by Wyclef Jean
“What … happened to him?”
“He was pinned under the Bentley.”
The rest of the day was a daze. Jerry Wonder got me into a car and we drove to the hospital.
As I’ve told you, my father had always worked on cars. He loved them, and he understood the mechanics, the engineering, and everything about the history of the automobile. Long after he needed to, he kept his job at Don Warnock’s dealership and never even accepted promotions because he liked to get his hands greasy in engines. He was the kind of guy who could tell you what year a Cadillac or Chevy from the forties or fifties was from half a block away, so as soon as I was able to, I gave my father a gift that I knew he would appreciate and would never have gotten for himself, even if he were able to: I got him a 1991 Bentley.
That gift killed him, a tragic accident that still haunts me to this day. The morning was cold, so he turned the engine over to let it heat up while the car was still in the garage. He was going to take a drive with my mother. He didn’t get all the way into the car to start it, instead he opened the driver’s door, turned the ignition, and then reached one foot in to push down on the gas pedal to rev the engine. In the process of doing this, he slipped the car into reverse, so when he pushed down on the gas, the car was launched backward. Since he was half in and half out of the car, the front wheel rolled over one of his legs, pulling him out of the car and onto the ground. The Bentley kept going until it hit the garage door, rolling right over my father’s chest.
As Jerry sped us to the hospital, I felt in my heart that he was already gone. I just knew it. It was like a black cloud in my heart and there was no lifting it. The doctor at the hospital didn’t even have to open his mouth. His face said it all when he came out of the operating room.
“We lost him.”
I fell to my knees, inconsolable, crying. Then I rose to my feet and demanded to see his body. They brought me to the room where he had passed. His body had been severely injured and I understood that, but to me he still looked so strange: the strongest man I’d ever known with the life crushed out of him. This couldn’t be happening. His face, though, was at peace. That gave me some sense that things were okay. I took him in for the last time. I went up and kissed his forehead.
“Good-bye Dad. All is good now. I love you.”
I MOURNED MY FATHER every day after he passed, because he was always close to my heart and in my mind, even during those years when we couldn’t find a common language to speak to each other. We finally understood each other, and in the year before he died I believed that we respected each other in a way we never had before. It made his passing weigh even more heavily on me in every way. The days after he died were surreal, because four days later was September 11, 2001, a day no American, New Yorker, or citizen of the world will ever forget. While mourning my father, I mourned the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. It just felt like a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from. Not even Psalm 23 could save me.
I’m not a man who cries often, but at my father’s funeral I broke down and couldn’t stop. I felt like the foundation I had built my character on was taken away from me and I lost all sense of focus in that moment. It was a very trying time for the world in general. I responded to all of that loss by forgetting who I was for a time, and making a series of mistakes for the next few years. I betrayed my marriage and I went astray. It’s taken me even longer to make those errors right, but I learned something valuable every step of the way.
My wife, Claudinette, always believed in me, back when I had no money, when I was just a teenager and she already knew what she wanted out of life. Both she and her family supported me financially and emotionally since the day they took me in. That kind of compassion and loyalty are why she and I are still married today. She always gave me shelter, she always nurtured me, and she made me believe I could do what I wanted to do every time I doubted myself.
In 2005, Claudinette and I adopted our daughter, Angelina, and she brought us even closer together. If you look into the lives of many of our world leaders, you will find that the woman that stays with them for life is a woman that they met when they were young, who knew them better than anyone else. No matter what happens during their career, no matter what skeletons come out or what trash is thrown around in the media, the most dedicated women stay with their men. Those couples have an understanding that runs deeper than the average boundaries of a marriage.
I have not been faithful, several times over, but my wife and I have always found a way to work it out. In the eyes of the world, and on the blogs and Internet message boards, people are always asking, “Why the hell does she stay with him?” People even write to Claudinette directly, saying, “You should have left his ass a long time ago.” There are women out there everywhere who flap their gums around Claudinette telling her that they’ll fix me. They’ll get Vodou too, saying things like “I’ll get two chicken legs and pepper and your man will be running down Main Street butt-naked once I’m done with him. I’ve got something for that bitch he done you dirty with, too! Call me, girl.” Claudinette doesn’t need any of that, because she knows she’s got me, and I love her, and I’m not going anywhere. That doesn’t mean what I did was right, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t value my family. It doesn’t mean I can’t change. I already have.
In those years after my father died, like I said, I made many mistakes. The worst of them was to get into a relationship with the woman who was my manager at the time. That affair damaged everything: my career, my family, my creativity, and my professional reputation. I had been unfaithful before—and I’m not just talking about being with Lauryn—but this relationship was a tremendous blow to my wife because it was so publicly in her face. It almost cost me my marriage and it should have; it wasn’t right. There were items written about it in the New York newspapers and my former manager denied the allegations—and because of that I can’t say too much more about this—but we all know the truth. It was all in the papers: there was the issue of a naked picture she sent to me that Claudinette intercepted. My wife found it on my BlackBerry and then asked me if I had been involved with this woman sexually at all. She asked if we ever got into orgies or anything like that and when I said no, she confronted me with the picture. My wife was a woman scorned, so she then sent that picture out to a few of her friends and one of them must have put it up on the Internet.
My former manager claimed that the picture was a nude shot taken by a photographer for a book of artistic portraits. I’m pretty sure that book never came out, but I wasn’t going to throw her under the bus publicly, so I didn’t say anything more about it. I didn’t even make a public statement on the matter at all. I don’t know if that was the best thing to do, because all the headlines in the gossip columns made it worse. After I fired my manager, some of the media even claimed that my wife had forced me to fire my manager because of the affair, which made Claudinette furious. That wasn’t true at all. I did so because of a few bad business decisions on her part, and I also didn’t agree with her management style. Even if those two issues hadn’t been there, my mixing business with pleasure was miserable. Firing her as my manager was the only thing I could do after crossing those lines, because business could not go on as usual between us any longer.
This event was a crossroad for Claudinette and me, and after we got through it, everything in our relationship changed. People can say what they want, but what they will never understand is the mystery of how deep the love between Claudinette and me runs. As much as I’ve ever wilded out, whenever she has said she’s going to leave me, I’ve done whatever it takes to keep that from happening. If she left me, I would lose my best friend in the whole world and the only person who has been with me since the beginning. I would lose that girl who made me want to ride my sister’s pink bicycle across town to see her, not caring about how much shit I’d catch from the thugs on the street. When I’m old and gray I’ll still have that excitement within me. I still feel that thrill when I see her now, every
single day. My wife knows my heart. She knows that I’m the kind of person who would take out my heart and give it to you if I could, and that is why she’s with me. I will give my last dollar to someone else and I’ll sacrifice myself for mankind as if my life doesn’t matter—as if I don’t even exist. She knows that is my soul, and I know hers is beautiful and compassionate and understanding. We can do this until the end of our days. I know this.
My wife comes from a very magical place in Haiti called Jérémie, which is the city of poets, far on the western part of the island. She has an intuition like no one else I know: she has talked about things that ended up happening ever since we were kids, in the way that a medium or a fortune-teller does.
What that has meant in our relationship is that whenever I’ve lied to her, it’s only been a matter of time until she’s found out the truth, because she already knows it, sometimes before it happens. We have been in bed together and she has woken up in the morning and said to me, “I’ve had a dream,” and whatever she has told me pretty much became reality.
My wife foresaw her mother’s passing long before it happened and she’s seen everything that ever went on between us—both the good and the bad. She prays a lot and she has a lot of faith, and there isn’t anyone else in the world like my Claudinette. And as much as she’s truthful with me, so much of her nature is still a beautiful mystery to me. She makes things manifest, so she only says some of what she sees in her mind.
When I look back at our relationship and everything I have done wrong, and every time Claudinette has known the truth before I even told her, I see that she was teaching me a lesson. I had to learn this lesson over and over until it finally manifested itself within me. I have finally grown up, and I have finally realized all of the blessings I’ve been granted because of her. I understand her wisdom and why she stands by me, because the two of us cannot be divided, no matter what our trial. We are meant to be together because we are one. In her wisdom, she knew this truth before I did, but now I understand.
I have a wife, I have a daughter, and my little girl really looks up to me. I began to realize that it wouldn’t be too long before my daughter would be able to read all about her daddy on the Internet, and if I didn’t change my ways, what she’d find out wouldn’t be good. She’d know that I’d messed up and I’d hurt her mom. That’s why I’m laying it all out there now. I want the world to know the truth about everything I’ve done wrong so that no one can say I didn’t own up to my mistakes.
Sometimes only the possibility of losing everything can make you learn a lesson. That is what needed to happen to me, more than once, but now that lesson has been learned. In the same way, tragedy wakes us up and demands that we value our lives and loved ones. And the earthquake in Haiti did that to me as well. Those twenty-four hours changed everything in my life. It was like I woke up to who I really was all along, for the first time.
It is easy to be a careless young man in show business. That kind of behavior is encouraged! But being treated like a star doesn’t teach anyone to learn what’s important in real life; it only feeds the ego, which keeps you in the mind-set of a teenager. Lifting bodies into trucks in my homeland, with the woman beside me who had stood beside me from the start, made it clear to me what life is all about. I realized that it was time for me to forget Wyclef and become Jeannel, a family man who my father would be proud of, and a Haitian who did everything he could for his homeland.
Working together on the relief effort, side by side, on the ground, brought Claudinette and me together in a whole new way. When we returned from that first trip, I changed everything: I fired the manager I’d had an affair with and I made a new start. For a long while I had no manager, no representation, and I just focused on raising money for Haiti and nurturing my family and my relationship with my wife back to health. Past mistakes became corrected and past problems found solution. I will no longer do what I did because I don’t want to lose my family and I don’t want to lose my country.
I had been working on a record that was a return to the rap game and I put that to bed. There was nothing else I could do. I had left that Wyclef down in the rubble and returned with a new purpose. I wanted my music to reflect the culture that defined me, because that is who I am. I wanted everything I did to give back to my homeland. And it did. Everything became clear to me and I haven’t let it go. I admitted my mistakes and I have confessed to my lies. Believe me, if you have the strength for that, your life will be the better. If we can all do that, this world stands a chance.
8
WYCLEF FOR PRESIDENT
In the aftershocks of the earthquake, my charity raised millions of dollars in just a few weeks. It is the most important thing I’ve ever done. I had been building Yéle in Haiti since 2005, and we had been making moves toward becoming an NGO, a nongovernmental organization like Unicef, but we hadn’t achieved that goal quite yet when tragedy struck. NGOs were established by the United Nations in the late 1940s to define groups that work outside of the government but often do benefit from government subsidies. It is the best way to operate: you have the blessing of the government but you are somewhat free to follow your own agenda. When I first started flying first class with the Fugees, I remember the hostess passing the orange box down the aisle asking for donations for Unicef, and that image stayed with me. I wanted Yéle to be just as established, accepted, and understood. When I began to look into it, I realized that Haiti didn’t have one NGO operating in the country. There was no global organization devoted to Haiti, no organization with millions of dollars in the bank to draw from when an unforeseen event struck. Haiti had no sponsors looking to build and improve its infrastructure—no group to rescue the people in times of need. I saw this void before the earthquake, so I had been doing all that I could to build up a support system, while spreading awareness of the country’s need internationally. When the quake hit, we weren’t even close to our goal, but in terms of aid groups on the ground, we were the most organized and most visible one there, and I am proud of that.
After spending the first forty-eight hours after the earthquake on the ground in Port-au-Prince, I returned to America to rally more support. And when I got off the plane I was met with accusations from a few media outlets that all of the money Yéle had raised via text messages, online donations, and corporate sponsors was a fraud. I was accused of running a company that stole from the rich and kept the money for itself while the poor starved. Single-handedly we had raised 1 million dollars in twenty-four hours just by asking people to text YELE 510 510, all of which, my accusers in the press claimed, was going to me and to my staff. According to their allegations, those funds weren’t going to provide shelter or clean water to Haiti. This wasn’t true.
I thought of what my father had always said when he talked about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in America. He wasn’t directly a part of it, but my father felt that struggle personally, and he always told me how Reverend King was accused of using NAACP funds to support himself and his family. My father said that this kind of malice went back to the time of Jesus, and it was what the weak men in power resorted to when they felt threatened. Jesus was the man. He was a true leader of the people, which was fine with those who governed until he brought his message to Jerusalem, the seat of power. Once he took his beliefs to the top and rode into the capital on a donkey, he was accused of everything and murdered because his teachings were too dangerous. My father always said that no matter what the situation, I should always think long and hard before riding my donkey into Jerusalem. He said to be sure the cause was worth wearing a crown of thorns, because if it were, even if they killed you and nailed your beliefs to a cross, your words and your example would go on. He was trying to tell me that no cause can be defeated if it speaks to the people and if you give yourself over to it completely.
I thought of my father’s words when I returned home from Haiti after the earthquake. But even those moments of reflection couldn’t have prepared me for
the crucifixion that awaited me. From the plane I went directly into a press conference, and aside from my father’s funeral, in that room, I’ve never broken down into tears so honestly in front of other people. I had been so caught up in all I had experienced over the previous two days, and so overwhelmed that for the first time I let the emotion go. If they had seen what I’d seen, if they’d been where I’d been, if they’d held their countrymen’s bodies like I had, they would have wept beside me.
I had not expected to answer accusations, which is what I learned I would be doing in the press conference. As I walked through the airport, a kid, college age, yelled out to me.
“Clef, I donated to YELE 510 510. I know you doing right, but they trying to throw dirt on you!”
“How?”
I was serious, I had no idea what he was talking about. In the days since I had left America, the media had investigated Yéle for supposed nonpayment of taxes. They had seen how much power we had with the people, so of course they had to find some way to bring us down. The same people that were there to listen to what I had to say about the conditions on the ground were also there to accuse me of collecting the money for profit, not for aid.
The focus was Haiti, but I had to take time away from that to clear my own name and the name of Yéle. Then after that, the affair with my manager came to light publicly. My image could not have been worse right at a time when I was poised to really make a difference in my homeland.
That first day back was complete darkness for me. In that press conference I cried for myself, I cried for my people, and I cried because of the misrepresentation. I poured out my emotions honestly, and whatever the reporters had thought of me when they came in, they asked no further questions after I was done speaking. All I could do was tell them about the horror I had just seen. I walked out of there to dead silence.
