Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Again, she thought of her parents. Such sweet losers. Her mother was a beggar, a peddler, and an all-around hustler. Her dear papa never had a job that she could think of, but somehow he rarely came home empty-handed. He could read too. Bedtime stories were the best. They had one book— The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren — but the best part of the night was after he’d close the book and talk to her. He told her she was the embodiment of his happiness, thus she was destined to always be happy. He told her this every night.

We were so happy you were born, he said. You were such a happy baby. We didn’t have much, but we had love. We loved each other, and we loved you. À mort . We were badass about love.

The word “ass” made her laugh. It brightened her mood. We were badass about love. You used a bad word, Papa, she’d giggle, and voilà, all funk was lifted, the memory of her latest fight with her mother was swept under her spiritual rug.

Do you understand how much we love you, chérie ?

Yes, Papa.

Never forget it, sweetheart, but, uh, don’t use that language around your mom, OK? I don’t want her to kick my ass. You know how she is. I ain’t as tough as you are.

Oh, Papa, she’d swoon.

Papa wore an Afro and a handlebar mustache long after they stopped being cool. Why don’t men wear mustaches anymore? Papa came from the north, probably Port-de-Paix. He never specified. I was born in a manger deep in a jungle, he said. My parents were kind and God-fearing, so angels visited them after my birth, like they visited us after you arrived.

That was all he offered by way of origin story. It confused Natasha, but she was often too tired and grateful for his undivided attention to question it, choosing instead to listen quietly to the soothing purr of his baritone voice and romantic take on everything. At a young age, he said another night, I came to Port-au-Prince, alone, barefoot, and shirtless. My pants were too small. I was young, but I was happy to be here. This is the city of dreams. I was eager to get my piece of it. I was famished, you see. Hungry. My father had been a captain in the army back when we had an army. Our country had no obvious need for an army, but an army had freed us from slavery, and we grew paranoid about going back to slavery, so a new army had to be available to try to keep potential new slave-masters at bay. Anyway, a new president came into power at the peak of my father’s powers and was kindly told by the foreigners who bankrolled his existence to disband the army, and disband it he did. Our family fell on hard times. Of course, our hardest times were nothing compared to the hard times of most of our neighbors. But still. Yes, dear, my father was an ex-mighty man. Nothing worse than a man of highly visible importance to his community fallen to the level of the ordinary. Papi struggled terribly with anonymity. That’s partly why I hope you never develop a taste for alcohol or celebrity or both. Your grandfather had his flaws but he was a good man. He never cut a corner nor smiled unnecessarily. See these muscles on my arms? His were bigger. If he was a little bit corrupt, if he was one of those people who thought the job in the army was a crown and not a difficult public service for a difficult public in need of more services than the government had means to deliver, if he didn’t worry about how I would think of him after word got out that he worked for the bad guys doing bad things, even though I was a child who thought he could do no wrong, if his legacy to me was less of a preeminent concern of his, which indirectly led to his loss of career and subsequent bankruptcy and love affair with Rhum Barbancourt — how that man, come to think of it, managed to drink himself to death, discreetly too, in our little quartier , is pretty fucking genius, pardonne mon français —if he was less noble, we’d be richer but much poorer for it. Because of his sense of honor we were never that poor.

Natasha laughed a small laugh. These confessions by her father often took place in her small candlelit room after her father had tucked her in bed, a bed made of cardboard and a too-small towel. He spoke carefully in a valedictory tone. It was as if he wasn’t sure he’d be around or alive in the morning and he had to make sure Natasha knew the Robert family history. Like most things in their country, their familial existence was fragile and easily snuffed out by unexpected forces, he felt. If he didn’t share their story with her, there was nowhere else for her to look it up. It wasn’t recorded much anywhere else and whatever records did exist could disappear in a flash of random fires and other disasters, though her father often made clear that she had no reason ever to feel unlucky or cursed or any such nonsense.

Oh, Papa, she said. This was the way the sleepy little girl indicated she’d gotten her father’s lesson de la soirée and wished to sleep. But Papa wanted her to like him and think him an honorable man. That these things mattered, that integrity and a sense of charity even when inhabiting a “borrowed” house with no roof in a country where any half-wit with a good smile could scare up money to live beyond his means, these were essential aspects of the Robert family character. He wanted five-year-old Natasha, and fifteen-year-old Natasha, and, hopefully, twenty-, thirty-, and fifty-year-old Natasha to remember these values as deeply and permanently as her pigmentation. Neither Papa nor young Natasha had any idea that Natasha would eventually become a twenty-year-old who’d sold her soul for a pot of gold.

She looked around her: a dozen stone-faced, armed, and oddly young Asian, Latino, and African soldiers stood behind her, the most powerful man in the country was in front, a jet with its engines running was impatiently welcoming her, open-ribbed. That morning, she had locked the one person capable of persuading her not to leave Haiti in a bedroom closet. For good measure, she had thrown away the key. Yes, Natasha, she told her herself, you screwed up. There’s no way out of this one. There won’t be a do-over.

You know, Natasha, Ernst Robert, her papi, would say at the end of her bedtime sermon in a bid to keep Natasha’s eyes from completely glazing over, You know, I know that all my talk about love, of legacies, honor, and family values will no longer be fashionable by the time you grow up and have to make tough decisions. They were already out of fashion when I was your age.

Fashionable or not, Papi said, being good for goodness’ sake, and not simply for beneficial outcomes, is what separates us from the animals, sweetheart.

Damn it, Natasha, stop thinking about that boy, or else you’re going to start crying again. A woman without grace — Papa’d say “woman” pointedly, like, this is no literary trick, I’m talking about you, girl; the candlelight at her bedside would flicker — a woman without grace and a sense of love towards her family will make decisions that could cause her enough grief to wound and scar and torture her for the rest of her life, a living death of a life, let me tell you. You betray your soul and you never get to live it down. Trust me. I know. There are worse ways to kill yourself than drinking yourself to death. Just look down your street. Just look at some of the faces on the sidewalk, on porches, hell, the stories on the radio, all the begging, all the false pride, there are way worse ways…

Papa would then shake his head in sadness for broken families and wayward children turned wayward adults. As a little girl listening to these sermons, Natasha had only a faint idea of what her father was talking about. The girl dug the moments just the same. She felt loved by his undivided attention. The care and tenderness were heavy and sweet. That’s all that mattered to her. Her father’s brown eyes got smoky. Come with me, he said, come forgive your mother for loving you too hard, you lovable brat.