Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [17]
Papa’s share of the profit was about five pennies per shirt. He quit after six months once he’d saved and borrowed enough money to buy his own sewing machine. He then began working for himself, selling directly to the vendors. That is, until the 1960s, when used clothes from the United States, which were called “Kennedys” because they were sent to Haiti during the Kennedy administration, became readily available.
One afternoon, my father was looking for another job when he stopped by the fabric shop where my uncle Joseph worked. He had become a regular customer there and was on good terms with the boss, who told him about an Italian émigré who’d just opened a shoe store on Grand Rue and was looking for a salesman. My father ran over to the store and, on the recommendation of my uncle’s boss, was hired on the spot.
My father’s new boss was always covered in jewelry. In addition to a gold necklace as thick as his belt, he wore an equally fat bracelet and two large gold rings on each hand.
“If men wore earrings back then,” my father used to say, “he’d have worn four.”
But the boss’s personal extravagance belied what he would pay my father. His salary was modest, less than the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars a month, with the possibility of a commission on sales of more than three pairs of shoes.
Having worked nonstop both as an apprentice and for himself, my father thought his new job would be a breeze. All he had to do was talk people into buying something they needed anyway.
The store carried shoes in many styles and price ranges. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, rubber shoes, plastic shoes—and the most expensive of all, leather shoes. He was told to emphasize that all the shoes, like the owner of the shop, were from Italy.
“Otherwise you can get any street corner cordonier to make you a pair of shoes,” the boss encouraged him to tell the customers.
But of course very few of the shoes were actually from Italy. The rest, he discovered, came from the United States via Puerto Rico.
Every once in a while, my uncle would recommend to his growing congregation that they buy their shoes from my father. Papa, in turn, convinced his boss to offer special discounts to my uncle’s parishioners by reminding him that church people were less likely to use birth control, which meant many more potential customers.
That period in my father’s life, the early sixties, was also shadowed by much larger events. Papa Doc Duvalier, who’d followed Daniel Fignolé into the presidential palace, refused to step down or allow new elections, despite a growing dissatisfaction with his increasingly repressive methods of imprisoning and publicly executing his enemies. Instead he had created a countrywide militia called the Tonton Macoutes, a battalion of brutal men and women aggressively recruited from the country’s urban and rural poor. Upon joining the Macoutes, the recruits received an identification card, which showed their allegiance to Papa Doc Duvalier, an indigo denim uniform, a .38 and the privilege of doing whatever they wanted.
My father recalled how some macoutes would walk into the shoe store, ask for the best shoes and simply grab them and walk away. He couldn’t protest or run after them or he might risk being shot.
After losing too many shoes, his boss came up with a solution. He ordered a large number of third-rate, non-leather shoes that looked like the real thing. Most of the macoutes who walked in wanting to steal shoes either didn’t care or couldn’t tell the difference anyway. If they asked to try on a pair of shoes, my father was to let them try on only the three-dollar shoes.
Papa would always get a knot in his stomach when a macoute asked him if there were other shoes. He would try not to shake as he replied, “Non,” all the while bending and