A Passage from Petit-Trou

By EDWARD BARNES/PETIT-TROU-DE-NIPPES

SOMETIME LAST MONDAY afternoon, Francois Nassau rested his distended belly on the floor of his father's hovel, curled one thin arm under his head, and quietly died. So silent was the boy's passing that his mother did not realize he was gone until she tried to rouse him. Francois was nine years old.

More than a year ago, Francois, his parents and 116 other Haitians had set out with a desperate sense of hope aboard a leaking sloop called Dieu Veut (God Wants). For two days they rolled and pitched across the rough stretch of sea between Haiti and Cuba that sailors call the Windward Passage. They had left their homes in Petit-Trou-de-Nippes, a town of 1,000 perched on the shore of Haiti's impoverished southern claw, provisioned with only two bags of rice and a single 50-gal. barrel of water. Even at sea they continued to take on new passengers -- some arriving in dugout canoes, others by swimming. All were convinced that Dieu Veut was their only chance.

Like so many others before, the boat was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, and the refugees passed the next two months in detention at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Only 25 of the refugees were allowed to apply for political asylum. The rest were shipped back to the docks at Port- au-Prince, given the equivalent of $15 and told to go home, where many were greeted by a rogue police force that reserves special violence for people who are returned against their will.

The refugees had left Petit-Trou in the first place four months after the coup that deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, when soldiers began arriving in trucks to round up suspected supporters of the exiled President. They hunted in particular for a group of 65 young men who were organizing a peasant co-op. Desperate not to lose the best of its youth, the community elected to pour its savings, its hopes and its most promising citizens into a single boat to America. Selling everything but their beds, the town cobbled together $1,650 and persuaded its wealthiest resident, who runs the local numbers game, to "buy" a 30-ft. sloop from police.

After the venture failed, those who made their way back to Petit-Trou found a very different village from the one they left. Before the expedition the town was tense, fearful, expectant. Today it is hollow and listless, its surviving residents thin with despair. In the past three months no mail has been delivered and no trucks have arrived with supplies. There are no stores, no cars, no doctors. There are no books in the schools, which doesn't matter because most parents can no longer afford to send their children. The hospital has ceased to function, and the only government offices still working are the tax collector and the local police post, which boasts a .50-cal. machine gun and the sergeant's collection of whips. The only work to be found is making charcoal that is shipped by boat to the slums of Port-au-Prince, but with each tree that is cut and burned, more soil washes away, and with it the village's livelihood. "We used to be able to grow cereal crops here, corn and rice," says Rene Coty, the local schoolteacher. "But no longer; the land has washed away. Instead we grow charcoal -- a crop with no future."

Having gambled everything in the hope that their relatives and friends would be able to find work in the U.S. and send money home, the residents of Petit- Trou are discovering that the refugees' return did more than demolish expectations; it has also robbed the town of all vitality. In a community already knocked flat by poverty, the returnees have come to make up a separate and uniquely destitute class, devoid of land, possessions and hope. Having sold everything but what they could carry, they own nothing. Farmers can no longer till because someone else has title to their land. Fishermen watch as canoes they once owned are paddled away from shore by someone else.

The Clinton Administration argues that as a rule, Haitian boat people are fleeing poverty, not political persecution. When he debarked from Dieu Veut, Jonas Esterlin, 22, found it hard to feel that way. Spotted by police as soon as the Coast Guard cutter tied up, he was ordered to a separate area on the docks. There, he says, he was pistol-whipped in the head and jabbed with an electric cattle prod. "The police kept yelling that we had fled to show support for Aristide," Esterlin recalls, "and that we should all be killed." Terrified, he broke and ran. Police were unable to catch up, so they went instead to Esterlin's mother's home in Petit-Trou. Still unable to find him, they fired several rounds into the house, wounding Esterlin's younger sister in the foot. "Now," says Esterlin, who spends most of his time these days working on a charcoal boat, "I am without a home and no longer go near the village."

An even more chilling reception awaited Obrin Ossou, a political activist who had spent weeks hiding in mangrove swamps along the coast before finally landing a berth on the Dieu Veut. According to his brother Miguel, Ossou was pulled from the line of refugees as he disembarked in Port-au-Prince. He has not been heard from since. For the past year, Miguel has paid radio stations to broadcast appeals for anyone who might know what happened to his brother. "I believe he is dead," he confesses. Local villagers are more certain of Ossou's fate. "He was beaten to death by police," they whisper.

Without the prospect of work, those returnees who did manage to return home have little chance of recovering what they lost. Instead they are forced to live off the goodwill of their impoverished neighbors, further hastening the downward spiral of a village already on its last legs. "Those who left and were granted asylum were the town's best people," says Gerard Phillippe, Petit-Trou's justice of the peace and the only one of the returnees who has carved out some measure of success. "They were the ones who organized the peasants and who would have one day run the town. Without them the town is dying. It stumbles from day to day but has no future."

When Nichols Pierre, a cattle tender, boarded the Dieu Veut, he carried only a torn plastic satchel of clothes and a new pair of shoes that he hoped would bring him luck in America. In the course of selling everything else he had ever accumulated, Pierre discovered that at age 38, his net worth amounted to slightly less than $23. Now it is zero; he sleeps on the floor of friends' houses and begs or steals food to survive.

Renaldo Duval was luckier -- at least in the beginning. Financing his escape by selling a small house and a plot of land on the edge of the village, he established for himself a nest egg of 3,000 Haitian gourdes (about $100). Sent back in March, he bought a place on another boat. When he was returned a second time, he still had enough cash for yet another try. But to no avail. Broke, Duval wanders aimlessly around the village, destitute and bitter. "It would have been better for them to kill me there than to force me back here where I am less than nothing."

Last year Petit-Trou's only storyteller died, leaving no one to protect its memories, such as they have become. Already bereft of a future, the town now finds itself without its past as well. Yet astonishingly, plans are already in the works for still another boat, whose keel is secretly being laid a few hundred yards from where the Dieu Veut was launched. Rumor has it that about 1,000 similar boats are under construction by neighboring communities up and down the coast. If the embargo continues and Aristide fails to return, the call for "leaving day" will be passed by word of mouth, and all the boats will embark at once. The hope is that the Coast Guard will be overwhelmed, allowing perhaps a handful of boats to make it through. If Petit-Trou's vessel is not among the fortunate few, the village, like Francois Nassau, will surely have outstripped its endurance. Perhaps then it will simply curl up, tuck an arm beneath its head, and quietly let go.