Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The young man is holding his bachelor party at a nightclub called Kombit in Brooklyn.

And what we have here are not strippers, hookers, and tequila shots; what we have here is not some last hurrah of single life before the shackles of domesticity are welded on for life — no, what we have here is a damn good party. The young lawyer has invited everyone to his party because that’s the Haitian style. Everyone he knows and loves is there at Kombit on that February night, from his grandparents to his innumerable cousins to his colleagues at work — partners, associates, and secretaries alike — to a dozen friends from law school, who know nothing of Haiti and think of Johel Célestin as a black guy with a French name and a white accent, a fact or condition that Johel Célestin both loves and hates, America effacing and rubbing away the nastiness of the old country, but also imposing a story on him that’s not his.

And just what is his story?

Jennifer McCall doesn’t know — that’s what Johel knows in his gut but won’t be able to say until years later. (“She never understood who I was, brother, because she wasn’t Haitian. That’s not a sin. Just a fact.”) She doesn’t understand that when you come from a country like Haiti, that’s as much a part of you as your family. She doesn’t know that being Haitian makes you different, it’s something that runs deep in your blood and bones. When he was in college, Johel used to dream of writing the great Haitian novel just so he could give it to his girlfriends and say, This is where I come from . But his brain didn’t work like that: two dozen drafts of twenty pages each, and Johel was applying to law school. His roommate in college was from a family of Somali immigrants, and the two of them got along just fine, members of the fraternity of the fucked-up nations of the earth. Those two didn’t need to explain to each other how hard the world is, if you scratch away the shiny surface.

But sweet, wide-hipped, bosomy Jennifer McCall knows only that Johel is kind and generous and dignified and smart, that he likes to sip very good rum from his extensive collection and sit in an easy chair after work listening to good jazz or reading a serious book. She knows that he is the kind of man whom you can spend your life with, who will be good and kind and faithful to her and their children, who is provident and mature. Jennifer McCall was even invited to Johel’s bachelor party — although next week she’s going out with her girlfriends and, like it or not, he’s staying home, because she knows that by midnight Johel will be yawning, her big, cuddly smart teddy bear of a man wanting to snuggle up warm in bed with her.

What a cozy future they have together.

And she would have been at his party, too, enjoying his colleagues and family and keeping an eye on her man, if it hadn’t been for Grandma McCall’s little stroke, not so serious, thank goodness, but necessitating an unplanned trip back to Boston.

She was sorry to be gone, because Johel had planned that party with the care and discipline and capacity for hard work that he brought to bear on everything in his life, somewhere between neuroticism and obsession, right down to the food, which had to be Haitian enough for his aunts and uncles who are fully and one hundred percent old country — that is to say, the food had to be greasy and hot and piquant enough for Tonton Jean and Tonton Alphonse and Tante Marie, who don’t like food if it doesn’t make your mouth explode — and still interesting enough to please his yuppie colleagues who regularly put the best restaurants in Manhattan on their expense accounts. So Johel stressed over the menu: huge platters of fried plantains; mountains of griot marinated in lemons and Scotch bonnet chiles; beef tassot made the way his grandmother liked it, soaked in orange juice for a night, then boiled and fried; and tray after tray of deep-fried akra . Everything was drenched in piklis , so spicy the waiters carrying the platters out from the kitchen kept rubbing their eyes with the back of their tuxedoed sleeves. Not to mention the drinks: vats of Prestige in big steel buckets, and on every table a bottle of five-star Barbancourt and pitchers of cocktails made from Haitian grapefruit, available at a Haitian greengrocer in Flatbush.

And the music — Johel originally chose the date for the party because Tropicana was touring up the East Coast and he thought, How about that, if Tropicana could play my party? But Tropicana dropped out at the last moment owing to the ever-present visa issues, and he sat with Ti Maurice who owns Kombit, listening to demo tapes of all the major Haitian bands who play the East Coast circuit: Miami, Brooklyn, Montreal, and Boston. When he hears Erzulie L’Amour, he says to himself, That’s just right. He thinks of the old-time bands from the back-in-the-day that he never knew; he thinks of starry tropical nights and a big band playing under a gazebo poolside at the legendary hotels of Port-au-Prince, the El Rancho or the Ibo Lele, a lady’s voice wafting out over the palmy night, and all sophisticated Port-au-Prince society dressed in white jackets and pretty dresses, drinking rum sours and dancing until dawn.

With planning like that, how could the party be anything less than a success? Everybody had a great time, even though the band was late and Johel was fretting like a maniac — not that you could tell, if you weren’t as close to him as someone like Jennifer McCall, who wasn’t there, of course. The associates from the firm had their ties loose and were flirting, like the crazy guys they were deep down, with Johel’s pretty Haitian cousins, all of them dancing to the music on the stereo — where is that band? — and winking at Johel and saying, “You sure you don’t want to marry a nice Haitian girl?” The cousins in their tight dresses and short, flouncy skirts are laughing and saying, “I tell him that every day, but he don’t listen!” Even the partners from the law firm seem to be having a good time, there with their wives, drinking cocktails and talking about long-ago vacations down in the Caribbean. The Haitian people of course are having a better time. Tonton Jean is telling jokes in Creole — there’s no better language in the world for joke telling, puns, stories, making fun, and having a good time generally. Tonton Jean’s telling that story about the time he had to go to Baraderes on a donkey in a hurricane, and when he starts talking in the donkey’s voice, there isn’t a person in that room who can understand a word he’s saying that isn’t slapping the table and letting loose monstrous guffaws.

Where is that band? Haitian people, Johel is thinking, would be late to their own damn funeral if somebody else wasn’t hauling them around in the casket.

Now everybody’s sweating a little from the spicy food and cool drinks; everybody’s been eating for an hour straight, loading up their plates and wiping their foreheads with their handkerchiefs, complimenting Johel on the delicious salty spicy food and getting up for just one more fried plantain or just a little more chicken. That’s when Tonton Jean decides to take the microphone and make a toast to the groom, only he forgets that half the room doesn’t speak Creole, so Ti Maurice takes the other microphone to translate, only Ti Maurice’s English is not so good either, so what you got was something like this:

“My fwens, my fwens, I wanna tell all you a little thing which touch my heart. This boy, when he get here to New York See Tee, he start learn spelling, and when he goes to Washington to make a big champion, I make a bet, like this. I bet one hundred dollars that he lose.”

Everyone in the room giggles.

“And you know who I make this stoo-peed bet with? With his maman . She bet that he ween.”