“Swish it around in your mouth, son,” I said. “Don’t swallow it fast. Let it soak into your tongue.”
He nodded and did as I said. We hadn’t eaten our black bread yet, as I wanted to spread the meal out for as long as possible. I knew that this paltry meal was only a preservation measure on the part of the officers. They didn’t care how healthy we were, but they also didn’t want us to drop dead too fast. Giving us some small amount of nutrition every week might be the qualifying minimum in their eyes. But they didn’t seem to know anything about vitamins and calories and dehydration. They were experimenting at best, and we were the test rats.
“You need to come with me, big zek,” said an officer approaching James and me.
“What about my son?”
“He can wash up while you come. Don’t ask questions. Don’t talk at all. Come!”
I looked at James and reassured him as best I could with my expression. Then I followed the officer over to the train car. It took everything for me to simply leave my son one hundred yards behind me, but I had no choice.
“Come inside the car,” he said while we walked, many of the surrounding prisoners trying not to stare at us.
As soon as we were inside he pointed for me to enter his compartment. I noticed how clean it was, how thick the mattresses were on the bunk bed, how stocked the food supply was—canned sardines, mustard, loaves of bread. There were two chairs.
“Sit,” he said, and I did. “Don’t talk, zek. Don’t say a fucking word. I mean it. I just want to give you a good meal. Don’t ask questions. Just eat it.”
He handed me a fork and a plate with a mound of grated vegetables on it. I was so hungry that I began eating immediately. Upon first taste, I recognized the dish as herring under a fur coat. It’s basically a layered salad made up of salted herring that is covered with boiled, grated vegetables. I could taste eggs, carrots, potatoes, and onions. And the dish looked like a fur coat because the top was covered with beets and mayonnaise, giving it a white-on-purple look. It was the best meal I’d ever had, and again, I’d always hated beets.
After I’d completely devoured it, the tall, olive-skinned officer who’d been standing over me the entire time handed me a bottle of beer. I guzzled it down within twenty seconds, never stopping to question why he was giving me this special treatment.
“You can go back outside and wash yourself now,” he said.
“Comrade Officer,” I said, putting the bottle down and standing, “would it be okay to bring my son inside for a bite? I must tell you that I am a close associate of an important American diplomat who—”
“Shut your fucking mouth, zek!” he said, poking me in the chest with the tip of his rifle hard enough to move me. “I told you not to speak. That is your last warning.”
I did as he said and exited. Trying to guess what this offering of food had been about was futile at this point. It meant something, but I hadn’t the energy to try to guess. I just knew that the next two days’ ration of my black bread would go to my son. I certainly had enough in my belly to last a good while.
On my way through the crowd again, I could see that the four others had joined James by the river, a sight that pleased me. I looked upstream and could see bare-chested prisoners washing their shirts in the water. They would rather wear wet, clean clothes than dry, dirty ones. I hadn’t really taken the time to concern myself with how the officers had arrested us that night, never allowing us to bring a single item with us. All we had were the clothes on our backs and our passports.
“You’ve returned,” said young Yury, holding his blue newsboy hat at his side, his thick head of brown hair soaking wet, as he’d obviously dipped it in the river. “What did he want with you?”
“He wanted to discuss my passport.”
Why I was lying I didn’t quite know. I just knew that whatever the reason behind the meal would reveal itself at some point. Perhaps I could find a way to get James a serving next time. Or would there even be a next time?
I looked down at James, his shirt off, sparkling beads of river water dancing in his frizzy hair, the sun warming his soft, cocoa skin. He had removed his brown soft leather shoes and socks as well. Seeing him in this condition—hungry, exhausted, and tormented—made me think about what had initially prompted me to leave our safe haven in the Montmartre section of Paris.
Back there I felt as if we were immersed in an international artists’ community that had run away from the real world. Our day-to-day way of life, particularly amongst us American coloreds, felt temporary, like we were all cognizant of the fact that we needed to get back into the arena and fight for real structural and systematic change, the kind that would affect everyday Negroes, ones who couldn’t afford to run to Paris and play pretend, ones who were forever entangled in the long-existing and carefully woven web of institutional racism.
That is what I believed then. But my current predicament had me questioning this decision. My son and daughter hadn’t cared about any of this high-minded, critical thinking, this sociological examination of sorts that I’d been dead set on continuing. They’d been too busy playing with their carefree friends—oblivious to whatever frowns might have come their way from the occasional Parisian bigot.
I put my arm around James and pulled him close, looking downstream again at where the murdered zek’s hat had drifted. His son, if he had one, would forever wonder where he was. The agony that child would have to endure was unfathomable. It was a pain I couldn’t dare let my boy experience. I had to stay alive.
4
Cap-Haïtien, Haiti
Three years earlier
AMERICA’S OCCUPATION WAS FINALLY COMING TO AN END. BOBBY and I stood along the pier in Cap-Haïtien as the USS Houston approached with President Roosevelt aboard. There was an excitement in the air, and many locals cheered and waved, hoping to get a glimpse of the president. He was visiting the island to put an end officially to America’s occupation. Later that evening, Bobby and I actually joined the president and his staff for a private dinner. I didn’t say a word. I just sat there and marveled at the way Bobby was able to so freely interact with Roosevelt’s inner circle.
A lot had changed for Bobby and me. Not only had he been selected for a post as Minister-Counselor to Moscow, Russia, he had also asked me to come along as his personal assistant. He’d first learned of the possibility in September of last year, and the official news had come down this March. Per his orders, I’d spent the last ten months inundated with studying Russian. It had been an arduous task to say the least, but I’d made considerable progress and now considered myself semi-conversational. “A God-given gift for world languages,” Bobby liked to say I had.
A few days later we arrived in Pétion-Ville, not far from Port-au-Prince, and convened for dinner at the beautiful little Hotel Kinam, a white-on-white gingerbread house that had been around since the turn of the century. We sat down to eat on the veranda just before sundown and I marveled at the design of the place. I knew that most of Port-au-Prince’s gingerbread houses had been built by just three architects: Joseph Maximilien, George Baussan, and Léon Mathon, all of whom were Haitian but had trained in Paris. And though we were in Pétion-Ville, I wondered if they’d built this nine-room hotel as well.
With the sun setting in the distance beyond the almond and palm trees, I envisioned myself having a go at building such a home for Loretta and the kids. The latticework was central to its theme; it was wrapped around the porches, doors, and windows. Victorian in style, the home felt wide, high, and open, and the tall turret roofs looked like snow-cone cups, the pointy tops seeming to tickle the clouds.