Purpose

by Wyclef Jean

  My father would not be stopped, so he went ahead and bought it.

  “God sent me a vision,” he said in his Sunday-sermon voice when we asked him why we had to move to a destroyed funeral home from a very nice house we liked. “It will become a great church that this community needs. From the ashes we will rebuild. When God speaks you must listen. This will be a great church.”

  My father had a great idea, but let me tell you, that place was never quite right. He was doing improvements on it from the day we moved in until the day he died, and even by then it was still a work in progress. The neighborhood wasn’t any better: while we lived there, there were more carjackings and automobile-related thefts on that block than any other block in New Jersey. To this day the sound of two-bit car alarms going off at night is almost peaceful to me. Those were the crickets that put me to sleep at night when I was a kid; now they just remind me of home wherever I hear them.

  As I said, this building was fried. Most of the roof was there and all of the walls were there, but it looked like a house of cards painted black with soot. We never learned what caused it, but it didn’t take the Fire Department to figure out that the blaze had started in the attic and made its way down. The third floor was destroyed, half of the second floor was fine, and most of the first floor was intact. The basement held the rooms where they had prepared the bodies. There were drains in the floor and all of the equipment—embalming fluid machines, leftover chemicals and supplies—was still there. There were coffins in the freight elevator, too.

  This place was eerie. You could feel the spirits of the dead there. Even if you don’t believe in that kind of thing, our home when we moved in would have changed your mind. The charred walls didn’t help us feel less like we were in a horror movie.

  My brothers and sisters and I adapted pretty quick coming from Brooklyn, but we already got teased because we were a preacher’s kids. If they saw us coming out of the funeral home every day, that would have been too much for any of us. So every morning, we’d have a lookout: one of us would sneak a look from the window, and when no other kids were coming down the block, we’d run out the back door and down the side of the house to the street. We didn’t tell anyone where we lived. We also had to keep this from our mother and just act like we preferred the back door as our exit of choice. She would not have been happy with us at all if she knew that we were not proud of our home.

  The coffins in the basement and the big freight elevator where they brought the bodies in and out were just scary. Next to that was a room with the metal table where they sucked the blood out and dressed the bodies for the funeral. The day we moved in we found the big knife they used to break bones sitting there on the floor. That was our new home. The basement, of all places, was where my father decided Bible study would take place. He walked around that room like it was as grand as St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  “This is where we will bring in the chairs!” he said beaming this huge grin. “We will sit here and do our study. The next room will be for services.”

  I know I wasn’t the only one in the family who thought that this was a little bit crazy, but my dad wasn’t the kind of leader who failed. He wasn’t the kind who listened either, so we knew that this was how it was going to be. He spent the first few months we lived there walking through the house praying in every room, every day. That didn’t do much to convince us kids that the place wasn’t haunted, and we had reasons for that, too.

  At first I thought it was a joke my little brother was playing on me, or my parents’ version of the monster’s claw that got us to pray back in the village in Haiti. But it wasn’t either of those: there were ghosts in the funeral home, and they liked to steal our blankets when we were sleeping. It was scary, but it wasn’t Poltergeist; some invisible hand would pull the blankets off of us some nights. It happened to my younger brother, my sisters, and me. We would wake up and the blankets would be on the floor at the end of our beds. All of us had experiences where we woke up, saw the blankets moving, and were frozen with fear.

  It happened a lot, because those ghosts liked taking blankets. I always knew when they were coming, too, because I could hear them. There would be a creak in the hall and then the whistling of a breeze through a drafty attic. I’d feel that cold wind pass over my skin, and then a feeling of dread would grip me. The moment I heard that sound in the middle of the night I was paralyzed. I’d try, but I couldn’t yell; whatever that energy was would keep me from crying out.

  After it happened to me a few times, I knew it wasn’t just a bad dream. After it happened to my brother and sisters, I knew I wasn’t crazy or special. I asked my father about it because I knew it was real. I wanted to know if he believed in spirits the way he believed in Jesus Christ. I wanted to know if he was as Haitian as me, because Haitians believe in ghosts.

  “Nel, there are spirits all around us in this world,” he said. “They live alongside us, all of the time. The dead are a part of our world.”

  I nodded, hanging on his every word.

  “Most of them mean us no harm, but some are mischievous, and others can be dangerous.”

  “Why do they like to take my blankets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what can I do when I hear them coming to take my blankets?”

  “There is only one thing you can do to turn them away.”

  “What is it?”

  “Recite Psalm 23.”

  Let me tell you, whatever you believe in as far as God and religion, I don’t care what you say, I recited the psalm when the ghosts came back, and it worked, each and every time. They never bothered me again.

  MY FATHER OBTAINED SOME funding from the Nazarene Church and some more through donations from his congregation and promises from all of them they’d volunteer their time on the weekends to help us rebuild, and that was how it went. We lived on the second floor, and my father started doing church in the basement every Sunday.

  He also put up a sign in the parking lot that said it was for the church only. Between the supermarket, the pub, and the Italian joint, there were always cars in there, during the day and all night long. Eventually he taught people: usually by walking outside every few minutes for the first few weeks we were there, to ask them to leave. You couldn’t blame people; the funeral home had been abandoned for years.

  The only ones who didn’t take any of that seriously were the Italian dudes. After we’d been there a while, my father decided he’d had enough of it. One night, he looked out the window and saw the lot full of cars. I knew it was all the Italian guys because every other car was a Cadillac Eldorado. It was hot that night and my father was wearing shorts and sandals as he went out the door to go talk to these guys. I was worried, so I ran behind him to watch what happened in case I had to report it to the police.

  My father walked right up to the door and knocked on it like it was nothing. This huge guy straight out of The Sopranos opened it.

  “Preacher, how you doin’?”

  “You must move all of these cars. They are not to park in the church parking lot.”

  “Take it easy, Preacher,” he said slowly. “Don’t worry about it; we’ll take care of you.”

  “I want these cars moved. I will call the police.”

  I saw a look of confusion cross the guy’s face briefly, and then that calm came back—which is the sign of a man you need to be careful with. Real gangsters and killers never lose their cool.

  “Preacher,” he said, “we are the police.”

  It was the only time I saw my father flinch, realizing that he’d walked into something he’d not counted on: a situation he could do nothing about. He wasn’t afraid, but it was the first time I’d seen him pause. In situations like this, he either got his way or kept talking, making his point. He stood there for a moment and for once he didn’t stand his ground.

  “Okay then,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Preacher.”

  The next day, we were rehearsing
the church band with my father when we heard a knock at the back door. I went up to see who it was. It was the Italian guy from the night before.

  “Get your father.”

  “Hello again,” my father said.

  “Preacher, this is for you.” He handed my father an envelope full of cash. It was thick, half-opened, and I could see the bills.

  “This is to help with your repairs, Preacher. Looks like you’ve got a lot of work to do here.” The guy smiled at him in that way that mobbed-up Italians do: he was friendly but you knew he meant business. “We’re gonna park there, Preacher, but we’ll be donating to the church. We may even come by for confession one of these days.”

  The Italians did what they said they’d do and their donations really helped us out. They were definitely made men, because nobody fucked with their cars, and on that block, back then, a parking lot full of Eldorados was like a stack of money left on the street in Times Square: it was unlikely to be untouched the next day. If nobody was pinching a parking lot full of Eldorados in Newark, New Jersey, in the middle of the night, something was up.

  Our new house was never quite right, to tell you the truth: it was haunted and it never looked good. By the time my father died in 2001, it finally looked alright inside thanks to the missionaries from Kansas, Texas, and all over the world who came to stay with us and help rebuild. The church was moved out of the basement and onto the first floor by then, but the outside still needed work. It always seemed to need a paint job, and we never got around to any kind of landscaping in the front yard. Only after I had made enough money did I take care of things. My father wasn’t going to let me buy him a new church outright or move him out of the place he had chosen. I helped him the only way that he would find acceptable: I contributed to the church fund.

  Living in the burnt old funeral home had one advantage: people thought we were weird, and that can be a good thing when people want to intimidate you. Across the street and down the block from us was a deli owned by a Chinese guy. And as there are outside every deli owned by an Asian guy in any bad neighborhood, a pack of dudes always hung out on that corner, and claimed it for themselves. They weren’t the toughest on the block, but they were a pack of bullies capable of doing some damage. One day my little brother Sedek went in the store after school and when he came out one of the thugs slapped him across the face just to humiliate him. I got home a little while later and I found Sedek sitting in the window by the door waiting for me.

  “Clef, these thugs smacked me,” he said. He looked scared and sad. “I was coming out the Chinese store and they smacked me. I’ve been waiting for you to come home so you can go get me my respect back.”

  “What now? Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not. I need you to get me my respect back.”

  I’m not the kind to back down, but this was a lot of pressure to put on me. I knew these guys: there were four of them, and they were all bigger than me. They looked like ballplayers and I looked like a mouse.

  “Okay brother, I will do this for you,” I said slowly, narrowing my eyes at him. “I will get you your respect back.”

  I had no chance of outpowering these guys. I had to rely on something else. I thought about what everyone in the neighborhood said about Haitians: they all thought we practiced Vodou. And that scared them. They thought we could put curses on them and steal their souls. I thought about how I could adapt this myth into a method of survival, how I could reimagine my roots to fit in on the block.

  I went to my parents’ room and into my mother’s closet to get her squirrel-fur scarf. It was a string of squirrel bodies, with the heads on each end. It was one of those scarves that you see and you say to yourself, That motherfucker is wearing ten squirrels. I wrapped that around my neck. Then I went into my father’s closet, all the way to the back, where I knew he had a machete. I took it out of its sheath and put it on the floor. Then I grabbed his raincoat and put it on.

  I knew I’d need some sort of Vodou powder to scare them with so I went to the kitchen and filled the pockets of the coat with salt. I hid the machete under the coat, tucked the squirrels inside the collar, and stood by the front door with Sedek.

  “Listen to me,” I said to him. “I am going to get you your respect back. I want you to sit here by this window and watch the street. I am going to bring that guy over here and I want you to come outside and smack him just the way he smacked you. That is how you get your respect on this corner. They have got to respect us, so we are going to make them fear us.”

  Sedek kept looking out the window and back at me. “Okay,” he said.

  I looked strange, man: raincoat, squirrel scarf, and something long hidden under the coat. In broad daylight I was wearing squirrels around my neck, with a machete hanging down the side of my leg. I wasn’t something you saw every day, even on South Orange Avenue.

  I walked across the street toward them slowly, kind of dragging the leg I held the machete against as if I had a slight limp. As I got closer I opened my eyes wide, like some crazy Zulu witch doctor.

  “What the fuck you lookin’ at?” one of them said.

  “I am looking at four dead men,” I said. I was still too far away for them to get the full impact of the squirrel scarf, so I pushed the coat back to let the heads show.

  “He has dead fucking squirrels around his fucking neck, man!” These guys were in their teens, but they were tough. I was two or three years older than they were, but there was no way I could take them. I might as well have been five years their junior.

  “Yo, what the fuck is that shit?”

  That’s what I wanted to hear, so then I went in for the kill: I reached into the pocket and threw a fistful of salt into the air at them.

  “What the fuck, man?” They backed up and started to separate.

  “That is the voodoo shit I been telling you niggas about!” one of them said. “Them niggas is witches, man! Fuck this motherfucker!”

  The moment I heard that, I pulled the machete out, opened my eyes even wider, and held it over my head, still walking toward them.

  “Yo, what the fuck! He got a fucking sword, man!”

  They started to scatter in every direction, and like a lion, I pounced on my prey, the tall one who had smacked Sedek. I got him in a headlock and, with the knife at his throat, began to drag him across the street toward our house. I got to the door and looked up to the second floor and saw Sedek sitting in the window, sucking his thumb. That’s what he used to do when he was worried: sit in the window and suck his thumb, even as a teenager.

  “Dek, get down here, now,” I said.

  “What the fuck, nigga? Let me go!” I tightened my grip and put the knife closer to the dude’s throat.

  “I will cut you like a goat if you don’t shut up, motherfucker. You will not disrespect my brother or my family. You will apologize to him!”

  Dek came outside, business as usual, looking like we hadn’t just talked about me doing this.

  “Dek!” I yelled. “Smack this motherfucker right now like he did to you.”

  Dek just looked at me, confused.

  “Smack him!”

  “I don’t want to smack him,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “I don’t want to smack him.” He half-smiled. “I just wanted my respect back.”

  Sedek is my brother and we are very close, but as you can see by this story, we are very different also. We share the same blood, but he was raised in America and I am an immigrant. From being born in the village, it was already my nature to get him his respect by any means necessary, and respect to me meant an eye for an eye. But to Sedek it was a little bit different. We learned a lot about each other that day. His perspective was that of a Haitian American, whereas mine was that of an immigrant, someone used to fighting for everything he’d ever have. I was upset with him: I did not understand how he could just stand there when I had risked my life for him.

  “I could have gotten locked up, Dek. Why the hell you di
dn’t do anything when I did that so you could get your respect back?” I asked him.

  “I just wanted my respect.”

  “And how did you get it? You didn’t slap that kid!”

  “I didn’t need to.”

  “That is bullshit, man.”

  I was mad at Sedek, but I learned something from him that day because in his heart he was like Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t have to slap that guy to get his respect; violence wasn’t going to solve anything. He was taking the Christlike stance, but I didn’t understand that at all at the time. I thought there was something wrong with him then, but I know that there was nothing wrong with him now.

  OUR NEW HIGH SCHOOL, Vailsburg, in Newark, was as much of an eye-opener as the new neighborhood. Every morning before we left the house, we’d wait until every kid on the block had walked by. We didn’t want to stick out; we just wanted to become part of the crowd. But our parents made sure that didn’t happen, and it had nothing to do with the funeral home. As they had since we were kids, they sent us to school on the first day in our Sunday best, which is not the best way to fit in at public school. This was a tough school, too; because of its location, kids from some of the worst parts of Newark were bussed in. Showing up the first day like that, I really stuck out. But I decided to run with that, and make the suit my thing. I didn’t want to say that my parents had made me wear it, so the next day I wore a suit again, making it mine, but I spun it a bit. I was a big fan of house music and Culture Club at the time, so I did my take on Boy George’s sense of style. I threw on an oversized trench coat and a hat with my jacket and tie, and I looked fly. My parents loved it that I was wearing proper clothes like that to school, and I turned something that made me stand out in a bad way into something that made me stand out in a good way.

  Vailsburg was very different from my last school. There was more of a variety of kids than at my Catholic junior high school, but the same segregation between Haitians and black American kids was there. It was even worse. In the cafeteria, the Haitians had a section and no Haitian would ever sit outside of that. Those lines were never crossed. I, of course, wanted to cross them.