Haiti Noir

“You can’t blame the man. They arrested him and didn’t even give him a trial.”

“Titide, if you came to torture me, it’s working.”

“Okay, answer me this one question and I’ll go away.”

Haba lifted the compress from her head to look at Titide’s round, brown face.

“Tell me: when you saw him, didn’t your heart beat faster? Didn’t your knees go weak even though he was completely filthy?”

It was a question she wasn’t ready to answer. Titide hovered over her waiting. Moah stooped closer to the window to hear, but Haba didn’t answer it for fear it would unleash all the feelings she had locked away for sixteen years. She couldn’t stop her mind from going to those days that she had folded away. She’d folded them the way a widow folds a shirt or a pair of pants previously owned by her dearly departed.

She tried everything to keep her mind still, but it was like a raging bull, charging and pushing to let the memories flood over her body. Her mind went back to the first summer of nursing school. She had been unable to pay the tuition and had returned home to Croix-des-Bouquets from Port-au-Prince. At that time, she had been hoping the Church would help her go back. At that time, Father John from Grand Marais, Minnesota, was young and committed to educating the people, so he told her to come work at the dispensaire, the community health center that the white missionaries had built. At that time, it was the only hospital-like establishment in Croix-des-Bouquets. That’s where she’d met Colin Didier. She hadn’t known anything about him except that he had been sent to medical school in Cuba and he had actually returned. He spoke Spanish and French with as much ease as Creole, but when he spoke Creole, there was a song in his voice. His words dragged-an indication that he was not from La Plaine. He was from the North where people didn’t speak Creole; they sang Creole.

Now she was remembering the perspiration that rolled behind her ears as she assisted him in cleaning the gunshot wound of a “troublemaker” brought to the clinic. In those days, the less you knew about someone’s injury, the better. The three hundred and ninety-two days that followed proved to be sweeter than icing on cake. There were stolen kisses and fondling in the storage depot. She danced for him in the river as water rolled over her body. Afterward, he wrote her a poem and the first line said, Dieu sourit quand l’africaine danse. God smiles when a black girl dances. She remembered the kisses on her toes. He borrowed words from that golden-tongued bard Francis Cabrel to serenade her with his guitar. Indeed, he drew from the wells of her eyes to write love letters. Then there was the way he made love to her breasts. He wanted to wait until they were married to penetrate her. But each day they came closer and closer, until they couldn’t wait anymore, and like a deluge they drowned in the rhythm of each other’s body.

Then one evening, on day three hundred eighty-nine, she sat on her veranda shelling Congo peas with her then pregnant sister-in-law Mimose, and God let the world step on her throat. Her brother had been on a two-month contract to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. That night, a woman dressed all in purple, with enough jewelry to sink a ship, accompanied by two men stood at the gate about ten feet from the veranda.

“Is this where a certain Habakkuk lives?”

Haba’s heart skipped. Very few people knew her real name. Outside of family-her brother, sister-in-law, her cousin Clotide, two aunts in Port-au-Prince and their five children- only Colin knew. She wondered if something had happened to him. She put the pan down and went to open the gate. The woman and her entourage entered.

“Would you like some coffee or water, miss?”

“Madame Lamercie Didier,” the woman said, with emphasis on the last name. “And no, thank you for offering. I don’t intend to stay long. I just wanted to see what the slut who refuses to leave my husband alone looks like.”

Haba felt faint and grabbed on to the post closest to her. Mimose dropped the pan and came to stand next to her.

The woman continued: “Be careful. I made him. I sent him to medical school for my purposes. No small-town tramp is going to take him from me. Back off. I hear he proposed to you. Be careful or the dress you marry him will be the dress you’re buried in.”

Haba stayed home and refused to return to nursing school even after Father John had found two months’ tuition for her. By that time, she knew she was pregnant. The torture didn’t end with Mrs. Lamercie’s threats. There were dead animals found in her yard. A snake in her bed.

Colin didn’t let up either. Every night he played a new song at her gate. She would go outside and throw rocks at him. Once she hit him on the head. He simply kneeled and asked her to do it again. He even brought more rocks for her to hit him with, but she couldn’t do it. She fell into his arms and they were both wracked with sobs not knowing what to do.