Excerpt: 'Brother, I'm Dying'

'Brother, I'm Dying' Book Cover

Beating the Darkness



He heard some muffled voices coming from the living room below, so he grabbed his voice box and tiptoed down the stairs. In the living room, he found Josiane and his grandchildren: Maxime, Nozial, Denise, Gabrielle and the youngest, who was also named Joseph, after him. Leone, who was visiting from Leogane, was also there, along with her brothers, Bosi and George.

"Ki jan nou ye?" my uncle asked. How's everyone?

"MINUSTAH plis ampil police," a trembling Leone tried to explain.

Like my uncle, Leone had spent her entire life watching the strong arm of authority in action, be it the American marines who'd been occupying the country when she was born or the brutal local army they'd trained and left behind to prop up, then topple, the puppet governments of their choice. And when the governments fell, United Nations soldiers, so-called peacekeepers, would ultimately have to step in, and even at the cost of innocent lives attempt to restore order.

Acting on the orders of the provisional government that had replaced Aristide, about three hundred United Nations soldiers and Haitian riot police had come together in a joint operation to root out the most violent gangs in Bel Air that Sunday morning. Arriving at three thirty a.m., the UN soldiers had stormed the neighborhood, flattening makeshift barricades with bulldozers. They'd knocked down walls on corner buildings that could be used to shield snipers, cleared away piles of torched cars that had been blocking traffic for weeks and picked up some neighborhood men.

"It is a physical sweep of the streets," Daniel Moskaluk, the spokesman for the UN trainers of the Haitian police, would later tell the Associated Press, "so that we can return to normal traffic in this area, or as normal as it can be for these people."


An hour passed while they cowered behind the living room couch. There was another lull in the shooting, but the bottle and rock throwing continued. He heard something he hadn't heard in some time: people were pounding on pots and pans and making clanking noises that rang throughout the entire neighborhood. It wasn't the first time he'd heard it, of course. This kind of purposeful rattle was called bat teneb, or beating the darkness. His neighbors, most of them now dead, had tried to beat the darkness when Fignole had been toppled so many decades ago. A new generation had tried it again when Aristide had been removed both times. My uncle tried to imagine in each clang an act of protest, a cry for peace, to the Haitian riot police, to the United Nations soldiers, all of whom were supposed to be protecting them. But more often it seemed as if they were attacking them while going after the chimères, or ghosts, as the gang members were commonly called.

The din of clanking metal rose above the racket of roofdenting rocks. Or maybe he only thought so because he was so heartened by the bat tenèb. Maybe he wouldn't die today after all. Maybe none of them would die, because their neighbors were making their presence known, demanding peace from the gangs as well as from the authorities, from all sides.

He got up and cautiously peeked out of one of the living room windows. There were now two UN tanks parked in front of the church. Thinking they'd all be safer in his room, he asked everyone to go with him upstairs.

Maxo had been running around the church compound looking for him. They now found each other in my uncle's room. The lull was long enough to make them both think the gunfight might be over for good. Relieved, my uncle showered and dressed, putting on a suit and tie, just as he had every other Sunday morning for church.



"I think we should cancel today," Maxo told his father when they met again at the front gate.

"And what of the people who are here?" asked my uncle. "How can we turn them away? If we don't open, we're showing our lack of faith. We're showing that we don't trust enough in God to protect us."




"Why are you all afraid?" he shouted, his mouth looking like it was floating in the middle of his dark face. When he paused for a moment, it maintained a nervous grin.

"If you truly believe in God," he continued, "you shouldn't be afraid."

My uncle couldn't tell whether he was taunting them or comforting them, telling them they were fine or prepping them for execution.

"We're here to help you," the lead officer said, "to protect you against the chimeres."

No one moved or spoke.

"Who's in charge here?" asked the officer.

Someone pointed at my uncle.

"Are there chimeres here?" the policeman shouted in my uncle's direction.

Gang members inside his church? My uncle didn't want to think there were. But then he looked over at all the unfamiliar faces in the pews, the many men and women who'd run in to seek shelter from the bullets. They might have been chimeres, gangsters, bandits, killers, but most likely they were ordinary people trying to stay alive.

"Are you going to answer me?" the lead officer sternly asked my uncle.

"He's a bebe," shouted one of the women from the church. She was trying to help my uncle. She didn't want them to hurt him. "He can't speak."


"Who's this?" they randomly asked, using their machine guns as pointers. "Who's that?"

When no one would answer, the lead officer signaled for his men to move out. As they backed away, my uncle could see another group of officers climbing the outside staircase toward the building's top floors. The next thing he heard was another barrage of automatic fire. This time it was coming from above him, from the roof of the building.




There were so many screams my uncle didn't know where to turn. Whom should he try to see first? He watched people stumble out of their houses, dusty, bloody people.

"Here's the traitor," one man said while pointing at him. "The bastard who let them up on his roof to kill us."

"You're not going to live here among us anymore," another man said. "You've taken money for our blood."


It was rumored that a reward of a hundred thousand Haitian dollars — the equivalent of about fifteen thousand American dollars — had been offered for the capture of the neighborhood gang leaders. My uncle's neighbors now incorrectly believed he'd volunteered his roof in order to collect some of that money.



"Pastor," she whispered, "my aunt sent me to tell you something."


"What is it?" asked my uncle.

"Don't talk," said Anne. "People can hear your machine."


"Pastor," said Anne, "my aunt told me to tell you she heard that fifteen people were killed when they were shooting from your roof and the neighbors are saying that they're going to bring the corpses to you so you can pay for their funerals. If you don't pay, and if you don't pay for the people who are hurt and need to go to the hospital, they say they'll kill you and cut your head off so that you won't even be recognized at your own funeral."

My uncle lowered the volume on his voice box and leaned close to Anne's ears.

"Tell Ferna not to worry," he said. "God is with me."


That night after dark everyone gathered in my uncle's room. He and the children crowded together on his bed, while Maxo and his wife, Josiane, Leone and her brothers stretched out on blankets on the floor. To avoid being seen, they remained in the dark, not even lighting a candle.

They could now hear a more familiar type of gunfire, not the super firing power of the Haitian special forces and UN soldiers but a more subdued kind of ammunition coming from the handguns and rifles owned by area gang members. Shots were occasionally fired at the church. Now and then a baiting voice would call out, "Pastor, you're not getting away. We're going to make you pay."


At one point they heard footsteps, the loud thump of boots on a narrow ledge above my uncle's bedroom window. Maxo tightened his grip on the handle of a machete he kept under his pillow, just as his father had in his youth. Something heavy was being dragged across the floor above them, possibly the generator on which they relied for most of their electrical power.


"They're mostly angry at me," he said. "They're angry because they think I asked the riot police and the UN to go up on the roof. Everyone who came tonight asked me, 'Why did you let them in?' as though I had a choice."

"Maxo," he said, putting as much command as he could behind his mechanized voice. "Take your wife and the children and go to Leogane with your aunt and uncles. If you leave at four in the morning, you'll be on one of the first camions to Leogane."

"I'm not going to leave you," Maxo said.


"They're very angry with us right now," he told Maxo. "What if they bayonet the children right in front of us? Would you want to see that? Your children torn from limb to limb right before your eyes?"


"Okay," he said finally. "I'll make sure the children leave safely, then I'll come back for you. You call my cell phone as soon as you can and we'll meet at Tante Zi's house in Delmas."

"You should leave with us," Leone persisted.






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