by Mambo Racine Sans Bout
Copyright 1996, all rights reserved
No reproduction without permission of author.
(Note - This is a true story, not a work of fiction. Houngan Belange Gabriel Mondesir and his
friend Ratokin are real people, but I have changed their names to protect their privacy. Franco
and Martin, and other historical personages, are also real people. Cite Soleil is the poorest, most
notorious, and most solidly pro-Aristide slum in Port-au-Prince.)
I arrived at the peristyle as the black clouds rolled off the mountains east of the city, and entered
the quiet, shadowy temple. Houngan Belange Gabriel Mondesir, the Vodou priest of Cite Soleil,
grabbed a handful of my upper leg, shook it, and said with satisfaction, "Mambo Kati, ou gra kou
chat mawon," Mambo Kati, you're fat as a wild cat.
Having bestowed this high compliment upon me, Gabriel sat down on a concrete block, stretched
his long legs, and relaxed into reminiscence. The word mawon, which means wild but also refers
to being in hiding, triggered his memories of life under the Haitian military regime. He launched
into a rich Creole narrative.
"Mambo Kati, you know my friend Ratokin? He's a little bony puppet, but it's he who is most
trustworthy of all my friends.
"During the break-bones regime, when the forces of darkness were in power, there was this
attache, this paramilitary, named Franco. Franco hated us, he hated us, he hated us to death!
Why? Because in those days, behold our works - we used to get up at three in the morning and
paste photos of our President Aristide all over the neighborhood! I used to paste them right on
the door of Franco's house, and Franco himself, he suspected it was me and my guys, but he could
never catch me at it. Oh! If he had ever once caught me, he would have killed me ten
times.
"One day, Ratokin came and saw me and said, come, I'll show you something', so I followed him.
And what did that gentleman show me? Franco, if you please, drunk, lying on the ground in his
house, with the door open, with his wife on one side and his children on the other. They were all
sound asleep! Franco was snoring like a hog!
"Ratokin had his machete in his hand and Ratokin said, Gabriel, I'm going to kill him, I'm going
to cut off his head, he's been giving us problems too much, and he's been arresting the young men
in the neighborhood and beating them in the police station, because of the pictures of Aristide
we've been sticking up on the walls. I'm going to kill him, and stick a photo of Aristide right on
his ugly face.'"
Gabriel put his feet up against the corrugated aluminum wall of his dirt-floor peristyle, and lit a
Comme Il Faut cigarette with long, elegant fingers. He shook his head regretfully, his face
pensive.
"I said no. Why am I so stupid? My heart was not hard, my heart hurt for him, I couldn't kill him
like that. Ratokin even said he would do the job alone, but I wouldn't agree, and he listened to
me. Mama! If I had ever once said yes, it is that which we must do, Franco would never have
seen the sun rise again.
"And Ratokin said to me like this, If you don't kill him now, you'll regret it later.' And truly true,
I did regret it later, because later Franco became even more enraged, and he killed my dog and
beat my neighbors to make them say where I was hiding. Oh, that man, he really made me know
misery... Okay, we gave Franco life and not death, so he could come after us to kill us later on.
Big mistake!
"But there was another attache, named Martin. He was worse than Franco, long time! Behold
the work Martin knew how to do - three quarters of the youths killed in Cit‚ Soleil, it was Martin
who shot them. He had a little .38, he called it Ti Marie Djol-Santi, Little Mary Stinkmouth. He
loved to shoot people. He was allergic to young men! He didn't want to see a young man in the
neighborhood at all.
"Worse yet - you remember when all those cadavers were turning up with no faces? It was he
who did that! When he finished shooting a person, he de-faced them! He did that so that their
families could not know them, to come and gather them up off the holy earth. No! For that
gentleman, the pigs must eat them, the dogs must eat them. Good God, where did he put their
faces? Until today, nobody knows where the faces of those unfortunates are kept, but surely he
put them somewhere. Ah, that was a mean black man.
"So! We decided that since we gave Franco life, we must give Martin death anyway. Good!
Now once we decided to kill Martin, we reflected, we said to ourselves like this, With what shall
we kill Martin? He has a gun, we don't have a gun. How shall we make him fall?'
Gabriel sat up on the concrete block and pointed two explanatory fingers in the air.
"We used to have these little toys we called 'festival', with two branches and a piece of elastic in
between, you hold it and you put a little rock in the elastic and pull it, and it shoots. Those things
can shoot well, Mambo Kati! We went and we made big ones, with big strong pieces of inner
tube for elastic. We used them, we shot and shot, every day, we shot at all kinds of things we saw
floating in the drainage ditches, until we could hit anything at all, all the time!
"And do you know what we did then, Kati? We found old batteries, and we took the lead out of
them, and we melted it down and we made lead balls, look at the size of them! And we made
many lead balls, and we shot them, we shot at bottles - you see, zip, ching! The bottles always
smashed into pieces, pieces!
Go on to Slingshot! - Part 2.