watching out for his 27 overgrown children in a military operation that has no precedent. In a year, Rice will retire. He plans to sit on his front porch in a rocking chair, in the center of 105 acres of rich bottom land in Maysville, Ky., and watch the chickens peck. Haiti will seem a distant memory, but he can only have that peace of mind if all the young soldiers in his command leave Haiti alive. ‘I came here with 27,’ he says, and the words seem riveted in the air. ‘And I’m by God gonna leave with 27.’
“Rice—a lean, tall, hard-looking black man with arms like telephone poles—is worried. He was for most of his career a soldier of the cold war. He worked a fence line in Korea, where razor wire divided friends and enemies, where soldiers were not expected to ride through towns drumming up good will. This post-cold-war mission seems to write new doctrine each day. Helicopters pound through the blue sky and blare a taped message in Creole on the humanitarian, democratic and peaceful intent of the 20,000 armed soldiers here. ‘These guys are more at risk because it is a walk-in mission instead of a forced occupation,’ he said. ‘If it had been a forced occupation, we would have just taken all these weapons out there. My job is to make sure they are prepared,’ but for what, no one is quite sure. More than anything, the men are afraid of a repeat of Somalia, where crowds first greeted American troops with smiles and later dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets, laughing as they did so. That image is burned into the mind of every soldier in the Third Platoon. They have heard stories about Père Lebrun. The poor of Haiti, the soldiers know, have their cruel dark side.
“But when the soldiers write home, they mention none of this. The thing Pfc. Jeff Harris hates worse than anything else is lying to his momma. In elegant script, he writes long, heartfelt letters home to Columbus, Miss., that describe Haiti as being safe, so his mother will not worry. ‘You only write your momma the good stuff,’ says Harris, who turned 21 in Haiti. He has the soft accent of the Delta. He also writes to a dark-haired beauty named Amanda Smith, whom he plans to marry if she will have him. He has two photos of her. He keeps them next to his Playboy magazine.”
I liked Pfc. Harris the most. We talked about barbecue and deer hunting and hush puppies—the kind you eat, not the kind you wear to poetry readings—and about lying to our mommas. I rode with the soldiers for a few days, finding out who they were, where they were from, what they thought. I found them to be afraid, not of guns or grenades, but of the magic of the place. I saw it when we drove by a man sitting buck naked at the side of a winding road. His face was painted mustard yellow. His fingers tapped the ground in time to a song only he could hear. “Is that some kind of voodoo?” asked Private Matthew Gunn.
“No,” said the squad’s interpreter. “Just a crazy person.”
<
br /> My last day with them, we stopped to rest in the shade high up in one of the mountain neighborhoods. A thin, slight man with a camera around his neck walked timidly to the soldiers and asked if he could show them some photographs. He said that for three years he has documented atrocities in this neighborhood, hoping that someday the people who committed them will be punished. The stack of photos is two inches thick. They show gunshot wounds to the head, mutilations, bodies hacked and burned. One is a young, beautiful woman, her breasts and shoulders crisscrossed with slashes. “I wish you could have come sooner,” the man said.
One by one the soldiers flip through them, then they go sit quiet. Some of them sit alone. I have never seen them do that before. No one looks at anyone else. “I knew they killed people,” Harris finally says, “but I didn’t know they done that.” He looks disgusted, like he needs to hit someone. “I never seen nothing like that.”
I remember that Brady did not say anything, not for a long time, that he just stared off into the trees. As we left the children ran alongside the Humvees, as they always did, but one little boy, as I wrote in my story, ran longer and farther than the rest, shouting, “Hooray.” I wanted to go home.
I left before I finished the story. I did not wait for the triumphant return of Aristide. I flew to Miami, closed the curtains on a hotel room in Coconut Grove, near my old house. I slept a long time. I did not dream of Haiti, then, but sometimes I do.
The phone woke me up. It was the national editor of the Times. She told me they were promoting me, to national correspondent. I was going to cover the South, from the Atlanta Bureau. I was going home.
I called my momma. She asked me how my cruise had been, and I told her, “long.” She told me, funny, she thought she had seen a picture of me on the news, in a crowd of terrified, running people. But she forgot all about it when I told her the news, that I was coming home. “Thank God,” she said. I told her I would see her at Thanksgiving, I would see all of them. But I was only partly right.
Months later, I got a letter from Private Brady’s momma. She thanked me for the story, for explaining her sons mission, how important it was. I meant to write her back, but I never did. I did not know what to say. Maybe I would just write:
Dear Mrs. Brady:
Your son seems like a fine boy. I hope he gets home to you, safe. And I hope he doesn’t dream.
3
GETTING EVEN WITH LIFE
34
Gone South
It happens a lot, especially in places where the people live far apart, separated by a few miles, a few fields, a few hundred fence posts. I knock on their door, and tell them I am a reporter for the New York Times. I see the doubt and sometimes even suspicion in their eyes.
“You don’t sound like no New York Times,” a state patrolman down in south Georgia told me.
“You sound like me,” a woman told me in a courtroom in South Carolina. She was paying me a compliment, I believe.
Sometimes, I have to show them my identification. It is not always good to be home—my homecoming brought as much sadness as joy—but it is an honor, by God.
To work in the Southern Bureau of the New York Times is to grab on to the flapping coattails of newspaper history, and hope your hands are clean. Legends did this job, in times of national crisis, in times when hatred and night riders ruled the region where I was born, and their stories helped define it for the rest of the world. To be a Southerner in this job is to live a dream, even if you never really dared to dream it. I am not going to poor-mouth too much—I wanted this job because I felt I could do it with some insight, without asking some college professor what I should feel—but it is as daunting as it is satisfying, to cover your home for strangers.
There have been many Southerners in the job before, of course, but it was a little odd, being the offspring of poor, white Southerners, working for the newspaper that had been so unpopular among my people for its often unflattering depictions of them. The Times was the ultimate pointy-head establishment, the ultimate outside agitator, the target of our hatred, and here I was, a modern-day extension of it.
But it feels right, doing this. I know how this part of the world is, how it works, and I know how it used to be, how it used to work. I thought, as I walked into work that first day, that I had an understanding of its meanness, its insecurities, its fragility, and its great good. I had lived much of it.
I had gaps in my knowledge, of course. I knew a good bit about poor whites and poor blacks and working people of all colors, but all I knew about the gentility was that I didn’t like them much. Yankee reporters love to hobnob with the gentility, and the gentility love to have them around. They secretly despise each other, over the crab puffs, but not nearly as much as they disdain the nasal-voiced crackers who keep their cars running and their houses clean. I don’t find the rich folks down here to be very interesting, and, they talk funny. If I have to hear one more penny loafer-wearing, pink-jowled, bow-tied geek who doesn’t know how to pronounce his r’s talk about how his “mutha” grew up in the Big House in “Jaw-ja,” I will bust. We may sound like trash, us up-country peckerwoods, but at least by God you can understand what we’re saying.
Anyway, except in politics and business, rich people seldom make news. Their money, like wings, carries them above the hardships and dangers of normal folks, and keeps them out of the newspaper between cotillions. If I should ever own a newspaper I shall set the society page on fire. I shall chase the society matrons out of my newsroom with a cattle prod when they come in with pictures from the debut. I shall …
It is nice to dream.
My understanding of those beneath the gentry helped me, and no place did I use that knowledge, my own life, more than in the story of the old washerwoman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Miss Oseola McCarty. She became famous when, in anticipation of her own death, she gave her life savings to the local university as an endowment for scholarships earmarked for poor students. The wizened, gentle old woman had made her living washing and ironing for the rich folks, saving her dollar bills and pocket change over a long lifetime. In the end she had more than $150,000, and, at age eighty-seven, she just handed it to strangers in the belief that her money could do good.
As we talked, in her little house on Miller Street, I had a hard time keeping my mind in the here and now. Her house was filled with clothes, other people’s clothes. They surrounded us, in bundles, in neat rows on hangers, as other people’s clothes had surrounded me in our own little house, a long, long time ago. As she talked about making them look nice, for parties she was never invited to, weddings she never saw, I heard a voice in my head telling me not to play in the piles of laundry. I smelled the clean, strong scent of bleach and soap and starch, again.
When I sat down to write my story, I closed my eyes and saw not an old black woman but a young white one. Like Miss McCarty, my momma had worn old tennis shoes with holes cut out, or worn through. Like her, she had sweated for hours in hot, airless rooms for dimes and quarters. I let some of the admiration I had for her creep into this story of a stranger, but I don’t think it hurt it much. It was, some people told me, the best story I ever wrote, in this job I was born to do.
The Times had never made me a hard promise that I would get to do it, but the editors had hired me specifically for it, I would learn some time later. First I had to prove myself in places where I was not part of the landscape, but after just a little over six months in that crowded, frenetic newsroom in New York, and a couple more in the dark, miserable twilight of Haiti, I was as close to home as I would perhaps ever be. It was a marriage so perfect, in my mind’s eye, that I was almost surprised when I got a cold, or stubbed my toe, or got a parking ticket, because such things do not belong in dreams.
From the eleventh-story window of the bureau office on Peachtree Street in busy, sprawling Atlanta, you cannot see forever, but on a clear day you can almost see Alabama. Some nights, as the sun sets over the hills that border my state from this one, so close
, I stand at that high-up window and lean my forehead to the cool glass. It is not a prayer, really, only something like it.
It was fall of 1994, when I finally got here. I rented an apartment in midtown and became an urban Southerner, again, because Atlanta has Los Angeles–class traffic and I am not going to waste big chunks of my life trying to get home to a house I would rarely see. I had not been in the city of Atlanta for more than ten years—you don’t have to get anywhere near the downtown to get to the airport, the first leg on my journeys home—and I found it to be as I remembered it: big, new, gleaming, at least on first glance, till you found its warts. I knew, from reading about it, that it was about as Southern as a snowmobile, a pretentious city striving for some kind of ridiculous national or international acclaim, or—as one native son once said—just a lot of really nice conventions. I have always been uncomfortable around people who are somehow ashamed of their heritage, who went to speech school to get rid of their accents. Atlanta is like that. It tears down its history with wrecking balls, and builds something bland and homogenized in its place.
But that is harsh. Atlanta is a good place. You won’t get shot here nearly as quick as Miami or New Orleans, cities I love, and it is much warmer than Manhattan and Boston. It has green, that lovely green, and nice, safe neighborhoods, if you can afford them and don’t mind the drive.
The place I settled into was an old four-unit apartment building where passersby were prone to steal the mail—the mail police told me so in a letter, which they mailed to me at home, risking it—and the washing machine danced back and forth in the closet like a mentally deranged great-aunt. But it had a fireplace and hardwood floors you could slide across in your socks and a good shower, and I spent a day just putting books on the shelves. I guess it is a form of mental illness, but I am careful about it. I put the good, old stuff—Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Capote, Dickens, Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Steinbeck—on the top shelf, in case of floods. It does not matter that I am on the second floor, the ritual continues. I did it in Los Angeles and I was on the eighteenth floor, with not a river in sight. They didn’t even have time to get dusty, there.