by Wyclef Jean
FOR THE FIRST TEN years of my life, I was raised by my aunt, Mama Filomen, who was my mother’s sister, and my uncle. I thought they were my mother and father. My aunt looked Ethiopian, and she could have been Indian as well—fierce eyes and beautiful bone structure. She wore simple cotton dresses and glasses and I was convinced that she was my mother. I would even call her Mama but she’d always correct me. “Your mother lives in America,” she’d say. “She sent you this Bible, and she will come back for you and Sam one day.” I never believed it.
We lived with my aunt and uncle and about thirty or forty of our relatives under my grandmother’s care in a series of huts that always felt like we were all living underneath just one roof, in one hut—my grandmother’s.
She was the matriarch to all of us. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, whose facial features also looked like a mix of African and Indian. She had eyes of fire but her smile was peaceful. Her voice was always calm, but when she screamed it was louder than thunder. What mattered most to her was keeping the family together; she did not want the tribes to separate. There were many kids under her care, and those with their parents with them were always more valid than those like Sam and me, who didn’t have parents there. This created friction among the homes, and it definitely weighed on my brother and me because it made us feel invisible. The only one who made us feel important was our grandmother, my mother’s mother.
My parents would send us gifts every Christmas from America, but I never believed the presents were truly from them. When my aunt and uncle would say, “These are from your mother and father.” I would nod yes, but I would tell my brother Sam what I really thought: our gifts were from Santa Claus.
I told Sam that Santa couldn’t bring his sleigh to our house because we didn’t have a chimney to slide down so he dropped our gifts behind the hut as he flew over. Each year we tried to stay awake to catch him, but sleep always won. As any child knows, the moment you fall asleep is the moment Santa Claus arrives.
My brother and I were consumed by the myth that our parents were Santa Claus until the moment they came and got us, which was a pretty strange moment I must say.
My father left us with my aunt, uncle, and grandma when I was one year old and my mother was pregnant with Sam. He flew to the States to preach and do further Nazarene training in the ministry. It wasn’t easy on my mother at all; you can imagine the struggle of having a child in those circumstances without her husband present. If it weren’t for my grandmother and her sister, she couldn’t have done it.
In a basic sense, too, everyday life for my brother and me was far from easy. My family were farmers for the most part; they owned a little piece of land that they tended, but they spent most of their time working the land for other people. When the crops came to bear, we would have a nice landfall and things were good. About once a month they’d take enough home that my grandmother could buy a pig or a goat, and when that happened, we kids knew that the feast of the century was coming. My grandmother would cook every single piece of that pig into dishes so delicious that I remember them all to this day. The animal would be roasted right in our backyard, behind our huts, so you could smell it cooking from a long way off. You could smell the rice simmering, and when you knew it was your family making that feast, you walked proudly through the town. There would be green beans, white rice, and meat, and I remember waiting in anticipation all day long. I loved those smells, but I wanted the food now. It was like being a child on Christmas; I could barely wait until mealtime. Those were nothing like the hard times, when I’d dig into the depths of the rice bowl hoping to scrape a few bits of burnt rice from the metal.
On Sundays, my grandmother would give us goud for the collection plate at church. Goud is the Haitian Creole word for money, adapted from gourde, the French word for Haitian currency. My mother’s mother was a good member of the Christian Nazarene Church and she raised us to be the same, so we went to services three times per week, and we attended the Nazarene school.
In spite of this, the goud did not always make it safely to the collection plate. “Don’t you buy candy with this,” my grandmother would say to us. “If you do, God will tell me, and he won’t be happy.”
What can I say? My brother and I were businessmen from the start, and as both street hustlers and CEOs know, you don’t succeed in business without taking risks. We would take the goud and go to a man who sold candy in the village. We would give him the coin and take the candy. We liked having one candy between the two of us, but we knew we’d be happier with many candies. After a few weeks, we made the man a proposition.
“This goud is enough for one candy. And we will come and give you a goud for a candy the next five weeks. But if you give us five candies today, we will guarantee you four more goud.”
We knew grandma was good for the goud. We just had to be sure we didn’t sit beside her in church and let her see us without the goud. In the end, out of the goodness of his heart, the man agreed, and I thank him for giving Sam and me a feast the likes of which we’d never known. To children who’d survived on so little, feasting on candy like that was like serving a starving man a steak.
If you have a best friend or a partner in the worst of times, you find a way to carry each other through anything, and that is what Sam and I did for each other. We were always hungry, but we never felt that we lived in poverty because we were always happy. If you have love, you have the will to survive whatever comes. When there was no food, we ate clusters of the red dirt that made up the floor of our hut. This is common in Haiti. The dirt has some degree of mineral content to nurture you and the bulk of it fills you up when there is no meal to eat.
Things never got too bad in our family because we had cousins on my father’s side who lived along the ocean in Arcahaie. Their town was in the middle of a rich agricultural region, so they were never without food, because vegetables grew everywhere. They worked farms and owned land the way we did, but they also lived by the ocean and were free to fish as often as they liked. They were good fishermen so they were never without, and whenever they visited us, they brought us some extra food, which was always a great help.
Those visits were also special because when our cousins came to visit we became the kid pack and we always got into mischief. My aunt and uncle were strict about Sam and me saying our prayers before bed every night, but when our cousins visited we never got around to it, because we never wanted to go to bed. We were having too much fun to sleep.
My aunt and uncle were wise though, and they came up with a scheme to get us to bed early and to say our prayers. One night after we were nestled together to sleep, my uncle took a branch that he had carved to look like the claw of a dinosaur and extended it slowly through the door. At least this is what I think happened. I have never gotten the truth out of my uncle.
As I lay there, I heard scratching in the dirt and opened my eyes to see this wooden claw making its way toward us. My eyes popped open, and so did my cousin Nason’s and we both started screaming. The others woke up and they started screaming, too, even louder when they saw the claw I was pointing at. Suddenly my aunt burst through the door of the hut with a machete and chopped the claw in two, yelling at the “creature” to be gone. She was our hero.
She may have only been trying to keep the children under her watch from misbehaving, but she accomplished much more than that. I have always enjoyed telling stories, and it did not take long for me to tell every child in our village about the monster that had tried to eat us in our sleep. My aunt had told us it was called Alugaw, the werewolf of the night, and I spread this story far and wide. This experience taught my cousins and my brother and me that there are greater powers at work in the world, and through this idea, and the fear that came with it, we were drawn deeper into our religion. We now had a reason to pray every night: asking God to protect us from evil and the demons that might try to eat us.
As an older man, I realize the value of illusions. I understand why a parent uses the
m to scare their children into the behavior that is best for them. But sometimes, when I lie in bed and see that claw again in my mind, I ask myself, Where did they get that idea? And how did they know it would work so well? They helped the entire village, because soon afterward, we weren’t the only children praying for an hour or more before we put out the oil lamp and lay down to rest.
THERE WERE MANY WAYS for young boys to spend their days in my village before they were old enough to go to school. My favorite activity was hunting because if we were successful, it meant more to eat that day. My brother and I had no guns or knives, so we made slingshots out of branches and thick rubber bands. We would shoot rocks at the small birds that lived in the trees in the village, and I was pretty good. They weren’t easy to hit, but it wasn’t unusual for us to come home with five or ten of them to eat.
One day, as I took aim at a bird on a branch, I saw the largest bird I had ever seen fly overhead.
“Look!” I said to my brother. “It is a giant eagle! If we can shoot that thing from the sky we will eat forever!”
The two of us flung rocks at the giant eagle as it flew on, its shadow passing over us. It was the first time either of us had ever seen an airplane.
My brother and I loved going to church, not only because it meant we’d get goud to trade for candy, but because there was music there. Haitian churches are where the culture really comes alive. Members of the congregation bring instruments, play songs, and sing as an integral part of worshipping God.
Ever since I was a small child, I’ve always been a bit of a bully. My parents have a picture of me in a little cowboy outfit holding two toy guns, and in that photo, you see everything you need to know about me. I was the kid who held all of the toys, even if they weren’t mine. And if they were mine, everyone else had better look out. Let me give you an example.
By the time I was eight years old, I did not believe that Sam and I had parents at all. I had realized that my aunt and uncle were my aunt and uncle, and I accepted it when they told me that my parents used to be here but now lived in a faraway place called America where I would join them someday. I nodded at them when they said that someday my parents would come for us, but in my heart I never believed them. I thought that our parents did not exist and that eventually my aunt and uncle would tell us this truth. By then I figured my aunt and uncle were Santa Claus, too.
That is not what I wanted to be true, but it is what I believed to be true. When a bicycle arrived in the village for Sam and me, supposedly sent by my parents, it became irrelevant whether they existed or not. All I knew was that this bike was ours and that no one else would ever ride it.
To the children in our village, a bicycle was a Bentley; there was nothing better a kid could have. If you had a bike, everyone wanted to ride it, but I didn’t let that happen. It was not because I loved riding it so much, but because it was mine and I was a bully. I would have felt the same way if the bike had been given to someone else in the village: it would still have been mine and I would have ridden it whenever I liked, perhaps even more if I could take it without a fight. The truth is that I got more satisfaction out of holding on to the bike than I did riding it. I’ve just always liked to be in charge. My cousin once made the mistake of trying to ride my bike around the village. I grabbed the closest rock from the ground and threw it at him as hard as I could, knocking him from the bike. He was one of my best friends, but that didn’t matter to me. I got in a lot of trouble and took a beating for it, but no one ever tried to borrow my bike again.
Now that I am older, I realize why I behaved this way. I told myself, and my brother, that we had no parents because in case it was the truth I wanted us to be prepared for that reality. I didn’t want that to be the truth, but I had to be ready in case it was. I wanted a mom and a dad just like every child, and I envied every kid who had them. I saw it this way: I couldn’t have my friends’ parents so they couldn’t have my bike. That bike symbolized whether my mom and dad existed or not. The bike was all I had of them, whether they were just an idea or real people, so I kept it close to me at all times. It represented independence for me as a kid, but to me guarding it was also a test. After all, if my parents didn’t exist, I would need to be a parent to Sam, and I would need to protect what was ours.
Every day, my brother and I walked a few miles to the Nazarene school in our uniforms. On the outskirts of our town, there was, like there are in many rural villages, a huge shit pond. This is how plumbing works in the third world: there is a ditch that runs downhill into a pond where the townspeople’s human waste gathers. Some of it dries out in the sun and turns to dust, but it’s always about three feet deep. Our path to school wound along the top of the hill that circled the pond.
One day, my brother and I were making each other laugh on our way to school and just then I slipped, slid down the slope, and landed face first in the shit pond. My head went under and I fell far enough in that I had to swim to get back to the shore. It was the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me. How can I explain to you how horrible the sensation of going under in a pool of human waste was? The smell was everywhere and it didn’t leave my skin and hair for days. It didn’t feel like water. It didn’t feel like mud. It felt like what it was. When you end up paddling through a shit pond, there is no fooling yourself, believe me.
That wasn’t one of my better days. I had only one school uniform, so I had to go to the river, take it off and scrub it until the stains came out. Then I had to wait around in my drawers until my clothes dried. By the time I got to school I was half a day late, so my teachers beat me. That is how they handled truancy in my school: the ruler was a learning tool.
I HAD MY FIRST musical experience in church, which isn’t uncommon, but this was a Haitian church. You have to understand: Haitian Christians are Haitians first, so as I’ve mentioned, they have no problem practicing both Christianity and Vodou. Religion is religion to Haitians; a relationship with God and powers greater than man are one and the same. Church is the house of God where these relationships are celebrated, so practicing both there makes sense to Haitians.
I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but there was a great controversy in our village surrounding a tamboo drum that someone had brought to church. Haitians always bring instruments to church, because the service is full of music and all of the congregation sings and plays together while they worship. The drum was not out of place, but this one was different. As the service went on, the preacher began to pay attention to the man playing it. He kept singing with us and clapping his hands, but I could tell that he was listening to this one drum out of all of the instruments. I knew this because I was standing directly in front of it. Slowly the preacher made his way toward the drum and stood staring at it, and me, for some time. Then he stopped the music.
“Bring that drum to me,” he said.
I froze. I figured he knew about Sam and me hustling goud off Grandma.
“That drum has evil in it,” he said. “You, child, bring it to me.”
I turned around and looked at everyone in the church, then took hold of the drum and brought it to him. It seemed like every other drum to me.
The preacher carried the tamboo to the front of the church and put his hands on it. He began to pray.
“Evil spirit, leave this drum! Leave this village!” He began rocking the drum back and forth. “I send you out in the name of Jesus Christ!”
It looked like something was moving in the hole in the bottom of the drum. The preacher leaned it to one side and a black snake crawled out. The preacher picked up the snake and brought it to the door of the church.
“Spirit be gone from this village!” he said.
The drum was placed at the back of the church where it would stay until the preacher took it away from the village into the woods. It was forbidden to even go near it. But I never thought rules applied to me if I wasn’t hurting anybody, so in the middle of the night, I snuck out of my hut, being careful not to wake my brot
her. I snuck past all of the dark homes and sleeping villagers and went to the church, because I had to play that drum. I made sure no one saw me as I crept inside, into the dark church. For a minute I thought that this wasn’t a good idea.
I got hold of that drum and ran my fingers over the top of it, then down the side. I got scared that another snake would come out, but I tipped it on its edge anyway, and ran my hand along the inside of the hole. I flicked my finger against it and heard the hollow sound it made. I began to pat my fingers against the drum, quietly tapping out rhythms. I wanted to play louder but I didn’t dare to. I didn’t want to be discovered, not because I was scared of being punished, but because I didn’t want to stop playing.
It felt like I played for half an hour, but when I looked up, light was leaking into the church. I knew I had to get home quickly or be caught, but still I couldn’t stop. I was in a trance, playing rhythms, and loving the music I was making in a way I never had before. I closed my eyes and kept playing.
Then the pastor came in. He pushed me aside, took the drum from my hands, and poured holy water over it. Then he covered it with a white cloth and took it outside. I followed him like a little boy who had lost his puppy.
“This drum is a curse!” he shouted. He put it into a bag, tied the bag to a donkey, and rode it out of town himself.
That was the last time I saw that drum, but I’ve never forgotten it. That moment was the first time I experienced “trance mode,” which is an incredible place for a musician. In trance mode you become one with your instrument and your thoughts and feelings are directly connected to what you are playing. It’s like being on autopilot, but without losing the excitement of flying on your own.