The Perils of Marilise

Back in the late 1980s, Marilise's parents didn't have the kind of money that would allow them to escape Haiti in style, to jet into exile as had Jean-Claude Duvalier and his free-spending wife, Michele. As long as the corrupt and repressive Duvalier regime was in place, the family at least enjoyed a measure of protection and privilege, but it was out of luck in the social and political chaos that followed. The post-Duvalier years leading up to the December 1990 election of Aristide as president have been dubbed the dechoukaj, from a Kreyol word meaning to uproot, smash, lay waste. Things got worse in some ways for the Duvalierists after Aristide took over and then seven months later was deposed in a coup. While paramilitary gangs hunted down and killed Aristide supporters, other pro-Aristide groups killed their opponents as well.

Marilise, the only daughter among her parents' six children, was indulged by her brothers, who tried to keep her away, as much as possible, from the spreading violence. By the fall of 1992, she had been out of school for a couple of years and sometimes worked as a nanny. She was in love with Franfrico, a former classmate who lived on the same block as her family. But the meager stability Marilise enjoyed ended one afternoon when, on her way home from a friend's house, "a lady told me don't go home because a bunch of soldiers had come into my house; some people broke the window, and they were looking for my brother to kill him."

Marilise ended up at the bus station, where, after sitting petrified on a bench for three hours, she caught the eye of a woman who camped out at the station most days to sell her homemade bread. "She see me sitting for so long, and she asked me what was I doing there," Marilise recalls. "I told her I can't go home, so the lady took me to St. Marc [a city southwest of Port-au-Prince], where she lived. She gave me food, and she told me about the boat going to Miami."

From St. Marc, Marilise called Franfrico to join her on the journey. The boat set out in late October 1992. The organizer of the voyage, according to Marilise, was the same Pere Lebrun of tire fame. It is doubtful this was really the man, though. A dozen knowledgeable sources, including a Lebrun in-law, say that the real Pere Lebrun is still in Haiti operating his tire business and that neither he nor his sons has ever been involved in running boat people to Miami. More likely, the leader of Marilise's expedition called himself by that famous name to disguise his true identity, a practice not unheard of among men involved in trafficking of one kind or another. Marilise, in fact, believes the boat captain "had done some very bad things in Haiti" and was escaping to save his life.

He did more bad things on the boat. Marilise has described the ordeal many times, but she invariably becomes agitated and her words begin to come out in bursts, scenes stumbling into one another in no particular order. She shrinks from talking about how "Pere Lebrun" and his group of about three or four other men wasted no time in helping themselves to the young women onboard. "Pere Lebrun," according to Marilise, "tried to get me and another girl." She is vague about what kind of sexual relations they might have had, but she clearly saw no possibility of refusing Lebrun's or anyone else's advances there in the middle of the Caribbean. Underlying her telling of this and later victimizations is an unarticulated acquiescence to an ancient principle that has infused most of the world's cultures and religions: That principle teaches girls and women to be in every way at the disposal of men. Even so, all the passengers were at the mercy of "Lebrun" to some degree. "I don't have no choice," Marilise insists, the monotone punctuated every now and then by a panicked staccato. "Because he be cursing us out, saying he's going to drop us into the water."

It did her boyfriend no good to resist, either. Marilise asserts Lebrun and his lieutenants resolved in their first few days at sea to offer a human sacrifice to the vodoun lwa, or deities, to ensure a safe trip "direk pou Miyami," direct to Miami. Two young men were selected. Franfrico was one, and Marilise says Lebrun's daughter's boyfriend was the other. Marilise wanted to intervene, but she did nothing. "I didn't have any power," she explains, almost pleading, repeating the statement a few times. "If I tried, I was going to die too. They threw him over, and he went under the boat, and nobody ever found him again. Then after [Lebrun] killed [Franfrico], he snatch my boyfriend's passport out of my hand, so no one would know what happened."