Petion. She and Uncle Joseph had only to make it there before they could consider themselves safe, at least from the gangs. She’d have to find the right trail, perhaps the muddiest, the least-frequented path, through the maze of alleys that would deliver her there.
Filing down the pebbled alley leading to Man Jou’s house, Tante Zi alternated between walking too fast, then too slow. Just as she and Man Jou had agreed on the phone, Man Jou was waiting for her out front. They wanted things to seem as normal as possible, just a chance early-morning encounter.
“Would you like to come in?” asked Man Jou.
“Wi, mesi, but I can’t stay,” Tante Zi said.
My uncle was sitting on Man Jou’s bed, calmly reading his Bible. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on under the muumuu since Monday. His face appeared hollowed, his high cheekbones-so much like my father’s-sticking out a lot more than usual. Looking up and seeing Tante Zi, he seemed relieved but also sad.
“Fre mwen.“ Brother, Tante Zi said, kissing him on the forehead.
He raised his shoulders and shrugged, which she understood to mean, “Oh, well, things are what they are.”
“He doesn’t want to do it again,” Man Jou said. “He won’t wear the disguise.”
“Fre mwen,” Tante Zi said.
My uncle shook his head no.
“I’ll borrow a towel, then,” Tante Zi said. “We’ll cover his head, at least. If anyone sees us, they’ll think he’s a sick person, someone we’re taking to the hospital.“
My uncle was tired of hiding, but most of all he wanted to stop imposing on Man Jou, so he agreed to the towel.
When they stepped out into the early-morning sun, my uncle, even with part of his face covered by the towel, winced from the light. Tante Zi grabbed his hand and pulled him down yet another series of winding corridors and back alleys, their feet splashing in the mud as they went. Though she was yanking hard, dragging him at times, he put up no resistance, catching up as much as he could.
“He was so tired,” Tante Zi recalled, “it’s as if he had surrendered.”
She tried to stay as close to the road that was being patrolled as possible. There would be fewer people down those alleyways and certainly very few gang members. Still, every face seemed menacing. Even the oldest woman peering out from her porch. Even the youngest child jumping rope next to her. Her grip tightened on my uncle’s fingers with every step. They had only to make it to the Lycee, to one of the patrolling tanks, she kept reminding herself.
While still in the alleys, they got as close to the road as they could, then Tante Zi dashed across an empty street, still tugging at my uncle. Walking quickly, they followed the footpath by the square in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, just in case they had to run inside the church for shelter. Within a few short minutes, they were in front of the Lycee, but the UN patrol was no longer there. Racing past the old cathedral, they merged into the crowd of vendors and slow-moving cars.
That wasn’t so hard, Tante Zi remembers reading on my uncle’s face. Why hadn’t I tried it myself?
“You couldn’t have, brother,” she said, reassuring him. “They didn’t just take your things. They took your legs. They took your heart. You could have walked out of Man Jou’s house alone and dropped dead from the shock of seeing the few people who did not want to kill you.”
She held him by the elbow as they walked to her stationery stand. She hadn’t been able to work every day in the weeks since the demonstrations had started. Catching his breath, my uncle removed the towel from his head. He sat down on a footstool in front of her stand and began wiping the mud off his shoes with a piece of newspaper. Tante Zi offered him water that she was using to clean her own feet and he accepted some. He turned down the food she offered him when they were done. He was suddenly full of plans. He needed to go to the police’s anti-gang unit to report what had taken place, to the UN to file a complaint. Maxo was even now traveling from Leogane and was going to go with him to Miami. My uncle had to stop by a bank to get some money, then a nearby travel agency to confirm that his flight was still leaving, then buy a ticket for Maxo. Were the flights even operating? he wondered. But then again, chaos in Port-au-Prince was often restricted to certain areas only. There could be a war raging in some neighborhoods, while others were as peaceful as…usually one might say as a church or perhaps a cemetery, but peace was hard to find now in some churches and cemeteries too.
He also had to stop at a pharmacy for a refill of the medications he was constantly taking for his inflamed prostate and high blood pressure. That same pharmacy had herbal remedies too, tree-bark-soaked tonics mixed with liquid vitamins that, he believed, if not cures, helped the body fight certain illnesses. While there, he picked up a large bottle for my father and another one for himself. These were not very different from the types of hope-laden potions my father’s New York herbalist might have prepared, but my uncle, having used such potions all his life, was certain that they would work better simply because they were homegrown.
Once he’d picked up his medication, he took a taxi to the anti-gang unit across from the white-domed presidential palace. During the early Duvalier years, in the late fifties, early sixties, you were not supposed to stop even for a minute in front of the presidential palace or you might be suspected of plotting against the government and risk being shot. Also at that time, if your hair was not closely cropped or if you had something that was beginning to resemble an Afro, you could be arrested. You could also be put in jail for walking around barefoot, like a vagrant, even if you were too poor to buy shoes. These so-called chimeres, these young men, some of whom were dying at home from their bullet wounds, and others who were even now crammed into a nine-by-nine-foot holding cell inside the anti-gang building, would not have survived that era either.
Inside the building, the noise was deafening, the cries of complaints from the overcrowded holding cell, the police officers marching in, some of them still wearing balaclavas over their faces even while inside. My uncle quickly walked to a desk manned by one of the special forces officers who was not wearing a mask. Like his masked colleagues, this man was tall and large, larger than most Haitians. Sometimes he’d hear his parishioners say that the CIMO officers were not really Haitian or even human at all. They were machines created by the Americans who trained them to kill and destroy.
“Can I help you?” asked the giant officer at the desk, who looked rather kind and mild, not like a brutal killer at all.
“I’d like to make a report,” he said.
His mechanical voice probably echoed throughout the dim room. He may have looked around to see if anyone was watching, anyone who might recognize him, then go outside to wait for him, to kill him.
The officer told him to sit down.
“What are you reporting?” the officer asked, pulling out a form from a folder on top of a desk already cluttered with piles and piles of papers. The officer grabbed a pen from under another set of papers and readied himself to write.
At the top of the form were the words:
POLICE NATIONALE D’HAITI
SERVICE D’IVESTIGATION ET ANTI-GANG (SIAG)
SECTION DE DOLEANCES
The last line indicated that my uncle was in the grievance section of the national police’s investigation and anti-gang unit. And as if to remove any hope that the matter he was complaining about might actually be looked into, the word “investigation” was misspelled on the department letterhead.
The nature of the incident in question was summarized as “pillaging, theft and incineration.” My uncle’s declaration to the officer recounted what had happened that Sunday at the church as well as the following day. Among the many things he said he lost were “nos papiers important,” our
