“If you join a militia, you’ll die.” Rezia stops to wipe her damp forehead with her vetiver-scented hankie that now looks like a surrender flag. “Then who will sing at your funeral?”
The room is quiet now, except for the fan spinning overhead and a car horn blaring outside. Mariselle throws her head back, empties her entire glass in her mouth, then flings it across the room. We watch it fly, then land on the wall, breaking into a torrent of little pieces.
“Hey!” Rezia shuffles over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards. “Don’t wreck my place. If I didn’t have this place, I’d be as crazy as the two of you.”
“We’re not crazy.” Mariselle tries to get up, but her knees buckle under her and she falls back in her chair.
“Freda, why don’t you do it now?” Mariselle says. “Why don’t you sing your own funeral song?”
“We’ll help you,” Rezia chimes in from where she’s sweeping up glass across the room.
I clear my throat to show them that I can do it, am willing to do it, sing my own funeral song. Why not?
And that’s how I begin my final performance as a funeral singer, or any kind of singer at all.
I sing “Brother Timonie.”
Rezia and Mariselle catch on quickly and join in. We sing until our voices grow hoarse, sometimes making Brother Timonie a sister.
When we’ve exhausted poor Timonie, we move on to a few more songs, happier songs. And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.
THE DEW BREAKER CIRCA 1967
1
He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin.
The sun had not yet set when he plowed his black DKW within a few inches of a row of vendors who had lined themselves along where he’d imagined the curb might be, to sell all kinds of things, from grilled peanuts to packs of cigarettes. He wanted a perfect view of the church entrance in case the opportunity came to do the job from inside his car without his having to get out and soil his shoes.
Catching the street merchants stealing glimpses at his elephantine frame, he shifted now and again to better fit between the car seat and the steering wheel, his wide belly spilling over his belt to touch the tip of the gearshift.
Later one of the women, who didn’t want her name used, would tell the Human Rights people, “He looked like a pig in a calabash sitting there. Yes, I watched him. I watched him for a long time. I tried to frighten him with my old eyes. I belong to that church and I did not want to see my pastor die.”
Rumors had been spreading for a while that the preacher had enemies in high places. His Baptist church was the largest in Bel-Air, one of the oldest and poorest communities in Haiti’s capital, a neighborhood that one American journalist had described a few months earlier in a
The church was called L’Eglise Baptiste des Anges, the Baptist Church of the Angels, which was printed in chalky letters on a clapboard sign over the front doors. Above the sign was a likeness of Jesus, scrawny, with a hollowed ivory face and two emaciated hands extended toward passersby.
The preacher had a radio show, which aired at seven every Sunday morning on Radio Lumiere, so that those who could not visit his church could listen to his sermons before they went about their holy day. Rumors of the preacher’s imminent encounter with the forces in power started as soon as he’d begun broadcasting his sermons on the radio the year before. Those at the presidential palace who monitored such things were at first annoyed, then enraged that the preacher was not sticking to the “The more you suffer on earth, the more glorious your heavenly reward” script. In his radio sermons, later elaborated on during midmorning services, the preacher called on the ghosts of brave men and women in the Bible who’d fought tyrants and nearly died. (He’d started adding women when his wife passed away six months before.) He exalted Queen Esther, who had intervened to halt a massacre of her people; Daniel, who had tamed lions intended to devour him; David, who had pebbled Goliath’s defeat; and Jonah, who had risen out of the belly of a sea beast.
“And what will we do with
He liked to imagine the whole country screaming, “What will we do with our beast?” but instead it seemed as if everyone was walking around whispering the sanctioned national prayer, written by the president himself: “Our father who art in the national palace, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done, in the capital, as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive us our anti-patriotic thoughts, but do not forgive those anti- patriots who spit on our country and trespass against it. Let them succumb to the weight of their own venom. And deliver them not from evil.”
The church members who were the most loyal of the radio listeners, when they were visited at home in the middle of the night and dragged away for questioning in the torture cells at the nearby Casernes Dessalines military barracks, would all bravely answer the same way when asked what they thought the preacher meant when he demanded, “What will we do with our beast?”
“We are Christians,” they would say. “When we talk about a beast, we mean Satan, the devil.”
The Human Rights people, when they gathered in hotel bars at the end of long days of secretly counting corpses and typing single-spaced reports, would write of the flock’s devotion to the preacher, noting, “
Not all the church members agreed with the preacher’s political line, however. Some would even tell you, “If the pastor continues like this, I leave the church. He should think about his life. He should think about our lives.”
The light of day vanished as he waited, the street vendors exchanging places around him, day brokers going home to be replaced by evening merchants who sold fried meats, plantains, and more cigarettes, late into the night. Among the dusk travelers were his colleagues in their denim uniforms. He didn’t know them intimately, but recognized a few. Those he did know loved to wear their uniforms, even though he didn’t think they should on jobs like this. Not that there was anything subtle about this job. He was sure that even before the “uniforms” had arrived some of the neighborhood people, upon observing him, had already gone off to warn the preacher. He was equally certain that neither he nor his uniformed acquaintances would deter the preacher. From what he knew of the preacher’s reputation, he was certain that the preacher would come and the evening service would go on. For if he stayed home, it would mean the devil had won, the devil of his own fear.
The preacher didn’t live far away. Four agents were even now in front of his modest two-room house, waiting to snatch him in case he tried to escape. Somehow he found it hard to imagine the preacher even being afraid. Perhaps he too was falling for the religious propaganda. The preacher would not be like the others, he told himself, who in the final hours before their arrests would plot impossible departures, run to trusted friends or relatives to parcel out their goods and their children.
In his work there were many approaches. Some of his colleagues tried to go as far from the neighborhoods where they grew up as possible when doing a task like this. Others relished returning to the people in their home areas, people who’d refused cough syrup for a mother or sister as she sat up the whole night coughing up blood. Some would rather “disappear” the schoolteachers who’d told them that they had heads like mules and would never learn to read or write. Others wanted to take revenge on the girls who were too self-important, who never smiled when their names were called out or when they were hissed at or whistled at in the street. Others still wanted to beat the girls’ parents for asking their last names and judging their lineage not illustrious enough. But he liked to
