On a recent visit, Eli and Bill and our son-in-law, Tom, were all having dinner at the table. My father kept eyeing them. “Where are all those men going to sleep, Pitou?” he asked my mother again and again. My older sister and I exchanged a look across the table. Our father was back in our adolescence, worried about males hitting on his daughters. Only after we made a show of parading the men out of the dining room did my father resume his meal tranquilly.
I go back upstairs and prepare a tray with two supper plates and, for dessert, two big slices of their wedding cake. A little later, I go down to collect the tray and say goodnight. By now the baby has quieted, lying on a padding of blankets on the floor.
We talk for a while, Piti explaining his plans. Tomorrow, they will head up to the mountains with Eli. At his foreman job, Piti has been promised a house for his new family by the owner he calls “el hombre.” But so far, el hombre hasn’t kept his promise. The problem is complicated because Piti owes el hombre money. I can see the worry on the young man’s face. He does not want his wife and little baby living in a two-room shack with the half a dozen other Haitians who are working on the farm.
“You must take the baby in for her vaccines,” I remind Piti. There is a free clinic in the nearby village. Then, since I am the godmother of their wedding, I decide to broach the topic of family planning. Unless it’s too late. Maybe Eseline’s nausea was actually morning sickness.
Piti looks relieved that I’ve brought up the topic. No, it is not possible that Eseline is pregnant. The couple have not had relations since the baby was born. In fact, he has a question for me. Can he have relations with his wife while she is nursing?
I had worried that the question would be more complicated. That I would have to plead ignorance because I’ve never had a child myself. But this one is easy. “Of course, you can have relations, but remember, Eseline can get pregnant.”
“And Ludy, will she be okay?”
Now I’m the one confused. “Why shouldn’t she be?”
Piti explains that he has been told that if a man has relations with his wife while she is still nursing, the baby will never learn to walk.
Later, when I tell my stepdaughter this story, she will laugh and say, “I can bet who invented that story!” New mothers too tired and sleep-deprived to deal with horny husbands for whom a headache is no excuse. But a crippled baby might just stop them in their tracks.
“Ay, Piti,” I say. “Somebody has been telling you stories.”
But it’s not Eseline he heard it from. Piti grew up mostly in the barracks, living with peers. All his education, including his sex education, came from them. I’m reminded of that boy I first saw, horsing around with other young Haitians after a day in the fields. And how far that boy has come, distinguishing himself as one of the hardest workers, promoted above Dominicans to be the foreman of el hombre’s farm. He has taught himself to read, write, play the guitar, compose songs. He has just married the mother of his baby girl and brought them over to live by his side. God’s blessings are raining down on his life. Mèsi, Jezi, mèsi, all right.
Upstairs, my mother has still not come out of her bedroom. I go in to check on her. These days, whenever I enter a room and either parent gazes up, I brace myself. Will this be one of those times when they don’t know who I am?
Tonight, my mother’s face lights up when she sees me. “When did you get here?”
I play along—why confuse her. “Bill and I just flew in. We’ll be staying with you for a week. But I hear you’re not feeling well. I’m sorry.”
“I’m feeling fine,” she tells me, having forgotten her earlier story. “I’m so glad you found me here,” she adds, patting a place beside her on the bed for me to sit down. “Tomorrow I’m going home.”
“Yes, I know.” I’m not humoring her. She is absolutely right: she doesn’t remember this place. So how can it be her home? What’s more, she will never be home again, except when—cursed, blessed disease—she forgets to remember she isn’t there. “We came to help you get there.”
“Thank you,” she says, clearly relieved.
My father is wheeled in from the supper table, calling out, “Pitou? Pitou?” The night nurse rings the bell for Don Ramón to come help, as Papi is too heavy a weight for us to lift by ourselves. We go through the rituals of getting them ready for the night: taking out Papi’s teeth, helping Mami brush hers, putting on their nightclothes, giving them their medications. For a while, we had a night nurse who insisted they pray. But mostly, it was the nurse saying the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary,” my parents chiming in with the few phrases they remember, Give us our daily bread; pray for us now and at the hour of our death; amen, amen.
I tuck them in, join their hands together, and turn off the light. Goodnight, Pitouses, sleep tight.
Back in our room, Bill and I lie in bed talking. One of the pleasures of marriage is having someone to listen to your stories and to tell you theirs. To help you make sense of experience, weave a narrative out of the disparate threads—precisely what my parents are losing, the ability to do this for themselves and for each other.
So many things to talk about! So many details to piece together from the last three days! And more to come in the weeks ahead. Do we just keep doing this? Each day a new batch. Story as a digestive tract, a way to process what has happened and store it away in memories to recount at supper parties—nothing more? As a child, my older sister used to have a recurring nightmare: she’d be put in a room stuffed with beads she had to string together. Just when she was about to finish, the door would open, and a whole new load of beads would pour in. She’d wake up screaming and tell me the story once again. All I could think was, That’s a nightmare? No monsters or murderers, no wild animals about to tear you apart? What could be so scary about endlessly stringing together beads? Now I understand.
But I’m praying to angels on high to bless us with another option: We string the beads into a ladder and climb out the window before the door opens. Story as agency, story that awakens and propels us to change our lives.
When we have seen a thing, what then is the obligation?
Bill and I talk late into the night. Finally, wearily, I ask him, “What do we do now?”
Although he often claims he is no wordsmith, Bill gives me the best answer I’m going to get. “We do what we can. We try to be generous wherever we find ourselves.”
And tonight it happens—what seldom happens in a human family so scattered and stratified, so divided by opportunity that sometimes it’s difficult to recognize the critter at the top as kin to the one at the bottom. Tonight, oh holy night: a disparate group has gathered like pieces of a story under one roof, all having eaten enough, all safe enough for now, all asleep or ready for sleep, except for Don Ramón downstairs with his little radio turned down low to keep him company until dawn when he, too, will get to go home.
TWO
Going Home with Piti after the Earthquake
January 12, 2010, the end of the world
I was talking to my sister in Santiago, the sister who has moved down there to help care for my parents, the sister of the beads nightmare, the sister who is emotive, expansive, and sometimes overreacts. It was my usual end-of-the-work-day phone call to see how the pitouses were doing.
“Oh my god!” my sister suddenly cried out.
“What? What?” My heart was in my throat.
In the background, my mother was crying out, a more terrified echo of my own “What? What?”
“It’s nothing, Mami, just a strong wind,” my sister was saying in a pretend calm voice that didn’t fool me. Then, she whispered into the phone, “I think it’s an earthquake. I better go.” And she was off, a click, then silence. I was left with an odd feeling. The feeling of the person who has heard the boy cry wolf before, and this time, hearing the cry, doesn’t know if there is a real wolf at the door.
There was a real wolf at Haiti’s door.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake, to be exact,
on the island of Hispaniola, which sits atop the boundary between two plates in the earth’s crust: one of which, the North American plate, is jamming itself under the other, the Caribbean plate, which has nowhere to go. (Geology as allegory?) Felt as far away as my parents’ house in Santiago, the quake’s epicenter was just fifteen miles southwest of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where the clayey soil meant that the houses were like those Biblical ones built on sand. Down they came, the mansions of the rich, and the shacks of the poor, the presidential palace and many other government buildings, hospitals, schools—concrete slabs pancaking down, in a country without building codes, in a city packed with millions of people.
Months later when the final toll was taken—though final would be another of those wobbly words, each day or week turning up one more casualty—the Haitian government reported 316,000 dead, 300,000 injured, 1.3 million displaced, 97,300 houses destroyed. Mind-numbing figures, hard to compute unless broken down to one life at a time, one story at a time. “It’s the end of the world! It’s the end of the world!” one terrified young woman screamed in front of a wildly rocking camera.
Which is why, after I turned off the television with the late-breaking news, and realized that my sister had not overreacted, I called Piti. He was back to working for us. El hombre had not come through with the promise to build him and Eseline a little casita of their own. Instead, for months, they had been sharing a two-room hut with half a dozen Haitian workers. Piti was feeling increasingly unsettled. Eseline was distracted. Eli mentioned that every time he saw her, she was hanging out, giggling and flirting with her Haitian housemates. All those homesick young fellows, all that free-floating testosterone.
Bill and I offered Piti a job as caretaker, down the mountain, closer to town, on another piece of property Bill had bought, this time not for any humanitarian project, but for us. (Again, the marital us.) With the help of some Haitians, Bill spent ten days building a small house: four rooms, an outdoor kitchen, a back patio, a front porch. The first of January, when his term with el hombre was up, Piti moved into that house with Eseline and Ludy.
Piti picked up the phone after one ring. Had he heard? Yes, he had heard. They had a little radio—I could hear it in the background, sirens, a Dominican newscaster with that inflated, telenovela reporting style, which usually seems over-the-top but not tonight. The earthquake was all over the news. Horrific reports were pouring in from Haiti’s capital city. Hundreds, no thousands, were believed dead—the count kept climbing.
Piti had not been able to get in touch with anybody back home: not his father in Port-de-Paix, nor his mother, nor Eseline’s family in Moustique. They were very worried.
This went on for several days. I’d call and ask if he’d heard anything. Then, I’d try to reassure him with what I was hearing stateside. The earthquake had been concentrated in the Port-au-Prince area. Northwest Haiti seemed to have been spared. “Pas de nouvelle, bonne nouvelle,” I quoted a saying Papi had picked up during his Canada years to keep up his own spirits when there wasn’t any news for weeks from home. No news, good news.
Piti did not want to contradict his madrina, but he was not so confident. Even if the earthquake had not been strong in Moustique, it doesn’t take much to bring down a mud house with a thatch roof on an eroded hillside. No news could mean that the unspeakable had happened.
It was almost a week after the earthquake when Piti heard from a Haitian friend also working in the Dominican Republic who had gotten through to his family that everyone was fine. Piti’s family. Eseline’s family. Leonardo’s family. Pablo’s family. But since Port-au-Prince has become the only place to go in-country for jobs, each of their families had someone living in the capital—just as each family had someone working abroad—and so no one could feel completely spared.
“We are thankful and we are mourning,” Piti told me. In the aftermath of the earthquake, those two feelings were so tightly woven in every Haitian heart, tears of relief could easily double as tears of grief. A sister spared but a cousin killed. A friend maimed but a brother whole. How can the heart encompass it all?
It was after the earthquake that I pulled out the journal of our journey five months earlier and read it over. I wanted to be close to Haiti in an intimate way, not the Haiti blaring all over the news, the Haiti of horrifics, the failed state, the death count rising. I wanted to hear the mango ladies laughing, and Charlie’s sister sweeping the yard with a straw broom in the early morning, and the six predicators and one pastor marrying Piti and Eseline. I wanted to hold Ludy and sing her to sleep with my old Dominican lullabies. To reenter the story as a way of being with Haiti after the cameras departed and the aid folks held their conferences in First World cities, sitting at roundtables with glasses of iced water refilled by waiters from the very countries whose problems these conferences were convened to address. The future of Haiti. The remaking of Haiti. I didn’t have any answers for Haiti or fix-it advice or even a high road to take or a moral stance for others to emulate. I just wanted to be with Haiti, and the line that kept echoing in my heart was the one from stations of the cross on Good Friday: Walk with me as I walk with you and never leave my side.
I didn’t want to leave Haiti’s side. And so I reentered the story I had written of our journey the previous summer. To borrow a metaphor from my sister’s childhood nightmare, the door had reopened in the narrative I had closed, and a whole new load of beads had come tumbling in.
Wolves on both sides of the door: a very brief history of Haiti
The wolf at Haiti’s door had been there long before the January earthquake.
For years we’d been hearing the sad statistics: Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, one of the poorest in the world. What happens when a natural disaster occurs in a country ill prepared to survive it? The answer was all around us in the days following the earthquake, televised scenes to break the heart and add our own emotional and moral rubble to the dust and rubble of what was left of Haiti’s capital.
And the saddest part was that it was avoidable, not the earthquake itself, of course, but what had happened as a result of it. No matter how the facts were spun and the beads strung, this was not a story of a natural disaster. It was also not a story of a cursed nation whose freedom had been acquired by making a pact with the devil, as Reverend Pat Robertson unbelievably and heartlessly pronounced the day after the earthquake. It was a poverty story, a story of badly constructed buildings, poor infrastructure, and terrible public services. Just as a point of comparison: an earthquake of similar magnitude in the Bay Area in California in 1989 killed sixty-three.
How can this be? Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere? One of the poorest in the world? If you took a time traveler from the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean and plopped him down in today’s Haiti, he would not believe this was the same country. Saint-Domingue, as it was then known, was the world’s richest colony, the Pearl of the Antilles. (Ironically, Santo Domingo next door was a destitute little colony, having been virtually abandoned by Spain for its richer, gold-laden viceroyalties in Mexico and Latin America.) In the hundred years after France acquired the western third of the island from Spain in 1697, Saint-Domingue was producing two-thirds of the world’s coffee, almost half of its sugar, large portions of its cotton, indigo, and cocoa—in short, its exports accounted for one third of France’s commerce. And the fuel that powered this enormously lucrative, money-making machine was human slavery, upward of five hundred thousand enslaved West Africans, “owned” and overseen by forty thousand white Frenchmen.
Again, how can this be? How can a small fraction of a population enslave half a million people, who outnumbered them at least ten to one? In a word, terror. If we were to send a traveler from our own time back to Saint-Domingue to check out how the plantation system worked (I volunteer Pat Robertson for the mission), what a tale of horror he would tell.
Even by the standards of the day, conditions on those plantations were jaw-droppingly brutal.
Field hands forced to wear masks to prevent them from eating sugarcane; recalcitrant slaves filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces. In his book on Haiti, The Immaculate Invasion, Bob Shacochis quotes a journal entry by a German traveler who was horrified when the wife of his colonial host ordered her cook pitched into the oven for a mistake in the kitchen. Another entry might seem trivial in comparison, but it shows how the slavery system trickled down and deformed the human soul, from a young age on. At breakfast one morning, a colonial child announced, “I want an egg.” When he was told there were none, he replied, “Then, I want two.”
Finally, in 1804, after thirteen blood-soaked years of fighting, the former slaves drove out their French masters. You’d think Haiti could at last begin nation building. That the world would breathe a collective sigh of moral relief. That all those French Revolution freedom fighters, whose example had inspired the colony, would rally to her side. But as the Haitian saying goes, “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” Nation after nation shunned Haiti, refusing it a place in the family of nations, making it a pariah state. France strapped her former colony with a huge reparation payment under the threat of another invasion and reimposition of slavery. Meanwhile, the United States refused to recognize Haiti. In part, this was due to pressure from France, an ally, but also to fears, particularly among Southerners, that a free Black Republic right in our backyard might influence their own slaves. It wasn’t until 1862, after the secession of our own slaveholding states, that Abraham Lincoln extended a hand to our neighbor to the south, and formally recognized Haiti’s right to exist.
Haiti’s own leaders seemed to have forgotten what they had fought for, and instead took a page from their masters, preying on their own people, declaring themselves kings and emperors, emptying Haiti’s meager coffers to fill their own pockets and fund their coronations, their castles, their revolutions, and, once in power, their military and their paramilitary militias to keep them there. Down the generations, many of Haiti’s rulers grew rich but left her poor—most recently and infamously the two Duvaliers, Papa Doc and his son, Baby Doc, who plundered the terrorized country for almost three decades from 1957 to 1986. Again a small detail captures the mindless decadence of their regimes: Baby Doc’s wife, Michele Bennett, had a refrigerated closet for storing her furs—in a tropical country, no less.