In Haiti, a relationship built on adversity

Reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti —  With his rap sheet and crooked gold teeth, Jean Pierre knew America didn’t want him anymore, but he missed it so much he sometimes cried.

He missed his mother and brothers in Florida. He missed their little house in Delray Beach, and cruising around in his burgundy ’82 Buick Somerset.

Sixteen years after being deported, he still couldn’t let America go.

Even here, his survival depended mostly on Americans who had come down needing an interpreter during Haiti’s periodic bouts of catastrophe. He always introduced himself as “Gene,” the way the name was pronounced in the States.

He loved Haiti and the woman who had rescued him here, the family they had built.

But on this morning in January, when he hadn’t eaten more than a cookie and water mixed with sugar in two days, he couldn’t take the hardship anymore.

He thought about calling his friend in California, a journalist who used to visit regularly. But Joe hadn’t been to Haiti in three years and hadn’t sent him money for a couple months now, saying he was tapped out.

Jean knew this could not be true. He suspected his friend was just wary of his relentless claims of poverty. Whenever he called him for help, the questions began: I sent you $200 three weeks ago. How come other Haitians can live on that for months? Are you really looking for a job?

Jean, who at 38 was a year older than the journalist, relied on him for help and advice, but resented the suspicion and the unspoken expectation that he should live like a slum-dweller. The dependency and paternalism were corrosively interlocked.

He called a French woman who lived in Port-au-Prince. Chantal Regnault was a photographer who came to Haiti in the 1970s and fell in love with it. She had become friends with Jean while working on a documentary about Haitians deported from America.

Regnault agreed to buy him lunch that afternoon at a big American-style fast food place they both liked. They hugged and cheek-kissed. He ordered a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.

“Do you think the journalists are coming back?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, honey,” she said. “The country is getting better. I’d forget about them. You need to find something else.”

“Why isn’t Joe answering his phone?” he asked.

“You need to stop asking him for money,” she said. “He’s got his own life. He’s got kids now.”

It was 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 12. Haiti’s next catastrophe was about to strike: a tremendous earthquake.

America was on the way.

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Jean was on his way to America before he was even born.

His mother was pregnant when she and his father climbed into the hold of a trading sloop headed for the Bahamas. They made it to Nassau, where she gave birth to Jean. They couldn’t carry a baby on the final leg to Florida, so they paid a woman to take Jean back to Haiti on a boat.

His grandparents, aunts and uncles raised him on a little family plot on the northern coastal plain. He lived in a clay-and-wattle hut with a palm-thatch roof surrounded by mango, breadfruit, orange, papaya and banana trees.

Jean’s mother sent the family money, so he was treated like a prince, always well fed. He adored his grandmother, Gran, and would ride with her on a donkey to the outdoor market in Limonade.

In the market he played with a little girl named Guerda, the daughter of a family friend. He went to school in the bigger city of Cap-Haitien and tore around at home with a best friend named Jean Milor, wrestling, shooting marbles, building toy trucks out of sticks and bottle caps.

When he was 9, a well-dressed couple came from the capital. Gran said they were going to take him to his parents in America.

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Two women and a man picked him up in Miami in a station wagon.

“Which one of us do you think is your mother?” one of the women asked. Something about her mouth was familiar.

“You,” he said softly.

Their apartment was in a big drab complex four hours away in Belle Glade that the Haitians called Bilding Criminel. He met his father and brothers: William, one year younger than Jean, came out of his room wearing boxing gloves. He looked at Jean — dressed like a Haitian, speaking only Creole — scoffed and turned away.

The privileged life Jean had in Haiti was over. He quickly learned that Haitians were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, below black Americans, Jamaicans, Mexicans and Dominicans. He got used to being beaten up and hearing “Haitian go home!”

Soon his parents split up and his mother moved the children to Delray Beach.

Struggling with English, Jean was put in a special ed program in middle school, where he made his first real friend, Richard Paisley, a small white boy with mild mental retardation. Jean protected him at school, and Richard’s parents took Jean to the beach and school events, even packed him lunches. They played basketball together in the Special Olympics and took second place at a tournament in Cocoa Beach.

Then Jean’s mother moved to a new apartment, and he went to a new school and tried a new persona.

He decided to imitate Michael Jackson, getting a multi-zippered jacket and shiny gloves from his mother’s swap meet stand. He learned the moonwalk and other break-dance moves. But most students saw him as a clown.

By high school, William was mingling with petty drug dealers and gang members. He had money, girlfriends and a brown ’79 Chevy Monte Carlo. Jean started to imitate his style and street rap.

When William got an “eight-pack” of gold tooth covers, four on top and four on bottom, Jean soon followed. A tough black American named Tyrone befriended him and gave him some cocaine one night. Jean never felt more confident and powerful.

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Soon Jean started selling crack he bought from a dealer in Ft. Lauderdale. Within three days, he made $2,000.

His mother warned him that he was not a U.S. citizen and could be deported. Jean didn’t listen. He’d rather go back to Haiti than be a clown again. He wasn’t exactly cool now, and at times battled near-suicidal depression. But he was a natural born salesman.

He racked up driving violations and got involved in the inevitable drug confrontations. He was shot in the hand, and he did nine months in jail for throwing a rock through the windshield of a woman who was trying to run him down.

Jean’s final offense in 1993 was driving with a suspended license and possession of about $10 worth of marijuana. He went to jail on a Friday. Immigration agents came to see him on Monday.

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At 23, Jean landed in a country he hadn’t seen since he was 9.

He moved in with an aunt and her husband in the capital while he tried to find a small property his mother had bought.

He learned that his childhood friend Guerda, the girl from the marketplace, was living nearby with her infant daughter and went to see her.

She was unlike anyone he knew in the States, deeply Christian, warm, with no trace of cynicism. She listened as he talked to her about his life and he found himself revealing more to her than he had to anyone.

They moved in together after a couple of months, platonic friends at first, and then fell in love.

Jean found his mother’s house, just a cinderblock box really, with one side wide open. He wanted to start fixing it and set out one morning to hustle some cash.

He bought a few dollars worth of marijuana, and sold it to an American at the airport for twice as much. With the money, he had another deportee take him to a wholesaler’s house. The guy took Jean’s cash and slipped out the back door.

He told Guerda what had happened.

“You shouldn’t be getting in that life again,” she said. “Haiti isn’t going to give you a second chance like America did. They’ll kill you here.”

He brushed the comment away.

“I don’t want to be with you if you’re doing that,” she said.

“Then go,” Jean said.

He stewed for an hour and realized she was right. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I want you to stay.”

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Jean had arrived in Port-au-Prince in the summer of 1994 at a time of chaos and terror. For nearly three years, the country had been run by a brutal military dictatorship that had ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

After years of hesitation and contradictory policies, the United States was finally threatening to invade and restore Aristide to power.

Jean hoped the Americans would invade, knowing he could make money with the U.S. military around.

When the U.S. Army did come, the politics of Haiti flipped. Mobs suddenly were hunting down the paramilitaries who had been executing Aristide supporters. Jean followed one crowd through his neighborhood to a man’s house down the street and watched as a single swipe of a machete removed his head.

Jean tried to get work interpreting for the U.S. Army, but competitors for the jobs said he was deported for horrible crimes in America. Instead, he made friends with some soldiers who liked to go to clubs at night and guided them around.

When the soldiers complained that they had only uniforms to wear, Jean quickly became their clothes supplier, buying secondhand clothes in bulk, removing the labels, and having them sewn onto cheap knockoffs — Adidas shoes, Polo shirts and Tommy Hilfiger pants — and passing them off as authentic.

He and Guerda fixed up their house and opened a little sundry store out front.

They got married. He still went through bouts of depression, but he knew who he was supposed to be with her. He recovered something he lost when he left his grandmother 15 years before.

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When I met Jean in 2004, the Marines were back again, this time after a U.S. aid embargo and a ragtag group of rebels funded by the country’s business elite pushed Aristide into exile.

He was thin and desperate for work. His business had failed, and he was walking around with a bathroom scale, charging people a nickel to get weighed.

I had worked with other interpreters. One could barely speak English, another refused to go to someone’s house because there was a dog in the yard. Jean knew the streets and could get people to talk. His biggest problem was how he paraphrased everything into his particular version of street English. I’d ask, “What do you mean ‘he just dipped out of there?’”

He worked hard on tamping down the slang, and he got us out of some scary moments. I loved driving around with him, swapping stories and finding common strands in our disparate lives. I laughed as hard with Jean as I have with anyone.

“There you go again,” Jean would say whenever I recounted how he once got two frenzied slum kids with guns aimed at us to walk away. Once they were gone, Jean leaned back in the passenger seat as if nothing had happened, coolly lighting a cigarette. But his hand betrayed him, shaking as if he had hypothermia.

I went to Haiti many times in the next few years, and Jean had regular employment with me. On many of my trips, Guerda would cook a big chicken-and-rice dinner for us all. I’d watch Jean and his four children play and see his obvious affection for them, and my concern about his constant hustling would fall away. Wouldn’t I do the same? Wouldn’t he be irresponsible if he didn’t?

When he was working for me, he’d eat three or four big meals a day, fattening up. When I left, I’d joke that he was ready to hibernate. And sure enough, when I returned, he was skinny again.

I tried to talk him out of his depression, whenever it hit, and regularly sent him money when I was gone, but it wasn’t enough to lift him beyond day-to-day living.

He asked me whether I would be his daughter’s godfather and I said no, foreseeing how that would be used to wheedle more money out of me. Joe, you can’t let your goddaughter suffer. I know he was hurt by that.

The disturbing part was that his family did suffer, going hungry, skipping months of school because there was no tuition, going without medicine. Most Haitians were even worse off.

Anyone who got close to people there came to this point: Should I forgo this and send money to my friend in Haiti? This cup of coffee, this new computer, this family vacation? In the scheme of human suffering, morally, I should.

But I didn’t. I helped when I could, which really meant when it wouldn’t diminish my family’s lifestyle.

Jean’s own conflicted personality didn’t help.

There was the Jean who would lapse into his street slang and Delray swagger, who would buy sunglasses and shoes and a better cellphone when he was flush with cash, and then have to sell them.

And there was the deeply loyal Jean, who reprimanded anyone who made a rude comment in Creole about the white guy, who would take in the daughter of his sister-in-law who died of cholera, whose face lighted up around his youngest daughter, Annesama. She was smart, sassy and funny like him. Only 3, she was, he knew, the future of the family.

As painful as it was for him to even form the words, he asked me one evening recently whether I would adopt her and take her to America.

I wished I could, but for many reasons I couldn’t. And I couldn’t do it to him.

I wished even more that some day Haiti would be in good enough shape that Jean and I could simply be friends.

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I got to Haiti the day after the Jan. 12 earthquake. I’d texted Jean asking how he was, but hadn’t heard back. I was worried about him, but the city was a shambles, phones were out and I couldn’t remember how to drive through the maze of dirt roads to his house.

I had to hire another interpreter, and I was walking with him the next afternoon. He was timid with people, and seemed to be vying for a better-paying job with television journalists behind my back.

I glanced at an SUV driving up the road and saw the gold teeth first.

The rented car stopped in the middle of the road. “Hey boss,” Jean said.

We hadn’t seen each other for three years. He was working for ABC News for $250 a day (and they would offer much more when he told them he had to go work for someone else.)

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“The Oloffson.”

“What time you want me there in the morning?”

joe.mozingo@latimes.com