“What have you brought us?”
Her daughter replied, “I brought all I could find.”
My grandmother tried to soothe her, saying, “It’s not important. It’s just the heat of the sun and the excitement of the fête. Go and lie down to settle yourself.”
After a few hours, the others saw that she was behaving strangely. They called my grandmother. Everyone knew that this kind of sickness was the result of a lwa acting on the victim. My grandmother tried to heal her, using a few methods that the lwa share with their servitors. But nothing worked. It was too late. The lwa had already begun its malevolent work, nullifying the powers that it had once delegated to the family. My grandmother was powerless.
Things deteriorated quickly. A few hours later, my grandmother received word that my father had also fallen victim.
Despite her folly, my aunt remained calm. However, Deland was stark raving mad. No one could subdue him and few were willing to try. He fought like a madman and showed no signs of connecting with reality.
My grandmother was bedevilled, struck by the fickleness of the lwa. After all their years of faithful service, the family was being destroyed by the very force it looked to for protection. When they understood what was happening, everyone panicked.
With my grandmother stymied, the other inhabitants came to the rescue. They looked for a way to save Deland from the spell. Several peasants were consigned to each of his arms and legs. Deland’s normal strength was multiplied by the power of the lwa working inside of him. But they succeeded in subduing him. Other peasants arrived with ropes and wrapped him from head to foot. They wrapped the thick rope everywhere, including his neck, and then pulled the ends, placing Deland’s life in real danger.
The lwa are extremely devious. This lwa had taken control of my father to provoke the peasants to harm him. The sneaky lwa was a spirit and, consequently, was suffering none of the effects of the human body of Deland. In fact, once it had provoked his friends to kill Deland, the lwa would be free to continue its malicious work.
Among the people who were pulling the ropes that were suffocating Deland were those who resented the recent agricultural success of our family. It was not that they were our enemies, but, nevertheless, the lwa was making use of their rancour. The lwa had very effectively set its trap. All the innocents were playing the roles that it had written for them in the drama. Meanwhile, Deland was at the centre of its complex machinations.
As soon as the lwa saw that my father was almost dead, it left his body to enjoy the drama from a different perspective. The peasants remained afraid of Deland and did not relinquish the tension on the ropes. Deland tried to speak. He managed to find enough air to say, in a tiny humble voice, “I’m choking.”
The peasants replied, “You want us to release you? What do you take us for? We’re not stupid. You will redouble your attacks as soon as you are free.”
Deland had no more air in his lungs. He fell silent.
One of the peasants was following the drama with compassion for Deland. He intervened and implored the other peasants to release the pressure on the ropes. He said that Deland was dying.
They replied, “You want us to let him go? If something happens to one of us because of him, are you going to compensate us?”
He said, “Okay. I’ll take the responsibility. Just, let him go because he’s dying.”
Against their better judgment, the peasants released their ropes and immediately lurched back to distance themselves from my father.
Deland was so weak that he could not remain standing. He fell to the ground, his arms and legs useless. The others who had been watching the event came to his aid. They took Deland and put him next to his sister, the two crazy people together.
Meanwhile, my grandmother went in search of an houngan or mambo who might have the power to counter the lwa that had turned against her family. When such things happen, the Catholic-Vodouists never go to the church. They know that the civilized world of the Catholic Church has no power to fight the lwa. Instead, they turn immediately to the houngan for help.
The cost of the cure would be high. Since the lwa was no longer a friend of my family, but the force that menaced its existence, my grandmother needed to sell everything that had come during the period of its beneficence. Everything now had to be sacrificed to free the family. So, the cows, goats, and chickens that were the family’s wealth would now be, literally, sacrificed. The time had come for the houngan to profit.
Some neighbours accompanied my grandmother, Deland, and his sister to the lakou of a local houngan. They spent several days there; it was a sort of hospital for the spiritually sick. Cures are not profitable for houngan. The longer the treatment lasts, the more the patient has to pay. On the other hand, houngan do not like to admit that they have no cure. They have to carefully coordinate the “cure” with the resources of the patient. As a result, it is the sick person who has to diagnose the houngan. If the houngan has no cure, it is best to make a clean break sooner rather than later.
My grandmother was experienced in these things. She quickly left the first houngan to try out another. Each houngan has his own diagnosis. One might determine that a zombie has taken over the patient and attempt to exorcise it by beating the body, bound to a stake, with a cane. Needless to say, some cures can be costly in a number of ways. And the patient may question the motivations behind some treatments. It is wise to dispute the treatment plan of a rancorous houngan or mambo who insists on beating the spirit out of the patient’s body.
My grandmother, Suzanne, went from houngan to mambo, mambo to houngan, looking for a cure for her children. She was reduced to financial ruin and her children were very close to death. She had sold everything that she had. There seemed to be no hope.
Finally, she sought the help of an houngan who was a member of our family. He gave her advice different from all of the others. He told her that no houngan or mambo could help her children. He too was powerless.
He explained that the lwa that the family served was very powerful. In fact, only that lwa had the power to help the family and, it was clear, it had decided to abandon us.
He counselled my grandmother to try one final desperate act. He said that she should go to the Protestants. Either the children would recover or they would die. If they died, the Protestants would help her bury them.
When she heard his words, she started crying. The most honest advice she had been able to find prepared her for the funerals of her children. However, since she had nothing left to pay for her children’s burials, she decided to accept his advice. But, before she did, she knelt down to pray before the peristyle in her lakou. “I have heard of You,” she said to God, “I don’t really know if You have the power. If You heal my two children, my family and I will dedicate our lives to serve You.”
Suzanne found a few Protestant brothers to pray along with her. She agreed to go to church with the children. With the aid of the other believers, and because they believed, my father and his sister were healed.
During the entire time of the insanity of my father, Cécile never once abandoned him. Some of the other young men used Deland’s descent into madness to court Cécile. She was deaf to them. Her parents also refused to allow other suitors to take his place. People told them that Deland would not recover. Moreover, Suzanne Déralciné was now ruined financially. But the hand of Cécile remained betrothed to a crazy man from a penniless family. They would have it no other way.
After his recovery, Deland discovered that Cécile had remained faithful to him throughout all of his sickness. And so he proposed marriage. In keeping with custom, Cécile left her family before the marriage to live with Deland in the house that he had been preparing in the lakou of his family. His elder sister, who had shared the madness with Deland, decided to marry at the same time.
In their new home, Deland and Cécile gave birth to my brother James in 1982. I came the following year. Both Cécile and Deland worked as cultivators and tailors at the
same time.
As is the case with many lovers, Deland and Cécile found that living with their betrothed was very different than courting from a distance. Cécile started to have problems with Deland’s family members. Sometimes, her mother-in-law, Suzanne, would leave quantities of rice and other produce from her fields in her home. She would often store them under her bed in a big metal tub, a kivèt. Her daughters would enter and take what they wanted. However, they left the impression that Cécile was taking it. “Have you noticed that since Cécile has entered the lakou, things go missing from Suzanne’s house?” they would ask the other peasants. Before long, Suzanne came to believe that Cécile was stealing from her. No actual accusation had ever been made, so no denial was possible.
These kinds of machinations were unknown in Cécile’s family. They were respectful of each other and did not stoop to petty gossip. Cécile did not have the experience that might have helped her cope with her new environment. My father understood the difference and was ashamed. But he was helpless to resolve the growing tension between Cécile and his sisters who lived in other houses in the lakou.
My father worried that if Cécile’s family should learn of the way that their daughter was being disrespected in her new home that his own status would fall along with that of his family. His new marriage was on a train heading toward a disaster. He looked for a way to escape before it was too late. He decided that the only answer was to move with Cécile and his two sons far from the lakou. He planned to migrate to the capital. His main problem was that he had no economic means to leave. To begin, he would need to pay for a room in Port-au-Prince. He would have to find a way to support his family. His new path was filled with huge obstacles even before he took a first step.
However, if he was unwilling to accept sacrifices, he would have no right to expect to succeed. To prepare the way for the migration, Deland would need to go to the capital alone. That meant the worst of all possible worlds: he would be on a reconnaissance mission in an unknown place while Cécile was alone with her two babies in the heart of what had become enemy territory for her. Deland tried to build up her courage to make the sacrifice along with him.
My father walked three-quarters of the way to the capital until he found a taptap that took him to Carrefour-Feuilles. There, he stayed with another peasant from Saut d’Eau who had already migrated.
As soon as he arrived, Deland recruited his friend to help him find a job. Knowing that most peasants had some knowledge of sewing and that Deland was highly skilled, he led my father to a factory that made clothes for foreign companies. He would make nineteen gourdes ($3.98 US) a day. Even though the pay was unreasonable, Deland decided to accept it for lack of other options. He needed to get his family from Saut d’Eau to Port-au-Prince as soon as possible.
He began his new Spartan existence. He worked twelve hours a day in the terrible heat of the factory. He ate the absolute minimum; otherwise, he would easily have spent everything just on his survival. Nothing would be left to achieve his goal of bringing his family to the capital. He spent several months working in the factory until he had made enough money to buy a sewing machine. He still needed money to find a room. The rents in the neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince varied enormously. The only place that Deland could afford to live was Site Solèy. There, close to the Route Nationale, he found a room made out of rusted corrugated iron and cardboard. The floor was simply cardboard laid on top of the dirt. There was no water, no electricity, no toilet. The local inhabitants used a narrow ditch at the side of the street as their toilet. As a result, all human waste flowed freely through the neighbourhood. For privacy, some of the elderly people would hold a piece of cardboard in front of themselves when they relieved themselves. Most didn’t bother. People threw their dirty water in the same ditch to help keep the waste moving. Only the mosquitoes flourished in Deland’s new neighbourhood. But he paid a price that corresponded with its value: 1,000 gourdes ($209 US) a year. That was my father’s limit for the moment.
He had made a promise to Cécile that they would move to the capital. He would keep his word. But whether Cécile would find this preferable to her situation in Saut d’Eau was an open question.
He returned to Saut d’Eau to bring Cécile up to date. He didn’t hide from her the reality of their new room in Site Solèy. She agreed to follow him anyway. She said that she would prefer to live in a desert in peace than in the poisoned atmosphere of his family’s lakou. Deland sold the home he had built to one of his youngest sisters, underlining his intention to not return to Saut d’Eau.
He put my brother and me in two straw sacks that straddled the back of his mule. Cécile sat on its back. Deland led the mule over the mountains and down the valleys until he arrived at the big market called Titanyen just outside the capital. Peasants from all over come to sell their produce at Titanyen. From the summit of the mountains above Titanyen, we could see the capital for the first time. We could see cars moving back and forth.
My father left the mule in the hands of another peasant who had come from Saut d’Eau to sell produce. He would lead the mule back to Suzanne. Then he piled us all onto a taptap, the first time we had ridden one, to take us to our tikounouk, our little hovel.
When we arrived in Site Solèy, our new neighbours took stock of the peasants who would be living among them. Dad had paid a man ten gourdes ($2.00 US) to carry our sacks on a bourèt. Finally, my mother bravely entered her tikounouk for the first time. She looked around at the rusting walls and cardboard floor.
Because my father had returned from Saut d’Eau with provisions for us, he decided to quit his job at the factory and to begin working as a tailor.
It was 1986 and Jean-Claude Duvalier was fleeing the country as we entered the city.
Everything was in chaos. We would hear the tontons macoutes running through our neighbourhood, firing their rifles in the air to terrorize us. Our doors and walls were made of corrugated iron. The bullets passed through it without any problem. My parents would throw James and me under their bed when they heard the macoutes coming. Hiding under the bed, we came up against huge cockroaches that showed no signs of conceding the space. We had a choice: we could face the macoutes or the roaches. We took our chances with the roaches.
I called that period La Chasse aux Macoutes. Haitians who had suffered under the Duvalier regime were taking their revenge against the macoutes, who had been his personal police force. The macoutes used to kill people in the prison of Fort Dimanche and then throw the dead bodies in our neighbourhood to make it look like we were the savages, not them. Now, the tables had turned. When the people managed to find a macoute who was hiding for his life, they would place a tire over his head and slide it down to pin his arms by his side. Then the people would douse him with gasoline and light him on fire. That was common enough to be given a name: people called it Père Lebrun. (The practice was called “necklacing” in South Africa during the same period. It was a form of rough justice imposed by local ANC communities against blacks who collaborated with the apartheid regime. In Haiti, the same custom was called Père Lebrun after a contemporary tire commercial on billboards in Port-au-Prince in which the salesman, Père Lebrun, appeared with his head through a tire.) In some neighbourhoods, such was the hatred for the macoutes that the local people hacked their bodies to bits and left the pieces on public display for weeks.
When we were playing in the roads, sometimes protests would pass.
They sang, Grenadye alaso! Sa ki mouri zafè a yo! — “Charge grenadiers! Those who fall, that’s their own business!”
They meant to say that everyone was involved in the civil war. As such, each person was responsible for his or her own life and welfare. The protesters passed on foot but in great numbers. They carried machetes, pitchforks, and picks: their everyday agricultural tools transformed into arms of war. Others filed branches down to the sharpest points. Still others carried tires and gasoline.
When they passed, we kids were terrified. Even if we
were not their enemies, they were telling us that if we were trampled underfoot, it would be our own business. They were pitiless and we were scared. If we were on our way to the ditch to pee-pee or poo-poo, we would turn in our tracks and throw ourselves under the bed until the protesters passed. We would wait until they passed and were out of earshot and then start out again for the ditch.
Once, we were out for a second attempt to relieve ourselves when we were surprised by the protesters who had turned around. They were on fire with excitement. I saw one protester brandishing the burning leg of a macoute, cheering. Others carried other parts. I stared for a second and darted back into our little house, launching myself directly under the bed with the poor cockroaches.
They chanted a new slogan this time:
Lafanmi Chilè siye dlo nan je’w,
Chilè pa mouri, se nan plàn li ye,
demen a katrè al telefòne’l,
al devan Sen Jan Bosko w’a jwenn Chilè.
Lafanmi Toto siye dlo nan je’w,
Toto pa mouri, se nan plàn li ye,
demen a katrè al telefòne’l,
al devan Sen Jan Bosko w’a jwenn Toto.
Wipe away your tears, Chilè family,
Chilè is not dead, he is at the pawnbrokers,
At four o’clock tomorrow you should telephone him,
In front of Saint Jean Bosco Church you will find Chilè.
Wipe away your tears, Toto family,
Toto is not dead, he’s at the pawnbrokers,
At four o’clock tomorrow you should telephone him,
In front of Saint Jean Bosco Church you will find Toto.
Chilè and Toto were two notorious tontons macoutes who had caused much suffering among the people of the capital. They had been involved in all sorts of crimes to enrich themselves under the Duvalier regime. That regime had been built upon terror. The people had been terrorized into submission. The tontons macoutes were responsible for controlling their sections. Some macoutes, like Chilè and Toto, had earned reputations across the capital. They knew that the Duvalier regime was behind them and so they could terrorize the people without fear of repercussions. News that they were coming to a particular neighbourhood caused crowds to disperse and people to run for cover. They killed young men regularly to show that they could. Not surprisingly, with the regime in free fall and Duvalier en route for France with hundreds of millions of dollars to soften the blow of losing Haiti, the local people took their frustration out on the tontons macoutes. Chilè and Toto were two of the most despicable examples of the regime of terror and so they merited a special place in the chant of the protesters. Now, the victims took their revenge.
Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti Page 3
