Haiti Noir

Miriam was singing along to an old Coupe Cloue tune while stirring a bubbling pot of cornmeal when the phone in her apron pocket rang. She set down the long-handled wooden spoon and turned off the radio. A light rain was falling, rinsing the dust off the flamboyant branches over her porch as well as the splotches of blood where she had cleaned goat meat the night before.

“Alo.” Miriam had decided she would send the caller away, or else risk having too many lumps in her signature dish which today she would serve with black beans and salted herring. Customers would start arriving soon for their noonday fix. She would not disappoint them. The goat meat she painstakingly cleaned was now marinating in a special concoction. By nightfall, every bit would be gone. People would come from far away for a taste. Kenold and most of the other guys who sold those brightly painted canvases up the street from the lycée and Anne-Marie Javouhey elementary stopped by Miriam’s for food on their way home. In all the years since she quit a back-breaking factory job to open the eatery, she had never let her customers down.

“Alo?” Miriam repeated, annoyed. Jean-Jean, the man she hired to clean the latrine behind her house, walked by with his shovel in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Miriam’s house was equipped with indoor plumbing, but she kept the old relic behind the house for customers. Miriam’s thoughts shifted to the days when hers was the only household in all of Puits Blain with a telephone. Nowadays, everyone had phones: maids, stall keepers at the marketplace, farmers, tap tap drivers, even Jean-Jean-a man whose profession required him to work under the cover of night when no one would see or judge him.

“M-m-i-s-s Mi-ria-m,” he stuttered, his head bent low due to chronic humiliation, “I’m c-coming tonight to start that j-job for you.”

“Kapitèn Poupou!” a group of giggling children saluted Jean-Jean. Ashamed, he pretended not to hear.

Miriam nodded. Now was not the time to explain why the job would have to be postponed. She would speak to Jean-Jean later. Perhaps she should have him seal that hole and make the old latrine disappear like the thatched huts and tincovered shacks that used to populate the area. Puits Blain was no longer an idyllic haven. The kenèp groves were gone. The cornfields had been replaced by top-heavy palaces with high walls surrounding them. Tightly clustered wannabe mansions and the ever-expanding bidonvilles did not spare a single sapling. On the upside, there was now a Culligan water depot just steps from her porch, making it much easier to run her business. The cyber café halfway down to Kay Peshòt-right in that spot where Papa Malbranche used to tether his blind horse-stayed packed with those seeking escape via the Internet. Hotel Flamboyant’s sparkling point of light stood on land where, it was said, a girl once turned herself into a mabouya to escape a beating. Miriam’s umbilical stump was buried under the flamboyant tree in her front yard. So was Foufoune’s, but that meant precious little to her sister. The dirt path where Gwo Manman used to ride her mule was now a bustling artery that accommodated the United Nations’ fleet of tanks hellbent on keeping Haiti safe. Minustah soldiers manned every few feet, catching gang members before they could disappear into the convoluted alleyways. Gone were the days when Puits Blain did not need guarding. Yes, Miriam resolved, it would be best to have Jean-Jean seal the latrine and demolish the decrepit wooden shack surrounding it once and for all. Anyone could hide in there. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Her customers would have to manage without it. Miriam shook her head. Her old Puits Blain no longer existed, but unlike her sister, she would never abandon her ancestral land to live elsewhere.

“Alo,” Miriam said a third time, keeping one eye on her steaming pot of cornmeal. She realized by the loaded silence on the other end that it was Foufoune. Gwo Manman’s children knew each other so well that they needed to maintain at least one ocean between their respective homes. Same mother, same father, same ancestral blood in their veins, but those two had even less love for each other than a goat and a butcher. Foufoune liked to think she was accidentally switched at birth. Nothing else could explain why her blood turned to ice whenever she even thought about her sister. Hatred raged inside of them like a parasitic cancer. The disease spread over the years, taking control of their lives, until one could no longer bear the sight of the other.

“It breaks my heart that my only two children cannot get along,” Gwo Manman often lamented.

“I have no problem with my sister,” Foufoune would lie to appease her mother. But to her friends, Foufounce would say: “Miriam is jealous of me because I made it and she’s nothing.”

“Hello, Miriam?” Foufoune said timidly.