by Wyclef Jean
People who know me always say that I’m a different person onstage, and any fan of mine knows that I’ve been known to play shows for four hours or more. Quincy Jones himself once said that Prince and Michael Jackson (rest in peace) had better watch out. He said no one should fuck with me onstage because they couldn’t keep up. It all started with that drum back in the village. Maybe that snake was left over from a Vodou ceremony the owner had done the day before. Whether it was possessed by a demon or not, that drum possessed me, and I have yet to be released from its spell. I hope I never am.
2
GARDEN STATE PROMISED LAND
I wasn’t a very good student in school at any point in my life. Aside from music class, and some pieces of world history, I’ve never been able to retain anything taught to me in a classroom. It’s not that I don’t like learning, or that I can’t read; it’s just that most days in my school, there wasn’t much going on that was more interesting than the thoughts in my head or the girls sitting next to me. Even when I wanted to pay attention to the teacher, beautiful girls were like interference causing static on the radio in my mind. The teacher began to sound like the weaker station far away in another town, while the girls were right there, coming through loud and clear. There were a few times when my teacher was herself a pretty young lady, which made it easy for me to pay attention to her, but hard for me to understand what she was saying.
In my Haitian school, I was no stranger to the ruler, because a swift hit to the back of the head was how teachers put an end to daydreaming. The only subject I was any good at was Haitian history, because the stories of our liberation from foreign rule made me proud. Other than that, I was completely useless, just staring out the window or trying to get the girls to smile at me and meet me after class.
When I did get involved in the lesson, I was even worse, because I was that kid who liked to ask the teacher questions that had nothing to do with the subject. I wasn’t so much a class clown as I was a rebellious instigator. I would try to lead the teacher into a conversation about life that had nothing to do with school. I was a skinny grade-school philosopher. I especially enjoyed doing this when substitutes or new teachers showed up for their first day. As soon as they’d said hello I was the first kid to put his hand up.
“Who are you?” I’d say. “Why are you here? You’re not our teacher.”
“No, I’m—”
“Where is our teacher, then?” I’d get all of this out before they could even answer my first question.
I had my reasons for this: by the time I was nine, teachers disappeared regularly from our school. It became accepted for history teachers in particular to disappear and never be heard from again. Most often the new teacher would silence me with a stern look and a slap.
Or they would say something like, “The other teacher is no longer at school because she was a Communist. Do not speak of her again.”
All of the kids knew what that meant: the army had taken our teacher away to be executed.
My father’s predictions about the young Duvalier had been right. Once he took power, he targeted intellectuals at all levels of society and they began to vanish—schoolteachers, lawyers doctors, writers—anyone smart and well-spoken who might oppose the regime. The side effects of this paranoia destroyed Haiti because it forced the educated class to flee for their lives. If you drive away the best minds of a generation, how can a country hope to move into the future? Our country was already in trouble, so Duvalier’s shortsighted cultural holocaust crippled us for life. My father was wise to see this coming, and like many others who would have otherwise stayed and helped Haitian society, he found a way to get out.
Duvalier drove the future away and kept the present in chains through fear, propaganda, and calculated gestures that convinced the poor that he was their benefactor. I remember one of these acts very well because it is among my fondest memories of childhood. It was what American kids experience when they go to an amusement park: a moment when magic seems real to you. A few days after Duvalier took power, he celebrated by sending helicopters over the most impoverished villages in Haiti to drop money from the sky as loudspeakers proclaimed the great wealth in store for us under his rule. That was like God speaking from heaven to a kid like me. My brother Sam and I jumped in the air to catch the bills before they landed and spent the rest of the afternoon searching the ground, picking up as many as we could find.
Of course, Duvalier Jr.’s rule was not the start of a rich and comfortable future for all Haitians. Those with no way to leave the country had to abide by his law or be murdered. The only way to insure your survival and that of your loved ones under Duvalier was to pledge your allegiance to him, and the easiest way to do that was to align yourself with his vast network of volunteer police. They were called Macoutes and they were the neighborhood thugs, with Duvalier at the top like a gang leader. The Macoutes were not formally trained or organized in any way and they operated under one order: to squash all antiregime activity that they observed. The Macoutes made their own rules locally as they saw fit and were feared by their peers in their villages. At any time a Macoute could create a reason to take a citizen and throw him in jail or kill him. Just as the sky was blue, if a Macoute didn’t like you, your days were numbered.
Becoming a Macoute or a friend to them was the only way to survive, and if I had grown up in Haiti past my tenth year, and things had stayed as they were politically, I probably would have become one. If there were fifty men in a village, you could bet that forty of them were Macoutes. Half of my mother’s brothers were Macoutes, not because they believed in Duvalier; they believed in staying alive. Paying lip service to a dictator and doing whatever deeds they were told to do was the only way to keep their families safe. My mother’s family knew that this was the only insurance a Haitian had against violence because one of her older brothers had risen so high in the older Duvalier’s regime that he became one of Papa Doc’s elite personal bodyguards. He made sure that his family members fell in line and that the men became Macoutes to ensure their survival. He was a fierce, brutal man, feared by all who knew him. His presence alone was enough to keep our family members safe.
I can’t share his name, but I can tell you that he was famous across the land because when he was still just a local Macoute, he built a jail cell within his own house where he took any citizen he suspected of crimes against the government. This guy took great pride in his job. He demanded that people in the village pay tribute to him by doing work for him or bringing him things, and if they didn’t, he would ask them to report to him at a certain time. Usually they didn’t do that, so he would find them and drag them by their arms through the village and lock them up in his jail cell until he decided to let them out. There was no law but his own, and he liked to make a point of it by enforcing it himself, without the help of his soldiers. A man like that has only to do something like this once or twice before the entire village gets the message. Under Duvalier, my mother’s brother became a local warlord, then a bodyguard to the man himself, but when Papa Doc’s regime fell in 1986, he fled Haiti in fear for his life and never returned.
My father only wanted a safe and peaceful life for his family, so he became a minister not only because it was in his blood, but because it was a way out. As a minister of the Nazarene Church, my father, Gesner, was able to put down roots in America. He joined some of his family who had settled there along with many other Haitians in the Marlboro Houses in Brooklyn, one of the roughest projects in New York City. Marlboro was a horror show back then and it hasn’t improved tremendously, but anyplace was safer than Haiti.
My mother and father were able to illegally emigrate to New York because my father’s sister already lived there. She hid my mother and father after Gesner’s visa ran out and until my mother gave birth to my brother Sedek, qualifying them for citizenship. This was a common hustle among Haitians. Once they’d set down roots legally, they arranged for us to join them.
We heard of this the ni
ght before we left for America. My aunt sat us down and said, “Your dad and mom are coming to get you tomorrow.”
That was the first time I really believed we had parents. We were going to America.
That morning Sam and I put on our best church clothes, which were the best we had, and we went to the airport to meet them. We were going to stay for a couple of days and then return to our new home. I’ll never forget standing at the window in the airport, staring at the big white jet.
“They flew here from America on that plane,” my aunt said. “They will be coming down the stairs, so you look for them.”
The staircase was rolled out, the door was opened, and people began to file down onto the runway. I didn’t even know what kind of person to be looking for.
My aunt started pointing. “There they are! There are your mother and father!”
My father was dressed in a very Western-style suit with a vest and a big belt buckle. He was all in black and he looked like Johnny Cash, with a wild beard. My mother was very neat and well kept; she was wearing a beautiful yellow dress and incredible sunglasses. I remember her looking like Jackie O. That is all I remember, because they were strangers to me. But I recall saying to myself that my parents were rich. “This is it, Sammy,” I said to my brother. “We’re going to America!” America was the land of plenty.
I ran up and hugged my mama and dad, and my mom began to cry. Then my dad picked us up and hugged us both a little. He didn’t cry; he just asked us if we were okay and how we’d been treated while they’d been gone. It was like stepping outside of anything I had ever known. To Sam and me, an airplane was as strange as a UFO, and until that day we’d never had parents.
My father didn’t want to stay in Haiti long, because he had hustled the system down there, too. And he’d left in a hurry, so he didn’t want to risk getting caught. On the plane, my father sat next to the two sons he hadn’t seen in almost a decade and he talked to us about life the entire way. I’ve never forgotten what he said, and what I remember of it has become more important to me over time. He spoke to us as if we were young men, not the little boys we were. He gave us something to eat and then he asked us straight up what we wanted out of life. I don’t remember what I told him. What does a nine-year-old want out of life? To be a cowboy?
He also asked us to describe how we had lived since the day we were born and Sam and I told him everything we liked to do. We told him about hunting birds and all the dogs in the village, and singing songs in church and stories about every kid we ever knew. And how much we liked the bicycle.
The pilot of the plane was white and so were a few of the stewardesses. We didn’t speak a word of English, so when they told us to fasten our seat belts, we heard alien language. Sam and I believed that they could make this bird fly using their powers. We thought they worked together to make it go up in the air. We believed that behind the door in the front of the plane was a secret closet with more white people in uniform who all worked to get this iron bird up in the air.
“That is why they are sitting in the front and the rest of the people are in the back, Sam. They all fly together and they pull this bird. That’s why we are sitting and they are still walking around. They are using their language to make it go up into the sky.”
It got even stranger for me when the white stewardess served me juice. That was something that had never happened to me: a white person serving me. Coming from my village, I was felt like I was on another planet and these people were the aliens. And these aliens were serving me juice. When I think back, the only white person I remember spending any time with in the village was a missionary. He had a beard and taught us about the Bible, so to me, he wasn’t a white man or a Christian: he was Jesus.
Over the course of our flight, I watched out the window as the sky went from light to dark. We had only experienced the passing of a day on the ground, never right before our eyes, up above the clouds. Suddenly, maybe an hour after we were in the air, it was almost night. I thought it was magic.
The first thing Sam and I saw of America were the Twin Towers and the tall red needles on top of them blinking. The lights of the city below, all spread out in lines, didn’t look real to us at all. I had no idea what they could be.
“Sam,” I said. “Look at this place! We have arrived in the City of Diamonds!”
He smiled and giggled.
“You see those lights below, Sam? They are the diamonds and they are everywhere.”
“We are going to be rich,” Sam said, nodding his head.
“We will work hard. We will get a bunch of diamonds every day. We will stay here for maybe a year and we must find people to help us get those diamonds on the airplane, but we will do it, and we will bring all the lights and other stuff back to the village.”
“That is a good idea,” Sam said. He was smiling but suddenly he got serious. “We need lights in the village.”
When we landed, Sam and I experienced cold for the first time. It was fall, not even winter yet, but coming from the heat and dust of Haiti, the cold hit me like a wall. The chaos of JFK airport made me dizzy. All around me people were speaking languages I had never heard; there were aliens everywhere. In my mind, I wasn’t in an airport, because the only airport I’d seen was the small one in Port-au-Prince, and this place was much too big to be an airport. To me, JFK was America, and all I kept asking my brother and mother was, “Where is everybody going?”
My dad’s brother picked us up in his LTD station wagon, which was green, like the Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation. We thought that thing was a limo. I could not believe how rich my parents were—first a UFO, then a limo. Life in America was going to be incredible. We loaded into the LTD and drove to our new home in Brooklyn to begin our new lives. We had never seen a maze of buildings like the Marlboro Projects, and I thought that this was how rich people lived. As we walked up to the building, I figured that my father owned the whole thing. I learned the truth when we got into the cramped apartment we now called home. It was packed: me, Sam, my parents, my grandmother, my aunt, and whoever else needed a place to stay, all living in that one-bedroom flat. I remember looking at my dad leaning against the wall, watching all of the activity, deep in thought. I can only imagine what he was thinking, after having jumped fences, dodged immigration, risked his life—all for this moment.
My father had come from Haiti on a missionary visa to do further study in the Nazarene faith. Then, when his visa ran out, he decided that he wasn’t going back. He went underground like every immigrant with no papers does after they find their way into America. My father hid out with his brother, down in Brooklyn, and they moved into small apartments all over the place. They lived on Nostrand Avenue, Avenue J, Prospect, and Clarkson. My dad did whatever he could for cash payment: cleaning snow, hauling trash, whatever odd jobs he could lock down. And he steered clear of the police or any other kind of authority, because that could have meant getting sent back. He and his brother moved from apartment to apartment like two outlaws. Especially before it was safe to bring my mom over, they lived like two cowboys on the run. If they got a tip that the INS was going to raid an apartment, they’d leave and find another floor to sleep on that night. His end goal was to make enough money to buy a visa (illegal or otherwise) for my mom so she could join him and they could start a normal life. Back in Haiti, my dad had learned to sew, so he became a tailor and did work among the Haitian community. He also worked in a few sweatshops and got paid under the table. He saved his pennies until he had enough to buy my mom a six-month visa, probably for a few grand, through someone who had connections in the Haitian embassy. When that expired, the two of them hid out. Until she gave birth to my brother Sedek, they hid from everyone.
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS THE matriarch of the first house I came to call home in America in every way, and to prove it she’d make us kids empty the vase she kept by her bed to piss in during the night. This became my job, to keep me humble. It didn’t make me humble, but I did
empty it. Whatever time it was—morning, late in the evening, afternoon—she’d shout, “Nel! Come take the vase.” Nel is an abbreviation of my first name Nelust, and there was never a question what vase she was talking about. The bathroom wasn’t very far away, but that wasn’t the point. Grandmother was old enough that she had earned the right to have her piss taken care of by her grandchildren. I didn’t like doing it, but walking her urine to the toilet was nothing compared to living in the village.
Our new house was a building made of bricks, with an electric refrigerator that kept the milk cold. That refrigerator was magic to my brother and me. For the first three days we were there, we kept opening and closing the door just to watch the light switch on and off. Our second night in America, my brother got out of bed while everyone slept, took the gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator, and drank from it as if he’d been lost in the desert for a week. He’d never tasted anything so delicious as ice-cold milk because we’d never had it before. We had never seen a whole gallon of milk in our entire lives.
“Sam,” I said when he got back in bed beside me. “What were you doing with the milk? You shouldn’t drink that much.”
“I had to,” he said, wiping his mouth. It was all over his chin. I had to laugh.
“You drank all of it?”
“No, I only drank half of it,” he said. “Listen, we are going to have to stay here longer. We can’t go back to Haiti with all the diamonds, yet. This milk is too good. We need to learn how we can take this milk to Haiti.”
“So you wanna take all the milk back, too? How that gonna help?”
“I don’t care. It’s probably not gonna help,” he said. “Okay, we can take the diamonds back, but we can’t take this milk. Because I’m gonna drink all of it. And you should, too.”
“That’s greedy, Sam,” I said staring up at the ceiling. “The milk is good, and we can’t take it with us, but we can take the diamonds and the lights and the other things we need in the village. We need to share and they have so much …”
