The Seeds of Fiction (9 page)

Graham later confirmed that he was watching from afar, upset and angered to see the country he had grown to love being torn apart by someone he described as a ‘madman'.

And then, on one of the bloodiest of days of the dictatorship, 26 April 1963, the dam burst.

I had just dropped my wife off at the gynaecologist in Port-au-Prince that morning and proceeded downtown
en route
to my office at the newspaper. Our first child, a son, was forty days old. As I drove near the National Palace I noticed soldiers were deployed outside the palace but their guns were pointing in different directions, suggesting they didn't know who or where their enemy was. Something had to be terribly wrong. The frantic, frightened expressions on the soldiers' faces indicated that the situation was serious. I parked my car and followed the policemen and Macoutes on foot to the Methodist New College Bird, named after an early member of the Methodist Church in Haiti. There the corpse of a Macoute was doubled over where he usually spent the day as a look-out on the veranda of an old house across from the Methodist school, which was attended by Papa Doc's son Jean-Claude and youngest daughter Simone. The two Duvalier children were safe in their school in a state of shock. Their escort and driver were both dead. I tried not to be noticed, but suddenly I faced a row of old rifles and screams telling me to get out or be shot.

Before I reached my office Macoutes were racing around the city like mad dogs on the loose, guns protruding from their battered old American-made automobiles, in search of the unknown marksmen who had tried to kidnap Papa Doc's children. Pandemonium reigned throughout Port-au-Prince. Passers-by pretended not to see Macoutes wrestle a former army officer out of his car and drag him away, leaving his automobile in the middle of the street, its engine running. Like other motorists on that street I drove around the empty car. This moment was also an opportunity to take care of personal grudges. A soldier guarding the home of the mistress of the presidential guard commander shot to death a former officer parked on the street. The city became a free-fire zone. Anyone suspected was shot on sight. Innocent people were shot because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some were killed because of their name — it was the same or similar to a suspect's.

That morning I rushed to the cable office to beat the censors I knew would stop all outgoing dispatches, especially mine. I filed a take to the Associated
Press and the
New York Times
on what appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap the president's two youngest children as they were entering morning classes at the Methodist school. As I ran back to my car soldiers were arriving by truck, and I watched as they were posted before the offices of RCA. I went back to reporting first hand the bloody mayhem, knowing I would find a way to get the story out somehow as I had done many times before.

Elderly Judge Benoît and his wife had just returned from Mass in the nearby Sacré Cœur church. Macoutes and a truckload of presidential guardsmen drew up before their house and opened withering fire at point-blank range. Those in the house died instantly. The house was set on fire. It became the pyre of the judge and his wife, a visitor and servant. Their son Lieutenant François Benoît's eighteen-month-old son died in the fire or was, as some believe, taken away by an officer. For days the Benoît's ashes were scattered by the wind throughout the neighbourhood.

The Palace believed the Judge's son, Lieutenant Benoît, an army sharpshooter, was responsible for the attempt on Papa Doc's children. (It was later proved to have been an act by Papa Doc's former secret police chief Clément Barbot.) Benoît had been in political asylum in the Dominican Embassy. Soldiers violated the sovereignty of the Dominican chancellery in their search, and they were halted from entering the Dominican Ambassador's residence and massacring those seeking asylum there only by President Juan Bosch warning that it would be an act of war. We could see the Dominican Republic from our house. Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's 31-year iron-fisted rule had been ended by assassins' bullets on 30 May 1961, and the long-time exiled writer Juan Bosch had become the Dominican Republic's first freely elected president. But with only four months at the helm he found the military machine he had inherited from the dictatorship now slow to respond to orders. Directed by Bosch to move against Papa Doc, the Dominican military refused even to rattle their sabres. They complained that they were out of petrol — literally.

I witnessed two young friends taken away in the absence of their father. Scores of ex-army officers were seized. One, a former coastguard commander, was shot dead by a squad of Duvalierist women. Everyone and anyone was suspect, especially the military.

I arrived home late that day. Not wanting to be detained at a roadblock by berserk Macoutes, I was forced to use back roads and drive over fields and around a mountainside to our home in a hilly rural farming area of Frères outside Port-au-Prince.

It was a restless night. As the heat of the day dissipated there was no sleep, except for our baby. We knew that the terror from the Palace would not be easily sated. The bloodbath would continue. Duvalier was bound to win all
his stand-offs, even with President Kennedy. He knew he could resist everything but a well-placed bullet, and he was well guarded. Two loaded silver-plated Magnum revolvers rested as paperweights on his desk, and he carried a light US Second World War carbine with him everywhere he went. A Thompson submachine-gun was propped in the corner of his bedroom toilet. Moreover, Papa Doc was a consummately cynical actor. He played many roles: the good man, bad man, evil genius and madman. He affected the Baron Samedi look, that of the Voodoo god who is guardian of the graveyard, dressed in black hat and coat. Only Baron Samedi's traditional cigar and bottle were missing — Duvalier neither smoked nor drank. (He was a diabetic dependent on insulin, but when his blood sugar got too low he would eat or drink something sugary, such as a sweet, to avoid insulin shock.) Wrapped in a red-and-black dressing-gown, the colours of his Duvalierist flag, he would shuffle aimlessly around the Palace at night like a
lougarou
— werewolf.

At daybreak I expected the Macoutes to come at any moment. Papa Doc knew that I would try to get the story out somehow. He would want to stop me. I had been repeatedly warned about reporting stories that created adverse publicity for the Duvalier government. ‘After all you are a guest here,' the foreign minister had recently warned me.

At 5.30 a.m. a carload of Macoutes arrived at my doorstep. My yard-boy held his machete threateningly and looked at me, but I signalled for him to put it down. I went peacefully.

I was finally deposited in La Grande Prison in the centre of the city. It was a rambling series of tin-roofed cells encircled by a high mortar wall built by the French colonizers in the eighteenth century, covering an entire block.

I was stripped naked and placed in a cell. Every second became an hour. I knew what had happened at some of the houses of those arrested. Many times the Macoutes go back to pillage the house and ‘disappear' the family. I was terrified for my family and powerless to help them.

When the sun went down and the roof cooled, the night sounds became weird, frightening omens. Occasionally there was a gunshot. Scared voices of sentries called out, trailing across the prison yard, reassuring each other at their posts along the wall. At one point I dozed, but a burst of gunfire awakened me, followed by the angry curses of an officer and mutterings from his men.

My thoughts were with my wife and little son, vulnerable to the roving bands of Macoutes. But I had some hope. My wife was from a family of fighters. General Laurent Bazalais — the mulatto Chief of Staff of liberator Jean-Jacques Dessalines' army and among the signatories of the 1804 act of independence that created the Haitian state — was one of her forebears. Our peasant neighbours were all friends and hated the Macoutes. My Catholic God remained a stranger; the Voodoo
lwa
(spirits of mystery) were more approachable.

Suddenly it was quiet — for Haiti, unearthly quiet. I strained to listen, but I heard nothing. There were no voices. From what I could tell, the prison, at least the section in which I was incarcerated, was empty. What had become of all those arrested on the street the day before? Could they all have been sent to Fort Dimanche? When a soldier brought me a plate of beans and rice the next day I asked to go to the latrine, hoping to make some human contact that could inform me as to what was going on. But instead they rolled the latrine into my cell: a 55-gallon oil drum cut in half, filled with lime and black with flies feasting on the stinking faeces.

I found a rusted Gillette razor blade resting on the crossbar of the cell. I could see it had been used to carve people's names on the walls, which were caked thick with lime from years of whitewashing. Everyone wanted to leave a trace of their existence behind. I tried to catalogue mentally all the prisoners' names etched in the wall and their dates of imprisonment, but I was too anxious to retain them. Then I decided to add my name and the date.

On the afternoon of the second day a soldier brought my clothes and told me to dress. He came back and escorted me to the prison's administration office. Captain Pierre Thomas was waiting. He was in charge of the Interior Department's Immigration Enforcement Section. We were old friends.

Several soldiers watched as Thomas sorted through my papers and pocketed my $17 in Haitian
gourdes.

‘You're leaving,' Thomas said.

‘Where to?' I said. I had hardly any voice. My throat was dry, and I realized I had not had anything to drink in forty-eight hours.

‘You are being expelled,' he replied.

‘What about my family? I am not leaving without them.'

Thomas looked at me. His eyes were tired. I could see he was exhausted, but his eyes seemed to offer some trust.

For the benefit of our audience, some of whom would report back to the Palace, Thomas said with finality, ‘They have no problem, but you do. This is the only plane. There will be no other plane for you. Let's go.'

‘But I have no passport.'

‘You do.'

I trusted Thomas. He was not one of them. Clearly there was a sense of urgency in his words about my leaving that made me realize I would not be of any use to my family dead. Refusing might endanger them even more. If I did get on a plane and reach the outside world, I could bring pressure on Papa Doc to allow them to leave.

Getting to the airport was another traumatic experience. A macabre out-of-season Mardi Gras band danced drunkenly in the street, blocking our way. My guard had fallen asleep in the back seat of the little car, and the muzzle of
his Thompson submachine-gun had fallen against my side. I noted he still had it cocked. All I could think of was that this was Russian roulette on a grand scale. Any good bump — and there were no shortages of ruts and potholes in the streets of Bel Air — could produce a burst of machine-gun fire into my heart. I studied the dangers of awakening him, or Thomas, who was driving, having a collision, or of the soldier being startled by a bad dream. It was the last time I saw Thomas. In 1968 he was executed by Duvalier along with eighteen fellow officers.

I climbed aboard the Delta afternoon flight to Santo Domingo with four cents in my pocket, wearing a sports shirt and a pair of linen trousers, the back pocket of which had been ripped off by the butt of a Macoute's rifle. Except for a US Marine officer I was the sole passenger on the plane. At dusk, the ‘Clipper' climbed out over the Cul de Sac plain and headed east across the lakes towards the Dominican Republic. There was no relief in my last look at the majestic Massif de la Selle mountain, only sadness for the country, its people and my friends — and fear for my wife and child. My beloved newspaper, the
Haiti Sun,
and printing plant were gone for ever. Of one thing I was certain: I was leaving Haiti only physically. The country had become ingrained in my soul. My wife, with the assistance of
Time's
Editor-in-Chief Henry Luce, the British Foreign Office and the New Zealand Prime Minister, but mainly by dint of her own courage, followed me into exile with our infant son three weeks later.

Papa Doc had won this battle. It had been impossible to send out reports on the bloody violence I had witnessed. In exile I could not write a first-person account of that bloody day for fear Papa Doc would retaliate against my family and friends. I had to keep silent. No first-hand account of that day was published.

We came upon the border but had to settle for looking at Haiti from the Dominican side. For the most part, the roughly 195-mile border that separate the two countries was a desolate and ill-defined line. There was no border fence. No single highway ran its length; only a series of feeder roads or narrow paths linked the few towns that populated both countries. Rivers served as the demarcation line in the valleys. In the mountainous sections the border could be delineated by the fact that the Haitian side had been eroded by tree-cutting for charcoal to the point where the land was virtually bald, while the Dominican side was still green with trees and vegetation. The border had an aura of evil, the uneasy feeling of a place not to wander about. The demarcation line, such as it was, had been soaked in the blood of ancient enemies.

The natives of Hispaniola, as Christopher Columbus baptized the island in December 1492 on his first voyage of discovery, suffered dearly under Spanish rule. In 1650 French settlers took over the western third of the island; it became known as La Partie Française until officially named Saint-Domingue with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. The Spanish side first introduced African slaves to the island in the early sixteenth century to toil in their gold mines after the Indian population had literally been worked to death. Much later, as the French settlers evolved into traders, Saint-Domingue became an important market for the thriving commerce in African slaves.