An experienced fixer for journalists covering Haiti, Jean often unexpectedly finds himself on the subject side of stories. After his son was kidnapped and his house taken, Jean decided to move his family out of Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic. In the new book, The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille, Jean tells us the story of this struggle to relocate, another change of country in his search for a better life.
Jean’s book is the first book from Dispatches, a new series of powerful and compact nonfiction titles documenting the highs and lows of daily human endurance, as they happen. Edited by award-winning writers Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott, each book originates in short confidences recorded by individuals during borrowed moments from their interesting lives. Set amid some of our most pressing contemporary predicaments, these invaluable books provide a vital firsthand look into lives rarely put to paper.
Today, we’re happy to offer an excerpt from Jean’s book, which is available now in our store.
PORT-AU-PRINCE DISPATCH: 10/18/22
This morning the sun came up, like every other day, and the violence came along with it. A lot of gunshots. You have people mostly staying inside. There’s an old person that was in a house close by. Maybe he got shot, because I heard screaming. An ambulance came and took away a body. Must have been him. Right now, I’m staying in Delmas 75. I was supposed to leave today to go to another ghetto, but I wasn’t able to, because of two things. One, I don’t have money. Two, I owe money. I have to pay my debts before I leave. There was a big rain today, and we had to run away from the shooting through the water in the streets. When it rains in Port-au-Prince, the roads flood. When
President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, whatever work they were doing to fix up the roads, it all stopped. The roads are unpaved in this area. We have to wait a couple of days for the water to go down.
As I sit, my heart is beating really fast. I’m panicking. I just want to get out of here. The roads out of the city are still blocked and there’s some war going on in Cité Soleil about the gas that’s being sold on the streets for G550 ($3.77) a gallon.
There was a lot of shooting going on just now. Another group of people came through this area, just shooting.
DISPATCH: 10/19/22
I was deported to Haiti in 1994 for some things I did back in the day in the United States. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve talked about it enough.
It’s always been hard for me in Haiti as a deportee. Hard to get work. People don’t always trust deportees. They wonder what you did to get kicked out of the United States. Ever since I came to Port-au-Prince, the only way I’ve been staying alive is through the international community. When reporters or people who work for NGOs come to Haiti, I get some work, as a driver, fixer, translator—I help out in all kinds of ways. Even after they leave, a lot of these internationals keep me in mind and help me and my family out a little. I used to do a lot of work with a woman from the Miami Herald. Lately, I got in contact with her, and she’s been saving me. Otherwise, I might already be dead.
Money is always a problem. Everything costs too much. Haiti doesn’t have free schools. There isn’t any soup kitchen you go to for food. There aren’t any government food stamps either. Food, gas, education—it’s all very hard to come by.
About six months ago, things were really hard. My small business renting out bikes didn’t bring in much money. I just didn’t have enough funds to get the business going. Then my mom died in Florida. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. I only heard about it because a friend saw a post on Facebook and hit me up. He said, “I’m sorry your mom died.” I wasn’t surprised. I knew from the way she was living that she’d pass away. She had old-people sicknesses, diabetes and high blood pressure and such. I’m not exactly sure what she died of, but I think it might have been coronavirus.
I’ve got three brothers in Florida: William, Howard, and Wilgems. Howard’s in jail. I heard he had been selling drugs out of my mom’s house. Wilgems, he’s the one with the restaurants, he thinks he’s better than all of us. He wasn’t helping out with my mom at all. But William had problems with depression. He died about six months before my mom died. I’m not sure what happened, maybe suicide.
Here’s the thing. Even if we weren’t in touch at the end, my mom made me tough. She told me, “You’ve seen me. I’ve never asked anyone for money. You’re a grown man. No matter what problems you have, no matter where you are, I’m not ever going to give you more than $100.” She never showed up to court, to my deportation hearing, nothing. My mother, she never smiled. You know, she never once told me she loves me. She was always saying mean things. Money is good, but it can’t buy love. It can’t buy happiness. She was never proud of me for anything I ever did. Yeah, she made me tough. Sometimes it would have been better for her to talk to me as a mother to son.
Wilgems, he’s my mom and my dad’s first son. He was with me on my voyages from Haiti to the Bahamas and back to Haiti. The day after my mom died, he called and told me that my mom had left me $7,800. I knew she had a life insurance policy. She said that when she died, she’d leave me money. But I thought it was going to be more. Wilgems sent me the papers, but it was so complicated. That money was hard for me to get. After a few months, after a lot of struggle, with the help of my friend Joe Mozingo, who works for the Los Angeles Times, they finally gave me the money.
So things were starting to lighten up with the help of the money from my mother. I was able to do some things I’d been waiting on, like fixing up my house. I was preparing to send my kids to better schools. My wife needed a surgery. Now we had the money to pay for that. Things were looking up for us.
Word got around the neighborhood. They see you’re not working but you’re eating. They see a truck drop off fresh water at your house. They see you rent a car for a couple of days. They see you bring home a pizza. They see you start gaining weight. In Port-au-Prince, you can’t get fat, because then people start to think you have money. And you don’t talk to anybody about money, either. Somebody must have gone and told the gangsters, There’s a guy around here with some money. It could have been anybody.
Peter Orner is a fiction and non-fiction writer. His most recent book is a collection of essays called Still No Word from You. A new novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, will be published next year by Little, Brown. He’s chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.
Laura Lampton Scott is an editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Hobart, 68 to ’05, and Michigan Quarterly, among other publications. Laura is a MacDowell Colony fellow and teaches at Portland State University.
Buy The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille in our store.
Join editors Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott in conversation with Amanda Uhle about The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille on McSweeney’s Instagram Live. October 24 at 10 p.m. EDT.