Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [21]
In her memoir, Mémoire errante, Jan J. Dominique, the novelist and radio personality who is Jean Dominique’s daughter and phonetic namesake, writes of the Artibonite Valley ceremony that during Jean’s wake she witnessed the creation of a myth when someone told Jean’s wife, Michèle, “You know, Madame Jean, he often came to see us. He would follow us across the river all the way to the coffee plantations high in the mountains. He would sleep with us, share in our way of life. He was just here, a month ago.”
“Michèle looked over at me,” noted Jan J. “I am bewildered. My father has never lived, in recent years, in this region. He had not left Port-au-Prince last month. When he went to the Artibonite it was to work as a journalist and activist. He neither planted nor harvested in the fields. We do not correct this man. We had not yet even scattered my father’s ashes in the river when he had already become a legend.”
I remember watching footage of the scattering of Jean’s ashes, which were passed in a corn-husk-covered calabash from his wife’s trembling hands to that of several local farmers before they were emptied into the slow-moving water. I remember thinking how ample they were, these bountiful ashes, for such a skinny man.
The footage of the scattering of the ashes is now part of a documentary that Jonathan Demme was directing about Jean’s life. The documentary would be titled The Agronomist because, during one of the many interviews that Jonathan conducted with Jean—when Jonathan had envisioned a film that would end with Jean’s triumphant return from exile—Jean, who is often referred to as Haiti’s most famous journalist, told Jonathan, “You will be surprised, but I am not a journalist. I am an agronomist.”
Jean had been dead for eight months, and the Haitian government’s investigation into his death had been going nowhere, when I met his widow, Michèle Montas, in a Manhattan restaurant in December 2000 to interview her for an article I was writing about the case for The Nation magazine. Michèle was indeed guapa, a tall, striking, usually cheerful woman, but the day we met to talk about Jean’s death in detail for the first time, she was looking just as sad as she had at his funeral months earlier. At lunch, she barely sipped her water. When the waiter came to check on her glass, he stopped to ask about a button pinned to her jacket. On the button was a picture of Jean. Above Jean’s piercing eyes, raised eyebrows, and high forehead were the words Jean Dominique vivan (Jean Dominique Lives).
“Who is Jean Dominique?” the waiter asked Michèle.
“My husband,” she said.
For more than two decades, excluding stretches of time when they were twice forced into exile, the two had worked together, coanchoring a morning news program, the highlights of which were Dominique’s commentaries on Haitian social and political life. Friends and foes listened to them, to “smell the air and test the waters,” as Jean liked to say, “get closer to the beton,” gauge the mood of the streets. Had it been any other morning, Jean and Michèle would have been together when he and Jean Claude Louissaint were assassinated in the radio station’s parking lot.
“We usually drove to work together,” Michèle explained, carefully drawing out her words, as though to pace herself so she would not cry. “That morning, Jean left ten minutes before me to look at some international news for the program. As I got in the car, leaving home, I heard some usual announcements on the radio and then silence. I called the station and the person who answered told me, ‘Just come!’ When I pulled into the