But if I had to harangue a crowd, I’d do it in Creole.
There was to Creole a compression of sense and thought, a pithiness, a violence that rendered even tongue-tied Haitian orators compelling — and in the hands of someone who could really talk, it was superb.
The judge spoke with a microphone, but between the noise of the crowd and the noise of the generator powering the loudspeakers, I heard only words and phrases of his speech. He spoke for no more than twenty minutes, and of that, perhaps ten minutes were devoted to the judge waving at the crowd and waiting for it to calm down sufficiently that he might be heard. Then I heard him say that he was looking at a crowd of slaves. Master Hunger holds one whip and Master Corruption holds another. Master Empty Cooking Pot locks the chains on in the morning and Master Can’t Afford the Doctor counts heads at night.
And Master Maxim Bayard is chasing down runaways.
That’s why Master Maxim doesn’t want a road. Because he wants his slaves down home where he can keep an eye on them. Because Master Bayard knows what there is at the end of the road.
Someone in the crowd shouts “Port-au-Prince,” and the judge shakes his head. The city at the end of the road — it’s a beautiful city, the most beautiful city there is. It’s a city where justice isn’t bought and sold. It’s a city where children aren’t hungry. It’s a city where the water is clean.
At the other end of the long road was a city called Freedom.
* * *
Kay and Terry fought while the judge spoke. He just wanted her to be reasonable and get in the car, and she said, “Reasonable? You’re talking to me about reasonable?” He said, “Kay, it’s not the way you think,” and she said, “Don’t tell me what to think.” He said, “Kay, we’re getting in the car, and we are going to Port-au-Prince.” I don’t know what she said to him. The last thing I heard him say was that he loved her. Then there was a loud noise from the crowd, and when I looked back, Terry was standing alone. Kay had slipped out the back door of campaign HQ, maybe expecting Terry to follow her. But Terry had let her go.
The judge finished his speech on the Place Dumas by asking the crowd to march with him to Port-au-Prince. The crowd had calmed down. The drums began to beat out a stately, almost funereal rhythm. Johel descended the stairs, and the crowd parted to let him pass. He crossed the Place Dumas. Terry walked beside him, a few steps to his right. The procession filled the Grand Rue, absorbing greater numbers as it went along until it filled the whole Grand Rue from Basse-Ville to the ice factory, a half mile or so long. They walked through the quartier populaire of Sainte-Hélène, with its dense, winding passages of cinder-block houses and the smell of shit coming from the black beach that served as the neighborhood’s latrine. At the rear of the procession were white Mission SUVS manned by UNPOLs, watching them.
I walked with the crowd just as far as the iron suspension bridge over the Grand’Anse, a gift of the government of France back in the 1950s. The judge’s SUV was waiting for him at the far side of the bridge, the last paved road until Les Cayes, six hours to the south. I saw that Nadia was already in the car. The judge wanted to give another speech, but Terry whispered something in his ear. So Johel just waved at the crowd. Then he, Nadia, and Terry were gone in a cloud of white dust. Little children ran after them until they were out of sight.
4
The next day, Johel Célestin became a legend. He awoke as a minor Haitian politician, little known even in the Grand’Anse. By nightfall his name was known from Ouanaminthe to the Île-à-Vache, from Marmelade to Jacmel. If his name is still remembered today, it is because of what happened that August day in Port-au-Prince.
I was not there, but I followed events on the radio. I was at the library the next morning when I heard the judge’s voice exhorting a crowd, and I knew that he was hitting all the right notes when Monsieur Duval, the librarian, put aside his book to listen. Then, when I stopped at the Marché Soleil to buy tinned anchovies, I heard the roar of a large crowd singing the Haitian national anthem. By now the streets of Jérémie had come to a halt as little clusters of voters gathered around each transistor radio.
On Radio Vision 2000, the journalist on the spot estimated the size of the crowd on the Champs de Mars at about five thousand. Radio Metropole told us that the crowd fully filled the immense square. Signal FM said that women had begun to pass out, either from dehydration or from overexcitement. Radio Kiskeya reported that a fistfight had broken out but was quickly calmed.
Now the announcers began to speak more quickly as the crowd descended the rue des Miracles, marching from the front gates of the Presidential Palace to the headquarters of the CEH. The marchandes who lined the streets around the Iron Market packed their wares and fled.
The journalists were now agitated. The marchers found the rue des Miracles barred by the PNH and a squadron of Nigerian riot police, several hundred helmeted men carrying shields and waving batons. Behind them were water cannons. In the middle of the block was CEP headquarters, a modest concrete bungalow surrounded by a high fence. Soon the marchers were throwing rocks in the direction of the police, who responded by lofting back bombs of tear gas. “C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!” cried the voice on the radio. The marchers remained resolute, drifting back until the gas was taken up into the southern-swirling wind, then moving forward again to assault the CEH’s protectors.
Terry would later claim that what happened next was his idea. He had scouted CEH headquarters a week earlier and noticed that while security was tight out front, there was almost no one protecting the rear flank of the building. Another part of the crowd disbursed onto the street running parallel to the rue des Miracles, where they found the back entrance to the CEH guarded only by a single unarmed security guard, who, seeing this immense crowd pullulating with testosterone, armed with machetes, and advancing on him, fled his post. The mob surged. Now the crowd was sweeping over the iron fence and swarming up the very sides of the building, Spider-Man style, pulling themselves up the drainpipes and into the open second-story windows.
CEH headquarters had been empty that day, owing to the menace of the protest. Before long, the building was overrun. The marchers now had the high ground and began to rain down anything they could find on the PNH and Nigerian soldiers below, from tea bags to boxes of printer toner. Out through the window and down onto the narrow street went reams of paper and three-ring binders that contained the numerous reports of well-paid electoral consultants; from the office of the director general came photographs of his three boys and his diploma from the Université d’Etat d’Haïti, class of 1971.
Soon the PNH and the Nigerians gave ground. The crowd, cheering, could hardly believe that the battle was over so quickly. CEH headquarters was now in Johel Célestin’s hands.
* * *
(Just where did those immense crowds in Port-au-Prince come from? I would wonder about this also, until, from Radio Toussaint Legrand, I heard the following story.
(Arriving by air in Port-au-Prince, whether setting out from Miami or Jérémie, you fly low over the vast slum of Cité Soleil. In the midst of the squalor and the garbage, the pigs rutting in mud and the tin shacks, there is — your eyes will hardly believe it — a walled compound with an azure pool. The house figures on no deed or bill of sale, but it was every bit the property of a man named Ti Jean Roosevelt.