by Wyclef Jean
All I heard was heavy breathing. Sam was already asleep, his belly full of milk, a smile on his face.
MY FATHER WAS BORN to be a minister, and leading people was his calling, so it didn’t take him long to start a Nazarene ministry church in the projects. There were eight of us living in this apartment once my brother and I joined them, but that didn’t matter. My father made space for a congregation to worship in there every Sunday.
My father’s services started early in the morning after a few helpers came by to move the furniture and set up a few chairs. From the time I was very young, I always liked to imitate people, and I’m pretty good at it, too. So after about two weeks of services, I started copying my father’s every move. While the room was being set up, I would imitate my father’s sermon in a corner to entertain myself and my brother.
I held Sam’s attention, but my father was incredible to watch. He took his flock on a journey no matter how small or large the church. Gesner Jean had a magical power over his fellow man and from the first time I saw him wield it over the neighborhood faithful, I knew I wanted that same power for myself.
I began to expand my audience beyond Sam in an effort to sharpen my skills. I would get my siblings to sit and listen to me imitate as much of Dad’s sermons as I could remember. The one I recited—and bastardized—the most was my father’s favorite moral tale, the story of Jonah and the whale.
My father’s favorite stories dealt with rebirth, sacrifice, and new beginnings, which were the right stories to tell a collection of immigrants trying to start a new life. They were also very biblical. He would talk about Jonah needing to suffer inside the belly of the whale until he had atoned for the sin of being a false prophet, and how his followers had had to make the sacrifice of casting him into the sea. In my version I got Jonah confused with Elijah the Prophet, whose story comes just before Jonah’s in the Bible, so Elijah ended up in the whale for some reason and then ascended to heaven. I acted it out very dramatically so no one minded.
Another of my father’s favorite sermons focused on Christ’s resurrection, and the theme of rebirth that was at the center of my father’s view of the world. He saw a second chance in everyone, so long as they followed the word of Jesus Christ. I can understand his faith better now as a grown man than I could as a teenager. His faith had gotten him through life, and his devotion to the church was the key to our family’s survival. All he wanted was to pass this good fortune on in the only way he knew how.
I got really good at imitating my father’s theatrics, so good that I’d catch my mom laughing sometimes when she saw me miming his moves. It was like I was doing closed captions for the kids in the room: I knew when my father was going to bang his jacket on the floor, so I’d do it just before he did, and I knew when he was going to hold his hands up to heaven and shake his fists, so I’d do it a little early and I’d keep going after he’d stopped to make fun.
My dad never confronted me about it, but he did come up with a way to focus all of my energy: he bought a bunch of musical instruments and told us to learn to play them. These weren’t proper instruments; they were Muppet Show instruments, bought at the local Toys “R” Us. Thank you, Jim Henson, for inventing the Muppets and thank you marketing guy who signed off on that licensing deal, because without it, the Jean kids would never have learned to play.
We had a bass, a guitar, some drums, a microphone, and we learned to jam in no time. Eventually, when our parents upgraded us to real instruments, we became a Haitian American Partridge Family. That might sound strange until you realize that the Nazarene Church was Western American, founded in the South, so all of the music in the church came from a country and gospel background.
We had Sedek on drums, my sister Melky singing on the little Muppet microphone, and the rest of us swapping on the rest of the instruments. Even on those toys it didn’t take long for us to become the Jean Family Band, entertaining the neighborhood. My siblings and I were blessed with the gift of music; we picked up playing whatever we were given as if it were second nature. To this day, when I play music with my brother or sing with my sister, it’s different than when I play with anybody else. My siblings and I share this chemistry that was always there. We don’t ever have to talk about it; we already know where the music is taking us. And when we don’t, we know that it will.
GROWING UP, MY FAMILY lived in some of the toughest, most dangerous neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey. The Marlboro Houses in Coney Island, where my brother and I began our adventure here in America back in the eighties, was a war zone filled with gangs, drugs, and gunfire. The city cleaned them up a bit in the nineties, but they’re not much better today. The murder rate there is higher than in any other housing project in New York. There is a reason why every rapper who’s lived there mentions it to prove he’s tough.
As soon as they had enough money, our parents moved us out of there, and for the next few years we house hopped around Flatbush and other sections of Brooklyn. Both of my parents worked several jobs until they could afford to buy their first house at 107 South Clinton Street in East Orange, New Jersey, which was the proudest day of my father’s life. It didn’t matter that the house was in the middle of the carjacking capital of the world. It was his.
My father was an imposing man. He was of average size, but his presence was more powerful than any man I’ve ever met. He commanded respect, even from those who respected nothing. Growing up I saw my father walk into situations that could easily have ended his life. He never resorted to violence and he was never scared, because he lived by a rule that he taught me early on: “You must never fear another man,” he said. “No man can take from you what you don’t give him yourself. Only you can give a man the knowledge that grants him the freedom to take all that is yours.”
Over the course of my life, I have seen my father live by this principle in many situations where it would have been safer to make an exception to the rule. His devotion to his principles may have gotten him into danger, but just like his favorite stories in the Bible, his faith delivered him in the end. That didn’t help me, standing there a few feet away, praying to God that I wasn’t about to see my father shot dead before my eyes. I have never forgotten that fear, just as I have never forgotten his strength when I have been tested in life.
The best representation of my father’s character was his drive to start his churches in the toughest neighborhoods he could find. “It is where God is needed most,” he’d say every time I offered to buy my parents a house in a better neighborhood once I had the money to do so. “Why would I turn my back on souls that need guidance?”
In areas like that, everyone and everything was a target, so naturally, local thieves tested the waters with Gesner—until they got to know him, which didn’t take long.
This happened every time we moved houses in Brooklyn, because each block was its own village. One of our homes was a very small three-room house that was also his church, of course. At some point, a member of the congregation donated a television to the church. It was kept in the front room, where you could see it from the street, so at some point soon after that, one of the thugs on the block stole it. My father had a pretty good idea who it was, so the next morning he got up, got dressed, walked out of the house with a real sense of purpose, and went down the street toward the rougher block where the dudes who ran the area hung out. I ran after him because I wanted to be there if something happened. There probably wasn’t much I would have been able to do, but I wasn’t going to let anyone touch my dad. I prayed that he and I wouldn’t end up dead over some old lady’s lame-ass TV.
Gesner walked right up to the guy he was looking for.
“Yo, what’s up, Minister? You lost?”
“No, I am not lost,” he said looking at the group of them for a moment. “Do you know where I live?”
The looked at each other sideways, not sure where this was heading.
“Yeah, you live down there, Minister. Right? You don’t know your own house?
”
“I live there, but that is not my house. That is the house of the Lord. It belongs to God and everything in it is his. You do not touch this house. Do you understand? A television was stolen from there last night.”
“Oh yeah, Minister? That’s fucked up.”
“It must be returned. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
When a man accuses a known thug of a crime, he’d better be ready to defend himself. No dude like that takes that kind of shit lightly. These guys were feared by everyone on the block and they respected nobody. They stared back at my dad hard, in silence, for a long minute.
“Alright, Minister,” one of them said slowly. “We hear that. It won’t happen again.”
“Thank you,” Gesner said. “The church is open to everyone. We have service every Sunday morning. I hope to see you there.” Then he turned on his heel like Sidney Poitier meets Dirty Harry and walked back home.
The TV was left on our back porch some time during the night and that next Sunday, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw one of those cats sneak into the back of church during my father’s sermon. He sat as far away from the front as he could, but there was no missing this dude. He stuck out from the rest of the flock like a wolf in a sheep’s pen.
I’m not lying to you when I say that my dad had a mystical quality to him, which came from my grandfather. Gesner had turned away from Vodou, but it was in his blood. I believe in greater powers or magic or whatever you want to call it, but even if I didn’t, I’ve seen things happen around my father that had no logical explanation. He was deeply spiritual, and when someone is in touch with God in that way, there is an almost supernatural quality to them.
One time, when we were still living in the Marlboro Houses, a local gang member stopped me while I was walking home from school. I started to weigh my options, deciding which way I would run if I had to.
“Yo, who’s that big dude your dad rolls with when he goes out?”
“My dad? My dad don’t roll with nobody.”
“Yeah, man. Big dude, real tough. He ain’t from around here. I see your dad rolling through here all times of day and night and the dude always be walking a few steps behind him, looking out for him.”
“My dad don’t know no big dude.”
“I’m telling you I seen this guy out here walking with your dad.”
Whatever you believe it was, Gesner’s protector kept him from harm walking in a place where it was easy to die just minding your business.
As a young man watching my father negotiate these situations, I tried to be like him in my own way. I vowed to myself that I would hold my head high when I was tested by kids at school. I wouldn’t go looking for trouble, but if it came to me, I would not back down. Being a Haitian with a thick accent, trouble found me.
It started back in Marlboro, where my brother Sam and I got chased home from school every day by a pack of mean, dumb-ass girls. They were older than we were and they were real tough, so they enjoyed beating up the Haitian kids who spoke funny, all the way from the steps of our school to our front door each afternoon.
This went on for a while until I decided we weren’t going to take it any more. The two of us had made one friend in the projects who knew his way around, so we asked him what to do. His name was Jeffery; he was a year older than me and he was tough as hell.
“Yo, listen to me. I’m gonna teach you how to slap box,” Jeffery said. “Once you learn how, you start slappin’ those girls. You do that, they gonna respect you, because they tough like men.”
Jeffery gave Sam and me boxing lessons in front of his building in the projects. He made us shadow box. Then we practiced against each other and after a while I got real good. I started to feel like I was ready to retaliate against those girl bullies.
The next day they started in on us the way they always did, the minute we walked out of the building.
“Hey, you ready? We’re gonna get you, Haitians. We gonna beat your ass again today, just like we did yesterday.”
They liked to let us start running and think we were getting away before they came after us, caught us by the backs of our shirts, and beat us to the ground. I wasn’t having that today.
“Y’all ready to run, Haitian?” one of them asked me. “Cuz we gonna get you.”
“Nah,” I said. “We ain’t running.”
They all started laughing. “Oh yeah? Okay, Haitian, then you’ll get your ass whupped right on the spot.”
They came at us and we started using the slap boxing we’d learned. My brother wasn’t too good so he got his ass beat, but I was able to keep them off me. I backed their whole crew up with my slap-boxing routine, and they weren’t expecting that.
This wasn’t some Karate Kid moment where I defeated all the bad guys and my brother and I lived happily ever after. They still fucked with us after school, but never as badly as they used to. They’d chase us but not as hard, and when they jumped us, they went easier. If they chose to play that game they’d still win, but they learned that they’d have to take some shots.
In 1985, when my family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, the bullying followed us. I don’t know what it was, but the black American kids in my schools growing up loved to hate on Haitians. When I started Nassau Elementary School, I expected it to be the kind of rebirth my dad spoke of in his sermons. The day we moved was a journey worthy of rebirth: it was the first time Sam and I had left Brooklyn since we’d arrived in America. During that car ride we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, which was the grandest thing I had ever seen, and then for the first time in our lives, we went through a tunnel. As our LTD station wagon descended into the Holland Tunnel, I thought of Jonah entering the belly of the whale. We were going beneath the sea.
“Are we underwater yet?” I kept asking my dad.
“Not yet.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“Almost.”
“Now?”
“Almost.”
“Okay, now we are under the water. We are beneath the Hudson River about to arrive in the Garden State.”
Our neighborhood on South Clinton Avenue was a lot like the one portrayed in the movie Friday. Within a two-block radius, we had all the same characters: the bully that smacked us in the head every day as we walked to school, the old ladies who knew everybody’s business, the dealers, the homeboys—all of it. Two blocks away, on Walnut Street, was a project where the roughest types lived and did their business. All the roughnecks from Jersey came from there: Treach, Vin, and Kay from Naughty by Nature, Apache from Flavor Unit, and lots of other rappers who never made it out.
I started school at Nassau two days after we moved and encountered prejudice for the first time in my life. It began with my family name. The kids in my class refused to pronounce it properly. Instead they pronounced it “jean” as in denim—and they said they were gonna wear me like a dirty pair of Haitian jeans.
I was confused. Coming from Haiti, I saw all black people as brothers and sisters, and I thought of them that way, too. I expected us to share the same ideology and feel the same way about things. I thought those girls back in Marlboro were just mean to us because we were the new kids. Making fun of us being Haitian was like calling us dumb or ugly or skinny. Now I knew there was more to it.
“After school we’re gonna beat you down, Haitian,” some kid whispered into my ear while I sat in class. “Not just you … We gonna beat the whole Jean family down. You boat people gotta know your place.”
That’s what was waiting for us after school, day one. It made no sense to me that blacks would be prejudiced against other blacks. We weren’t a minority in the neighborhood either; there were so many Haitians that they had a bilingual curriculum at school to help us integrate. That set us apart though, so we were easy to pick out. When they saw us in the hallways, those kids taunted us by shouting, “Go back to Jamaica. What’s old is what’s new!” They called all the immigrant kids “boat peop
le” and told us to go back to our own country. None of them had any idea that Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas were all different. We were all the same to them.
This culminated in what came to be known as Haitian Day, when all the kids in school formed a mob and beat up the Haitian kids, all day long. I held my own on a daily basis, but Haitian Day was too much for my slap-boxing skills. I had to do something to put an end to this bullshit, at least as far as my family being caught up in it. I’d make them leave the Jeans alone.
There was a bully named Walter who was one of those dudes who grew real early. By elementary he was the biggest kid in school and he knew it. Everyone was scared of him and no one tried to fight him. At that age I was still real skinny and not very tall, and Walter was already a few grades ahead of me so this guy looked like André the Giant compared to me. It didn’t matter; on Haitian Day I decided that fighting Walter was the only way to end this shit.
School was letting out and I was leaving school to walk home with my sister Melky and my brothers, Sam and Sedek. Walter walked by us with a bunch of his friends and I saw my chance.
“Yo Walter, you guys are punks.”
“You talking to me, Haitian?”
“You’re punks for jumping all of us in crowds like that. You could never take us one-on-one.”
“Oh yeah, you think so?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna whup your ass. If you’re a man, you’ll fight me one-on-one right now.”
“Okay, whatever you want.”
Walter tamed his dogs back and I did mine, and we approached each other in the middle of the sidewalk.
I wasn’t worried at all because I had a plan. I’d spent every Saturday afternoon since we came to America watching all of the karate movies I could find on TV. I had studied Bruce Lee, then Five Deadly Venoms, Drunken Master, The Kid With the Golden Arm—all of the greats. I saw myself as a master of the martial arts from the time I was a small child and I told my brothers and sister that I was a descendant of the Shaolin. There was a tall white building that we could see from the highway every time our parents drove us to visit our grandmother and when we passed it I would bow.