Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [32]
Her strength and resolve seemed to grow with each word, even as she said she got depressed sometimes because she couldn’t do much for herself or her family. She ached all the time from the wounds we could see and others we could not see. At night she ached even more because of the seren, the twilight air, which affected her bones. Her husband had to bathe her and comb the children’s hair. Something a man ought not to have to do, she added.
Her son was sitting quietly in a corner observing the shoot while her daughters played and ate candy in their Sunday dresses. Watching the girls, it occurred to me that when they are grown, they may look exactly the way their mother used to look.
“I think we are done,” Patricia said at the end of the interview.
Alèrte’s body slid down on the couch. She seemed relieved. Her eyes traveled around the room, and then she asked Patricia, “Kote w soti?” Where are you from?
Patricia told of her origins in shorthand. Born in Haiti. Mother French. Father Haitian. Raised in Queens.
“Do you like New Jersey?” Patricia asked.
She did not go out much, Alèrte said. People stared. She had just been invited to appear on the Phil Donahue Show, though, and had agreed to go and, with a translator, tell her story.
“If it helps Haiti,” she said.
Suddenly, her son edged closer. Patricia asked him if he wanted to say something.
The boy said yes.
On camera?
The boy nodded.
Patricia asked Alèrte and her husband if it was all right to let the boy speak on camera.
They both nodded.
We started filming again, and the shy little boy told of seeing his mother in the hospital for the first time.
“She looked like chopped meat,” he said, echoing his father’s words.
Tears ran down the little boy’s face as he spoke. His body was tense but it seemed as if he was finally releasing a knot in his stomach. He could not stop crying.
We all began to cry along with him, even those who did not speak Creole and could not understand a word he said.
As we drove back though the Lincoln Tunnel, leaving Alèrte and her family behind, we all wondered if there was more we could have said. Was there something else we could have done? I kept asking myself what Alèrte’s life with her husband was now like, what their relationship was like beyond his being helpful to her. A question I could not ask was whether or not they were still attracted to each other, still in love.
A few months later I got my answer.
She became pregnant.
Alèrte Bélance: I remember lying in the hospital bed and trying to imagine how I was going to live in the situation I’m in now. I don’t have two arms. My left arms sticks to my body but serves no purpose for me. . . . Killing Alèrte Bélance was supposed to mean that Alèrte Bélance couldn’t speak for a better life. Contrary to their stopping me, I’m progressing because I’m still bearing children. They tried to take my life away, but not only couldn’t they do that, I’m producing more life.
The following week was the taping of the Phil Donahue Show. The producers of the Donahue Show asked our producers to find Haitian audience members, and Patricia and I, along with Jean Dominique and a few other friends, were in the audience.
The point of the show was to encourage the Clinton administration to do something about the junta that was killing or maiming people like Alèrte. The lure was the celebrity supporters of Haiti, including Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, and Danny Glover, as well as the TransAfrica Forum founder Randall Robinson, who went on a hunger strike to press the Clinton administration to act. Alèrte did not get to speak very much on the show because she had to use a translator, which slowed down the process of telling her story. Instead, Phil Donahue held her arm up in the air; her story was told more visually than in her own voice.
After the show aired, however, Alèrte became the face of the junta’s atrocities in Haiti. I ran into her again at several events and rallies where she loudly demanded the return of the democratically elected