The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  “Madee!”

  38

  THE LAND OF HIGH MOUNTAINS

  AT SUNRISE, IN January 2004, our plane came in for a rough landing in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

  The runway in Port-au-Prince was potholed, and the airport unlike any I had seen before. The sole terminal could best be described as a mess, filled with smells, music, chaos, extreme heat and humidity, and even more extreme despair and desperation.

  I had always been curious about Haiti and wanted to visit and see if all the stories surrounding the mysterious island were true. One side of my family had Haitian roots, and voodoo lore and rituals hung in the background of my early childhood in Louisiana. My grandmother, whom we called Mamee, would speak Creole, and to this day I can still understand bits of it when I hear it spoken. In going down to Haiti I felt I would learn something about my heritage.

  Haiti also played a pivotal role in black history. In 1804, Haiti, then a French colony of black slaves, gained its independence, making it the first and only nation of slaves to do so. This fact makes its two-century descent so tragic, born of such courage and promise, only to land in despair. Recently Haiti has been tagged with several nicknames, none of them good. Haitians jest they are the only country with a last name: “Haiti, The Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere.” Novelist Graham Greene, who set The Comedians in Haiti, termed it a “Nightmare Republic,” and “a shabby land of terror.” Greene said of Haitians, “they live in the world of Hieronymus Bosch,” and of their living conditions, that it was “impossible to exaggerate the poverty of Haiti.”

  I was in this strange land, not just to explore my roots, but for something immediate as well.

  It had to do with my girlfriend, Tami Clark.

  Tami is beautiful, blond-haired and blue-eyed. But most important, she is someone who truly fights to make the world a better place. Like Madee, everyone is welcome in Tami Clark’s world—no one is a stranger. The daughter of Baptists, Tami grew up in a religious household split between California and Texas. From her earliest memories, the family was always involved in some kind of church-based charity work. They volunteered at the Casa de Esperanza (House of Hope), an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico; worked at a soup kitchen, the Path of Life, in Riverside, California; or spent Thanksgiving at the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles. Tami and her aunt prepared travel packs, containing soap, shampoo, and lotion, and just passed them out from their car to needy people they saw on the street. Tami didn’t just talk a good game about people needing to help others; she and her family truly walked the walk.

  After attending Baylor, a private Christian university in Waco, Texas, Tami returned to Southern California, where, in the early 2000s, she became involved with Compassion International, a relief organization that included recording artists and radio stations. Their cause was to bring some aid and relief to Haiti.

  After my period of wandering ended in Oklahoma, I too returned to Southern California. My goal was to resurrect my relationship with Tami. I tried to be more open and honest, less angry and brooding. For the first time I spoke about all of the problems I had with my family.

  At the time, Tami found it impossible to connect with me. She was heavily involved with her church, but I still could not embrace God. She could not give herself to me at that time. I just carried too much pain.

  She then left for Haiti without me.

  * * *

  I first met Tami Clark in 1991, when she was doing charity work in Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierras, just south of Mono Lake. She needed a grand marshal for a Fourth of July parade. Her friend Efren Herrera, a former placekicker for the Dallas Cowboys, recommended me, telling her that I was an experienced public speaker with a long history of volunteer service. I accepted, because it gave me something to do, and it felt like a vacation.

  As soon as Herrera introduced us, I felt a spark. Tami later told me she did, too, but she also sensed tension in my handshake. She said it had electricity in it. It felt strained. Her heart whispered, “Come here.” Her head screamed, “Run like hell!”

  In the months following the event, Tami got a divorce and moved to nearby Temecula, California. We went on a date. Then another. We had a lot in common. We shared a commitment to charity work, she too was an avid sports fan, but most of all, she could make me laugh, something I did far too little since the murders.

  I remember an early phone conversation we had, when she mentioned that she had been flipping around the channels on TV and stumbled upon the movie Brian’s Song, about the great friendship between two Chicago Bears, Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo. Tami loved the Chicago Bears, going back to a loyalty to Bears linebacker Mike Singletary from her days at Baylor. Baylor’s mascot is also a bear.

  After watching footage of me diving through the line and tearing up Sayers’s knee, she asked, “Was that you?” “Yup.” “Then we’re through.” She hung up. This had always been a sore spot for me, and I thought she was serious.

  I called her back and tried to explain. I had apologized to Sayers, I said. Sayers knew the hit was clean. Sayers returned to the field in 1969 and gained over a thousand yards. Sayers was fine, he was later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As I went on, she started to giggle. “I was just kidding, you know. Boy you’re easy,” she said, laughing.

  Then we both laughed. I really laughed hard. What a fool, falling for that, but I had just not been in the habit of laughing for some time. I was out of practice, but boy did it feel good. It also let me know who I was dealing with, and I liked it.

  Tami said that making me laugh became a mission for her. She told me how much fun she had with me, but that I didn’t do a very good job trying to hide my sorrow. The turmoil would just bubble up, and then I would shut down.

  The next year, 1992, we moved in together, but my walls and distance never allowed us to get truly close. She knew my issues were related to August 31, 1984, and its aftermath, but whenever she asked, I withdrew, then exploded. She also knew I was estranged from my family as fallout from the killings, but again I kept her an arm’s length away, giving a virtual Heisman stiff-arm whenever she cut too close. When questions about my mother, my family, the relationships and dynamics neared the live nerves, I would first answer generically, next get evasive, finally turn hostile.

  It put her in an unwinnable situation. She wanted to help ease the trauma. But she couldn’t and I wouldn’t let her try. I had not come to terms with what happened, never knew what role I played, and didn’t know how to go forward. I trusted no one, least of all myself.

  Tami, needing to know more, started doing research on her own. She went to libraries, scouring the microfiche, asking people outside my presence to tell her what they knew, knowing that her private investigation would set me off.

  Then finally, one day, as we drove on the freeway to visit her parents in Anaheim, she pushed the issue.

  “Every time we go somewhere,” she said, “somebody asks me about your family.”

  I opened my mouth to interrupt. She held up a hand to stop me.

  She said she could feel the tension coming off me, filling the car.

  “Just listen,” she said. “One day when you’re ready, could you just tell me what really happened?”

  This time she wouldn’t take the generalities or evasions I threw up to block her. This time she was going to press until I blew up or broke down. I would do both.

  Feeling cornered and out of control, I slammed the accelerator, gunning the car close to a hundred miles an hour. Tami swore I was going to smash into the upcoming barrier and kill us both.

  She asked for it.

  “Kermit!” she screamed.

  I tore the car off the freeway, onto an exit, and peeled out into an empty lot. I jammed on the brakes, jarring us to a sharp, lurching stop.

  “Just don’t say a word.” I glowered. “You want it, I’ll give it to you one time, and that’s it. Don’t interrupt. Don’t ask questions.”

  Tami was shaking, and und
er her breath said only, “Okay.”

  In a menacing voice, I continued, “Because I’ve never told anyone this story, never talked about it with anyone except my family, and this may be the last time I ever do.”

  Four hours later, tears streaming down my face, I was done. It was like lancing a wound, releasing twenty years of venom. It didn’t cure me, didn’t dull the pain, but it released some pressure. Drain the puss and the infected limb may heal. The immediate and violent purge was temporarily relieving, but the underlying guilt and cycles of rage would live on.

  Finally, in 2001, after nearly ten years of living together, Tami couldn’t take the tension and moved out.

  * * *

  In 2003, when she returned from her first trip to Haiti, I took her to a special spot of ours and asked her to marry me.

  Lake Perris is in a valley in the mountains of Southern California. For months I helped her train in these beautiful parklands for a 250-mile charity bike ride. For hours we talked on a particular bench. I was forthcoming, open, ready to commit.

  Now I would finally take this vital step in the healing process. I was ready to allow someone into my life. I would place a ring on her finger.

  As we sat on that special bench, filled with magical memories, I asked Tami Clark to be my wife, Mrs. Kermit Alexander.

  Her answer: “No.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  After this journey back from the depths. “No?” Really? Really. No. She was turning me down? For years she had waited for me to propose.

  “No.” The words echoed.

  She said she was just not ready to give herself up to me. True, she said, for years she had waited for me to propose, but I had always kept her at a distance. Just because I finally had an epiphany, and I was ready to commit, didn’t mean she could just wash away years of pain. She did not trust that I had come to terms with my own life, and that I would not continue to hold my secrets from and inflict my moods upon her. You have to trust to be trusted, and as far as she was concerned, I still did not.

  And furthermore, she told me, something had changed in her life.

  As she spoke, I watched a new light cross her eyes.

  Uh-oh, I thought, someone new.

  Yes, she said. She met him in Haiti. His name was Clifton.

  * * *

  Clifton was an orphan, age of five or six. He suffered from extreme malnutrition, his belly distended, his hair falling out. He had scabies, his nails wouldn’t grow, and his teeth were decayed. Calcium deficiencies led to broken bones. He looked like an old man in a little boy’s body. Haitian doctors didn’t give him a year.

  When Tami asked the mission’s director about the little boy, he said, “Oh yes, everybody meets Clifton,” referring to the boy’s engaging personality.

  “So he calls all women ‘Mom’?”

  “No,” the director said, “never heard that one before.”

  And then Tami knew something was up. When he first saw her, he ran and jumped into her arms, cooing, “Mama.”

  When Tami’s trip was up and she had to leave the orphanage, Clifton cried and refused to let go. When she swore she would return, he wouldn’t look at her. She had broken his heart. She turned out to be just like all the others: come, tour, do a few days’ good deeds, then leave. No one ever really came back. Not to Haiti.

  * * *

  After clearing customs, Tami got us a driver. After exiting the airport, we drove through miles of tent cities. Infamous cites, such as Cité Soleil, one of the worst slums in the world. The “housing” consisted of sticks and boards, with a plastic milk container cut in half and filled with wax serving as the light. Dirt, mud, and refuse surrounded the living quarters. It looked as bad as any footage I had ever seen of the slums outside Mumbai, India, or the notorious hillside favelas of Brazil. Some of Haiti’s slums were so bad that armed UN peacekeepers refused to go in.

  “Kermit,” Tami kept stressing, “I’ve worked with poor folks my whole life, but nothing prepared me for this.” The crushing heat, coupled with the stench of poverty flowing from open sewers and decomposing garbage, made us both claustrophobic and nauseated. Add to this the danger posed by the marauding gangs, and the constant sight of girls pregnant following their first cycle made one want to run, to escape. Tami kept telling me that on her first trip, she doubted whether Haiti was a place she could function, much less make a difference. But, she said, this was where differences had to be made. This was where you had to face it, where you couldn’t look the other way.

  But God, the sights almost forced you to look away, only once you were inside it, there was nowhere else to look.

  Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital, with more than two million people, is surrounded by steep mountains. The water flows down a public irrigation system and pools around the settlement. In the slowly moving water, pigs and oxen defecated, and a man washed his motorcycle. Downstream, a woman scooped the water in an old tin can and used it to prepare a meal. Others bathed in it. We kept waiting for a tropical breeze. When the wind blew, it was just a belch from a sewer.

  I was stunned; the squalor and the poverty were amazing, like nothing I had seen. I couldn’t believe people were allowed to live like this. Residents of the poorest ghettoes in America would be middle class under Haitian standards. Put up against Haiti, Watts felt like Shangri-la.

  After touring the tent villages, we left Port-au-Prince and drove to the town of Titanyen, ten miles to the north. Due to road conditions, the drive took an hour and a half. The traffic was wild, a mass of weaving, swerving, stop-and-go chaos. Traffic lights and stop signs were more approximation than regulation, causing people to slow down, sort of.

  As we continued to plod northward, we hugged the Caribbean coast, with the hillside falling off to the sea to our left. For the length of the drive, the horn honking was incessant, and of all different styles, long and drawn out, short beeps, intermittent bleats and blasts. We were told this was a kind of “language of horns,” with the different sounds encoding messages grasped by all local drivers. What’s more, since the roads were so rutted and potholed, traffic in both directions weaved and bobbed, sometimes veering off the road onto the dusty shoulder, causing a flutter of chickens, children, and travelers, other times slicing across the road into oncoming traffic, causing counterswerving on the other side, in an ongoing game of chicken.

  Add to potholes, horns, and ruined roads the constant stops caused by “tap-taps,” or Haitian taxis. Cars and small trucks that had been opened up to hold as many people as possible, they were painted bright circus colors with inspirational sayings or identifying monikers, “Jesus Saves,” “Praise the Lord,” “Exodus,” “Hollywood,” and “No Problem.” The name “tap-tap” derives from the custom of tapping the floor loudly with your foot when you want the car to stop so you can get off. As we slowed and then stopped behind a packed tap-tap and watched a man, laden with bags of produce, defy physics and squeeze in, we asked our driver, “How many people can fit into a tap-tap?” The driver paused. We watched the man disappear into the sea of travelers. The driver’s answer, “One more.”

  As we continued north on the endless ten-mile drive, the roadside was in a state of constant commotion. Women balanced baskets upon their heads. Mules, chickens, and very stray dogs with very long breasts dodged each other. At speed bumps or particularly impressive potholes, children rushed up to the traffic, hawking mangoes, sugarcane, and pistaches—a kind of peanut hybrid. Behind the kids, open-air markets bustled, with melons, tubers, roots, and nuts set out in wooden lean-tos covered by thatched roofs.

  Somehow the chaos had a strange rhythm to it. A blan, Creole for foreigner, would either crash or lose their mind on these roads, likely both. But for natives, it had become normal. They could negotiate this landscape the same as we drive a U.S. highway. You just get in a groove and you go.

  As we drove on, we crossed dry desert washes, cacti barriers, plantain trees, and rows of sugarcane. The sky above was overcast
and humid. Mountains were a constant to our right, stretching east toward the Dominican Republic. A muddy coastline extended west, before blending well offshore into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.

  As we approached the town and the orphanage I had a strange feeling of peace, something I would not have expected to find in Haiti. I felt close to Tami, sensed a new chapter unfolding.

  We drove through the gates to the Mission of Hope campus. As Tami had promised, when you enter through these gates, you can “feel the hope.”

  Twelve hundred children in uniform attended school. The classrooms were small boxes with cinder-block windows. The students were orderly and attentive.

  I felt a long-gone sense of purpose returning. Just look what even small amounts of American money could do: make massive differences in the lives of Haitian children. It was at the Mission of Hope that Tami heard her calling and began pondering how she could help Haiti.

  After touring the mission, we took a road up into the surrounding hills. We got out of the car and gazed out over the Caribbean. At last, a breeze. Still hot, humid, muggy, but the air was fresh.

  I breathed deeply. The mission, the valley, the fields stretched to the sea. The sky above, an overcast gray, tranquil, it all felt surreal.

  For the first time in years they weren’t inside my head, following me wherever I went. Tiequon Cox, Sterling Norris, my family pointing their fingers of guilt, CW, Judge Boren, Los Angeles Superior Court, for once they all felt so far away. I couldn’t imagine them coming up here to get me.

  A gust of wind blew from the sea. No stench, a real sea breeze.

  Tami said the heat and the wind reminded her of Amarillo, and her grandmother’s home. She told me about windmills spinning under a big Texas sky.

  * * *

  Haitian poverty results from an unhappy history of corruption, upheaval, and violence.