Michael Hood
The DNA was obviously contaminated, the test, compromised.
The black cloud gathering since I’d discovered the test missing from my backpack, cracked with lightning bolts and a tropical rainstorm of bummer poured down upon me.
‘They know what they do,’ said Pipi.
Yes, they did.
Elie, the Haitian-American hotelier, and friend, scowled in that Brooklyn way he has, and said, ‘It’s bullshit! Of course they knew what they were doing! That is not your baby!’
It probably wasn’t planned specifically, but someone in Dani’s household (if not Dani herself) opportunistically nicked that precious little box, and let me get away all happy-happy.
Then they opened the box, and the envelopes, and made sure the contents were unusable. Every next step was intentional, my Haitian friends believe, and I must agree.
The doctor corroborates that he sealed and handed the envelopes to me, and I snapped them into the little polyethylene box and zipped them in my day bag. What happened next? Who knows.
What I do know is that I’ve done my due diligence. Even though the truth held the possibility of setting them free, they chose to sully the possibilities. I think they knew the answer to the question the test was to settle, and destroying it saved some face.
The test might well have proved that Dani was lying when she looked me right in the eye and said she’d been with nobody else. I’ll be long gone, and the family will forever be able to say that the father, a blan, had skipped out. That Dani was pure as the driven slush.
I’ll have some face here too. I’ll always be able to say that little Mikelson is not my child, and that my best efforts to prove it were intentionally shattered. This sliver of face as opposed to the reality of a negative test is cold comfort. But I know in my gut that this all was an attempt to defraud me, that the soft little boy was Josef’s.
I wonder if, after I depart, they’ll rename him. Josefson?
I think of him, he who’s likely the real father. He believes baby is his, I’m told. As other young men around here, he’s in no position to marry, though he’d probably like to. He’s underemployed if not unemployed
How did it feel to know that Dani and Wilma were trying to pawn off the fruit of his loins on me: a dandruffy old dude from The Valley of the Blan? Was he ever in love with Dani? Did he want this little boy? I’ll probably never know, I’ve asked my various fixers to introduce us, but Josef chooses to stay away.
Elie is on the village hotline. He’s heard the talk here; the word on the street is that the family knew she was pregnant a month earlier, and tried to abort the child with herbs. It didn’t work, obviously, but it shows their prior knowledge and disingenuousness. They knew she was pregnant before I came into the picture (or wherever I came).
I know they tried to abort the baby because they didn’t need another mouth to feed. I’m sure I must have been seen as godsent.
A child born of this coupling would almost have had to be a gift from god; I’m thinking Anti-Christ here, or the reincarnation of some Baba. That’s considering my long-established vasectomy and the relative harmlessness of a 71-year old prostate.
I’m still pissed that the doctors we visited, especially the one who performed the procedure he called a “lavage” that supposedly washed Denise clean of an infection he claimed was common in Haiti “from the water.” I took her to the gynecologist because she was choking on her saliva from night one, and the local doc told us to do that.
No doctor (we saw 3) suggested to me that she was pregnant, though I discovered later that this salivating and choking was a condition peculiar to Haitian women and certain West African tribal women. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth_in_Haiti
There’s another reason no one around here believes little Mikelson is Michael’s son. It’s about skin color mostly. Here’s the opinion of RK, an old friend in Amerik who has some anthropology:
“Here’s the deal. If one person is a white-skinned European and the other a relatively unmixed black African, all children will come out an intermediate color in the first generation. If one or both are mixed between the two, any child’s skin color will be anywhere from white to no darker than the darkest parent. In the case of these two populations, whatever dark genes are present will show as they are dominant. In that you have no genes for dark skin, your’s will be mixed equally with hers resulting in a chocolate hue. It is true, however, that a baby’s coloration does not necessarily reflect their coloration when they are older, but I think that, if anything, the child would be lighter rather than darker than their final coloration. A good example is Trevor Noah from the Daily Show.”
Anyone have any different science? I believe this to be true, as do the Haitians around here.
I feel let down. It’s the feeling as when a criminal takes a guilty plea for a heinous crime, and you were hoping a jury would throw the book at him. It’s revenge denied. Vengefulness is miserable to have living inside you, and I try to expunge it by any means except, of course, denial.
But I’ll be pissed at Dani for a while. We were never not friends, yet she looked me straight in the eye, and said ‘No!’ at the suggestion she’d been with someone else. Even in Haiti friends don’t lie to each other.
Is this story finished? As far as I know, it is. What’s next for me? Probably some touring. And for as long as I’m here, I’ll be writing about and photographing Haitians.
I love it here: Haitians are compelling, it’s stinking hot, the sea is perfect. What’s more: there’s no Trump, no snow.