We drive over mountains of dirt, literally piles of garbage. But the streets are full of workers. Markets with fruits and candies and ginger root. At one end, there’s a port. The water is so blue, we are tempted to jump in. Baby pigs wander the streets. “What’s that?” I ask when I see a bright blue-and-white building that looks newly built. A new police station right in the middle of Cite Soleil. I guess something is being built. We zip past barbershops, women cooking in these massive metal tubs. On the main road, it’s stunning how little has changed structurally I look into Sofia’s eyes. It’s all so new to her.
We arrive at the Lighthouse. Children surround Sofia. Cendy appears and suddenly begins hiding in case I have any more cameras. Sofia intrigues her. She is fascinated by my relationship to Sofia. Sofia plays all the hand games I played with Cendy on my visits. Sofia is fair like her father and is already getting red from the sun. She crouches down and extends her palms in a game of nerves—will the other person slap your palms before you retreat? Cendy remembers when I did this with her. She looks at me and immediately connects with my daughter. It is a fascinating dance. Sofia has seen the documentary where Cendy’s story of abandonment is told. I wonder what is going on in the heads of these two little girls. The boys get in line to play, too. “Me next. Me next!” they shout. Sofia’s connected and she’s beaming. She’s figured out how to break through as a stranger and she’s proud of herself.
Susette’s warm hug is my first real greeting in Haiti. Now I feel as if I have really arrived. She gives me a look that makes up for the two months since we’ve seen each other. We don’t even have to talk about how important the documentary was for her and her work. The report was a nonjudgmental human look at the kind work of Christian missionaries and the lives of two orphans. It wasn’t a debate or an issues piece about Christianity, adoption, race, or politics. There was no back-and-forth. It is a new voice for me, a style of reporting that does great service to the human story You just tell people about one person’s life and chart their journey. Then leave the judgments and takeaways to the viewers.
Susette is still on her personal mission. The subject of her work today is a baby they are trying to evacuate. She pulls me into her rush. I glance over at Sofia, who looks at me like she wants to stay The hot sun splashes sparkly bits of light on the vast concrete bin. The laughter bounces against the walls and mixes into a cheery symphony of children’s sounds. Mark Kenson is here, too, smiling and excited to see someone who has met Wyclef Jean, Haiti’s big star. The playground is full of optimism and life. Sofia heads down the street to the girls’ dorm to work on crafts with the older girls. Cendy races after her, so they can stick together. How crazy is that! So I leave my nine-year-old playing in an orphanage in Haiti, which somehow at that particular moment seems like the safest place in the world.
We head out to look for a doctor who can do tests on the baby Susette and Bill are trying to evacuate. We take a treacherous road through collapsed buildings. The city looks exactly the same as it did days after the quake in many places. A building that was leveled just sits there pancaked flat. Susette tells me the women who were sitting on the sidewalk under the building selling fruits and vegetables were all crushed to death in the quake. But now I’m worried that we’re going to impale our car, or even ourselves, on the metal bars sticking out from the house. Our driver slowly rolls by the debris. All the drivers in Haiti seem to be pros at dodging metal and stone.
We meet Vanessa, who runs Angel Mission Haiti. She shows me a picture of her seventeen kids—two biological and more than a dozen others. She explains what documents are needed to get the baby evacuated to get his medical care in Pennsylvania. They need legal documents that are notarized, promise letters from the hospital and the cardiac surgeon who will do the work. Vanessa is a stout woman with short hair and a suntan. She wears shorts and a bright short-sleeved shirt, almost what someone would wear on a Caribbean vacation. She is covered with beads. She’s moved her desk outdoors because her Internet has failed today and she’s borrowing from a neighbor. The downside of this arrangement is she’s hot, so she’s arranged bedsheets around her to try to block the sun out.
A hospital in Philadelphia has promised surgery for free, but the sticking point seems to be that humanitarian parole has ended. Humanitarian parole is what the U.S. government gives someone who is brought into the country without a visa. The baby has big eyes and surgical tape holds a feeding tube in place. He is six months old and weighs seven pounds. His twin, a girl, is doing better. Their mother has been feeding her but had been ignoring him a bit, afraid to bond because she sensed he might not survive. Now they realize he has an operable heart problem, the same heart problem that Jon Olinger has. The surgery is straightforward, but impossible in Haiti. His name is Adriano.
I go back to the Lighthouse to find Sofia having a tougher afternoon. She is having trouble communicating. A lot of the kids have not mastered English and she knows no Creole. She accompanies the Manesseros to the feeding program where hungry neighborhood kids come eat. She looks very sad. It makes me sad. She tells me she doesn’t know how to help people who are living in tents. I tell her she is doing what she can do by being here. She gets back to taking care of little girls, applying stickers and playing games. The boys find her fascinating. They all like her. A little boy named Richard says: “You are so pretty” I say “Thanks.” He says, “No. No. Sofia! Sofia. Sofia is so pretty.” They’re sort of awkward around her. But her heart is breaking. I think it will make her grow up a bit, see that there is a larger world around her and she can make it better, if even in a small way. I hand her my camera. I tell her it will help her communicate with the kids. She takes their pictures and they take hers.
A group of seven kids, three girls, four boys, organize a performance. The clouds roll in just in time to provide some cover from the blazing sun. All the children begin to giggle as the cables are rolled out into the bins. A computer reboots and goes “dun dun dun dah!” They all laugh at the universal sign for it’s on. They are so cute. A hip-hop tune comes on and they do their dance: “Uh uh uh uh. I’m free from sin.” It’s Christian rap. When the music ends there are big cheers.
The next group is the smaller kids. The cheers are deafening. Cendy is in a summer dress, lacy and gauzy and lavender. She’s got new braids. She ignores me but loves Sofia. I could have used Sofia on the last trip when we ran around trying to get her picture. Cendy, quiet, shut down, camera shy, retreating little Cendy is going to dance with nine other kids! Katie, a volunteer from California who’s been reaching out to Sofia, leads them in a song. “There are seven. There are seven.
“Con-tin-ents. Con-tin-ents.”
Cendy stomps her foot to the song. She is so cute.
People are yelling out names: Keso, Markendy I give my BlackBerry to Eli, the Manesseros’ son, to e-mail my own son, Charlie. “I hope to meet you one day” I’ve sent a picture to Celia and Charlie, who are e-mailing sorrowful notes about missing Sofia and me. Jackson has gone to watch the World Cup with Brad. We wind up inside the house, where the flies are ignoring the merciful cross-breeze. A screen door would cost $1,000, so Eli is sent to get a fly swatter. He is ten and strong and the flies have no chance. The Manasseros are living in a new house that is big and airy, much bigger than their last one, which was tagged with a yellow mark that means the cracks make the house unsafe. Get them fixed or move out. So they moved out. There is a big living room with a TV on the first floor. We are in the guest room downstairs. Upstairs there are three more bedrooms, with bunk beds for the kids. And there is the most amazing view from the upstairs veranda—stunning, and over the rooftops. It’s lovely.
The next morning Sofia wakes up before me and I’m told she’s upstairs having a tea party By breakfast every child in the house has Silly Bandz, the latest kid craze back home. A boy named Fanfan is wearing seven on his right arm—all the way from the wrist to under his armpit. He’s getting ready to go off to school. Sofia has given him every di
nosaur-shaped Silly she has. Kenny has three on his left arm, and one on his right wrist. He wanted lobsters and alligators. And the N.Y. for the New York Yankees. They are a hit. I watch Sofia watch the small children, who switch effortlessly between English, French, and Creole. I feel like all my lectures on teaching her to speak other languages have just been outdone by this moment.
It’s the last day of school so there are ice cream treats. Whitney, a tall auburn-haired girl from California, came to teach. She was promoted to principal after her first day She’s leaving, and so is Ashley, who works in the clinic. Susette says they’ve had such great volunteers. Some have come from their church, some from the Web site, some drawn by our documentary. The heat is getting to Sofia. It must be ninety-five degrees today and there are no clouds. She’s flushed and has finally agreed to knot her hair up on her head. She spent part of the morning giving out treats to neighborhood boys, who asked me first for water (I had none) and then to take their photo. She is still so quiet, nodding her head yes and no.
Adriano is ailing and the orphanage is still working on his case. Meanwhile, I get to hold him on my lap. He isn’t squirmy like most babies his age, which reflects his ill health. But he has that warm baby summer smell and hope in his eyes. I feel a peace come over me like I have not felt in ages, not through the rush of work or even the incredible moments of joy I experience each day with Brad and the kids. I am sitting in Haiti, where a quarter million people died in an excruciating catastrophe. Their government is fractured; their history promises little revival. American generosity is far-reaching but fleeting. These kids will likely never know the advantages and possibilities handed to people like me just a boat ride away I have a sick child on my lap. But I can help. I can be here. I can hold Adriano on my lap while they successfully negotiate his rescue. I can tell his story I can teach my daughter that she may just bring these kids stickers and smiles today but the growth in her heart can help her reach far beyond this sunny afternoon in Haiti.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GOING HOME
I don’t often go to Smithtown, even though my parents’ home is still out near the beach. But today I cruise along the Long Island Expressway, the unwelcoming flat-line highway that cuts across the island of my birth. I am off to visit the home where six black kids grew up surrounded by white kids feeling utterly American, yet somehow outside the main.
An exit away from Smithtown, in Patchogue, a white boy who dated black and Latino girls has been accused of killing a guy from Ecuador because he hates “illegal aliens.” I feel like my next assignment needs to be to find out why But I know I will never have a full answer. Jeffrey Conroy is nineteen. I met his parents weeks ago when the trial first began. Now he has been convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison despite a tearful apology to the judge. He is one of seven teenagers who described going out “beaner hopping” and stabbing to death a man named Marcelo Lucero. The U.S. Justice Department is now probing bias attacks against Latinos on Long Island. This is my hometown. Conroy’s parents are incensed over the sentence. But that day his mother approached Lucero’s brother in the hallway at the courthouse. She cried and told him she was so sorry about what had happened. Her son has a swastika tattoo and a lightning bolt tattoo, which together symbolize white power. Jeffrey told the courtroom he was there when Lucero was killed but that a friend had been the one to plunge the knife into him. Again, I just don’t get the anger.
Today, I blow through many towns like Patchogue now ripped with tension over immigration. I can’t understand at what moment Long Island became a flash point in debating the status of these latest immigrant newcomers. There are towns with enormous wealth out here that seem troubled by the presence of people seeking low-paying jobs as contractors. There are blue-collar mini-cities where people gripe about lost jobs. It’s a complex debate, but one I’d like to someday get at the heart of. I am certain this will be my next big story
But today I am on a quest to recapture my youth, to see where things stand back home. When you touch base with your childhood memories there is always a risk. I swing by the home of Angela Cinqmani, the girl who I believed to be the only other Latina at my school. A hilarious scene unfolds. Her tiny white cottage is overgrown with vines and is now collapsing on the far side of an enormous lot. A big McMansion is being built on the rest of it, tall and brick with Sopranos detail. It looks about 90 percent done but is obviously empty I yell and knock because there is light on in the little house.
It takes a long while and then out comes Angela all grown up. She immediately recognizes me. I tell her I am writing my own story and have mixed memories of Smithtown. She begins immediately to tell her tale without me asking. She was miserable in school, chesty and bigmouthed, by her own account, and, she admits with enormous pride, secretly very rich. “I had a hundred and eight absences in English because I wasn’t a morning person,” she says in a very thick Long Island accent. We never had a conversation this long in high school, so I feel as if I’m getting to know her for the first time. It begins to rain. She clearly wants to talk but doesn’t want to let me inside either of her houses.
At this point her mother approaches the front window in a see-through white nightie and begins banging her cane against the glass. “AAAAAANNNGELA. Shud up! Just shud up and get your ass back in here,” she says, as if she is the very originator of the heavy Long Island accent.
“Coming, Ma,” Angela replies and continues. “I had big boobs.” She confirms that she was a C cup in third grade. “The vice principal told me I was a hazard. I lived in detention. I was best friends with a big albino girl. I had maybe one or two others, but they stole my boyfriend so I skipped graduation and prom.”
“Get inside. Shud up. Come inside now,” her mother yells. She bangs the cane on the window again. I begin to back up.
“Coming, Ma,” Angela yells back. Her eyes throw me a conversation-closer look.
I blurt out the reason I’m here. I need perspective. I ask her about being Latino in Smithtown. We weren’t friendly, but we were the only ones, I tell her. “Latino?” she says, laughing gently. “I’m freaking Italian.” She stalks back into her house and I begin to laugh, mostly at my memory of myself.
I instinctively know how to find Shevoy Onley’s little one-story house. I sit out front for a while and just stare at the lot where it used to be. There is now this beautiful suburban two-story house presenting itself as Smithtown’s suburban best. I go up to knock and see if they know what has happened to the Onleys. And it is Shevoy herself who answers the door—all grown-up! We stare at each other, give the predictable screech and hug. I walk into this beautiful brand-new house. She has built her own fabulous house atop the tiny old one where she lived with her parents. The front bedroom where we used to have sleepovers is now a playroom for her eighteen-month-old son and five-year-old daughter. Shevoy’s husband stares at me like I’m some ghost from her past. I guess I am.
Shevoy has returned to this community to raise her own kids. It’s a statement on how far both she and Smithtown have come. Shevoy looks exactly the same, and we fall right back into the banter of our youth. I tell her I’m writing about Smithtown, and she laughs aloud. I ask if she remembers how people treated us. “I didn’t worry about how other people treated us because we had each other,” she says. “I knew we were different but Mom would say, ‘You worry about the person you are inside.’” Shevoy recalls so many of the best memories of my youth: the giggling sleepovers and the games out on the lawn. Yet the best recollections of all are the looks we gave each other in the halls, our shared strength. It is remarkable how one person’s friendship can turn bad to good. “Kids would say things, and I knew my feelings were hurt but I didn’t know why,” remembers Shevoy. She ended up working in Child Protective Services, where she met her husband, who is half white and half Ecuadorean.
Shevoy’s parents were also immigrants. They came from Bermuda searching for new opportunities. Her aunt had married an American and
moved to Smithtown. She sold him on the square lawns and safe streets. Shevoy was thrilled when she found Orestes and me in school. “It was at least three of us then. And we were like interchangeable to folks. We all knew the rules. We were not going to fight anyone about anything. We knew we were different but no one was going to risk his or her life over that. We knew we wouldn’t date and you just didn’t get upset about that.”
Her recollections reaffirm the reality of my youth. Yet it doesn’t upset me in the least. Here we are, all grown-up, having seized the opportunity our parents won for us. That she built this big house atop her parents’ old house is all you need to know about what happened to Shevoy. “For my parents, I’ve gone beyond expectations,” she says as she begins to give us a tour of her ample closets and wide-open living room. Her lawn seems endless. Her children go to school with the children of the same folks who ignored her back in school. The kids are mostly white, but there are also kids who are Indian, Spanish, and black. Occasionally someone will assume she is mother to one of the others. A few folks will tell her that her fairer daughter must look like her father. But she proudly tells the census her children are black, Latino, and white. In the end, she won.
I can’t go visit Corinne Vargas in Smithtown, the woman who was denied a federally subsidized cash voucher so she could move to my hometown. She never got the opportunity to live there. Smithtown settled the lawsuit but the town never admitted to discriminating against anyone ever. Corinne and the other plain-tiffs were finally given Section 8 vouchers in 2009. Her daughter was five when she applied for the voucher in a moment of distress. She is now eleven. She went looking for housing but, after years of only seeing white applicants, the home owners with eligible rentals turned her down. “I got sixty days to look for a shit hole in the middle of a palace and people wouldn’t even rent me the shit hole,” she says, laughing.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 25
