Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

I was halfway to the beach when a very skinny kid with an incongruously deep bass voice stopped me. If you closed your eyes, it was like talking to Sidney Poitier. Open them, and there was a malnourished kid who looked about twelve, with a large plastic bag of potatoes and manioc balanced on his head. He had a face like a space alien, with very big eyes, a broad forehead, and prominent cheekbones tapering down to an angular chin. I don’t remember how he began the conversation — that we were conversing at all was a sign of what a natural salesman he was — but the upshot was this: he was seventeen years old and called himself a student; his family had no money; he had no money; his mother had no money; his little brothers were hungry; and he wanted to be an artist. He asked me for money to feed his little brothers and I gave him the change in my pocket. His name, he told me, was Toussaint Legrand.

A few days later Toussaint presented himself at the front gate of the Sénateur’s mother’s house. Jérémie is a small place, and Toussaint, going from neighborhood to neighborhood and door to door, had found me. As he waited for me, he had a look on his face of patient, fragile hopefulness. I invited him into the house, where he drank a glass of orange juice. Much later I learned that he was so excited to see me that he hadn’t slept the night before. That’s exactly the look he had on his face as he sipped his orange juice, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he, Toussaint Legrand, of Carrefour Prince, Haiti, was sitting there on my terrace drinking orange juice.

In the weeks and months thereafter, no pretty lady has ever been courted by such an animated and constant suitor as I was courted by Toussaint Legrand. He came by the house all the time. He was unshakable.

My wife and I tried many schemes to convince Toussaint to leave us alone. We told him that he was allowed to visit only every third day. Every third day without fail he showed up at our door. We asked him to visit only after five in the evening, with the result that we had a standing appointment with Toussaint Legrand at 5:01 p.m. Once, we asked him not to visit us at all. Hah! He was resistant to hints, oblivious to suggestions. What did he want? Not just to ask for money, but also to say hello, or to eat a meal, or to hang around, or to ask a question. What he wanted more than anything, I think, was to be part of the family. He wanted to sit with us out on the terrace in the evening and belong .

In the end, Toussaint wore us down. He was the kind of kid you could horse around with. He was always up for kicking around a soccer ball or taking a trip to the beach. You could send him up the mango tree, and he’d come down with half a dozen fresh, juicy pieces of fruit. He had an easy laugh. You could tease him about girls. My wife taught him to dance. After a couple of months, it got to be an accepted fact of life that two or three or five days a week, Toussaint Legrand would show up at our house and hang around until we told him that he had to leave. It was hard to be mean to somebody so young who wanted so badly to be liked.

Brilliant smile aside, Toussaint wasn’t very handsome. He had terrible body odor, and his hair was reddish at the roots — he asked me for money to buy soap and shoe polish, which he rubbed in his head. His red hair bothered him more than hunger, because every girl on the street knew, just by looking at him, that he was broke. Even the qualities of Toussaint’s own character weighed against him. He told me he wanted to be an artist but had no talent: only once did I ever see him actually try to make art. Illiterate, years behind his age in a school he rarely bothered to attend — who could even start to say how intelligent or capable he was?

It was hard to imagine somebody who had been dealt fewer good cards in life than Toussaint. He and his family had nothing. They had no money, no property, no savings, no skills, nothing but hungry bellies. They were out in the storm. And so the family lurched from crisis to crisis. Shortly after I got to know Toussaint, his mother’s stall at the market caught fire. Then Israel, his younger brother, contracted typhoid, and the family spent his brother Junior’s school fees on doctors. Then Toussaint’s grandmother died, and the family was desperate to give her a decent funeral. About once a week Toussaint would rap at our gate late at night with some new, ever more elaborate story of dramatic need. Some of these stories might even have been true.

Toussaint had only one asset in life, but it was considerable. It was the reason why I gave him money. Despite every disadvantage he suffered, despite every self-inflicted wound, he was nevertheless making his way in the world with radiant, unshakable optimism. One day he bought a hen, whom he named Catalina. This was to be the start of a chicken-breeding empire. Then his family got hungry and ate Catalina. Toussaint was undismayed. He asked me for money to buy another starter chicken. If you gave him fifty gourdes, he’d give half to the kids on the street to buy candy — Toussaint saw himself as somebody who could afford to be generous. When he told me he wanted to be an artist, I think he chose the word almost at random from a list of grand words that to him were synonymous with hope. He would tell me later that he wanted to be a preacher, a doctor, a poet, an engineer. Step by step, he went forward toward an opaque future that he was sure — absolutely, unshakably sure — would one day be glorious.

In the meanwhile, he got by.

* * *

The judge had a discussion and study group at his house three times weekly. He started by inviting the smartest high school kids in town, all of them curious about the world and wanting to know what was out there past the sea and the hills; but the group soon expanded to include kids back home from university in Port-au-Prince, seminary students, young lawyers — anyone eager to talk, listen, argue, and think. Nominally a group devoted to human rights issues, they’d come to the judge with stories of abuse of power and corruption and the kinds of things that make up the pages of the Amnesty International country report, but soon it was more like a bull session on Justice and Liberty and Freedom. What does it mean to have the Separation of Powers? How do we get an Independent Judiciary here in Haiti? What is the Rule of Law? Anything with a capital letter was grist for the mill: they’d sit out on the judge’s terrace, yakking until sundown. Then the judge, who was a talker, would start talking about whatever was on his mind: building a road to Port-au-Prince, the mangoes, how long it took fish to get to market in the DR. Long before I had sat with Terry and the judge that day out at Anse du Clerc, those kids had heard the speech a hundred times, had started to repeat it around town themselves.

Every time I saw Johel, he was on me. “Brother, why don’t you come over and talk to my kids?”

“What do they want to talk to me for?”

“These kids — Port-au-Prince is the end of the world for them. They want to meet anyone who’s been anywhere. ”

Next time, same story: “Brother, when are you coming to talk to my kids? And why don’t you take Toussaint with you?”

After the shooting incident, Terry had insisted that the judge throw up a wall around his house, so three masons worked ten hours a day for three days, and now when you came up the road, there was a fifteen-foot stone wall topped with razor wire. Open the gate and you’d expect a mansion, something commensurate with that mighty wall, but there was just a tiny concrete cottage, painted sunflower yellow, still pockmarked with bullet holes.

Now keep your eyes on Toussaint Legrand. He’s the skinny kid in the back of the room, looking all shy and intimidated by these smart, lycée-educated kids. But the judge is saying with his eyes, Toussaint, I’m glad you’re here.