The Dew Breaker

The final part is divided into 13 sections and takes place in 1967, three years after Haiti’s National Assembly voted to accept Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Duvalieriste Constitution, which established Duvalier as president of Haiti for the full of his life. Only the final section, which takes place later, is separate from this timeline.

In these 13 sections the point of view alternates between the dew breaker, the preacher the dew breaker has been sent to kill, and Anne, the preacher’s stepsister (and later the dew breaker’s wife and Ka’s mother).

The story opens with the dew breaker—Ka’s father—waiting to murder a preacher whose antigovernment sermons have attracted the attention of the Duvalier regime through radio broadcasts. The dew breaker waits in his West German sedan near a row of street vendors, in perfect view of the church, “in case the opportunity came to do the job from inside his car without having to get out and soil his shoes” (183).

The preacher’s church (L’Eglise Baptiste des Anges, or the “Baptist Church of the Angels) is in Bel Air, one of the oldest and poorest communities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Night falls while the dew breaker waits for the preacher’s arrival. He orders a boy to buy him cigarettes from a vendor, then gives the boy additional money to recite history lessons from school before sending him away.

The dew breaker regards Duvalier’s other agents as they patrol the streets, and we learn additional agents are watching the preacher’s house, four blocks away. The dew breaker mitigates his own guilt for the impending murder by focusing on the difference in the two men’s religious affiliation: The dew breaker is Catholic, while the preacher is Protestant, so “killing someone like the preacher wouldn’t make him feel guilty for long, no matter where he had to do it” (188).

As the section continues, we learn that the preacher’s wife was killed six months earlier by the daughter of a rival preacher who “slipped a piece of poisoned candy to the preacher’s wife during a woman’s auxiliary meeting” (189). The section also reveals that the dew breaker has been saving money for a move to America; a childhood zinc deficiency left him without the ability to taste sweet, sour, or hot things; and he enjoys playing card games with those he imprisons and interrogates, allowing his captives to believe they will be set free should they win the game, though of course they won’t.

The dew breaker’s backstory is also included in this first section. His parents, “landowning peasants” (191), lost their acreage when Duvalier came to power. His father went mad after the loss, and his mother disappeared. According to rumor, she moved to Jamaica with another man. The dew breaker joined the Miliciens, or the Volunteers for National Security, at 19 years old, after being bussed to, and awed by, a presidential rally for Duvalier’s Flag Day speeches.

The section concludes with recollections of one of the dew breaker’s former female captives saying of the man: “He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with his words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God” (199).

The second section is told from the preacher’s perspective. It begins in his home, where he sits with three of his deacons, all of whom, like the preacher himself, are aware of the impending violence. Determined to live bravely to the very end, the preacher ignores his deacons’ advice of giving the sermon at home and begins his walk to the church. Over Rue Tirremasse’s “muggy, dusty and loud” (202) four blocks, he has brief conversations with a vendor selling corn, a couple he married, a widow he hired to wash and iron his clothes, and a shoeshine man who “was one of many who’d conspired to empty slop jars from their roofs over the heads of some Volunteers” (204) after they came to arrest students for performing Samuel Beckett’s seminal existential play Waiting for Godot.

At the church, the preacher delivers his sermon. His stepsister Anne enters the church for a brief moment, then leaves. The sermon focuses heavily on his wife, and the preacher recounts further details about her last day, after she was poisoned.

The dew breaker, along with other Volunteers, enters the church while the preacher is still speaking at his altar. The group forcibly leads the preacher outside to the “suddenly empty” (211) street and throws him in the back of a truck. Duvalier’s men blindfold and savagely beat him as the truck drives away. The preacher understands he’s being taken to one of two places: the nearby military barracks, knowns as the Casernes, or the prison, Fort Dimanche. He hopes for the barracks, recalling that “it was said that if one went to the former there was a small chance of coming out alive, but the latter was literally a sepulcher from which no one was ever expected to resurface” (212).

The preacher winds up being taken to the barracks, where he is thrown in a cell, surrounded by “loud, moaning men” and “the smell of rotting flesh” (212). The section concludes with other men in the cell urinating on the preacher’s eyes, an indigenous, pre-Christian cure for ridding them of disease.

Section three is told from the point of view of Anne, who is epileptic and having a seizure at her home. She recounts her childhood, her younger brother’s death by accidental drowning, and her concern for her older brother, the preacher. Even in her present epileptic state, she is aware something is wrong: “either his body was dying or something inside him was dying, but she feared she might never see him again” (216).

Section four, also quite brief, is from the perspective of the dew breaker, who has received a change to his orders to kill the preacher: Word from the national palace is that Duvalier now wants the preacher set free. The dew breaker learns this information through Rosalie, “his superior […] a short, stout, bespectacled woman” (216). Folklore is discussed, with inclusions that the name of Duvalier’s volunteer militia derives from the name of a bogeyman from Haitian myth. Rosalie deems the preacher the dew breaker’s responsibility, but the orders are clear: The preacher is to be released so as to not be made into martyr, his death rallied around. The dew breaker instructs a guard to bring the preacher to his office.

Section five, from the preacher’s point of view, follows the preacher as he is led by a guard—whom the preacher identifies as The Voice—from his cell to the dew breaker’s small office. He thinks of his wife and his sister Anne on the journey. The prisoners in other cells offer bon chance, or good luck.

The sixth section, from Anne’s viewpoint, begins with her coming back to consciousness, post-seizure, with the shoeshine man Leon standing over her. Anne runs toward the barracks where her brother, the preacher, is held. She looks back at Leon and thinks that “he looked like both the angel of life and the angel of death” (222).

Section seven returns to the preacher and takes place in the dew breaker’s “nine-by-twelve-foot mustard-colored prison office,” which is “hot and foul-smelling with the stench of body fluids mixed with tobacco” (223). The dew breaker gets up from his desk and approaches the preacher, who feels trapped in his seat, certain he is about to be executed. The dew breaker, planning on letting the preacher go, per Rosalie’s orders, tells the preacher he must stop his antigovernment sermons. Shaking from fear, the preacher rears back from the dew breaker, causing the chair to break. As the dew breaker smiles and moves closer, the preacher grabs a splintered piece of the chair and jabs it at the dew breaker’s face, gashing the man on the cheek. Bleeding and angry, the dew breaker takes out his gun and shoots the preacher to death. The section concludes with the preacher speculating on the merits of the sermon he could have given about his experience and feeling pride for wounding the dew breaker before his own demise.

Section eight, quite brief, documents Anne’s continued journey through Port-au-Prince toward the barracks. She notes that “the streets were otherwise so empty that she felt she was the only person still alive in the entire city, and that thought kept her running” (228).

Section nine sees the dew breaker effectively fleeing the barracks, following Rosalie’s arrival to his office after he killed the preacher. Sure that Duvalier’s regime will exact revenge upon him for not properly following orders and killing the preacher instead of letting him go, the dew breaker leaves the grounds and literally runs into Anne, who is approaching the barracks to try to find and save the preacher. The two say tanpri, or please, to one another at the same moment, and the dew breaker recounts how his mother once told him “that when you spoke the exact same words as someone else at the exact same time, it meant that the two of you would die on the same day” (231).

The dew breaker assumes Anne, sweat-soaked and wearing only a white satin nightgown, to be “a madwoman” (231). Dizzy from his wound, he leans into her, surprised she can support his large frame. Anne sobs into his shoulder and the two make their way toward the dew breaker’s home.

Section 10, very brief, shows the dew breaker arriving home with Anne. He falls asleep, telling himself he will deal with all he must in the morning while hoping Anne might lie down in bed next to him.

Section 11 follows Anne as she watches the dew breaker sleep. As the sun rises, she observes a funeral procession passing on the street, then leaves the home to find ingredients for an infusion—ginger, honey, and sprigs of yurba buena—for the dew breaker’s injury. She finds a vendor with the needed ingredients but has no money to pay him. The vendor gives the ingredients to her, and Anne speculates that “maybe he was giving them to her because he thought she was a healer or a madwoman who all of a sudden was sobbing” (234).

Section 12 begins with a flashback to the dew breaker’s youth. He works in the garden of his childhood home with his mother. His father arrives and then leaves again. He is surrounded by “the seeds they’d planted together, [which] had magically taken root and were turning into trees—mango, papaya, guava, and avocado trees” (235). The dew breaker’s mother plucks a mimosa piduca, or a shame plant, and guides the dew breaker’s fingers over its leaflets. When the dew breaker touches the plant, its flowers shrink. His mother tells the dew breaker to wait, and the flower reopens. The dream ends with the mother handing the dew breaker a sprig and telling him to hold on to it.

The dew breaker awakens, unable to remember Anne’s name but recalling the prior night’s events. Anne asks what they did to him, and the dew breaker responds, “I’m free…I finally escaped” (237).

Section 13, which returns to the narrative’s present day, occurs soon after the events in Part 1. Told from Anne’s perspective, this section provides denouement and fills in the events that led Anne and the dew breaker to America: A doctor stitched the dew breaker’s wound; Anne heard that her stepbrother, the preacher, was dead; Anne and the dew breaker flew from Port-au-Prince to New York, where they met an old army friend of the dew breaker. Upon meeting this friend, the dew breaker introduced Anne as his wife, and Anne “did not disagree” (240). The public story about the preacher’s death is that he set himself on fire in act of political rebellion. Once in the United States, the dew breaker does not deny this politically concocted falsehood. Anne, for her part, accepts that the dew breaker only arrested her brother but didn’t kill him. The narration adds that “neither [believed] the other nor themselves” (241).

These facts are unveiled during a phone conversation between Anne and Ka. Ka is stateside, and it’s assumed but never explicitly stated that Anne is back in Haiti (the two are described as being thousands of miles apart). Anne realizes that while she was disclosing this information to her daughter, Ka hung up on her: “there was now a strange mechanical voice on the line telling her to ‘hang up and try again’” (241).