This bus I’m in happens to be in Haiti. I’m out in the countryside, about fifty miles west of Port-au-Prince. What I’m doing here isn’t important to this column, which is supposed to be about the short story. I will say, though, that there are times when I wonder if I don’t go out of my way to find new places to be lonely. I wasn’t lonely enough at home? And not to toot my own horn, but someone who can feel alone on a packed bus in Haiti has a certain amount of talent in this area.

And I have to say also that there is something comforting about watching a movie on someone else’s computer while on a packed bus. My seatmate’s daughter is asleep, squeezed in the nook between the seats. Her name is Chantal. She’s four. Before she fell asleep, she and her mother talked to me. Chantal dozed off during an earlier shootout. But just now she woke up and tugged her mother’s arm because she’s hungry. Her mom has paused the movie and I’m taking this opportunity – Van Damme’s face frozen in fierce contemplation on the screen (he’s sad, as if he wishes he didn’t have to be so strong and fearless all the time) – to take down a few notes for a long, long over-due column. A half hour ago I was in the middle of a V.S Pritchett story called, “The Fall.”  My finger is still holding my place. I’ve read this story many times, and though it is brilliant, almost miraculous in my view, Van Damme totally walloped it.

***

It’s been the habit of this column to bring together disparate elements. Usually this has to do with where I am and what I happen to be doing at a particular time, and how it all connects to a given short story.[1] So it might be expected that I will now link the elements I’ve raised here, Van Damme, the Republic of Haiti, and the great English storywriter V.S. Pritchett. But this time I won’t. The fact is that but for all three things happening to me at this moment, on this bus, they have zero to do with each other. Why force it? I should also mention that while Haiti itself is fascinating and difficult and very welcoming (note Chantal and her mother’s kindness to a stranger), even Haiti’s green, often breathtaking, severely denuded countryside is no match for this goon, Van Damme.

General Dessalines

I could, of course, remark on the irony of a Haitian woman watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie at all, and talk about how Haiti whooped Napoleon’s French ass in 1804.

(Is Van Damme French?) Anyway, you get my point. Or maybe not. Wait, that’s right, I’ve decided not to make a point here at all. What I’m trying to say, without making a case out of it, is that the world is full of these crazy crosscurrents. Let us now praise disconnection. It doesn’t fit. It will never fit. It fits. A Haitian woman and her daughter, a somewhat lost American, this idiotic movie, V.S. Pritchett on my lap – all here, all now.

***

This said, it is tempting to inject a bit more meaning by replacing the Pritchett book with the Lyonel Trouillot novel that’s in the backpack at my feet. There would be more symmetry if Van Damme, (the French?)[2] action hero, had distracted me from a profound and intense novel of Port-au-Prince called The Street of Lost Footsteps. I might then have been able to say colonialism remains alive and well via the entertainment industry.

But no, it won’t line up. What can I do? I’m blown away by the Trouillot book, but it’s Pritchett I’ve been reading, trying to read, this morning.

And traveling in a relatively unknown place with V.S. Pritchett is like having a busload of befuddled oddballs along with you on the bus of oddballs you are already on. Right then, onward with the column. Chantal will be done eating her oatmeal, potato chips, and string cheese soon.

***

“The Fall” is about an accountant. The scene is an industrial city in England, also a former colonial power but that is neither here nor there. The story opens with the accountant, Charles Peacock, in his hotel, getting ready for the annual accountants’ dinner.

At the Royal was Charles Peacock, slender in his shirt, balancing on one leg and gazing with frowns of affection in the wardrobe mirror at the other leg as he pulled his trousers on; and then with a smile of farewell as the second went in. Buttoned up, relieved if his nakedness, he visited other mirrors…

Frowns of affection! Saying goodbye to his legs as he puts his pants on! Relieved of his nakedness! See what I mean? This is the third sentence in the story, and you are already starting to know, intimately, a guy named Peacock. We are nothing more and nothing less than our idiosyncrasies. For example, I often carry on detailed conversations with my shoes. And like us all, Peacock is burdened by problems, family problems. In his case, it is his brother, Shelmerdine Peacock – the movie star – who plagues him. Everywhere Peacock goes he is only his brother’s brother. As soon as he enters the dinner, the president of the accountants’ association shouts, “I saw your brother this afternoon.”

Peacock’s drink jumped and splashed in his hand. The president winked at his friends.

“Hah!” said the President. “That gave our friend Peacock a scare!”

“At the Odean,” explained a kinder man.

“Is Shelmerdine Peacock your brother? The actor?” another said, astonished, looking at Peacock from head to foot.

There’s an upside though to being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother, and Peacock vacillates between being horrified to basking. He’s a lonely neurotic. Even here among all his fellow accountants, Peacock is jittery and isolated. The man’s got no Van Damme. (His brother might, not him.) So being the brother of celebrity takes the edge off a little.

It was pleasing. There was always the praise; there were always the questions. He had seen the posters about Shel’s film during the week on his way to the office. They pleased, but they also troubled. Peacock stood at his place in the Great Hall and paused to look around, in case there was one more glance of vicarious fame to be collected.

And yet, something beyond his merely being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother occurs and this is where the story takes a turn for what I will call: the ordinary strange. By this I mean that V.S. Pritchett has a way of immortalizing the plain weirdness of being alive on a daily basis. Charles Peacock hates the annual dinner, but at the same time he – desperately – doesn’t want it to end. (Who can’t relate to this? I dread going to parties, but once I get to one you got to pry me loose.) So Charles Peacock, a most average man, in order to try and convince his fellow men to stay a little while, is about to do something no reader will ever forget. Because Shelmerdine is not the only Peacock with talent. As the men begin to leave the Great Hall, Peacock drops to the floor.

‘Falling,’ said Peacock. ‘The stage fall.’ He looked at them with dignity, then let the expression die on his face. He fell quietly full length to the floor. Before they could speak he was up on his feet.

‘My brother weighs two hundred and twenty pounds,’ he said with condescension to the man opposite. ‘The ordinary person falls and breaks

an arm or a foot, because he doesn’t know. It’s an art.’

…

And down he went, thump, on the carpet again and lying at their feet he said: “Painless. Nothing broken. Not a bruise. I said “an art.” Really one might call it a science. Do you see how I’m lying?’

‘What’s happened to Peacock’ said two or three of the men joining the group.

And Peacock falls and falls again.

After a while, most of the accountants begin to lose interest. One of the few men who has bothered to stay finally tells Peacock all right already, that he gets it, that he appreciates the demonstration but that Peacock need not fall again, that he’s actually more interested in the theory behind the falling than the falling itself. This infuriates Peacock who insists that there is nothing theoretical about it. Once again, he hits the floor. Peacock’s falling is not unlike a Pritchett story itself. His stories never call attention to how good they are. They just do. They just are. Meaning is never handed. Connections are never forced. Now a man – a man we have come to know – is standing. Now he’s at our feet. Peacock stands, Peacock falls. A character is redeemed, and for me, enshrined in my memory for good. Who needs Shelmerdine and his movies (Waste, The Gun Runner, Zut)? I, for one, will always have his brother, Charles. At last the final indifferent accountant slowly wanders away.  It’s his brother who’s famous, not this hapless clown. Why should I watch him fall?

“The Fall” ends – hilariously, movingly – with Peacock alone in the Great Hall, showing off his skills to a portrait of Queen Victoria. And the queen might or might not have clapped her little hands.

***

There’s some Charles Peacock in us all. We fear other people while at the same time we have an insatiable craving for attention. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me. Look at me. By the way, our bus is now, in case it is of interest, stopped at a police roadblock. The guy in the seat behind has just handed me – an obviously lunchless person – half his turkey sandwich. “We’re going to be here a while,” he said. “As soon as they get bored terrorizing us, we’ll be on our way.” So on the bus we remain. Out the window, on the left is a small lake; on the right a steep cliff. In front, and behind us, a line of cars, buses, motorcycles, women and men and children on foot hauling merchandise. Money changers wave wads of bills. A woman selling hats wears, I count, eighteen of them on her head.

***

And, yet in my mind – even as Chantal has finished eating and the three of us are once again ensconced in the movie – I’m also still thinking about the story I didn’t re-read and how nice it might be to simply let go and fall on the floor. Any floor. Which is, in a way, comforting. As comforting as this turkey sandwich, as comforting as my seatmates and this movie.

***

Two last things: (and with my apologies for the whiff of connections): One, I no longer want this bus ride to end and am half hoping that the cops find some reason to detain us. Or maybe later we’ll break down. And two, I just remembered that a couple of days ago, in Port-au-Prince, I saw a man selling a peacock on John Brown Avenue.[3] He was selling the bird for 1600 U.S. dollars, cage included. I asked my friend Jean Pierre who he thought might buy it. Jean Pierre said someone with 1600 USD who also wants a peacock. Like that would not be unusual at all, and maybe it wouldn’t be.

___________________________________________________________________________

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Roxane Gay’s debut collection Ayiti is a touching patchwork of stories, lists, modern fairy tales and poems, cataloging and exploring the author’s relationship with Haiti.

“You Never Knew HOW THE WATERS Ran So Cruel So Deep,” cautions the title of the sixth chapter in Roxane Gay’s Ayiti. The sixth chapter is a collection of prices, an itemized list of how much things cost in this world, where you can sell your ’92 Camry for $175 US, and buy passage for two “on a somewhat seaworthy vessel from Cap-Haitien to Provinciales, Turks & Caicos, then the United States” for $3,250. The prices do the talking here, commanding everything from sex to immigration.

The preoccupation with selling and possibly selling-out pervades the narratives of Ayiti. In the chapter, “Things I Know ABOUT Fairy Tales,” the narrator, a mother and wife, is kidnapped and held captive for thirteen days while visiting her parents in Port-au-Prince. During this time she remembers a dinner party at home in the States where the “pretentious but engaging conversation” turned to Haiti:

One of my colleagues mentioned a magazine article he read about how Haiti had surpassed Colombia as the kidnapping capital of the world. Another colleague told us about a recent feature in a national magazine. Soon everyone was offering up their own desperate pieces of information, conjuring a place that does not exist.

…Three years later, I would overhear one of these colleagues, trying to be charming at a cocktail party, telling a precocious graduate student that he knew someone who had been kidnapped in one of those Third World countries. When I walked by he wouldn’t have a strong enough sense of shame to look away.

Even as the narrators of Gay’s stories offer us intimate perspectives into lives and experiences we may never personally encounter, they remind us that we are voyeurs, even potential exploiters of these stories. So many of the voices in Ayiti are trapped in situations that are too difficult to bear, and yet they must. Possibly the reader faces a moral trap in the difficult stories that Gay has to tell—to hear and exploit would be one kind of betrayal, to refuse to hear would be another and possibly worse.

The longing for and resentment against diaspora is another cruel, deep water that overwhelms the stories of Ayiti. The word “Ayiti” is Creole for Haiti, the first independent nation in Latin America and the first black-led republic. There is fierce pride in this knowledge, in the rich history and folklore, and in the beauty of a home where the white sand can burn and “the water so clear blue it hurt my eyes.” Contrast this pride against the narratives:

aired in perpetuity, whether on Euro News,
Univision, ESPN, or ABC, CNN, CBS, FOX or
NBC, will begin and end referring to your beloved
land as the poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere. You are what you have not.

So much seems packed inside this awareness of Haiti’s reputation broadcast over the world: anger, shame, love, desire, knowledge, wisdom. The tension implicit in defending a country that often fails to defend and comfort you, is layered here as in so many of the stories, where the desire to leave is just as strong as the need to stay. It’s not clear if any of Gay’s characters gain what they hope to when they reach the United States. For what have they gained? A frantic purchase of over-the-counter sleeping pills and a home pregnancy test. A meander through a 7-11, culminating in the purchase of a Hot Pocket. Only the ones who have already acclimated, whose stories of humiliation are elided here, seem to have gained the promises of diaspora. And in this case, the blade cuts both ways, because it is the Haitian, so in love with Miami, who writes letters back to her cousin, asking “Is it true Haitians are eating mud pies?”

Gay’s writing has a declarative and knowing quality, which immediately reassures the reader that she is an expert of her material, if not on the matters that may have been discussed in “the political science class she slept through in college.” Gay’s expertise seems like a kind of physical knowledge, located beneath her skin and that of the people whose voices she has invented, recorded, eavesdropped upon and slept with. Where the stories are received, as in “In the Manner OF WATER or Light,” which recounts how the narrator’s mother was conceived in a river of blood following a massacre of Haitians by Dominican soldiers in 1937, the events’ aftermath are explicitly memorialized in the body. Both the mother and grandmother suffer from the smell of blood in their nostrils that cannot be helped by medicine. The grandmother feels a sharp pain across her back and shoulders whenever she sees a sugarcane field. She drinks the mud of Massacre River, bonding to her cells what she refuses to erase from memory.

Ayiti, as a collection of diverse voices and story forms, is its own kind of diaspora. There are fifteen named sections but dozens more stories within them, some so short you could read in sixty seconds but ponder for weeks. Roxane Gay has a gift in presenting the taste of a life in a single sliver. She will tell you what an immigrant couple purchased from a CVS on June 26 of an unnamed year, and from there, you could easily—or uneasily—imagine the rest.

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Before all that, I was briefly a junior preacher (I wrote sermons on yellow legal pads overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway), then even more briefly a put-upon founding editor at a religious publishing outfit (I wrote solicitation letters to Irish people in a sterile office building in suburban northern Orlando, looking for someone to write a faith-based biography of Bono and U2, and eventually landed a university chaplain in Belfast, who went on to sell more copies of his book than I will probably ever sell of all of mine.) What was I looking for? In the immediate present, time, always time. In the ever-present “future,” some kind of romantic vision of the person I was not but might one day be. I was thinking Kerouac’s scroll and a subsequent ride cross-country ride on Ken Kesey’s bus; or Vonnegut’s butcher-paper-lined office at the University of Iowa, where sprouted Billy Pilgrim and the Nazis and a time-traveling race of aliens newly named the Trafalmadorians; or Barry Hannah bringing his handgun to his classes at the University of Alabama, blowing his trumpet at his students, shooting an arrow through the open window of the dean who cuckolded him. All these notions were new to me, because I was newly drunk on literature, never having read any of it (save a novel or two of half-understood Faulkner or Hawthorne or Hemingway in high school.) I knew nothing. I wrote two page stories in stolen four-hour blocks, sent them to the New Yorker, and waited patiently for a letter from David Remnick saying: “We recognize your genius, and oh how we have been waiting for it. Here is a check for five thousand dollars.”

This evening I tried to make a list of all the places I’ve written. I started with cities in Florida: Key Biscayne, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Lake Worth, West Palm Beach, Jupiter, Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, Daytona Beach, Cocoa Beach, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Gainesville, Ocala, Pensacola, Wauchula, Arcadia, Ft. Myers, Ft. Walton Beach, Wildwood, Winter Haven, Brandon, Tampa, Leesburg, Lutz, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Bradenton, Lakeland, Lake Mary, and Lake Wales. Then states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee—38 states in total, to spare you the list. There was a swath of summer in Eastern Europe with a Polish-born buddy, now an American citizen by way of Sicily, a Montreal ghetto, Yale, Wall Street, Johns Hopkins, and Columbus, Ohio, where we cemented our friendship at the Blue Danube restaurant on High Street by sketching a plan to trace the course of the Danube River from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. We paid for it by writing a grant proposing we write a book of competing and contradictory accounts of the trip, but all we wrote were drunken postcards to people we admired, which we were smart enough not to mail from the post offices where we went so far as to address them, in Brasov, Budapest, Bucharest.

These days I’m fairly anchored to a teaching exile in Toledo, Ohio, for nine months a year. I’ve bought an old house and built myself a proper office, but I can’t shake the urge to move around, which seems by now to be a prerequisite for finding the language. I favor two coffee shops separated by an often-icy interstate loop, and a Mexican restaurant where I occasionally compose in the company of a mariachi band, and a sports bar where a kind former student sometimes brings me extra sticks of celery to cut the bite of the spicy sauce that coats the chicken wings I must buy to earn my writing seat among the parties of giant factory workers wearing the colors of the Detroit Lions or the Cleveland Browns or, godforbid, the Pittsburgh Steelers. I finished the last pages of my first book in the Jimmy John’s Sub Shop on the south side, right across the street from the Panera Bread from which I could occasionally skim Internet if the wind and the weather cooperated in carrying the signal from there to here. I composed those pages while sitting down, listening on the sub shop speakers to the same song (“Let It Bleed”) I’d played on my headphones while completing the book’s earliest story in a way that used to work but now seems crazy: One floor at a time, first to nineteeth, three hundred draft words per floor, bottom to top, in the now-demolished stairwell of the old Ohio State University library tower.

Isaac Adrien, who grew up in the orphanage and now helps run it, burns a pile of trash for sanitary purposes.

The summer gets the best of my writing now, my desk in an orphanage in a remote mountain village in Ouest Province, Haiti, where I’ve been working off-and-on for several years now on a novel about American missionaries and a narrative nonfiction book about a child-kidnapping-for-ransom. My Haitian models and teachers, many of them children, regard me strangely. Sometimes one of the children will ask, “Why do you sit and type all day while everyone else is doing work?” At those times, I look up from whatever atrocity I’ve been reconstructing in prose—the dechoukaj uprising, the little girl lost like a leaf in the river into which she’d fallen, the cemetery down the mountain path that cracked open in the earthquake and the bodies fell out—and see the reason why it matters to move my writing desk away from an easy place and into the less-known world that won’t give up its secrets to the comfortable. In those times, it is my responsibility as a human being to put down my pen and paper or my laptop computer, and walk outside, and hammer a nail into a plank, or watch a soccer game or a cockfight, or talk with a farmer, help throw the trash onto the fire, so that the dangerous used-up things—medical needles, bacteria-filled food packaging left behind by American visitors, toilet paraphernalia—won’t injure someone desperate enough to dig them up from where they would have otherwise been buried and use them to deliver a new dose of medicine, lick the last morsel of nourishment someone else was too wasteful to value, patch a hole in the wall where some rain is getting in.

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There comes a time in every New Yorker writer’s life when collected articles morph, as if predestined, into a book. For David Grann, whose full-length book The Lost City of Z exploded onto the literary scene last year, that time is now. Grann’s The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession is made up of twelve previously published articles (nine from The New Yorker), some having first appeared almost a decade ago.

Despite its widely varied subjects—ranging from a French man who roams Europe pretending to be a teenager to the prosecution of the Aryan Brotherhood—Grann’s book does indeed have a unifying theme, one which makes the volume more than the sum of its parts. Grann’s theme is the quest for darkness in its broadest form. Sometimes that quest is literal, as when he follows two men who spend their lives probing the ocean’s depths in search of giant squid. More often, the quest is metaphorical, as the writer introduces us to men and women—mostly men—who are obsessed with the dark side of life. A man who becomes obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and may or may not have orchestrated his own suicide to mimic a Holmesian death. A man who allegedly murders his ex-wife’s lover, and then writes a novel detailing his crimes.

David Grann

In “City of Water,” Grann enters the lives of “sandhogs,” those who dig the tunnels far below the streets of New York City, and struggles to understand why anyone would choose a profession that, aside from being fraught with danger, forces one to spend more time under the surface than above it. What’s impressive is that Grann never pushes his subjects too hard, nor stoops to easy conclusions. A reader leaves “City of Water” not really knowing why James Ryan, Grann’s subject, does what he does, beyond the simple reason that his father and grandfather were sandhogs before him. But we do come to understand Ryan in ways that are more meaningful and less condescending than mere explanation.

Grann is not afraid to tackle subjects, interview people, and go places many journalists would prefer to avoid. He admits to being terrified of entering a “mole”—a huge, powerful, potentially deadly machine burrowing hundreds of feet below the city. But he does it anyway. “Soon,” he writes, “I was standing in mud and water up to my knees, staring at the giant metal blades. I tried to step away, but my back hit something hard: the head of the tunnel.”

In the strongest and most poignant piece, “Giving ‘the Devil’ his Due,” Grann meets and follows a Haitian exile named Emmanuel “Toto” Constant. Constant, the alleged head of a paramilitary death squad in the post-Aristide era, somehow emigrated to Queens and, at the time of the article’s original publication, was living in the midst of the Haitian community in exile, many of whose families he had terrorized and murdered. “Unlike Cain, who was cast out of his community,” Grann writes,

Constant had become an exile in a community of exiles, banished among those whom he had banished. Though he had fled justice, he could not escape his past. He had to face it nearly every day—in a glance from a neighbor, or a poster on the street.

Grann allows Constant to speak for himself, telling his story over several months, often speaking “for hours on end.” Over the same period, Grann “interviewed his alleged victims, along with human-rights workers, United Nations observers, Haitian authorities, and former and current U.S. officials.” Though Constant is clearly villainous, Grann manages to tell his story dispassionately, in a style that is calm and objective without being cold. It is this absence of pathos or judgmentalism in telling the story of a cold-blooded killer that makes all the stories in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes so powerful, and so important.

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Who wants a Sumatran tiger for a pet?

“The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.” — Sidney Mintz at The Boston Review

A handy interactive guide to everything Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Sylvio Berlusconi has “allegedly” done wrong.

Whoops! Congress took away your civil liberties for another year. (via Maud)

And because I like you, a classic Believer piece: “The Last Antiwar Poem.”

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Claire Durham of the Red Cross on why you should donate money instead of your old yoga mat. (via Boingboing)

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Here’s an underreported story: Dominicans are coming to the aid of Haitians, despite a less-than-idyllic history between the two countries.

VICE is taking a ton of heat for its treatment of Liberia in “The Vice Guide to Liberia.”

A very cool looking architectural installation that covers an abandoned Detroit home in ice.

Here is what Gitmo looks like.

In an unrelated side note, due to what will forever be referred to as the great hard-drive mounting fiasco of 2010 (really, who decided that hard drives needed to “mount” anything? Couldn’t they have called it something else?), my computer has decided to die on me. Unfortunately, this will be my last post today, but I’ll be back next week with a new computer and a lot less money in my savings account.

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Rebecca Solnit blogs at Guernica about the media stigmatization of looting in the Haiti earthquake and elsewhere. Her conclusions, as you can imagine, are refreshingly unconventional and subversive:

“After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.”

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As we mentioned yesterday, Royal Carribbean Cruise Lines is still docking at Labadee, its privately-owned Haitian port. Yes, they’re delivering some relief supplies, but they’re also encouraging their passengers to party at Labadee as well. My question: does Carnival get a cut of what these vendors in Haiti earn by entertaining passengers?

The following are announcements I’ve picked up here and there about fundraisers. Not all will have links.

Via Facebook, if you’re in south Florida on Saturday, January 24 from 6-10 p.m., Murphy’s Law Irish Pub at the Seminole Hard Rock will be holding a fundraiser for Haiti Relief. Patrons will be charged a $5 cover and all drink proceeds from 6 – 10 p.m. will be donated to the cause. Bartenders from the pub, as well as from other Seminole Paradise clubs and Center Bar inside the Casino, will be donating their time and tips. Murphy’s Law has pledged to match that amount.

In New York, I am Ayiti is holding a fundraiser featuring performances by DJ Laylo on the 1s and 2s, Kalunga Neg Mawon, Tiga Jean-Baptiste & T’Chaka, and Jhon Clarke (formerly of Black Parents). Minimum donation of $10, and CCADI is also a drop-off point for relief supplies. Check the link for more details.

Also in New York, Drom is hosting “The World Stands with Haiti,” with all proceeds going to benefit Partners in Health. Music by Charanga Soleil with very special guests “Papo” Ortega – Pepito Gomez – Luisito Ayala – Eddy Zervigon – Ray Martinez – Richard Agustin – Cedric Brooks & many more surprise artists.

Send any Haiti news to poetry@therumpus.net

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“In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.”

On January 17, 2007, a gang of armed kidnappers broke down Francky and Tania Désir’s front door near the village of Callebasse, Haiti, in the mountains just south of Port-au-Prince. They abducted the Désirs’ 2-year-old daughter Fabby and held her for $200,000 ransom. For 5 days, the Désirs did not know if they would ever again see their daughter alive. Francky Désir negotiated the ransom down to $5,000, borrowed the money from relatives in upstate New York, and delivered the ransom to the kidnappers in Delmas. The next day, his daughter was released on the street nearby. Her clothes had been stolen, and she was severely dehydrated because  she had been given little to eat or drink except moonshine. She was afraid for her life, but she was otherwise unharmed.

For the last two years, I have been traveling to Callebasse to work on a book about Fabi Désir’s kidnapping. While there, I often stay as a guest at the orphanage where Tania Désir used to live, and which she and Francky now operate. When news came last Tuesday, January 12, that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Haiti, my first thought was of the orphanage. What about the children who live there, and what about Tania and Francky Désir? Were they alive? Were they safe? Was there still a roof over their heads?

Francky and Tania Désir

Information came in dribs and drabs, some of it good, some horrible. The orphanage was still standing, but many of the other homes in Callebasse had fallen, and many in the village were dead. All the children at the orphanage were safe and accounted for. Tania was safe, and Tania’s children were safe. Francky was missing. He had driven a truckload of men to a church meeting in Port-au-Prince the morning of the earthquake, and no one had heard from any of them.

In first days after the earthquake, the television showed horrible scenes, most of them from Pétionville, the richest and best-constructed city in the country. The streets were full of rubble. Bodies lay dead beside fallen buildings. Men with sticks and shovels tried to rescue the people trapped inside.

Then worse news. The Hotel Montana had fallen on its occupants. The Caribbean Supermarket was down. The National Palace was down. These were bourgeois places, the places where foreign dignitaries slept and the richest families shopped for imported ice cream and President René Préval governed. If the earthquake was sufficient to topple these well-built places, what of the cheap concrete and tin-roofed squatter houses in the bidonvilles on the unstable rises overlooking Pétionville? What of the shantytowns alongside the open sewers of Cité Soleil by the water? What about the impoverished cities of Carrefour and Léogâne, near the epicenter of the earthquake? What of the remote mountain villages like Callebasse just hours from Port-au-Prince?

It was not difficult to foresee the worst: International aid would reach the city first, get bogged down in the transportation, security, distribution, and other logistical snags that would greet the first responders, and never quite reach the countryside.

Yet if I had to choose a place to ride out the aftermath of a devastating earthquake—in the city or in Callebasse—I would choose Callebasse. The people I knew there were survivors. They grew their own crops, raised their own rabbits and chickens, and believed in replenishing the local forest. They lived through the fall of the Jean-Claude Duvalier regime, the dechoukaj uprooting, the so-called political times surrounding the rises and falls of the priest-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the terror of the kidnapping gangs out of Cité Soleil, and the hurricanes of 1998 and 2008. What man and nature destroyed, they rebuilt.

And if I had to bet on a single survivor, I would bet on Francky Désir. In the last three years, he had lived through many nightmares—his life threatened, his dogs poisoned, his trucks and guns stolen, his daughter kidnapped—and yet he went to work daily, driving his truck up and down the same mountain roads along which his tormentors had taken his daughter, so he could shuttle supplies between the village on the mountain and the city below. He was the neighborhood taxicab driver, offering free rides to town to anyone who asked. He was the neighborhood ambulance service, on call 24 hours a day, to bring the gravely ill and injured to the nearest hospital in Fermathe. And he was the neighborhood’s chief mechanic, able to build one new truck component from three old, broken, and mismatched parts. In his downtime, he was turning his house into a walled, armored, and iron-gated fortress so no one would harm his family again.

A day passed with no news. Then, Wednesday evening, a new report: No one had heard from Francky, but now the roof was caving in on the house he was fortifying. Tania and the children were sleeping outside, in the open area of the yard, for fear that aftershocks might topple the house or the wall around the property and crush them.

At 8 AM on Thursday, January 14, the phone rang, with good news: Francky was alive. Then the bad news: The truckload of men he delivered to the church meeting had died along with everyone else in the building, 40  dead altogether. Francky would have died too, except that his truck developed mechanical problems on the way down the mountain, and he skipped the meeting to buy some parts downtown.

One danger of writing a dispatch from the moment is you don’t know what is going to happen next. I continue to fear for the safety of my friends in Haiti—I am afraid to hope too much—and I plan to return to the country as soon as flights resume to see them with my own eyes and to offer whatever help I might. For now, I offer an excerpt—the story of Fabby’s kidnapping— from a book now less close to being finished. The village of Callebasse must be rebuilt. The ill and injured must be tended. The dead must be buried.

In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.

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