them, but would he make it through the barricades and to the bus depot? He could also go to Tante Zi’s in Delmas, but would he have the same problem?
He could think of only one solution. Tante Denise had a cousin who lived right on the fringes of the neighborhood, near the perimeters of the gangs’ barricades. Her house was somewhere between the Lycee Petion and Our Lady of Perpetual Help church, where the UN tanks often gathered. If he could make it to her place, then they could wait for an opportune moment when the tanks were there to slip out of the neighborhood.
“You know Man Jou?” he asked Ferna.
She did.
“I’ll go to her house,” he said. “She has a telephone. I can call Maxo from there. I don’t want him to try to come back for me. They might kill him.”
Now he could also hear the shuffle of other feet in the dark-Anne’s. Anne lit a small kerosene lamp and moved it toward his face.
“You can’t go out in your own clothes,” Ferna said. “We need to disguise you.”
Reaching into an open suitcase laid out by his feet, Ferna pulled out a dark, curly, shoulder-length wig, a wide-rimmed wicker sun hat and a long flowered muumuu large enough to fit over his clothes. He couldn’t figure out why she had all these things packed in the suitcase like that. Maybe she was thinking that one day she too might need to escape.
“You must disguise yourself,” Ferna insisted again. “It will be light soon and someone might see you.”
What choice did he have? He could not let himself be captured. He could not surrender either, to be butchered, to die. So he let Ferna and Anne slip the muumuu over his clothes. As they placed the wig on his head, the hair fell against the side of his face, itching, just as his wife’s wigs had when he would kiss her long ago. Though she wore wigs for a long time, he remembered how she often found them intolerable, yanking them off her head as soon as she got home.
Wearing the wig and with the muumuu over his own clothes, he stepped out into the alley with Anne and Ferna at his side. There was an odd stillness to the neighborhood, the houses merging with the murky shadows in the dark. As they guided him up and down the hills and inclines of the winding neighborhood alleyways, he felt like a blind man being led through a labyrinth. Walking briskly, they would occasionally come across a boy stumbling home, drunk. A girl heading to sleep after a night of selling her body. A man, or was it a woman, who, following a furtive look at his very male shoes, quickly hurried past them, head further bent, face further hidden, this person perhaps also a fugitive, perhaps also fleeing.
Man Jou bore the balloon-shaped jowls of Tante Denise’s clan as they aged. She was often ready with a smile, but even readier with a scowl. She was known for her quick temper, but also for her generosity and sense of humor. So when Uncle Joseph showed up at her door dressed in drag, she opened the door, laughed, then let him in. Her house, like Ferna’s, was small, a living room and one even smaller bedroom. However, she had a large bed, with enough room for someone to disappear under it without suffocating.
My uncle spent the next two days at Man Jou’s house, sleeping on a twin mattress at the foot of her bed. As he lay there, often after attempting a series of phone calls through which he’d been unable to reach either Maxo and the children or Tante Zi, he would listen to Man Jou’s accounts of an increasingly dismal state of affairs. In nearby Rue Saint Martin, the police had ordered four young men to lie facedown on the ground and had shot them at close range in the back of the head. Their bodies were left to rot on the street for more than forty-eight hours, as a gruesome deterrent. In the meantime, the gangs had constructed new barricades near his church with trash and burnt-out cars. Only residents who were on good terms with the gang members were being allowed to enter his street. The gangs had set up residence in his apartment, the school, the church, establishing a base from which to operate on his premises.
“If he ever comes back,” the chief dread was said to have declared, “we’ll burn him alive.”
Limbo
My uncle was able to reach Maxo and Tante Zi on their cell phones the following Wednesday night. They’d exhausted their minutes calling all over town, trying to track him down. Finally they’d refilled their cards and waited for his call.
Once his children were safely settled in Leogane, Maxo had decided to travel with his father to Miami and planned to meet up with him at Tante Zi’s as soon as his father made it out of Bel Air. When my uncle called Tante Zi, whose stationery stand was on Grand Rue, only a few minutes’ walk from Man Jou’s, Tante Zi decided to go and get her brother.
“Don’t come,” my uncle pleaded. “Not now, Zi. Not yet.”
“We can’t just leave you there,” Tante Zi said. “You have your ticket. You can leave the country tomorrow. We have to get you out.”
The next morning, Thursday, Tante Zi got dressed in one of the all-white outfits she’d been wearing since 1999, when her oldest son, Marius, died of AIDS in Miami at the age of thirty.
At the time of Marius’s death, he’d left no trace of his more-than-five- year undocumented stay in Miami. No note for his mother. No bankbooks or jewelry, nothing that could be placed in a sealed pouch and mailed to his family. Because of the void out of which Marius had been shipped to her in a shiny American coffin, Tante Zi always carried pictures of his corpse with her wherever she went and wore only white clothes, as a daily reminder of his passing.
Tante Zi was wearing her mourning garb when she approached the first barricade in Bel Air that morning.
“Son,” she called out to one of the many armed young men guarding a narrow path between two shelled-out yellow school buses. One of the men bore an eerie resemblance to Marius, her dark, broom-thin, beautiful boy. She held out a hand to him. He reached back. She quickly pressed a Haitian twenty-dollar bill into it, turning away before the others could see.
“Pray hard,” he mumbled. Maybe he thought she was on her way to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to attend early-morning Mass.
He motioned for her to walk past and she did, moving farther into the neighborhood.
This was the first time she’d been in Bel Air since Sunday’s operation. She had never seen it so bad. The streets were cluttered with trash. There were empty tear gas canisters, hollowed grenades, spent cartridge and bullet shells and other garbage everywhere. Some houses were missing entire sections from the bulldozing by UN earthmovers.
As she walked through another checkpoint, this one a pile of tires as tall as she was, she raised both her hands over her head even though no one was there. Clutched in her right fist was a white handkerchief, which she waved back and forth to show that she was unarmed. The UN patrols and the gangs’ checkpoints were separated by only a few blocks, leaving room for someone like her, who just happened to be on the street at the wrong time, to be shot by both sides.
The sun had risen and a few people were beginning to venture out of their houses. She was trying her best to blend in, walking slowly as though she were just strolling and not going anywhere in particular, but she was also sweating, soaking her cotton blouse and skirt. Not since those long days between hearing the news of Marius’s death and waiting for his body to come home had she felt so frightened.
A UN tank was parked a good sprint away, down the hill, near the Lycee
