Create Dangerously Part 4

Across the aisle from me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers in and out of a large manila envelope onto the tray table in front of him. He wiped his brow with a monogrammed blue handkerchief and then rang the flight attendant call b.u.t.ton. When a plump blond woman hurried over, he asked her for a gla.s.s of water. When she brought it to him, he asked her when we were going to land.

I recognized the man, who had been escorted by immigration officers past the security checkpoint, right through the gate and to his seat on the airplane. He seemed to be in his late forties, was russet brown and thin with a gaunt face, his jaws speckled with the remnants of a beard that looked as though a shave had been attempted on it but had failed. He was a deportee.

While looking over at him, I thought of my cousin Marius, who in his own way had also been deported. I had foreseen the two of us, Marius and me, traveling on the same day and my New York flight arriving a few hours before his Miami one so that I could be there to greet him at the airport in Port-au-Prince, but the obstacles to Marius's flight had been abruptly lifted and he'd gone ahead on his own, before me, to be buried.

Originally, Marius's departure had been delayed because the undertaker could not locate his papers. Before his mother called us in New York-from Haiti-to announce his death to my father and to ask for our help in getting the body sent to her from Miami, I hadn't seen or spoken to Marius in years. Only two years younger than he was, I had barely interacted with him when I was a girl because his parents had divorced when I was quite young and he lived mostly with his father, who'd rarely mingled with our family. My father could barely remember Marius at all, as he was still a boy when Papa left Haiti for the United States. A decade after I'd moved to the United States, I heard that Marius had taken a boat to Miami. A few days before my flight from New York to Port-au-Prince, his mother had called to tell us that he was dead.

Once he'd offered his condolences to Tante Zi over the phone, my father asked me to pick up the extension and tell her that I would take care of things, would get Marius's body sent to her in Haiti.

After offering my own condolences to a tearful and hiccupping Tante Zi, I asked her where Marius was living before he died.

She paused as if to breathe past a large lump in her throat, and then whispered, "Miami," sounding puzzled, as if wondering why I was making her repeat something she'd already repeated many times.

"Do you have the address of the place where he was living in Miami?" I asked.

"No," she said. But she did have the telephone number of Marius's roommate of two years. His name was Delens.

I would call Delens, I told her, and get back to her.

I dialed Delens's number soon after I hung up with Tante Zi and asked in Creole if I could speak with him. The young man who answered replied, "Would you mind speaking English? I grew up here. It's hard for me to speak Creole."

It turned out that he was Delens. I told him, in English, that I was Marius's cousin and was trying to help locate his body to send it back to Port-au-Prince. Could he help me?

He gave me the number of the Freeman Funeral Home, where Marius's body had already been placed while awaiting expatriation. He didn't have the amount of money the funeral home charged and Tante Zi didn't trust him enough to send it to him, accusing him of being responsible-in some way that he could neither comprehend nor explain-for Marius's death.

At the end of the conversation, I cautiously asked Delens in my most polite voice, "Can you please tell me what Marius died of?"

"Move maladi ya," he responded in perfectly enunciated, nonaccented Creole. The bad disease, a euphemism for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

"When did it happen?" I asked. "When did he get it?"

"I don't know." He switched back to hip-hop-toned English. "Maybe he had it even before he left Haiti. I don't know. But he's been living wild here, man, made some stupid-a.s.s mistakes."

"Did he leave anything behind?" I thought Tante Zi might want to know. Maybe he had some a.s.sets that could help mitigate the transportation and funeral costs. But I wasn't thinking only about money. Perhaps there were more personal effects, legal papers, letters, photographs, journals, keepsakes that later on might comfort his mother.

"He had nothing," Delens replied harshly. "He was living it up and wasted everything. All he had when he died was sixty dollars."

Rightly or wrongly, I couldn't accept that a thirty-year-old man had left nothing else behind. When I hung up and summarized the other end of the conversation for my father, he told me that Tante Zi believed that Marius had been poisoned by his roommate, but almost everyone in the family had different theories. There were those who thought he had committed suicide and others who were certain he'd died of a drug overdose. I didn't know what or whom to believe, but it really didn't matter. A grieving mother was waiting to be reunited with her son. And since she couldn't come to him, we had to find some way to bring him to her.

The funeral, if held in Miami, would cost three thousand dollars, Mr. Freeman told me when I called. But for Marius's body to be s.h.i.+pped back to Haiti, the price would go up to five thousand. He'd already had Marius for a day or two now and would be happy to s.h.i.+p him to the funeral home of our choice anywhere in the Haitian capital, but he needed "papers."

"What kind of papers?" I asked.

Because Marius had come to Miami by boat and had never received asylum or legalized his status some other way, he was undoc.u.mented.

"I have to get him exit papers from the Haitian consulate," explained Mr. Freeman. "The U.S. authorities will want to see these papers at the airport before he leaves and the Haitian authorities will want to see them when he arrives."

"He's a dead man whose cadaver needs to be s.h.i.+pped to the country where he was born. Why is it so complicated?" I asked.

"In part," he answered calmly, "because he's an alien."

Were we still aliens in death, I asked, our corpses unwanted visitors still?

Fortunately, Delens managed to find Marius's Haitian pa.s.sport, so Marius would certainly be granted exit papers by the Haitian consulate, Mister Freeman a.s.sured me. It was simply a matter of time.

"But that's not the only thing," he continued in the same unruffled ministerial voice. "It's also complicated because of the disease he died of. There are some special procedures involved with these types of corpses."

Even though it was probably written in large bold letters on Marius's death certificate, no one wanted to name the disease that had killed him. It was as if in some bizarre way they were all respecting his dying wish. Silence at all costs.

The next day, I called Tante Zi and explained all that I'd learned about Marius's return to Haiti. Tante Zi was aware of the funeral home cost, she said; she just wanted to confirm that Delens was telling the truth. She was ready to make a money transfer. She even had Mister Freeman's information.

"Marius should be home soon," my father told her.

Before she hung up, Tante Zi began sobbing again and then added, "Look how they took my boy from me and took everything he owned on top of it."

Marius had been sending her a few hundred dollars each month, Tante Zi said. There was no way he could have been broke. And he didn't die of the "bad disease" either. He'd called her once a week, every Sunday, and promised her he'd come back to see her as soon as his papers were in order. During those talks, he was always full of laughter and hope. He never sounded like a sick person.

My father abruptly interrupted Tante Zi's tearful recollection and told her to calm down, to make sure she had her head on straight so she could face what lay ahead.

"You haven't seen your son in years," he reminded her. "He's coming back to you in a coffin. Met fanm sou ou. Be the strong woman you have to be."

Tante Zi, who often openly said that she loved my father more than all her other siblings-just as she said of all her other siblings that she loved them more than the others-agreed.

"You're right, brother," she said, still sniffling in my ear on the other extension. "I'll have to pull myself together to face this."

"I am sorry I can't come there to be with you," my father, who was recovering from very early symptoms of the pulmonary fibrosis that would eventually kill him, said to Tante Zi.

"I understand, brother," she said.

Three days later, Marius's exit papers came in. After eight days in Mister Freeman's morgue, Marius was going home. In the meantime, my father had a sudden crisis with his health and I missed Marius's departure day. Marius's body was s.h.i.+pped to Port-au-Prince. I couldn't find another seat on a flight, so I missed his arrival in Port-au-Prince and his wake and burial, too.

When I got to Haiti, I didn't immediately visit the family mausoleum where Marius was buried. I didn't have to. Tante Zi had had the entire funeral photographed and a small souvenir alb.u.m made. The most eye-catching pictures were of Marius lying in his silver coffin in a dark suit and tie, his hands carefully folded on top of his belly. His dark bloated pancake face was sculpted around a half grin that makes it hard to imagine what he might have looked like under different circ.u.mstances.

I saw Tante Zi several times that summer in Haiti, once at the baptism of her newest granddaughter, the child of her only daughter, Marie. She also came to visit me at the seaside campus where I was working, helping to teach a college course to American students.

One afternoon when she came to visit, we sat on the warm sand under an almond tree as two of my cousins played soccer and water volleyball with some of the students in the course. We watched the calm turquoise sea and bare brown mountains in the distance, the clouds s.h.i.+fting ever so carefully above them, rationing suns.h.i.+ne and shade. I knew that Marius would come up at some point that afternoon, and he did.

"I know this is what you do now," Tante Zi said. "This thing with the writing. I know it's your work, but please don't write what you think you know about Marius."

The truth is that I knew very little about Marius. Even though we were cousins, the same blood, our adult lives-my adult life, his adult death-might never have intersected at all had I not been asked to help return his body home. In the end, there had been very little drama even in this returning of his body. It was all so sanitized, so over-the-phone, nothing Antigone about it.

This type of thing happened all the time, Mr. Freeman and Delens had each explained to me in his own way: faraway family members realize that they are discovering-or recovering-in death fragments of a life that had swirled in hidden stories. In Haiti the same expression, lt b dlo, the other side of the water, can be used to denote the eternal afterlife as well as an emigre's eventual destination. It is sometimes impossible even for those of us who are on the same side of lt b dlo to find one another.

"We have still not had a death," Marquez's Colonel says. "A person does not belong to a place until someone is dead under the ground." Does that person still belong if someone died there, but is not buried under that ground?

"You should be buried where you die," Tante Zi's older sister, Tante Ilyana, had said. But what if you are all alone where you die? What if all your kin is lt b dlo?

"People talk," Tante Zi went on. "They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere."

Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wis.h.i.+ng I could apologize for that, but the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on. I wanted to quote the French poet and critic Stephane Mallarme and tell her that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name or Marius's.

She was silent again, momentarily comforted by that tiny compromise. I changed the subject, asking if she wanted to go swimming. Just to relax her body a little, I said, before the return trip back to Port-au-Prince. I thought she would say no. She had turned me down before. Still I hoped that she might surprise me and say yes.

"I can't," she began, and then corrected herself. "I don't want to."

A large cloud lingered above, casting a hint of gray over us. But it was still sunny over the water, the waves glittering as though taunting the fogginess above.

"Some people come back from the other side of the water, don't they?" She said, her eyes still fixed on the water. "You're proof of that, non?"

She raised her hands high in the air, aiming them at the twinkling sea as if to both scold and embrace it.

"They do," I said.

"Why didn't Marius come back?" She seemed to be asking both me and the sea.

"I don't know," I said.

"It's stupid to even ask," she said, scratching the short gray hair under the white kerchief that covered her head. "How could any of us know the answer to something like that? Only the sea and G.o.d know. Right?"

"Right," I echoed, still treading carefully after her rebuke.

"I suppose I should be glad we didn't lose him at sea," she said.

With her eyes still on the water, she got up and peeled off her milky white clothes. Wearing only her red bra and dark panties, she walked toward the ocean for an afternoon swim.

CHAPTER 7.

Bicentennial Two hundred years had pa.s.sed since the Western Hemisphere's second republic was created. Back then, there were no congratulatory salutes from the first, the United States of America. The new republic, Haiti, had gained its independence through a b.l.o.o.d.y twelve-year slave uprising, the only time in the history of the world that bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state.

The two young nations had several things in common. Both had been heavily taxed colonies, and both had visionary leaders whose words had the power to inspire men to fight. Compare, for example, Thomas Jefferson's vision of the tree of liberty as one that must be "refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" with that of the Haitian general Toussaint L'Ouverture who, as he was captured by the French and was being taken to his death, declared, "In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many."

The fact that the United States of America was not more supportive of its smaller, slightly younger neighbor had a great deal to do with L'Ouverture's roots, which were African and which were now planted in America's backyard. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the declaration that defined his own nation's insurgency and who had witnessed and praised the French Revolution, knew exactly what revolutions meant. Their essence was not in their instantaneous bursts of glory but in their ripple effect across borders and time, their ability to put the impossible within reach and make the downtrodden seem mighty. And he feared that Haiti's revolt would inspire similar actions in the United States. "If something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children," Jefferson wrote about the potential impact of the Haitian uprising.

Haiti's very existence highlighted the deepest contradictions of the American revolutionary experiment. The U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, but Haitian slaves and free men and women of color battled what was then one of the world's most powerful armies to prove it. Yet how could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have failed to hear echoes of his own country's revolutionary struggle, and victory, in the Haitians' urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slaveowner and the leader of slaveholders he couldn't manage to reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel. So Haiti's independence remained unrecognized by Thomas Jefferson, who urged Congress to suspend commerce with the nascent nation, declaring its leaders "cannibals of the terrible republic."

Timothy Pickering, a senator from Ma.s.sachusetts who had served as John Adams's secretary of state, wrote to Jefferson to protest his refusal to aid the new Haitian republic. "Are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States, and without which they cannot subsist?" Pickering asked.

Yet the United States had benefited greatly from the colonial strife next door. Broke after its Haitian defeat, France sold a large region, 828,000 square miles, from the western banks of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The Louisiana Purchase would prove to be one of the most profitable real estate transactions ever made, nearly doubling the size of the United States at a cost of about four cents an acre. Alexander Hamilton said Napoleon would not have sold his claims except for the "courage and obstinate resistance [of the] black inhabitants" of Haiti.

It would take six decades for the United States to acknowledge Haiti's independence. During that time, Haiti continued to be considered as a possible penal colony for the United States or as a place (a la Liberia) where freed blacks could be repatriated. By the time Abraham Lincoln recognized Haiti's independence in 1862, America was already at war with itself over the issue of slavery. Burdened by its postindependence isolation and the hundred million francs in payment it was forced to give France for official recognition-an amount estimated to be worth more than twenty-two billion U.S. dollars today, which some Haitians, including the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have insisted should be repaid-Haiti began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a nineteen-year U.S. occupation and three subsequent interventions in the past hundred years.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson predicts what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worstcase scenario. But his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America's plundered neighbor. "The spirit of the times . . . will alter," Jefferson wrote. "Our rulers will become corrupt. . . . The shackles . . . which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of war will remain on long, will be made heavier and heavier."

Perhaps, had it been given a fair chance at its beginning, Haiti might have flourished and prospered. If that had been the case, Haiti might have celebrated the bicentennial of its independence with fewer shackles. Instead, in January 2004, Haiti observed the two-hundredth anniversary of its independence from France in the midst of a national revolt. In the Haitian capital and other cities throughout the country, pro- and antigovernment demonstrators clashed. Members of a disbanded army declared war on a young and inexperienced police force. Mobs of angry young men, some called chime (chimeras) by their countrymen and others ironically echoing Thomas Jefferson and calling themselves lame kanibal, the cannibal army, battled one another to determine whether the then Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide-wors.h.i.+pped by chimeras and reviled by the cannibal army-would remain in office or be overthrown.

A few weeks later, Aristide departed in the early hours of a Sunday morning. By his account, he was kidnapped from his residence in Port-au-Prince and put on an unmarked U.S. jet, which took him to the Central African Republic, where he was practically held prisoner for several weeks. By other accounts, he went willingly, even signing a letter of resignation in Haitian Creole. What remains uncontested is that as he began his life in exile, Aristide recited for the international press the same words that Toussaint L'Ouverture uttered on his way to mortal exile in France: "In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many."

Haitians in and outside of Haiti were not surprised that, in Haiti's bicentennial year, Aristide chose to link his exit with such a powerful echo from the past. After all, there has never been a more evocative moment in Haiti's history-even though neglected by the world-than the triumphant outcome of the revolution that L'Ouverture and others had lived and died for exactly two hundred years earlier. Though Haiti's transition from slavery to free state was far from seamless, many Haitians, myself included, would rather forget the divisions that followed independence, the color and cla.s.s biases that split the country into sections ruled by self-declared oligarchs and monarchs who governed exactly as they had been governed, with little regard for parity or autonomy.

In The Kingdom of This World, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier allows us to consider the possibility, with which his own Cuba would later grapple, that a revolution that some consider visionary might appear to others to have failed. Through the eyes of Ti Noel, no king or ruler but rather an ordinary man, we get an intimate view of the key players in an epic story that merges myth and lore, magical realism with historical facts. Here we encounter some of the most memorable architects of the Haitian revolution, along with some fictional comrades they pick up along the way. We meet the one-armed Makandal, who is said to have turned into a million fireflies, or in other accounts a mere insect, in order to escape his fiery execution by French colonists. We also meet a Jamaican expatriate, Bouckman-most commonly spelled Boukman-who presided over the stirring Vodou ceremony that helped transform young Toussaint L'Ouverture from a mild-mannered herbalist to a heroic warrior. And of course we come to know King Christophe, a former restaurateur, who later shoots himself with a silver bullet, but not before forcing his countrymen to experience "the rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt."

Though Ti Noel does not remain among the resigned for too long, he is certainly tested through his disheartening encounters with those who have shaped his country's destiny. Like Haiti itself, he cannot be fully defined. At best one might see Ti Noel as a stand-in for the novelist Carpentier. Born of a Russian mother and a French father, Carpentier shows with his skillful handling of this narrative how revolutions a.s.sign us all sides, shaming the conquerors and fortifying the oppressed, and in some cases achieving the opposite. For even if history is most often recounted by victors, it's not always easy to tell who the rightful narrators should be, unless we keep redefining with each page what it means to conquer and be conquered.

Of Carpentier's Cuba, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being. . . . Could we induce her to join us in granting its independence against all the world?"

In a prologue to the 1949 edition of The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier describes how during a trip to Haiti, he found himself in daily contact with something he called the real maravilloso, or the real marvelous.

"I was treading earth where thousands of men eager for liberty believed," he wrote. "I entered the Laferriere citadel, a structure without architectonic antecedents. . . . I breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, monarch of incredible undertakings. . . . With each step I found the real marvelous."

The real marvelous, which we have come to know as magic realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as Haiti's revolution does. The real marvelous is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken. It is in the enslaved African princes who believed they could fly and knew the paths of the clouds and the language of the forests but could no longer recognize themselves in the so-called New World. It is in the elaborate veves, or cornmeal drawings, sketched in the soil at Vodou ceremonies to draw attention from the G.o.ds. It is in the thunderous response from G.o.ds such as Ogoun, the G.o.d of war, who speak in the hearts of men and women who, in spite of their slim odds, accept nothing less than total freedom.

Whenever possible, Haitians cite their historical and spiritual connection to this heroic heritage by invoking the names of one or all of the founders of the country: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. (The latter's fighting creed was Koupe tet, boule kay-Cut heads, burn houses.) "They can't do this to us," we say when feeling subjugated. "We are the children of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines."

As President Aristide's opportune evocation of Toussaint L'Ouverture shows, for many of us, it is as though the Haitian revolution was fought less than two hundred days, rather than more than two hundred years, ago. For is there anything more timely and timeless than a public battle to control one's destiny, a communal crusade for self-determination?

The outcome, when it's finally achieved, can be nearly impossible to describe. It certainly was for one Haitian poet, Boisrond Tonnerre, who was given the Jeffersonian task of drafting Haiti's declaration of independence. To do it appropriately, he declared, he would need the skin of a white man for parchment, the man's skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.

At the August 1791 Vodou ceremony that would launch the more than decade-long fight for independence, the G.o.d of war Ogoun was summoned in song and a pig was sacrificed in Ogoun's honor.

"The machete suddenly buried itself in the belly of a black pig, which spewed forth guts and lungs in three squeals," Alejo Carpentier writes in The Kingdom of This World.

Then, called by the name of their masters, for they had no other, the delegates came forward one by one to smear their lips with the foaming blood of the pig, caught in a wooden bowl. . . . The general staff of the insurrection had been named. . . . And in view of the fact that a proclamation had to be drawn up and n.o.body knew how to write, someone remembered the goose quill of the Abbe de la Haye, priest of Dondon, an admirer of Voltaire who had shown signs of unequivocal sympathy for the Negroes ever since he had read the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Would the Abbe lend a hand and a pen? was the burning question.

Eventually, a proclamation was drawn up and a revolution was launched, with or without the Abbe's goose quill.

CHAPTER 8.

Another Country The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel. . . . The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses further around the sh.o.r.e heard the big lake and wondered. The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn't worry -Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d In Zora Neale Hurston's visionary 1937 novel, Janie Crawford and her boyfriend, Tea Cake, a day laborer, refuse to evacuate their small, unsteady house before a deadly hurricane batters the Florida Everglades, near where I currently live.

"Everybody was talking about it that night. But n.o.body was worried," wrote Hurston. "You couldn't have a hurricane when you're making seven and eight dollars a day."