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Reading for Detail

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PHOTO: ©DANIEL LAINE/CORBIS

your e d n u fo d n a g in n one mor p u e k o w u o y if What

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OCTOBER 2004 Literary Cavalcade

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eaker by Edwidge Danticat

nged? a h c d a h y r t n u r entire co

The people of Haiti demonstrate against the Duvalier government.

The Story So Far It is February 1986, the dying moments of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime in Haiti. The streets are exploding; there are widespread riots; and 12-year-old Michel is hiding from mobs of people seeking vengeance toward those connected with Duvalier’s reign of terror. While he and his mother wait for the crowds to pass, Michel recalls times with his best friend, Romain, whose father is one of the doomed men the angry Haitians seek.

M

OTHER AND I COWERED

beneath her cot after a small rock pierced the sheet of plastic she’d draped over our bedroom window the week before as extra protection against the alley mosquitoes. She was winded from all the excitement outside, forcing air out of her lungs while trying to contain a sudden bout of hiccups. Keeping her eyes closed, she felt for the rosary around her neck and between hiccups and deep breaths whispered, “Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph, please watch over Michel and me.” The sound of a large crowd stomping through the alley between Monsieur Christophe’s water station and our house seemed to be what was making the cot rattle, rather than Mother’s and my shaking bodies. Above the echoes of drums, horns, bamboo flutes, and conch shells, we heard voices shouting, “Come out, macoutes! Come out, macoutes!” daring members of the Volunteers for National Security militia to appear from wherever they were hiding. Overnight our country had completely changed. We had fallen asleep under a dictatorship headed by a pudgy thirty-four-year-old man and his glamorous wife. During the night they’d sneaked away—I had to see the television images myself before I could believe it—the wife ornately made up, her long brown hair hidden under a white turban, her carefully manicured fingers holding a long continued ➟ Literary Caval cade OCTOBER 2004

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cigarette, the husband at the wheel of the family's BMW, driving his wife and himself to the tarmac of an airport named after his dead father, from whom he’d inherited the country at nineteen, to an American airplane that would carry them to permanent exile in France. The presidential couple’s reign had ended, his having lasted fifteen years and hers the span of their six-year marriage. Their departure, however, orphaned a large number of loyal militiamen, who had guarded the couple’s command with all types of vicious acts. Now the population was going after those militiamen, those macoutes, with the FROM THE DEW determination of an army in the middle of its BREAKER BY biggest battle to date. EDWIDGE DANTICAT. COPYRIGHT © 2004 My cousin Vaval, who’d left the house at BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT. dawn to catch a camion to the provinces but REPRINTED BY then had postponed his trip to come back PERMISSION OF ALFRED A. KNOPF, A and brief us on what was going on, told us DIVISION OF how on his way to the bus depot he had seen RANDOM HOUSE, INC. a group of people tie one of these militiamen to a lamppost, pour gasoline down his throat, and set him on fire. The flock making its way BAHAMAS through the alley behind our U.S. HAITI ATLANTIC house was probably on a simOCEAN CUBA ilar quest for vengeance, most likely looking for a man called 0 50 HAITI Regulus, who lived nearby. DOMINICAN Miles ® continued from page 13

Area of map

REPUBLIC

Port-au-Prince

N W

Caribbean Sea

E S

by Edwidge Danticat

Regulus’s eighteen-year-old son, Romain, was my hero and the person whom at that time I considered my best friend. QQQ

It didn’t take long for the crowd to move past our house. I had to remind myself that these men and women, old and young, meant no harm to people like us, people like Mother, Vaval, and me. Vaval was so certain of this that he was standing out in front of the house watching the crowd, as though it was an ordinary parade going by. Mother, however, whose creed in life was something like “It’s harder for trouble to find you under your bed” (yes, I know there are many ways she could have been proven wrong), had thought that it would be best for us to hide. The rock coming through the window reinforced her case. I couldn’t help but be frightened. I was twelve years old, and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else—in the provinces, in another country, or across the alley not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had aban-

ous rebellion led by Toussaint

Again, Haitians resisted. They exiled President Jean-Claude Duvalier to

first free black nation. In 1915, the U.S. invaded Haiti and

France in 1986. The Haitians established

installed a military government. They

a democratic government and elected

withdrew 19 years later, and François

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a left-wing

aiti is on an island in the

H

Duvalier came to power by promising

priest, in 1990. But within months, a

Caribbean, which it shares

to support the Haitian peasants.

military coup pushed Aristide into exile.

A Brief History

with the Dominican Republic.

The military ruled for

However, once in office, he ignored the

three years. Then the

with the massacre of its native Indian

workers and catered to

U.S. sent troops to Haiti,

population. Afterward, France and Spain

the wealthy. He used a

restoring Aristide to

each claimed parts of the island.

violent militia to con-

power. In 2004, amid

trol and terrorize the

political chaos and vio-

Its recorded history began

The economy of Haiti—or Saint

14

assumed the presidency in 1971.

L’Ouverture, Haiti became the world’s

Domingue, as it was then called—was

peasantry. His son,

based on black slave labor. Yet the

Jean-Claude Duvalier,

slaves resisted. In 1804, after a furi-

did the same when he


lent rebellion, Aristide President JeanClaude Duvalier

was overthrown again and went into exile.


8/10/04

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doned us altogether to serve the regime. My mother’s hiccups subsided. Judging that the crowd had moved a safe enough distance from our house, she raised a corner of her skirt and used it to wipe the sweat from her forehead, crossed herself several times, then crawled out from under the cot. She waited for me to come out, then sat on the cot’s edge and dusted a film of white grime from her knees. “I knew that girl was not sweeping all the way under the beds,” my mother said, quickly reverting to her normal griping self, perhaps to erase the image in my mind of her cowering with fear under the cot. The “girl” she was referring to was Rosie, a dis-

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in jail or in the grave. In addition to his other crimes, Regulus had abandoned Romain when Romain was a month old. Romain had never called his father Papa but, like everyone else, referred to him as Regulus, his last name, which Romain didn’t even have. ■■■

Romain and I had met when I was about eight years old. His mother and mine had become friends, taking turns visiting each other every evening to catch up at the end of the day. I would accompany my mother on her visits to his house, and while our mothers sat inside and chatted, we would play marbles or kick a soccer ball around out front.

PHOTOS, LEFT TO RIGHT: ©BETTMANN/CORBIS; ©COLIN BRALEY/REUTERS; STOPWATCH: PHOTODISC VIA SODA

Like us, Romain and his mother had nothing to fear from our angry neighbors. It was Romain’s father, Regulus, they wanted. tant cousin my mother had summoned from the provinces to do such things as cook and wash and sweep under beds, when she’d promised Rosie’s poor peasant parents that she’d be sending her to school. In fact, the only education Rosie was getting was from talking to the people who came to buy colas at a busy intersection where my mother stationed her when Rosie wasn’t inside the house cooking, washing, and not sweeping under the beds. Being madly in love with Rosie—Rosie’s bloodline was separate enough from mine that I could have married her had I been older—I didn’t blame her at all for the dust balls under the cot, but I knew better than to defend her to my mother, who would have turned her anger at Rosie on me. All the commotion with the departure of our despised leader and his wife and the crowd passing through the neighborhood had made me hungry. But what I wanted most to do was head over to Romain’s house and make sure he was okay. Like us, Romain and his mother had nothing to fear from our angry neighbors. It was Romain’s father, Regulus, they wanted. He’d beaten them up and stolen money and property from most of them and had put many of their relatives

U

nlike many of the older boys, Romain didn’t have many friends and didn’t seem to resent having to play with a runt like me. In fact, he even appeared to like it and came around to my house most Sunday afternoons to ask my mother if he could take me to a kung fu movie or for a bike ride on Champs de Mars plaza. Our mothers had a falling-out one day—neither Romain nor I was ever able to find out from either of them what it was about—and I stopped visiting Romain’s house with my mother and he stopped coming around to ask my mother’s permission to take me places. Our outings became less frequent, but every once in a while we’d plot to meet somewhere and then proceed to a karate flick, especially if it was a new Bruce Lee. Romain knew what it was like to be an only child. And maybe this is why he always watched out for me, stepped in if I was in a scuffle with some other kid from the neighborhood, slipped me some of his mother’s money now and then for candy and ice continued ➟

MEET THE AUTHOR: Edwidge Danticat BORN 1969, Port-auPrince, Haiti EDUCATION Barnard College FIRST NOVEL Breath, Eyes, and Memory, written as an MFA thesis at Brown University. But she almost became a nurse. LANGUAGES Danticat came to the U.S. at the age of 12, speaking Haitian Creole and French. She was, in her words, “completely between languages.” ON WRITING “It’s a very hard thing, because you are sort of making a shape out of the air. Trying to figure out and create something, just like a sculptor who is fashioning a piece of rock— as if making a shape with your fingernails. It’s extraordinarily hard.”

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by Edwidge Danticat

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cream, and invited me over to his house whenever his mother was away. His maid, Auberte, would prepare whatever I wanted to eat, whether it was good for me or not. While we ate Auberte’s delicious fried sweets, I would listen to Romain talk and talk, mostly quoting lines from books I’d never read and writers I’d never heard of. Even though I rarely understood everything

he said, I was grateful that he was speaking to me, like a peer, like a man. Looking back now, I realize how much I needed someone like Romain in my life. He must have felt this too. Come to think of it, aside from Rosie and Vaval, who were always too busy with my mother’s chores to spend much time with me, Romain was my only friend. Q

SKILL DRILL CIRCLE THE BEST ANSWER FOR EACH OF THE FOLLOWING: 1. Haiti shares an island with _______. (A) Puerto Rico (B) Cuba (C) the Dominican Republic (D) Belize 2. Michel recalls the last days of _______’s regime. (A) François Duvalier (B) Jean-Bertrand Aristide (C) Maurice Chevalier (D) Jean-Claude Duvalier 3. Crowds of Haitians turned against the _______, or government henchmen. (A) mau-maus (B) macoutes (C) marauders (D) marmadukes 4. Haiti’s dictator had ended his _______-year reign and fled to France. (A) 10 (B) 30 (C) 15 (D) 6

>>Your Turn!

5. Michel and his mother hid _______ while angry citizens took to the streets. (A) in the attic (B) under a stalled truck (C) under a cot (D) in a steamer trunk


TO PLAN AND WRITE AN ESSAY BASED ON THE FOLLOWING: How does the narrator feel about the events transpiring around him? Use examples from the excerpt to explain your opinion.

6. When Michel was about 8, he met _______, who became his best friend. (A) Vaval (B) Jean-Claude (C) Romain (D) Regulus 7. Michel’s mother complains that Rosie has not _______. (A) sold enough colas (B) agreed to attend school (C) swept under the bed (D) prepared dinner on time 8. Romain likes to tell Michel about _______. (A) his new BMW (B) the books he has read (C) exploits of the militiamen (D) the daily soccer scores

Write an account of an experience you have had that was like Michel’s, in that it was both exhilarating and frightening.

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20-Minute Essay >>TAKE 20 MINUTES

LC Book Club Questions The narrator’s mother says “It’s harder for trouble to find you under your bed.” What does she mean by this? Do you agree? What would you be doing if you were in the narrator’s situation? Do you think you’d be scared? Excited?

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