Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

We should get going, he said. Let me tell you a story.

Natasha Robert and the President were now standing in the shadow of the jet, which was embossed with a giant American flag. The President stood on a step so he could be the same height as Natasha and look her in the eyes. The soldiers who had escorted them to the tarmac of Toussaint Louverture Airport were off a ways, standing under the airport tower’s shade, chatting among themselves. His posse kept a respectful distance. They knew not to be close enough to eavesdrop but he knew they heard every word anyway. These people had ears like bats.

I know what you’re thinking, the President said. Long pause. Natasha looked up in surprise and pursed her lips. She wished she could melt into the asphalt.

What? she said. What did you say?

I just wanted to let you know that I understand how you feel, the President said. Back when I was your age, I got terrified when my dreams were on the verge of coming true too. Here’s how I developed the ability to overcome this fear. When I was a boy, my father used to take me fishing in a corner of the Artibonite River. My father was a farmer from Hinche who was said to own no land. My mother was a laundry woman. I didn’t care. Like every boy, I loved to hang out with my father without my siblings or mother around. Those mornings, honey-gold sunbeams bathed the green waters around us. The smell of jasmine enveloped us. Back then there were trees on the banks of the river in the country’s breadbasket. The trees were tall, leafy, and proud. Their branches and leaves opened their palms up to the heavens to drink in the sun’s life-giving rays with ivresse . The trees looked like they were praying. Photosynthesizing with God. The millions of people, small and needy, who reaped the benefits of the trees’ constant prayers knew well enough to thank the earth and God regularly for their existence.

My father and I ambled down to the river most often on mornings when it was too hot for me to play football with my friends and too early for him to have worked through the night’s hangover. We sat in his small boat for hours. My father often slept during this time, but with his eyes open. I stared at the schools of fish swimming around us in the still river, and I imagined I had a machine gun to speed up their conquest. On days when I had problem that needed sorting, I asked my father for advice. I was a shy child. I stammered a lot. But, strangely, not when I spoke to my papa. I told Papi of a kid in school who I thought was a friend but who hurt my feelings by making fun of me. Recently, he had started taunting me by calling me Garcia, my middle name. In front of all our classmates, he kept saying that my name was Dominican and that I wasn’t really Haitian. I was a traitor, a spy. All the kids laughed at me. I hated it. I am Haitian, Papa, right? I said. I’m not a traitor, right? I would never hurt people. What was this boy talking about, Papa? I’m not Dominican, right? Even I was, all Dominicans are not spies and enemies, are they? What should I do about this boy? He bothers me nonstop, Papa. I’m starting to lose concentration in class.

What?! my father said, startled awake. He coughed and wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. He wore that pained look he got whenever he was confronted with unpleasant news. My father always looked like he was easily wounded, for he was a thin man. Thin eyes, lips, hands, legs, and torso. People in our quartier called him Chinaman. The women loved him. They wanted to cradle his waifish frame. They liked his easy, lopsided grin. His head was clean-shaven yet gray at the temples. Raffish and handsome and somnolent, that was my father, the latest in a long line of easy-to-love men in our family that ended with me.

What is the boy’s name? my father asked me that day in the boat. B-B-B-Bernard, I said. Bernard Métélus.

Métélus’s boy? he said. You letting that little runt get to you? What’s wrong with you, son? Did you punch him in his face after he insulted you? Did you punch him and tell him that Dominicans and Haitians don’t exist? It’s one damn island, one country of people stuck on an island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. We’re the same squirrels trying to get nuts from the same stingy bastards.

Non, papa , I said.

Good, Papa said. What a fucking fool, that Métélus kid. Just like his father. Still. You’re better off keeping that to yourself. Better to make friends than enemies with him. Don’t let that anti-Dominican shit get to you, son. I gave you that name for a reason. The Dominicans are all right. Don’t let the loudmouths fool you. That doesn’t mean they don’t have their funny ways. Not too long ago, they had a president, Rafael Trujillo, a real asshole, who, on a whim, ordered his army to execute the Haitian population living in the borderlands we share with them. In a few months, the Dominicans killed somewhere between twenty to thirty thousand of us. Probably more. No one can ever tell how many Haitians are in any one place at a given time. We’re everywhere! Anyway, the Dominicans really got carried away with themselves that day. The soldiers used knives and swords. They didn’t spare women or children. You see, some Dominicans never got over the fact that their people are Haitian. African, Indian, with a dash of European. Haitian. The island was one country for a long time, for a longer time than it’s been artificially separated by the Americans. The propaganda that keeps us separated is ridiculous. Oh, we don’t share everything. Over there, they have a thing for Christopher Columbus that’s pretty embarrassing. No one else in the hemisphere likes that motherfucker. We prefer to celebrate the people who stood up to the Spanish conquistadors. Here, we love our African soul. Not in the DR. They love their Spanish roots. It’s no big deal. To each his own God be true, right? However, being mad at sharing our ancestry is like being mad at being called human. The human condition has no mysteries for us Haitians, does it, son? We take its best and its worst, with a shrug and a chuckle and a glass of rum. We’re tough hombres, foolish, maybe a wee bit crazy from the sun and sex, but we have good taste. We take the best shots from God and the devil on any given day and still we rise. My father chuckled. I didn’t understand all of what he was talking, but I got the gist of it.

The Dominicans called the massacre El Corte, the cut. The sad event was also known as the Parsley Massacre from stories people told about how the soldiers made sure they killed defenseless Haitians and not defenseless Dominicans by accident — ah, the complications of fratricide. Trujillo had the soldiers hold up parsley sprigs to their potential victims and then ask them, What is this? If the potential victim said the word “parsley” with the wrong accent, off went her head. To illustrate the absurdity of it all, my father then said the word “parsley” with pitch-perfect Spanish and the widest, toothiest grin. A bit of drool dribbled down the corner of his mouth.

Natasha, I could care less about history, not now and definitely not back then, the President said, holding Natasha’s gaze as steadily as he held her hands. In my teenage mind, the moral of the story he told me revolved around the magical powers of immortality conveyed from knowing the right way to say the right word, like “parsley,” at the right time. You could say my political career was born that day. I became a listener. I became a diplomat of sorts, a reconciler and not a fighter. A crowd-pleaser. A shit-eater. A winner. I got off that boat and went back to the neighborhood determined to become Métélus’s best friend. I wasn’t going to ask him to stop mocking me. I was going to make him like me so much that mocking me would come to seem a waste of his time. I was going to become useful to him, you see. And it worked! I rode his coattails to the presidency! Everyone wants to be liked and served, especially bullies. I didn’t want to be coddled by everyone like my father was, but I figured being inoffensively offensive in aggressive and hostile surroundings would spare me the worst of any situation. I was not a quiet boy or a choirboy. I could fake humor like the best of men. On my journey to manhood, I simply found the easiest way to eliminate obstacles was to listen, then seduce. Just so. Never too much. Too much of anything, especially words, ruined events, moments, made life unnecessarily harder. Live in the moment, but without excess. Have faith, have cool, have a ready modest smile. So when Métélus became president of Haiti, I was his right-hand man.