All Over but the Shoutin' (29 page)

The boy became almost catatonic. He refused to leave his momma’s side. He sat beside her or at her feet and followed her around like a puppy, his fingers entwined in the hem of her dress.

The day I went to talk to them she needed to speak to me a few minutes alone, and had to pry the boy’s fingers away from her dress, and told him to go outside. “Baby, it’s okay to play.”

But Dirty Red couldn’t face the neighborhood that day, any day. To please his mother he walked down the steps, then quickly doubled back and sat on the steps, his thumb in his mouth, just outside the door. I know this because our photographer, Ricardo Ferro, took a heartbreaking picture of it.

“They told me my boy fell through the cracks,” said his momma, a woman with those defeated eyes you usually only find in the terminally ill. “I wanted somebody to write a letter, maybe, to the people who live here. I wanted somebody to tell them my boy is all right. But nobody has done, maybe because they just don’t care about him. If this had been a rich white family, do you think this would have happened. Do you think they wouldn’t have fallen all over themselves, saying they were sorry.”

She tried to spread the word that her son did nothing, that it was all a mistake, but the people believed only what they saw that night, the night they came for the child.

For months after that, he screamed when his momma turned loose of him even for a second. “Finally we got him to go outside by himself, but that’s when the people get him.”

I wrote the story of Dirty Red in the Miami bureau of the St. Pete
Times
, a peaceful place on Coral Way shaded by banyan trees. At the very worst, I promised his momma, I wouldn’t do her son any harm. They ran it on the front page, with a big, heartbreaking photo. The next week, I sent his momma a bundle of them.

She took them door to door in the neighborhood, as I knew she would, and shoved the story in the faces of the people who had abused her son, and said, “See. I told you.”

Seeing it written down, they began to believe. The story drew the aid of ministers and other do-gooders who helped spread the word, who made sure the word got out. Counselors called and offered to help free of charge. People sent money. People sent toys. He became a sort of mascot for the Miami Heat basketball team. He got better.

I didn’t get into this business to change the world; I just wanted to tell stories. But now and then, you can make people care, make people notice that something ain’t quite right, and nudge them gently, with the words, to get off their ass and fix it.

The fact is, I did very few happy stories in Miami, and the vast majority did not change a damn thing. I wrote about Castro selling relatives to Cuban Americans in Miami, and the hopeless story of a man who had been choked into a coma by Miami police. Friends have told me I did too much of it, that I dwelled on it, that I should be careful not to let it build up inside of me. One reporter, a friend, christened me “the misery writer.” But I have always been able to distance myself, to dance between the raindrops. Miami is a great place for distance. On a good day, you can stand on South Beach and see forever. I lived my life as full and rich as I could on a reporter’s salary, and every month I put money away in savings, to keep my promise.

O
ne day I just had too much of the bad news piled up in my head, and I guess I snapped a little. I wanted to do a happy story, anything that did not involve killing or meanness, and I flipped through the local papers, searching for something, anything. There was one, just one. A rare plant, the “deltoid spurge,” grew only in a few places in Florida, and one of those places was to be developed. Environmentalists were trying to save it. Never mind that they couldn’t save the panther or the manatee.

I called Bill Cooke, our free-lance photographer and my friend, but an ornery man even on his best days. I told him to join me in the bureau, that we were going to help save the deltoid spurge.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“We are off to save the spurge,” I said.

“Are you drunk?” he said.

“No. Come. The spurge awaits. It needs us.”

He showed up a few minutes later, looking at me suspiciously. Bill had been in Vietnam. He had seen people drift quietly away from the piers of life.

Thirty minutes later we were standing in a grove of pines and scrub just off U.S. 1 in South Miami, standing over a little green plant that looked like a cross between a mushroom and a pineapple.

“Looks like it,” he said.

“Well?” I said.

“Well, what?” he said.

“Take its damn picture.”

“They’ll never run it,” he said.

“Take it anyway.”

He took a few shots and we went home. That night, I wrote the prettiest story I could on the plight of the deltoid spurge. Faulkner couldn’t have done it better. My newspaper ran it across the top of the Tampa Bay and State page, and Bill Cooke had to buy me dinner.

“You may be the only man I know who could get twenty inches out of the deltoid spurge,” he said. “You are a poet.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The spurge lives, to this day.

F
or more than two years the newspaper left me alone and let me find good stories, except for one week when they sent me to cover Operation Desert-whatever-it-was, the part before they actually did any serious shooting and renamed it Desert Storm. I didn’t even have a passport, when they told me I could go, but I was thrilled. “I will kiss a camel, if you will let me go,” I told the editors. I wrote one good story—Jewish soldiers in Saudi Arabia were forced to pray in closets and had the Star of David removed from their dog tags—and about four truly bad ones. It was the first time I had ever gone outside the country to write a newspaper story. The next time would rearrange my soul.

I had come to believe that I was good at one thing, writing about people in trouble, about misery. As it turned out, I was a rank amateur. I didn’t know what misery was, but I would learn.

26
Tap-tap

Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
October 1991

I
had always wanted to go to Haiti, the same way I’d wanted to touch my mother’s hot iron. The resilience of its people amazed me. But in truth, what drew me to this place was its capacity for evil. A bloody coup gave me a reason to come, and write of it.

“The dead disappear into the muddled minds of old caretakers,” I wrote, “in a graveyard where roses rust. The funeral flowers are made from tin so they can be used over and over again. Vilason Dorvilier wanders the cemetery searching for his father, but there have been so many dead since September the caretakers can’t remember where they put them all. The ground is full, one old caretaker said.

“Crypts rise from the old graves, four to eight caskets high. Dorvilier steps to the top of one and climbs the concrete cross, hoping he can find his father’s crypt from there, but all he sees is his future. The cemetery stretches for five acres until it blends into the stink and swelter of the slums, where naked babies stand in sewage and old women hide from view because it is shameful to starve. He sees the yellow army barracks, where illiterate young soldiers play with guns the rich people bought for them, guns used to murder his father two weeks ago. Higher up, up into the cloud-capped mountains, are the homes of the light-skinned aristocracy, who live clean and have too much to eat. But Dorvilier can’t see that far, even standing on the coffins of generations.

“It was less than a year ago that a savior came into the murk of Haiti, an angry avenger for the poor who warned the aristocracy to share the wealth or watch the peasants take it. He reminded them of the Père Lebrun, a car tire soaked in gasoline that the people use to burn their enemies alive. The poor loved Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but in the end all he brought to Haiti was a return to darkness. Aristide, the first Haitian leader elected in a legitimate democratic process, watches in exile as his divided nation edges toward chaos and Haitian soldiers enforce the status quo with bullets.”

N
ightfall of that first day in Haiti caught me sitting on a crypt in the biggest boneyard I had ever seen, waiting for the young man Dorvilier to locate his father. Here and there, between the old crypts, gray bones jutted out of the gray dirt, where grave robbers tossed them aside. I had told my momma not to worry if she tried to call me in Miami and couldn’t find me. I told her I was on vacation “somewhere in the islands.”

I was thirty-two and divorced, could have lost a few pounds—a few dozen—and I felt the beginnings of arthritis in my knees and ankles. The woman who said she loved me, at the time, was beginning to think that she might not be able to improve me sufficiently after all; the rest never had. I was not in debt but I didn’t own anything, either. One good friend had said I was the only man he had ever met who just might glide all the way through life without leaving “one single lasting footprint in the sands of society.” But I had a hell of a story to do, and I would be happy for as long as it lasted.

I was working with a towering Haitian named Daniel Morel, my photographer and interpreter and one day to be my friend. He had met me at the airport, standing a full head taller than the mass of gesticulating, shouting men who offered to drive, to interpret, to—I would later learn—try and sell me the location of dead bodies. A shooter for the AP, he had heard of my newspaper—“good, good photographs”—and agreed to show me Haiti, all that I could stand of it.

I was no kind of foreign correspondent. I begged the foreign desk at my paper to let me do it; I didn’t know then that I had none of the qualifications to join the club. I didn’t even look like one. You can pick an FC out of a crowd at a hundred yards. They can talk without moving their jaws—it is a genetic thing that, I believe, comes from generations of speaking through teeth clenched around a pipe stem—and they speak French a lot, even when they don’t have to. I don’t speak French—I know how to say, “Señorita, how beautiful you are” in Spanish—and the only Creole I had picked up in Miami was “Git mou mou,” which I think is something dirty.

But I wanted to come here, because it was a story unlike others I had done. A whole country, ruled forever by despots and murderers and low-rent sons of bitches, had been promised something better, and seen it yanked away. I wanted to come here because I had read about it my whole life, not just as a place of misery, but magic.

The foreign desk let me do it, mainly because reporters were not exactly lining up to volunteer. I was barely better than nothing, but I was still better than a blank page.

I told Daniel what I needed. I wanted to talk to Aristide’s people, and he just said, “Of course.” I told him I also needed to speak to the rich, and a shadow passed over his face. When I was safely gone, he would still be living here. I should not have worried, though. He just said, “Of course.”

Daniel, I would learn over days, over years, could fix almost anything.

T
hat first day, the images of poverty and cruelty whirl through my head one after another after another, but the smell seldom changes. It is a mix of flowering plants, charcoal smoke, human waste, rotting garbage, crushed sugar cane, old sweat, death.

I had rented a car but, because I had no idea where I was and Daniel couldn’t hold my hand the whole time, I took a long taxi ride. As the rusted, dented, smoking thing hurtles around a blind curve on the road to Pétionville, where the people with money live, the driver almost hits a little girl with a big bucket of water balanced on her head. She stumbles back, and the water spills. The taxi driver is not concerned. She is only a restavik, a slave for one of the middle-class families. Her life is an afterthought, a pothole, a speck on his bumper.

In Cité Soleil, where people live in huts the size of outhouses with sewage creeping between their toes, a boy with a distended belly sits with the flies. Vedlin Severe’s two naked babies play in muck near the docks as her son, Presnoc, begs. An old woman who looks like she hasn’t eaten in weeks sits half-hidden in the door of a tin shack. She hides her head when people pass. Aristide’s symbol, a red rooster, is painted on the wall. These are Aristide’s people.

“God sent him to us,” said Celeste Georges, who sells chicken cooked in hot oil on the street. She won’t say where she lives because soldiers are killing people who talk. She said it broke her heart when they made Aristide go. “Titid will return to us,” she said, using Aristide’s pet name. “He won’t leave us like this.”

They waited two hundred years for him, and they got less than a year of relief, respite, before the return to darkness.

The more I read about Haiti’s history, the more fascinated I became. I learned that Haiti was rich once, a lush French colony with 95 percent of its people in chains. “In 1791,” I wrote, “a voodoo priest named Boukman drank the blood of a sacrificed pig and led the first slave rebellion. When Haiti finally seized independence at bayonet point in 1804, slavery ended, but oppression was only beginning. The poor stayed poor and the upper class stayed rich under a succession of cruel, inept leaders. People starved as Haiti’s resources vanished, turning it into what would be called the Hell Side of Paradise, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Then, in a questionable election in 1957, Haiti found its man to rule over hell: François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a doctor and dabbler in voodoo who once tried to converse with the head of a dead enemy, who sought the future in goat entrails, who beat an enemy to death and then had his doctor perform emergency brain surgery in an effort to revive him. (We didn’t know what cruelty was, back home. When we buried somebody, at least we made sure they were dead. Duvalier put them in the ground alive, wrecked their minds, and left them to wander, as a lesson.) He declared himself president for life, and unleashed the Ton-tons Macoute, named for a mythical giant who walked the mountains stuffing unfortunate children in his sack. They crushed resistance until Papa Doc died in 1971 and his son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, took over. Food riots became so violent that he fled Haiti in 1986. One leader after another tried to stay in power by terror. The Duvaliers were gone, but the Macoute lingered on, under other names.