Mrs. Krey, who interpreted the remark as flippancy, glared disapprovingly and warned her future daughter-in-law: ‘At Concord, you know, young wives from outside have to earn their way, as it were,’ and Tessa said, almost harshly: ‘But we won’t be living in Concord. Dennis will be starting a new career at Trinity in Hartford and I’ll be doing the same at Wellesley.’
‘But you will be spending your summers in Concord, I hope.’
‘Later, perhaps. At first, mostly in Europe … pursuing studies and the like.’ When Dennis verified their plans for the next few years, Judge Krey said stiffly: ‘We think it would be more prudent if our friends in Concord could see your wife … get accustomed to her.’
The implications of this revealing statement were too harsh for Tessa to accept unchallenged, and with the roguish humor she often used to puncture such comments, she broke into a ravishing smile and said: ‘You remind me, you really do, of the Jewish boy at Harvard who called his mother in New York to tell her: “Mom! Guess what! I’m marrying that cute Japanese girl you met at the Princeton game,” and after a pause his mother said: “That’s fine, son. When you bring her down you can have my big room on the second floor.” Delighted that his mother was taking it so well, he said: “No, Mom, you don’t have to go that far,” and she said: “It’ll be empty, because the minute you bring that tramp in our front door, I jump out the window … headfirst!” ’
She allowed the awful silence that followed to hang in the air for about ten seconds, then laughed easily and placed her hand on Judge Krey’s forearm: ‘Our marriage can’t be as shattering as it must seem in Concord. Dennis and I will be living in communities that are long used to mixed couples like us. I think we represent the wave of the future … of little or no concern to others.’
Judge Krey, resenting the familiarity of her touch, withdrew stiffly, marshaled his New England rectitude, and said: ‘Cambridge is not the world, thank heavens,’ and they moved on to the engagement lunch, which should have been a festive affair, considering the handsomeness of the intended groom and the beauty of the bride, but which was painfully strained. When the elder Kreys departed for their drive back to the security of Concord, they left no doubt about the chilly reception Tessa would face in that proper New England town. And Dennis added to her insecurity by saying, as soon as his parents departed: ‘You should never have told that joke about the Jewish boy and his Japanese bride. You should have foreseen that it would embarrass my folks.’
Somewhat chastened, Tessa put her Ph.D. diploma away and plunged into preparations for the Caribbean cruise. Swedish officials of the line that operated the Galante, aware that in addition to her impressive scholarly credentials, she was black, had thought it an asset. They told her: ‘You’re a fine-looking black scholar explaining the new black republics in what we’re going to advertise as “your sea.” And you have a marvelous French accent, don’t lose it. That’ll be a double asset.’
It was providential that the tour would be starting at Cap-Haïtien, with passengers being flown in from three major airports, for that would provide her with an opportunity to go down to Port-au-Prince two weeks before embarking and see what changes had taken place since that dark night in 1973 when the Vaval family had scuttled out of St.-Marc for freedom in Canada. When she informed Dennis of her plans, he was not entirely pleased: ‘I did approve the idea of the cruise. Great chance to renew your contacts in the area, but I hoped we’d have the time to ourselves before the boat sailed,’ and she replied: ‘For a Haitian to know what’s happening in Haiti is tremendously important. Anyway, we’ll be married as planned in late June.’
The flight from Boston to Port-au-Prince covered far more than space; for although she started out as a self-directed young woman of twenty-five with career and marriage well in hand, by the time she landed she was once more an awkward, spindly-legged child fleeing her homeland, not fully aware of how important a citizen her father was nor what a significant role her family had played in Haitian history. Later she had learned that in the mid-1800s one of her ancestors had served a three-year term as president, a responsible subsitute for the impossible generals, murderers and psychopaths who had run the black republic during its one hundred and eighty-five years of independence. His term had ended before a firing squad directed by the next group of generals waiting to take over, but his martyrdom continued to inspire hope that at some point Haiti would learn to govern itself. ‘The good President Vaval,’ he was referred to, and his grandson had been ‘that clever Vaval who held off the Yankees’ when American troops invaded early in the 1900s and he governed for some twenty years.
She knew a great deal about the two Duvaliers who had murdered so many good men, and she remembered that her father had called their horrible Tontons Macoutes the ‘Nazis of the New World, worse maybe, for they killed and maimed their own people, not a so-called alien race.’ At home her family had drummed two lessons into her: ‘If the slave Vavak had not had the courage to flee St. John when he did, none of us would be alive today, and if we hadn’t fled Haiti when we did, we’d also be dead.’
She thus saw Haiti not only as a romantic island nation which as a child she had loved for its color and music and delightful people, but also as a forbidding prison from which only the lucky had escaped. In contrast, she now regarded Canada as one of the kindest nations on earth and the United States as the benefactor that had given her, practically free, her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She was therefore in the proper mindset to evaluate her natal land, and what she saw appalled her. The revolution of 1986, which had ousted Baby Doc Duvalier and his outrageous entourage of thieves and murderers, had produced no brave new leaders like her father, and the continuing disorientation showed no signs of ending.
In Port-au-Prince, which she found a miasma of hunger and futility, only one thing gave her hope: when she stopped to speak to young people, explaining who she was, most of them greeted her enthusiastically: ‘Oh, Thérèse, I do hope your father comes back to run for high office. We need his guidance and his courage.’ But these signs of hope were dashed when older and wiser people whispered: ‘If he can get a foothold in the States, Thérèse, warn him never to return. This place is beyond redemption.’ After a string of such dismal days she caught a rickety bus that carried her north and into the rural area where the Vavals had for many generations owned a prosperous farm. She remembered this farm—the fine house of the owners, the earthen-floored shacks of the peasants—and she was dismayed to find that no improvements had been made in her absence. The poor people of Haiti still lived like animals, miserably housed, poorly fed and clothed in rags.
When she went to the main house, she found that even now it had no electricity; it still used a hand pump for water; and the rooms which had provided comforts for her family of seven now contained five different families living like rabbits in a crowded warren. Perching disconsolately on a bench improvised from a flat board propped on rocks, she turned in all directions, surveying the miserable signs of life: dangling from a frayed clothesline, laundry that should have been thrown away fifty washings ago, junky bits of machinery, shacks that were about to collapse, women of thirty who slaved so unremittingly that they looked sixty. Poverty and despair now defined a nation that had once been one of the richest in the world.
Then, inescapably, came the terrible question which had been in her mind even before she started her tour of the Caribbean: If Haiti had been an independent, self-governing republic ruled only by blacks since 1804, and if it had achieved so pitifully little for its people, what did that say about the ability of blacks to govern? And as she sat among the dreams of her childhood, she felt overwhelmed by the reality around her. She stood up, clenching her fists, and shouted at the cloudless sky: ‘What in hell is wrong with my country?’
Her next two-minute self-lecture, as might be expected, was more academic: It could all be so different. Dear God, it could have been so much better. Suppose in 1920 you’d had three young people like me who attended a
good Jesuit college in New England where they learned to think and act. And another three who enrolled in a strong liberal college in New York where they had sense and character knocked into them. And they’d come back to Haiti and put their talents to work. Goodness, they’d have cozened the United States and Canada into giving them millions of dollars. France would have helped out from pride, because we speak French. And Russia would have leaped in to prove it could do even more than the other nations. We’d have had roads and railroads and factories and colleges, and new methods of agriculture. We could have built a paradise here … Haiti, which was once so wonderful, could have been wonderful again!
In the days that followed her disastrous visit to her old home, she met several leaders in Port-au-Prince who remembered her father, and they were pleased to learn that she would be teaching at Wellesley: ‘Fine college, we’re told. Excellent reputation.’ She did not inform them of her impending marriage to a white man from New Hampshire, for they would be smart enough to know that this implied some interesting conflicts. Instead, she interrogated them about the future of Haiti, and was delighted to hear them orate in their lovely mix of polished French and lowdown creole which could be so colorful and expressive. Their message was not heartening, for they saw little hope for their nation. ‘What do we make that the world wants?’ one man asked rhetorically. ‘Only one thing. All the baseballs used by the American big leagues are sewn together here. If the Taiwanese ever learn to sew baseball covers, we’ll perish.’
They said that the political situation was so bleak that the patterns set in the last two hundred years were likely to continue: ‘One petty dictator after another, one general with a little more braid and less brain than his predecessor.’
One knowledgeable fellow suggested that she hire a car and he and two friends who worked for the government would show her something of basic importance in the hills north of the city. When they were well into those once-forested mountains in which her ancestor General Vaval had so ably thwarted Napoleon’s French invaders, this young man pointed to the terrible desolation that had overtaken rural Haiti, for as far into the distance as she could see, the hills and valleys were denuded of trees. Every square inch had been stripped clean by charcoal makers, and the bare and dusty slopes were devoid of any growing thing, not even seedlings to replace the lost grandeur.
‘See how the gullies run toward the sea. Torrential rains roar down them, carrying the loam away.’
‘You’re creating a desert,’ Tessa cried, almost in pain, and the men said: ‘Wrong. It’s already been created, and with rain and wind behaving as they do, it may never be reversed.’
She had brought with her the address of an uncle who had remained behind during the evacuation, and now she repacked her belongings and caught another fearfully overcrowded bus, which took her well to the north of St.-Marc, the seaport where Napoleon’s Polish Battalion had massacred the remnants of a black regiment, and if she had been appalled at conditions in the village north of the capital, she was speechless when she saw how her relatives were living. They had none of the amenities of a town, none of the incidentals which make even a life of poverty endurable: they were living as so many Haitians did, in a shack that had only bare earth for a floor, two mattress-less beds laid flat on the earth, two unsteady chairs, a rickety table, some nails for hanging such clothes as the family had acquired. They were living, these descendants of generals and presidents who had served Haiti well, at about the level that their ancestor Vavak had lived two and a half centuries ago when a slave on the Danish island of St. John.
Seeing this incredible degradation, caused by the endless chain of dictators who made themselves wealthy and their people poor, she impulsively threw open her purse, took out the wallet in which she kept her money, and gave her relatives funds she had saved for the purchase of books at various island stopovers: ‘Please, Father would insist.’
‘How did you get so much money?’ they asked, and she said: ‘In Canada everyone has a job. It’s quite wonderful, really,’ and she explained that most nations in the world provided for their people: ‘First two years out of college I worked for the Peace Corps. In African nations … probably because I was black. First-rate experience, and frankly, wherever I have been, I never found a country as poor as Haiti.’
This condemnation so moved her uncle that he went to a miserable wooden shelf he had nailed to the wall and brought back a big handsome book printed in France in vivid color: ‘Each of us had to buy six copies, very expensive,’ and when Tessa looked inside she saw a big photograph of Papa Doc, with the caption: ‘The revered head of the nation presents the true visage of Haiti: the dignity, the pride, the wisdom of the thinker, the force of the conqueror.’ But what made her really gag was a photograph of fifteen handsome young black men in sparkling blue uniforms which bore the insulting caption: ‘The revered Tontons Macoutes benevolently assume responsibility for the liberty we enjoy.’
In trembling rage she slammed the disgraceful thing to the floor and kicked it into a corner, crying: ‘They murder not only people but also the truth, and there is no shame in them, damn them to eternal hell!’
‘What can we do?’ her uncle asked, and she had only one suggestion: ‘Get on a boat, any boat—the way your brother did, and get out of here.’
‘Too late,’ her uncle said, and she burst into tears, for she knew he was right. For this family it was too late.
For younger Haitians, there was still a chance, and they meant to claim it. One afternoon when she went into St.-Marc to buy her uncle some groceries she saw in the shallow bay a boat so pitifully small that she thought: It ought to be on a lake somewhere, not in the ocean. But when she passed it again at dusk, she watched about forty black people climb into that fragile thing and sail off into the Atlantic. Horrified by the thought that they might be trying to reach the United States in such a vessel, she walked along the shores asking questions, and learned that yes, these fugitives were risking their lives on the high seas in an overloaded boat with insufficient provisions rather than remain one more day in Haiti. She fell to her knees at the edge of the Caribbean and prayed: ‘Beloved God, send a boat from Canada to rescue them,’ and in that moment she ceased being a trendy intellectual from Cambridge drinking Perrier water for lunch and listening to Vivaldi and became once more a Haitian black woman struggling against all odds to keep her life together.
When, still brooding about the refugees in their tragic boat, she delivered the groceries to her uncle, she found that an extraordinary item of news had arrived by runner from a much smaller village, Du Mort, four miles back into the mountains: ‘A zombie, eleven years dead, has come back to life.’
The word zombie irritated her, because in both Québec City and Boston well-intentioned friends, when they heard she came from Haiti, had pestered her about zombies, as if they were the major characteristic of her homeland. Most such questions she laughed off, but some were more serious, particularly at Harvard.
To these scholars she replied truthfully: ‘I’ve heard folk tales about zombies throughout my childhood. And I was terrified. A zombie, we were taught, is a dead person brought back to life and used thereafter as a slave in perpetuity.’ Asked if she had ever heard of a real, authenticated case she was always tempted to answer, with a touch of ridicule: ‘No! Did your family ever see one of the giants or elves they told you about?’ But she refrained from a blanket denial because she had an Uncle René, shot later by the Tontons Macoutes, who swore that when he was a boy a zombie, dead for many days, had been brought back to life and had served as a slave to a wealthy family. But like always, this very circumstantial miracle had happened in another village farther on.
But now it was a village only four miles away, in the real year of 1989, and she could go and check out the preposterous story for herself. Enlisting one of the two taxis in the village, she took her notebook and kit of medicines and drove out to where the alleged zombie had been seen.
The village contain
ed some thirty mud-floored shacks distributed around a handsome public square, one side of which was a colorful market with stalls occupied by sellers of meat and fish, vegetables, fruits, needlework and clay pots. Near the village pump squatted a young black woman, about twenty-eight, of presentable appearance and fine placid features—except that she was almost inanimate. Her eyes showed no recognition of things about her; she did not respond to questions; and if anyone approached her, she drew back in obvious terror. If any human being could be justly described as ‘the living dead,’ it was this unfortunate.
Tessa was immediately drawn to her. ‘Who is this person?’ she asked about, and several bystanders were eager to provide answers and explanations: ‘Her name Lalique Hébert. Her tombstone at edge of village, over there.’ And Tessa was taken by villagers to the rude cemetery where a flat tombstone made of flaking cement showed clearly that interred below were the mortal remains of LALIQUE HÉBERT, 1961–1978.
When Tessa asked: ‘Is this the same person?’ one of the bystanders cried vigorously: ‘Yes! Yes! I know her sister.’ And another said: ‘I knew her parents.’ And when the question became: ‘But did any of you attend her funeral?’ someone replied: ‘Yes, that one helped carry her coffin.’ And a man of about fifty stepped forward, willing to be interrogated.
‘You carried the coffin?’
‘I did.’
‘Did you actually see the corpse?’
‘We all did,’ and a group of women moved toward the grave to confirm that they had seen the girl Lalique Hébert in her coffin at her home and had then helped carry her here for burial.
‘You’re sure she was dead?’
‘Yes! We saw. Doctor signed paper.’
A quick check at the church registry showed that in June 1978 the girl Lalique Hébert, aged seventeen, daughter of Jules and Marie Hébert of this parish, had been buried, her death having been attested to by a Dr. Malárie two days prior.