Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The judge was thinking of a funny story. So he was just a little judge, thirteen years old, fresh off the metaphorical boat, just arrived in the Cold Country, and believe me, you people don’t know cold until you know an upstate winter, and he was competing in his first spelling bee. Spelling? He barely spoke a word of the language. He would have been better off at a flying bee.

Then he explains to the kids what a spelling bee is, how it works, and they’re nodding up and down, locked in on him, emoting with him, sharing his story — even Toussaint.

So this is an ordinary school spelling bee, and he has no idea if he can compete with all these white kids. He’s just a little Haitian boy, after all. Strange thing about being a Haitian. We know we kicked Napoleon’s ass, won our freedom and independence … same time, we’re never sure we’re as good as anyone. They asked him to spell “I,” he might have stuttered and choked, he was so nervous. And what’s the very first word that comes up? What did the good Lord ask him to spell right there and then?

Ratatouille.

R-A-T-A-T-O-U-I–L-L-E.

And he knew that word because his Haitian mother had clipped a recipe from Le Nouvelliste and left it on his Haitian refrigerator for the first twelve years of his Haitian life. That’s when Johel knew he belonged. He knew he could compete. Doesn’t matter that he screwed up his next word, “irony.” He knew he was as good as anyone anywhere.

Not the next year, but the year after that, the judge was national spelling champion, best speller in the whole country. They put him on TV.

Haitian kid.

Then he finished third in his class, straight off to college, scholarship.

Haitian kid.

Law school, where he was Law Review ; clerkship for a United States appellate judge.

Haitian kid.

Just like them.

All they needed to do was go down the road, and to go down the road, you needed a road.

And there was one kid in particular who was soaking in that message — a kid who couldn’t have spelled “ratatouille” to save his life, no less defined it, and that was Toussaint Legrand. I’d hauled him along to the judge’s meeting, no agenda or intention on my part, just thinking it might interest him. But this was what Toussaint Legrand — those big space-alien eyes not blinking, his whole being absorbed in the judge’s message — had been looking for.

After that, Toussaint didn’t stop coming over to my place, but he started heading over to the judge’s place too. Soon he was knocking on the judge’s door three times a week, the judge inviting him in to sit and watch soccer, the judge asking how his family was doing. When Toussaint asked for money, the judge said no.

He said, “Toussaint, you’ve got to take your own destiny in your hands. Nobody ever gave me anything in my life but that road. Your road isn’t a good road, but you got to get yourself down that road by yourself.”

And here’s what Toussaint Legrand is thinking about. He’s thinking about the mango trees on his uncle’s land in Carrefour Prince. He might not be able to spell, but he can sure as hell add, multiply, and divide. And what he’s thinking about is how fine he’d look if he could only sell the mangoes in Port-au-Prince. He’s thinking that if there was a road, that would change everything. He wouldn’t have to paint his hair with shoe polish. He could afford deodorant. He’d find a girl.

* * *

All Toussaint knew his whole life had been bad roads.

He was born in a little village about an hour’s walk from Jérémie. Out in Carrefour Prince, there was no electricity, no running water, no nothing but sugarcane, goats, beans, and fruit trees: mangoes, bananas, plantains, and breadfruit.

And no road.

Toussaint’s bad luck began before birth. His daddy was a master of the dark mystical arts, a boko named Destiné Eric. When Toussaint was five months in his mamma’s belly, Destiné Eric quarreled with an unsatisfied client who swore that he would take his vengeance — which he did, most unmagically, cutting Destiné Eric’s throat open with a machete. Toussaint was the thirdborn of a brood that would eventually swell to five brothers by five different fathers, all dead before their children were born.

Madame Legrand sold flour, sugar, rice, corn, and a myriad of Chinese-made plastic housewares at a stall in the market. When Toussaint was twelve, his little brother Junior got into a fistfight after school. Madame Legrand confronted the bully’s mother. Words got heated. This other lady cursed her: “Marie, you’re too rich. You won’t have money again!” After that her products ceased to sell. Weevils invaded the flour. She got too tired to get up and go sell. She ran out of money. She pulled Toussaint out of school, no longer able to pay his school fees.

Out of school, Toussaint got to vagabonding all day long around Jérémie. At the bus station he fell into conversation with a fat lady from the seaside village of Corail. Toussaint looked at the lady’s huge thighs and broad behind, her arms as thick as his chest, and he could almost smell the rice and meat in the folds of her clothes. Where there’s fat, there’s food , he thought. So he smiled at Suzette, melting that fat lady’s heart, and Toussaint had a new family, three hours’ walk down a bad road from his old family.

But things in Corail weren’t as Toussaint had hoped. There was a house to clean and dishes to wash and pots to scrub and buckets of water to haul; and although he wanted to be one of Suzette’s eight happy kids, he wasn’t. All the kids slept in comfy beds, but Toussaint slept on the floor in the kitchen with the rats and the bugs; and when Suzette made big fat-lady meals of rice and beans and meat, first she fed her kids, then herself, only then giving Toussaint the skinny leftovers.

Toussaint had been living twenty-one dog years chez Suzette when there was an incident — a nasty one.

Suzette’s husband was a tired, mean man who loved goats; he kept them and raised them and bred them and ate them and sold them. He had a ram that he kept for stud, a hearty, rancorous, endlessly horny beast just like himself, named Cerberus, and one of Toussaint’s jobs was keeping an eye on Cerberus when he was at pasture. A goat like Cerberus was the envy of many another goat breeder in the district.

Now, just what happened to Cerberus is a matter of dispute, Toussaint claiming that he asked one of Suzette’s kids to watch Cerberus while he himself helpfully hauled buckets of water, said child of Suzette thereupon irresponsibly falling into a deep and typical slumber. The other story was that Toussaint himself had fallen asleep, allowing Cerberus to gnaw his way through his rope. Either way, Cerberus was gone, most likely now rutting his way through some other man’s she-goats. Truth in the affair may be indeterminate, but blame was assigned nevertheless to Toussaint, who was beaten with a thick leather strap Suzette’s husband maintained for such exigencies, until thick welts like mushrooms sprang up on his slender face and arms and he was huddled in a ball in the kitchen. That’s when Toussaint took stock of his life and conditions — he was as skinny as the day he showed up and no closer to glory or a girl — and decided to take the bad road home.

So after three years on his own, Toussaint walked back to his mamma in Jérémie, where he did nothing and had nothing to do, and nothing was the problem that he faced all day every day: nothing to eat, nothing to wear. Toussaint had been back in Jérémie just a few months, and he woke up one morning to hear his little brothers crying on account of their being so hungry and his mamma not being capable of feeding them nothing. So he went out on the road looking for a vision of what to do, and a vision came to him of his mamma’s uncle out near the airport. It was a long walk, and when he made it out there, his uncle was boiling up potatoes and manioc, which made it hard for said uncle to deny the existence in his garden of potatoes and manioc. When Toussaint explained that Junior and Israel were crying hungry back home, his mamma’s uncle dug him up some potatoes and manioc, which Toussaint tied up in a black plastic bag and balanced on his head, and went walking home, feeling somewhat resentful that he was doing what his mamma should have been doing, begging for food for the little men.