Night Riding
By Savannah Balmir
It’s 10:55 on rue du Commerce in Jacmel, Haiti and the streets are pitch black save for the generator powered lights at our favorite café. The most romantic strip in Jacmel, rue du Commerce is part ruins, part new construction. It is home to one café, two hotels, several artisan studios, and a massive, newly renovated blue and white church that assails the entire zone with megaphoned worship services three times a week. The ruins are covered in ivy, with rusty twelve-foot doors and moss clinging to historical stones. The doors to the newer constructions are painted in bright blues, yellows, and oranges.
We are on our weekly outing where we buy two rum punches each and attempt to enjoy ourselves. A mounted tv plays a YouTube rotation of salacious konpa music videos, featuring girls in ripped shorts grinding on cars or under waterfalls. We laugh about our coworkers, and our overbearing boss at the non-profit who doesn’t approve of our weekly outings but won’t provide us with a car. A giant fan whirs above our heads, circulating warm air. We make plans to go to the beach, a getaway in a villa up the coast in Kabik. The staff sweep the floors around us, pile chairs on tables, shut off the fan. We nurse lukewarm dregs of melted ice and juice and alcohol, until they come to take our glasses.
We stumble down a cobble stone street. The lights of the café behind us, our steps are now illuminated by the sky’s half-moon, and the roving shadows of motorcycles rounding corners. There are some holes in the ground, we know. We can identify them because they look like even deeper swatches of darkness, black holes leading to another dimension. We hear someone nearby, voices and rustling. When we squint towards the noise, we see a man sprawled under the awning of a boarded-up building, his hand working in his ripped boxers while he mutters to himself. We hurry to the corner where the taxi drivers are more likely to be passing by.
There is a gas shortage. This is a chronic thing, even when there is gas in the gas stations, there is never enough of it. But when the gas prices go up, so do the taxis. We paid two times the usual fare to get to the café earlier that evening. And even though the sun had not yet set, the roads were eerily devoid of people walking down to the wharf. There was not the usual throng of young men buying cheap rum, children wandering from home, women in dresses getting felt up by summer wind. We are the only ones spending money on rue du Commerce.
Now it is dark, and the fares are even higher. Plus, we are foreign. They can see it on us, the drivers, and they will try to tax our fares.
We count the seconds between each sighting of a moto bike. We see the sometimes yellow, sometimes soft brown, sometimes bright white lights before we can make out the shape of the driver, usually a man wearing a baseball cap. Anxious to get home, we yell out, Taxi! prematurely, before sighting the silhouette of a passenger sitting behind him. They zip past. We stand at the corner of rue du Commerce and continue to wait.
After our drinks, we have two hundred and fifty gourdes in cash between us. The ATMs have been empty for weeks, just like the gas pumps. Not having access to one’s money is nearly the same as not having any money. Nearly. If it comes to it, we are prepared to haggle for our fares. We are prepared to squeeze both of our backsides onto the seat of one motorcycle, though this will be uncomfortable, and we are still attached to certain luxuries. We would prefer to ride separately, to have comfort on our sixteen-minute ride back to our neighborhood in Lamandou.
It is 11:06. Four motorcycles pass by without stopping. Two stop when we wave them down but refuse our price and destination. They don’t even try to haggle. They kick up their stands and drive away. We become worried that the later it gets the harder it will be to find a driver and the higher the fares will go. We have no boyfriends, but there are people we could call. We don’t want to bother them. We want to be independent. We want to go out and come back by ourselves. We are not accustomed to having chauffeurs at our 24-hour disposal, we feel that this is an entitled way to behave. We call someone anyway, a driver we know with a tiny bike held together with zip ties.
No gas, he says. Sorry.
It is 11:14 on Rue du Commerce, and even the ocean has hushed its crying for the evening and is now snoring in gentle waves. We try to stay aware of our surroundings. We turn the light of our cellphones on. A pile of dumped debris rots a few dozen meters away. Black spray paint covers a retaining wall in hastily traced letters.
ABA JOVENEL, the words say.
The sour stench of stagnant water in the gutters no longer offends our noses as it used to. Two motorcycles round the corner, then a third. We wave our arms, wave the small lights on our cellphones, we throw our voices across the road and call out to whoever will stop.
They all slow, but only two of them stop. We look into the eyes of the men, judging them by their faces to determine whether we should trust them with our lives. We are prepared to choke them with the straps of our handbags, to stab them with the blunt teeth of our house keys, should we notice them driving in the wrong direction, or separating us from one another.
We can spot the differences between real drivers and fake ones. Real ones have baskets on the front of their bikes where they keep their change. Real drivers keep sunglasses on their person. Real drivers wear hats, sneakers, and long jeans, not shorts and flimsy sandals, because real drivers spend all day under the sun and need their bodies properly covered.
Fake drivers have taxis with no baskets. Fake drivers don’t know the actual price of a fare, which is hard to know because prices fluctuate constantly, depending on the currency exchange rate, and the distance of the ride, and the relative quality of the road one might be obligated to drive upon. Fake drivers wear shorts and slippers, or are dressed for an occasion, as if they are in the middle of running their own errands, to the store, or to work, or to a destination determined by their own minds and needs. There is also, of course, the kind of fake driver who does not intend to bring you to your destination at all.
One of these drivers who has stopped for us is real, and the other is a fraud. The real driver has named his price, and it is fair.
Get on, he says, with a gruff insistence.
Wait, we say. Wait.
If only one driver had stopped, we would have given our double fare to him, but because of the fake driver’s presence, things are now complicated. We don’t want to look stingy. We don’t want to take one ride, and pay one man, when we could take two bikes and pay two men.
Sometimes fake drivers become real drivers when times are tough. We know that it is hard to make a living. We know that there is no gas in the pumps, and that black-market petrol is expensive and risky.
The real driver recognizes this. He is angry because he wants the double fare. He tells the fake driver to go away. He raises his voice. We catch each other’s eyes, reading the situation. We are women in dresses with American accents to our Kreyol. We are careful about when to interject ourselves, though we are the passengers, and we are the customers. In America, the customer is king, but in Haiti, we understand, we are all at the mercy of our fellow human. At any moment these drivers can whisk off into the night and strand us with the masturbating man in the alleyway.
Another moto comes back towards our group. It is another fake driver, the third set of lights we had seen before circling back to check on his fake driver friend. The real driver strikes his kickstand up with an angry click. He revs his engine, he rolls away. He can’t afford to waste petrol idling in the street like this, he says. We are left with the two fake drivers.
Get on, they say.
And we are so desperate to get home, we meet eyes, and we take our risk. We bunch our dress skirts between our legs and climb behind the drivers before we have even told them where we’re going.
We know the main streets because we walk them often during the day. We know the ways to get home—there are only two, really, and the one with the better road is the one we always take. The fake drivers ride side by side. Their lights glow to reveal the road before us. Treacherous gutters which frame the street, cracks in the asphalt and potholes big enough to bury a body. A mural mosaic in the outer face of a concrete wall depicts a standing peacock, blue spots in its feathers like eyes, bedazzled with mirrors that wink back at us. A dog scampers across the avenue. The bikes pick up speed and our skin goes gooseflesh as we gain momentum.
Where are you from, the drivers ask us.
Do you like Haiti, they want to know. Yes, we do like Haiti, we love Haiti. Haiti is beautiful. Haiti is sweet. We love the mountains and the ocean, and the rivers. We love the food, and the music. We like to dance. The thing that makes Haiti dangerous for us, are the people. We don’t say this to the drivers, but we think it. We think about seventeen Americans kidnapped, missionaries who had no business coming to this country at a time like this. We think about the dead president and his fox-faced Prime Minister. We think about a girl who went missing, not far from our favorite café. We feel relief as we turn down a familiar road and get closer to the place we call home.
Sometimes a real driver will ask if we know the way that he’s taking, to make sure we are comfortable with the route. Our fake drivers play games zipping ahead of one another, but never so far that we can’t see each other. We are prepared to make them stop, to scream in their ears and force them to wait if they drive too fast. But they drive like friends accustomed to sharing the road. They smile. They are lighthearted. We can see them more clearly now, we can see that they are just young men on their way home, who saw some pretty girls and wanted to offer them a ride. From our perches behind our drivers, we see freshly lined haircuts at their temples. We smell the mix of cologne and sweat in the wind. Our breasts bump against their backs when we ride over rocks. Our legs clench. We try in vain to minimize contact. We keep our shoulders straight and our hands planted on our own knees.
We know better than to let drivers, real or fake, drop us at our house. We prefer to be deposited at the luxe hotel on the same street. A single light blankets the entrance with a dim sepia color. A rifle clad security guard greets us at the gate, which is open, but we don’t drive through. We dismount outside, pat down our skirts and reach for the two hundred fifty gourdes between us. The fake drivers don’t take our fare. We insist, and they refuse.
We just wanted to do something nice, they say. To show you our country is full of good people.
Have a good night, they say.
We want to smile but we can’t be nicer than we already have been.
Good night, we say. Get home well.
They turn their bikes around and wait for us to pass through the gates, as if concerned for our safety. They think we are visiting for a few days or weeks. They don’t know that we live here, in this country. That we work here, that we pay rent for a smaller house three doors down. They ride back down the road in their same zigzagging, playful way. We wait until their lights disappear. We walk out of the hotel gate with a nod to the security guard. Our feet crunch over gravel as we amble toward home. We pull our keys from our handbags and unlock our own door. We chain the gate behind us.
About the Author
Savannah Balmir is a Caribbean-American writer. She studied English and French at Howard University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. Savannah is a Kimbilio Fiction fellow, an Oxbelly Fiction Fellow, a Haitian Studies Association Emerging Scholar, and winner of the University of Kentucky’s 2024 Fiction Award. She is also the recipient of a 2024 Albers Foundation residency at Thread, Senegal. Savannah’s work has been published in Black Powerful, Castle in Our Skins, Kweli Journal, The New York Writers Coalition Black Writer’s Journal, SONKU, and The Seventh Wave Magazine. Her short story “Night Riding” was longlisted for the 2024 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize. Savannah is co-founder of Writers Rest, a traveling community and retreat for Black Womxn writers. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
