Nightmare Voyage to Freedom

Musty heat rose in waves to meet Petion Blaise as he descended the ladder into the hold of the wooden cargo boat.

People yelled and cursed as he inadvertently stepped on a hand or foot. He stumbled to the middle of the hold and found room to sit with his knees drawn to his chin.

More than 500 people were jammed into the 60-foot Elizar on this June afternoon. Designed for nonhuman cargo, the hold had no portholes to let in air or light.

Even before the boat sailed, people were pleading to be allowed back on deck.

Blaise had a special horror of the open seas. Like many of his countrymen, he had heard grandparents tell of ancestors crammed into slave ships and carried to cruel labor in Caribbean cane fields.

Like many of his fellow passengers, Blaise had never been on a boat before and did not know how to swim. But the 30-year-old mason and his sister Marie-Rose were intent on making the dangerous, illegal passage to Florida, 630 miles and a dream away.

Haitians desperate to escape the poverty of their island are taking to the sea by the thousands. The survivors of the Elizar are unusual only because they have told their story.

Blaise knew they were making a mistake as soon as he laid eyes on the huge crowd boarding the little boat. He begged the boatmen to give him back his money, proceeds from the sale of a house he’d built with his life savings only last year. They refused.

As Blaise hesitated amid the milling crowd, the stories flashed through his mind: boats that disappeared without trace. Boats that had floundered at sea for days while passengers died of thirst and hunger. Countrymen who had become meals for sharks.

“Teledjol,” the Haitian grapevine, told of a government inquiry that concluded as many as 100 people died last year on just one of these voyages of desperation. Death by suffocation, beatings, cannibalism and suicide.

But Blaise had also heard of successes. A family in his hometown, Fort Liberte, received money every month from Miami, from a son like him who took a trip like this in search of freedom and opportunity.

“This poverty keeps me a virtual slave anyway,” Blaise thought as he watched prosperous people--well-dressed people--going down into the hold. “If they are ready to risk their lives, then I suppose I can too.”

The argument with the boatmen had lost Blaise the chance for a choice spot at the edge of the hold. People sandwiched him in. He tried to stretch a leg, but kicked someone.

Already, he’d lost contact with his sister, who had been shunted with other women to the back of the hold.

Marie-Rose had made the painful decision to leave two toddlers in her mother’s care. A woman abandoned by the father of her children, she told her family, had only two ways to feed them: to sell herself to other men or escape to find work as a maid in Miami.

Above deck, 26-year-old Carline Jean was congratulating herself on already having clients in Miami anxious to use her services as a manbo, a Voodoo priestess.

Because she knew boat owner Michel Elizar and some of the sailors, Jean and younger sister Marie des Amours got a privileged position in one of the two cabins above the hold. They shared an area 6-foot square with eight women and a half-dozen children.

The sisters held 10 small tins of Carnation milk, some salted biscuits made from corn flour and 12 bottles of Malta, a nutritious malt-based drink--standard fare for boat people.

They were privileged to have a porthole in their cabin. Nearby was a reeking toilet they shared with the crew.

Below, there was just the hatch in the deck, which the sailors had left open after pulling up the ladder.

“You have to stay below if you don’t want to be caught by the American Coast Guard,” the sailors shouted to those who asked to be allowed on deck.

In the hold, Blaise and his neighbors introduced themselves, first names only, during the four hours they waited to set off.

“Miami! Miami! Miami!” The word, pronounced “Me-ah-me” by the Creole speakers, was on everyone’s lips, repeated like an incantation.

Around Blaise, people were boasting about what they’d do when they arrived:

“I’m going to make enough money to send for my family in style, by airplane.”

“I’m going to live in a house big enough that I can have a bedroom all to myself.”

“When I’ve made my fortune, I’ll come home and live like a king.”

From all over Haiti, they had come to join the voyage: from southern Jacmel, the seaside town known for its naif paintings; from Port-au-Prince, the capital with its crumbling neo-Gothic mansions and shantytown shacks; from northern villages where farmhouses are woven from sticks; from Blaise’s own port town of Fort Liberte--Fort Freedom--a desolate place in the northeast with houses the color of the gray dust that coats everything, including the brilliant orange blooms of the flame trees.

Conversation stopped as the two engines roared and the boat moved out, and lurched over the great waves of the Atlantic.

Blaise felt his stomach drop to his toes, then rise as if it would jump out of his mouth. Everyone was ill. Boasting gave way to moans and pleas to the gods.

Blaise almost welcomed the distraction of other pains: the wooden boards numbing his backside, the cramps in his legs, the itch he could not move to scratch, the heartache of what he’d left behind.

His mood swung from elation to despair and back again: “Finally, finally I’m on my way to a new life.” Then, “Am I crazy? Did I make the right decision? Was I right to burn all my boats?”

He grinned to himself at the bad pun, twitched the curly end of his mustache.

He thought of the two teenage siblings he could no long afford to send to school, of the aged mother who depended on him for everything, of weekends when his girlfriend would arrive from the countryside, perched stylishly side-saddle on her donkey, her Sunday-best straw hat at a cocky angle.

For a while, these ruminations distracted him from his roiling stomach. Then a great thirst set in.

“Water! Water!”

His calls were joined by a chorus throughout the hold. But the barrel was at the entrance, and by the time a tin was passed, jostled in the semidarkness, shared by some on the way, there never was more than a mouthful left.

Hours into the voyage, the aroma of cooking vegetable soup tantalized those imprisoned in the hold. Blaise supposed the sailors were eating, but they did not respond to the passengers’ calls for a share.

Blaise didn’t care. His roiling stomach revolted at the thought of food. He turned down a neighbor’s offer of rice and beans.

During the night, conditions worsened. With little room to move, people relieved themselves using the cans, paper and rags they had brought along, then passed their waste to the hatch, where sailors pulled it up in buckets attached to ropes. But soon, the hold stank of feces and urine.

Some of the women began singing “Haiti, Cherie,” the unofficial anthem addressed to “darling Haiti.” Blaise hummed along, then stopped, wondering why they were praising the country they were fleeing.

Blaise tried to will himself into a daze and get as much sleep as he could, resting his head in his knees. Sleep proved impossible. He couldn’t tell night from day down there. The journey was a blur of pain.

He became aware of huffing and puffing and whispered exchanges: A man had died. People were maneuvering the body to the hatch so the sailors could get rid of it.

Nobody wanted to discuss it. Blaise was shocked, wondering how they could be so uncaring. Then he caught himself up, remembering how, when he felt particularly bad, someone he did not know tried to comfort him by rubbing his back.

Then a second man died. People started to panic.

There was no outcry, none of the women’s anguished screams that traditionally accompany a death in Haiti. Just whispers: It’s bad luck. Who’ll be next? How long have we been at sea? Three or four days. It feels like an eternity. Miami must be here soon.

It was all too much for Blaise’s friend, Petrice Francois. He started to yell that they were sacrificing people. He demanded someone call the police.

“Hamilton, come and get us!” he shouted. Hamilton, Blaise supposed, was the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Hamilton, which intercepts Haitian refugees off the shores of Florida.

Francois started hitting out at people around him. Blaise knew he had to act. With Francois in tow, he blundered over fellow passengers, forced his way to the hatch, and demanded the sailors let them up.

After much pleading and a bribe of 10 Haitian dollars (about $3.50), the sailors pulled them to the deck.

Blaise was blinded by the sunlight. He tried to walk, but staggered. Francois was trying to throw himself into the sea. Blaise grabbed for his friend and screamed as Francois bit his upper arm, leaving a mangled coin of hanging flesh.

“We’re near Nassau,” someone said. “That crazy man is going to bring the coast guards down on us. We’d better throw both of them overboard.”

Blaise fought for his life while trying to hold onto his friend so he could not jump into the sea. He spotted a machete left carelessly on the deck, grabbed it and swung it in an arc. The sailors jumped back as he wrestled Francois into a chokehold and dragged him away from the rail.

He tied his friend’s hands and feet, occasionally swiping the machete to keep the sailors at bay.

Suddenly, the sailors turned their backs on Blaise and looked out to sea. Urgently, they passed the word: “The Coast Guards are coming.”

In the cabin, a mother clapped her hand over the mouth of her baby, who’d been screaming in irritation, it seemed like for hours.

In silence, they heard the Coast Guard challenge the boat. Then came the welcome sound of the cutter droning away.

Soon, the people were chanting in triumph: “Next stop, Miami! Miami, next stop!”

Ten minutes later, a voice of doom thundered through a bullhorn: “Captain, stop your boat or we’ll sink it.”

Then, shouts from the deck: “Everybody out. Everybody out.”

Four days after it had set out, the Elizar was escorted into Nassau harbor by the Bahamian Coast Guard. Bahamian officials appeared as stunned as the sun-blinded refugees who dragged their cramped limbs off the ship.

“You couldn’t get more than 70 people comfortably on that boat!” a Bahamian exclaimed as more and more people stumbled out of the hold.

The Bahamians counted 545. There were no bodies on board. The two dead must have been thrown into the sea.

At a detention camp in Nassau, Blaise and Francois faced the hostility of fellow passengers, who thought Francois’ madness had attracted the attention of the Coast Guard.

But then, everyone was diverted by the arrival of hot food. Bahamian police wielded batons to keep the refugees from fighting over the food, which they shoveled down so fast they couldn’t say what they were eating.

Then depression set in.

“What have I got to go home to?” one woman wailed. “I sold everything, my last pig, to buy my passage.”

“Now I have nothing,” Blaise thought, chastising himself for paying the boatmen literally his last cent.

The next day, the refugees were flown back to Haiti.

*

Back home, Blaise shares a room in his mother’s house with eight siblings and cousins.

Life in Haiti had not improved. A half-hour drive from Fort Liberte, a body was found with five bullet holes, no identification, its pants pockets turned inside out. Somehow, this corpse symbolizes the hopelessness Blaise feels for his country, and for his life.

The girlfriend whose style Blaise so admired says he deserted her, and she won’t return to him. He has no job and can’t even find part-time work because clients fear he will take off on another boat.

“But I could never do that again,” he says. “Only death could be worse.”

To Jean and her sister, there are fates worse than death.

Jean screams and curses at a reporter interviewing her at a three-room shack on a hilltop overlooking the sea in St. Louis du Nord.

“How do you expect me to talk when I’m hungry. You see that fire? It’s cold,” she says, pointing to the blackened stones that serve as a kitchen.

She speaks only after she is appeased with a plate of meat and vegetables and a bottle of clairin, the fiery local rum she tosses back from the cranium of a filthy human skull.

“I WILL get to Miami,” she crows. “I WILL live in your country.”

“First time, we got as far as Inagua, in the Bahamas. That was 1994. Second time, only as far as Mole St. Nicholas [Haiti]. Third time, Nassau. Fourth time--Me-ah-me!”