Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [111]
At the lunches in the little restaurants, at the late-night ceremonies, at the clubs where groups played konpa and merengue and the people danced so perfectly while hardly moving at all, he asked, What can I do for Haiti?
No idea came to him. There was no wisdom from Damballah. The lwas were as silent as Yahweh. Until one day …
A 110-foot rusted Honduran freighter was for sale for so cheap that he could buy it with the money he had saved from the merchant marines, with enough left over for the repairs. The engine only needed a little work, which he could do himself, the shaft was straight, the screw was almost new, and he only had to spend a small amount on scraping and repairing the hull. A forward pump needed a little work. And then Izzy Goldstein was captain of a freighter.
He was going to name it Damballah, but then a better idea came to him in Little Haiti on a block of two-story yellow buildings shining hot in the Florida sun. He could form an organization that brought relief to Haiti on his freighter. What kind of relief? Doctors? Medicine? Food? Tools? What should he bring them? He went to the Jeremie, a little bar where he could find his friend DeeDee.
DeeDee, whose real name was Dieudonné, was a light-skinned Haitian with graying hair. He kept moving back to Haiti and then back to Miami, back and forth as regimes changed and he was in or out of favor. DeeDee took him to a lawyer in a gleaming white office on Brickell Avenue. The lawyer’s name was Smith. He was tall and lean and had his hair slicked back in that way that had become fashionable for men with that kind of straight hair. He was from the rare group known in Miami as Anglos. This was a negative grouping. If you did not speak Spanish and you weren’t black and you weren’t Haitian and you weren’t Jewish, you were an Anglo. Smith wore powder blue–striped seersucker and this worried Izzy. He never trusted men who wore seersucker suits. Izzy was surprised that a lawyer who specialized in Haitian clients would have such a luxurious office, but whatever reservations he had about the lawyer were laid to rest when he told Izzy that he was not going to charge him. “I’ll just do it for Haiti.”
Wasn’t that wonderful? The lawyer showed him how to establish a nonprofit organization with tax-exempt status and a fund-raising program. Izzy called his organization National Assistance for a New Haiti and had the letters NANH painted on the hull of his freighter. Haitians pronounced it like the Creole word nen, which means dwarf and made them laugh, but Izzy Goldstein didn’t know anything about that.
What he did know was that thousands of dollars from concerned Americans were contributed to NANH, and with that money DeeDee loaded the freighter at night. He said it was too hot during the day. When they were set to leave, Izzy was surprised to see his deck stacked high with used cars, bicycles, and even a few Coca-Cola vending machines.
“I don’t know, DeeDee. Is this the kind of stuff they need in Haiti?”
“They need everything in Haiti,” the man replied with a big sweep of his arms. “Even bicycles.”
“But shouldn’t we bring medicine?”
“We are gonna do that too. But you have to be careful with medicine.”
“How do you mean?”
“Not everybody is happy to see white people come with medicine.” Izzy looked worried; he didn’t like being reminded of his color. “We will go to Ti Morne Joli and Madame Dumas will explain everything, man,” added DeeDee with a reassuring smile. The lawyer had talked about Madame Dumas too. She was going to be important for NANH.
They pulled up the anchor and made their way around the curve of the Miami River into the bay Izzy had always loved, and set a course for Gonaïves, Haiti. In the pilothouse, Izzy Goldstein was