“I am leaving for Port-au-Prince next week,” he said. “I would like to write to you.”
“No, don’t ever write to me,” I answered.
“Why?”
I began trembling so badly that he looked at me with astonishment. He grabbed my hand and I jumped as if he had stung me. The contrast between our joined hands had overwhelmed me. I shoved him so hard that he exclaimed:
“Do I disgust you that much?”
“Don’t mock me,” I shouted. “I’m warning you, don’t mock me.”
I made a run for my room and watched him from behind my window blinds. Tears of rage and bitterness ran down my cheeks, and when my mother came into my room, I cried out:
“Why am I black? Why?”
“Your father will make a rich heiress of you.”
“I don’t want anyone to marry me for my money. I will never get married, never.”
“Claire!”
The next day, my father left for Port-au-Prince, accompanied by Laurent. I had seen my mother hand him a bag of money and I heard her cry and reproach him for wasting everything we had to satisfy his vain political passions.
“You are ruining your children, Henri,” she was saying. “You have already sold almost two hundred acres. You have to stop.”
“Let me try my luck one last time,” my father answered. “Over a thousand men are with me. The best families in Port-au-Prince have called for me, all I need to do is to earn the people’s trust and I will win it with this…” (He pointed to the bag of money.) “I will be gone for some time. Have Demosthenes go to the fields with Claire. Let them make sure we aren’t being duped by the peasants. Adieu, my wife. Perhaps you will soon be the First Lady.”
Demosthenes went to Lion Mountain by himself because I refused to go.
“Think how angry your father will be, Claire,” my mother repeated to me. “Think how angry.”
But I stood my ground.
Well before my father’s return, we learned that Tancrede Auguste [20] had been elected. Father returned from the capital looking old, demoralized and nearly ruined. He was welcomed by his diehard supporters, who ranted against the new president, whom they called incompetent.
In less than two years, the country saw four other heads of state come and go well before their terms were up, due to the unremitting anarchy, poverty, killings, and the constant uprisings by the Cacos [21] of the North. The insurrections completely drained state funds. The political climate in our province as well suggested that the country was rolling through one disaster after another on its way into an abyss. The government of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam [22] was cornered and appealed to the Americans for financial assistance. That day I saw my father’s faction give in to their anger, roaming the streets, drawing crowds. They seemed to have gone mad.
“Incompetent!” my father yelled. “All of them, incompetent! They are leading us straight to our ruin. You will soon see Americans in charge of all our institutions. They are waiting for the right moment to jump at our throats. They want to run our financial affairs. They will get control of customs. They’ll throw a noose around our necks. If we keep fighting and spilling our blood in fratricidal struggles, we’ll see an army of American soldiers land on our soil. Haitians don’t know what they need. The only man who can save them from this disaster, they will never choose him, they will never put him in power.”
“Long live Clamont!” the crowd cried out. “Long live Henri Clamont!” He was carried off in triumph this time, and my mother, despite her tears, had to give him another bag of money, which he distributed to a group of strangers who were asking for an audience and who called him the future president. More and more optimistic, he neglected his plantations. His fixation with power gnawed away at him. He was always leaving for Port-au-Prince, by boat and on horseback, each time returning more disappointed and visibly older.
“We have only a few hundred acres left,” my mother complained. “We are nearly ruined! What will become of our children?”
“Oh, my wife!” my father vituperated, “give me your support instead of your recriminations. Do you think that all those who have assumed the presidency just crossed their arms and put their feet up before their election?”
“But you will never be elected president,” my mother tried to reason with him.
“Enough!” my father ordered. “I will take you to Port-au-Prince just so you can witness my popularity with your own eyes. I bask in praise there, and my speeches are applauded with such force that I choke up with emotion. They don’t want brawlers and rebels anymore, they will choose an honest tiller of the soil like me to save the country from disaster. We are weighed down by debt. After I presented my plan for economic independence the audience carried me away in triumph. My wife, are you listening? In triumph I was carried away, and not by a band of flea-bitten bums but by men of culture who represent the cream of Port-au-Prince, the only sensible, capable and representative class of people.”
He noticed me, came toward me and said:
“Even though you refused to help me, you will choose the man of your dreams, I promise you that.”
He twirled his mustache, stuck out his chest and left.
“Down with Clamont!” we heard.
“Who dared say that?” my father roared.
Tonton Mathurin, dressed in his old
“Me,” he shouted. “Clamont, you are nothing but a pitiful ignoramus, a pretentious and narrow-minded mulatto. The degree in agronomy you picked up in Paris would impress only an imbecile like yourself. A phony! You are nothing but a phony and I swear no man with any sense will back you. We have seen four incompetent men come to power, and that’s enough. That era is past before it even began.”
“Mathurin,” my father barked. “How dare you speak? You, the immoral one, shunned by society…”
“What society are you talking about, Clamont? The one made up of stubborn people like you who boast of being white and who close their doors in the faces of worthy black men? Have you forgotten your grandmother, Clamont, the black woman whose
“I have forgotten her in fact,” my father replied, pale with wrath.
“There is your eldest daughter to refresh your memory. I thank God for arranging things so well.”
A crowd gathered. Some listened smiling to Mathurin’s words, others like Laurent and Dr. Audier pulled my father by the sleeve to drag him home.
“He’s just a crazy old man,” Laurent whispered to him.
Hidden behind their blinds, the ones who dared not show themselves tried not to miss any of the spectacle. I saw their glowing eyes, heard their cruel muffled laughter, comments, judgments, against which my father could scarcely defend himself. My fear of him died that day. I had seen him blush before my eyes, shaken and beating a retreat. A vague premonition alerted me to the falseness of our situation, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Tonton Mathurin deep inside.
The next day, six masked men broke into Mathurin’s house and took him away. He came back three hours later, his clothes torn, his face bloody: he had been dragged into the woods and horribly beaten. He found my father, walked up to him and spat in his face.
“Coward!” he yelled. “You are not yet sitting in the presidential chair and you are already abusing your powers, you hypocrite. Look, all of you, I have spit in your candidate’s face.”
My father ran home, took down his rifle and fired at Mathurin, whom he fortunately missed. There was a rush to disarm him, and to calm him down and settle his bad blood my mother gave him two spoonfuls of castor oil that he swallowed without raising an eyebrow.
That evening, I thought for a long time before falling asleep… I remembered Mathurin’s insults, and realized that we had not once invited to our house the parents of Alcine Joseph and Elina Jean-Francois, two very smart black girls my friends and I knew at school. And the word
