It was quiet again. My uncle waited for the children to nod off before discussing strategy with the adults.
“They’re mostly angry at me,” he said. “They’re angry because they think I asked the riot police and the UN to go up on the roof. Everyone who came tonight asked me, ‘Why did you let them in?’ as though I had a choice.”
“Maxo,” he said, putting as much command as he could behind his mechanized voice. “Take your wife and the children and go to Leogane with your aunt and uncles. If you leave at four in the morning, you’ll be on one of the first camions to Leogane.”
“I’m not going to leave you,” Maxo said.
“You have to,” my uncle insisted. He wanted to paint a painful enough picture that would force Maxo to leave, not just to save himself but the children as well. So he borrowed an image from his boyhood of the fears that a lot of parents, including his, had for their children during the American occupation.
“They’re very angry with us right now,” he told Maxo. “What if they bayonet the children right in front of us? Would you want to see that? Your children torn from limb to limb right before your eyes?”
Maxo paced the perimeter of the room, walking back and forth, thinking.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll make sure the children leave safely, then I’ll come back for you. You call my cell phone as soon as you can and we’ll meet at Tante Zi’s house in Delmas.”
“You should leave with us,” Leone persisted.
I’ll never know whether my uncle thought he was too old or too familiar to his neighbors, including the gang members, to be harmed in any way, but somehow he managed to convince everyone to leave. So when the sun rose the next morning, he was all by himself in a bullet-riddled compound.
Hell
Granme Melina liked to tell a story about a man who one day fell asleep and woke up in a foreign land where he knew no one and no one knew him. Finding himself on his back in the middle of a dirt road filled with strangers, he looked up at the blurry faces around him, which were framed by a gloomy gray sky, and asked, “Where am I?”
“You’re where you are,” answered a booming voice.
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“Where you need to be,” replied the voice.
“I didn’t ask to be here,” the man said, “wherever it is.”
“No matter how you ended up here,” said the voice, “here you are.”
Tired of the roundabout conversation, the man said, “I want you to tell me right now where I am. If you don’t, I’m going to be angry.”
“Who cares about your anger?” answered the voice. “No one is scared of you here.”
Truly upset now, the man said, “Tell me where I am right now!”
“You are in hell,” replied the voice.
And since these were long ago times, the man didn’t know what hell was, even though he could already see that it was not a happy place.
“What is hell?” he asked.
“Hell,” replied the voice, “is whatever you fear most.”
The next morning, Monday, at four a.m., Maxo, his children, his aunt and uncles reluctantly left for Leogane. My uncle sat alone in his room and gathered some papers, including his passport and his Miami plane ticket, which he’d purchased weeks before to visit some Haitian churches there. He was scheduled to leave on Friday, October 29, just as he’d told my father.
The plane ticket bookmarked the Lord’s Prayer in his Bible. He would now leave the house, for how long he wasn’t sure, but he hadn’t wanted to put the children’s lives in danger by walking out with them. Besides, he was still hoping that the situation might somehow be resolved. He could talk to the dreads, as the dreadlocked gang leaders were also called, and explain. After all, before they were called dreads or even chimeres, they were young men, boys, many of whom had spent their entire lives in the neighborhood. He knew their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts. Some of them had attended his church, his school, had eaten in his lunch program. Many had been to his church for christenings, weddings and funerals. He would often lend them his generator for soccer tournaments and block parties. He had even given many of the U.S. deportees among them jobs as English tutors for his students. The shooting from his roof had destroyed an uneasy equilibrium between him and them, but surely one of them would have a fond memory that could override what they wrongly believed he’d done.
Before heading downstairs, my uncle removed the suit he’d had on since the day before and changed into a maroon pants and gray jacket ensemble he sometimes wore on long trips to the countryside. He put on a pair of old brown leather shoes, which, like all his other shoes, had been repaired and resoled many times. I’m not going anywhere, he wanted his clothes to say. And up to that point he wasn’t sure he was.
As soon as he walked down to the courtyard he heard one of his neighbors hissing at the side gate, trying to get his attention. It was barely light, but the streets were already full with vendors hawking their wares and people walking back from Mass, children heading to school and camions and taxis dropping off and picking up fares. His neighbor Darlie, a tall and skinny girl with long braids dangling past her waist, quickly slipped through when he opened the gate and pulled it shut behind her.
“Pastor,” she whispered, “last night they took the church’s generator and when Gigi tried to stop them, they picked her up and threw her off one of the terraces.”
“O bon dye,” My God, he mouthed, raising both his hands to his head. How could Gigi, another kind neighbor, have put herself between an armed gang and a generator? And how could he have not heard her screams from his room?
“Is she alive?” he mouthed. He knew better than to use his voice box, which would draw attention.
“One of her legs is broken,” the neighbor continued. “She’s in the hospital.”
My uncle reached into his pocket where he had his passport and plane ticket, and into his jacket pocket where he often kept his Bible, on the off chance there might be a few dollars left. All his money was gone.
“But this is not what I came to say. Pastor, you should leave now. They’re coming. Go away quick. They’re coming.”
She unlatched the gate and slipped out. My uncle was trying to close it behind her when a man’s large hand reached in and yanked the metal latch away from his fingers. A short, beefy youth with a small Haitian flag wrapped around his head quickly stepped into the courtyard. He had a face pockmarked with what looked like lines of razor scars. He was followed by another man, this one taller, thinner, with a thin, uneven beard and a white fishnet cap covering an abundant head of long dreadlocked hair. A bald- headed man followed. The last one opened the gate wider to allow in a few others. Then followed another group, then another, all their faces quickly merging into one angry haze. Suddenly he understood the true workings of a mob, one infuriated body morphing into another until they all became limbs to one raging monster.
The courtyard was soon filled with young men. And when he looked up at the balconies and terraces, they were crammed too.
“Pastor,” the chief dread shouted, his voice strained and hoarse. “Thanks to you, we lost fifteen guys yesterday and we have six with bullet wounds. Because you let the fuckers in,
