Istwa Nou

It started with one church bell at five in the morning and by evening the Duvaliers were gone. Heinl's account catches the details that a summary loses. The sartorial shift, where the only people still in denim were dead or being paraded, because denim read as Macoute. Heads on spikes. Père Lebrun, the burning tire necklace, named after a tire dealer's advertisement. The Bennett properties being looted live on Télé-Haïti. Green branches carried and bodies painted blue and red. Papa Doc's tomb opened and found empty. And the smallest one, which is the one I keep. People walked unchallenged on the sidewalk in front of the palace for the first time in a generation. Déchoukaj means uprooting, and it is an agricultural word. You do not prune a thing you intend to be finished with. You take it out by the root.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.