22454: (Hermantin) PalmBeachPost-Good lessons from a flawed teacher (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Good lessons from a flawed teacher

By Gariot Louima, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, June 20, 2004



The last time I saw my father, he was not much more than a skeleton. He was
sitting hunched over in a chair, waiting for his name to be called for
kidney dialysis treatment.

After years of fighting, my father and I had made amends. We were finally
able to talk like father and son.

"If I get this job, I could come home," I told him.

He extended a hand and I shook it. It was frail, all bones. He smiled and
looked me over with jaundiced eyes. I could see he was tired.

"Your mother would like that," he said finally.

I knew I would never see him again.

What I didn't know is how he would haunt me in death, much as he had
terrified me in life.


Demons and discipline

My father, Tervilien Louima, was born in Anse-a-Foleur, a town in northwest
Haiti known for coffee and beekeeping.

As a young man, he left home in a boat bound for the Bahamas, as Haitians
have done for decades. He left in the early years of the infamous Francois
"Papa" Doc Duvalier regime.

My father once told me he'd done OK for himself in Nassau, doing odd jobs
for a British family. His sister, my Aunt Anne, joined him there, as did his
younger brother. My father rode a motorcycle and had gotten a prized work
permit when most others could not. He sent money home regularly to support
his mother and his siblings. The Bahamians called him "Tony," because his
name was too complicated for English-speaking tongues. Eventually, he met my
mother, a face he remembered from Anse-a-Foleur.

"She was tall and skinny, and she had long hair," my father said once. "I
couldn't let anybody else have her. That wouldn't make any sense."

Mom insists she didn't know my father in Haiti. She'd gone through a bad
break-up with the man who'd fathered my eldest sister, Ruth. She didn't have
much family in the Bahamas and was supporting herself and her child while
working as a seamstress and cleaning house.

My father said he'd take care of her. He promised he'd raise Ruth as his
own. They never married.

All that mattered to my mother was that "he was a good man."

But Nassau never felt like home to the family. Today, there are a little
more than 22,000 Haitians in the Bahamas, and they're openly called the
"Haitian problem." Children born to illegal Haitian immigrants aren't
granted legal status.

"They used to call us dogs," my mother remembers.

Frustrated, she returned to Haiti in the late 1960s. She took Ruth and my
eldest brother, Michel, who was a little more than a year old. She didn't
last 12 months, and sent word to my father that she wanted to return to
Nassau. With no passport and little education, my mother entrusted the
raising of Ruth and Michel to her sister, and she boarded another boat for
the Bahamas.

She had three more children when she reunited with my father. I was the
youngest, born two months too early. I was so small at my birth, my mother
was afraid to hold me.

"Your father wasn't scared. He was the first one to hold you. He put you in
one hand and he said we were going to call you Gariot."

A year later, my parents bundled their belongings and took separate boats to
America. We landed in Miami's Little Haiti.

And here is where my earliest memory of Tervilien Louima is set.

I was 4 or 5, and I'd missed the bus that was to take me home to our
one-bedroom apartment from day care. I started to walk home on my own, even
though I had no idea how to get there. And because it seemed like a good
idea, I pestered a dog in some family's yard. It jumped the gate and I ran
into the street, where I was hit by a car.

I was not seriously injured. In fact, I was hit only a few yards from a
neighborhood clinic. A nurse drove me home after I told her I lived on 68th
Street, the only part of our address I could remember. She drove around
until I recognized our apartment building.

After she left, my father pulled his belt from his waist to spank me. That
time, he didn't hit me. My mother told him he'd have to get through her
first. And he yielded. That time.

Over the years, my contact with my father usually came when I was in
trouble. If the offense was bad enough, he beat me with a belt or tree
branch while I knelt, my arms folded over my chest -- a traditional form of
Haitian discipline.

I remember being beaten for breaking things, for scraping my knee when
playing outside, for talking back, for slapping my sister at Sunday Mass.
Each time he pulled out his belt, my father explained exactly why.

Each syllable was punctuated by a strike of his belt.

He drank heavily and gambled constantly. He and my mother argued regularly.

At those times I hated him. Each time he and my mother fought, I went to bed
hoping he'd be gone by sunrise. And each time I saw him at the breakfast
table, I resented my mother.

Our lives, I thought, would be better if my father disappeared like some of
my friends' fathers and my cousins' fathers.

But he never left.

He worked odd jobs to pay the bills (the position he held the longest was as
a janitor at Neiman Marcus) while my mother worked full time as a
housekeeper. Money was always tight. We never ate out, vacationed or got new
toys at any time other than Christmas. My parents never owned a car or a
home. We rented and took buses everywhere.

For three years, my parents managed to pay private-school tuition, believing
it was the best thing for their children. But that expense proved to be too
much, and we were enrolled in public schools. That's when I learned we were
poor. For us, shopping for school was a trip to discount stores in downtown
Miami. Each child got two shirts, two pairs of pants and sneakers.

The summer between seventh and eighth grades, we were evicted from our
apartment for not paying rent.

That's when my mother decided things had to change.

That summer, she found a new apartment and told my father he didn't have to
follow us. If he wanted to move in, she wouldn't stop him, "because kids
need a father," she said.

Yet she set conditions. If my father moved in, he would have to accept that
my mother was the head of the household. He would pay rent to her each
month, contribute to our school-related expenses and sleep in the living
room.

Dad accepted those terms. Until his death, he slept on a twin bed in the
living room. It was placed between the sofa and the wall that separated the
living room from the kitchen.

The children were responsible only for their educations. We weren't
permitted to get part-time jobs until we graduated from high school.

We were forbidden from working at fast-food restaurants. Because, my father
said, he didn't come to this country to have his children serve other
people.

I was allowed to get my first job as a high school senior -- because it was
a paid internship at a local newspaper, $4.25 an hour to compile weekly
calender listings.

Though the 15-hour-a-week job gave me pocket money and an opportunity to
"write" for a newspaper, I liked it for another reason.

It kept me out of the house and away from my father.

I couldn't understand why my mother kept him around. A jaded teenager, I
argued with him whenever I had the opportunity. When we weren't arguing, we
barely spoke beyond "hello" and "good night." I had taken little note when
he stopped drinking my sophomore year in high school.

By the time I graduated, he was on disability, with kidney failure, gout and
severe arthritis. His streak of harsh disciplinarianism mellowed. He instead
adopted the role of the educator with our family's next generation, spending
a lot of time with my cousins' small children. He would talk to them about
everything from the weather to the importance of paying attention in school.
He even scolded them mildly at their parents' requests, because he had so
much influence with them.

And to my surprise, he and Mom became friends.

I remember waking one early morning to find him frying eggs and brewing
coffee. I asked what he was doing. His response: "I'm making something to
eat for me and my partner."

I thought he was talking about my older brother, Brian, his favorite.

He laughed, saying, "I'm talking about my partner for more than 30 years."

My mother.


Our one and only hug

I enrolled at the University of Miami in the fall of 1997. Scholarships,
grants and loans covered the tuition. I got a work/study job at the campus
library to pay for books and Metrorail fair.

My relationship with my father slowly began to change.

Much of it, I realize now, had to do with his illness. He no longer had the
strength to yell and argue. He was in and out of the hospital every few
months. And when he was home, I was at school or away on a summer
internship.

I spent the summer after my sophomore year at a newspaper in New Orleans. At
least once a week, my mother would call to see whether I'd been eating well
and getting enough rest. After each conversation, she'd put my father on.
Our conversation was always the same: He'd ask whether everything was OK,
then tell me my mother missed me.

When I returned at the end of that summer, my father welcomed me home with a
hug. It was the first and last time we embraced.

Even at my college graduation, when he had about a year left to live, he
delivered only a firm handshake and "Congratulations."

My father spent that last year of his life in excruciating pain. Arthritis,
infections and complications from dialysis tortured him. He was in the
hospital more than he was at home. He had difficulty breathing and speaking.
He barely ate. He forgot most of the English he'd learned.

Three months after graduation, I left home for a two-year journalism
training program in Los Angeles. At the end of my first year, I decided I
wanted to move back to Florida to be closer to my family. I flew home in
June for job interviews.

I saw my father only briefly, because I was busy with interviews and he was
in the hospital most of that week. He came home on Thursday but went
straight to sleep. On Friday afternoon, I volunteered to take him to his
dialysis appointment, where I last saw him alive.

I still remember how cold the waiting room was and how it smelled like
disinfectant. When I shook his small, fragile hand in goodbye, it was so
different from the heavy hand that administered punishments in my youth and
that embraced me that one time five years before.

As I rounded the corner on my way out, I couldn't shake the image of what
he'd become: an old man, shivering from pain and cold, waiting to be hooked
up to a machine so he could live a few more days.

I called home several times after that visit. But each time my father
answered the phone, he sounded tired and was barely able to speak to me in
English or for longer than a few moments.

On July 12, 2002, I got a job offer from The Palm Beach Post. I accepted,
and immediately called home to tell my parents. There was no answer.

After celebrating with co-workers, I returned to my apartment to find a
message from my brother, Brian.

"The old man is in the hospital again. He's not even conscious."

Some time after 11 p.m., I got a call from my sister, Milande, now an
attorney in New York. We stayed up all night, talking about "the old man,"
mostly in fits of laughter. We joked about how strict our father had been.
The arguments and the beatings seemed comical now, as if pulled from a UPN
sitcom. We scolded him for his faults: not taking better care of himself,
not getting life insurance, never becoming an American citizen.

Shortly after 5 a.m., as I recounted a scene from our childhood, the
call-waiting signal beeped. Brian was on the other line, his words barely
discernible through his tears.

In the background, I could hear the hospital's intercom system, and my
mother screaming my father's name.


Lessons from my father

I see a lot of Tervilien Louima in me. I see him in the shape of my face,
the timbre of my voice and in the anger that sometimes gets the better of
me.

Since his death, I have struggled with what his life meant, what his legacy
means for me, his youngest son.

My father struggled with demons: alcoholism, gambling, anger. But even
through the haze of his own weaknesses, he wanted more for us.

He was from one world. He brought us to a new one.

His children have all succeeded in this new world.

Because of him or in spite of him? I'm not sure. Perhaps that is why I think
of him so much.

Now, I make sure I am here for my mom. And recently, when my eldest sister
Ruth asked for help with her 14-year-old son, Woodre, I became his temporary
guardian. For six months, he lived with me, and I lectured Woodre on the
importance of education, sat with him late nights to help him with algebra
homework and chastised him when he was suspended from school.

>From Tervilien Louima, I learned what not to do. When Woodre lied, my first
instinct was not to reach for the belt. Instead, we talked about the
problems he was having at home, specifically the difficult relationship he
has with his father (the reason he moved in with us for those six months,
and a subject I consider myself an expert on). Then, the serious talking
done, we went to the movies, played pool and talked about girls.

We are a strong family. Imperfect but strong.

In spite of everything, my father accomplished what he set out to when he
and my mother boarded boats for Miami in 1980.

Sitting in the bleachers at my niece's high school graduation this month, my
mother said, "Tony did OK. We had some problems like everybody have
problems. But we did OK."

As Ruth's daughter walked across the stage in red cap and gown, I understood
exactly what my mother meant.

gariot_louima@pbpost.com

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