My mother and I have always looked much younger than our ages. Big almond-shaped eyes bracket her pert nose, both complementing her bright, manicured smile, her smooth, medium-dark skin. Busty and pear-shaped, she looks the way you might imagine an upscale librarian—bookish, sensibly dressed, a woman who isn’t missing a good meal. Meanwhile, I am gangly.
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Still we share a haunting resemblance. Strangers often point out how much we look alike—the inquiring eyes, the wide nose, the mouth that can whipsaw from raucous smile to damning scowl. Both of us like to make our faces go blank, organic Botox. We freeze our faces so our adversaries have no idea what we’re really thinking. The enemy is thrown off guard, made to feel uncertain, insecure, even less than. It is our resting-empress face.
No matter our similarities, for years I sensed an intense grief in my mother that kept us from connecting in a deep and real way. I didn’t know the circumstances of her upbringing. I hadn’t heard about the violence she’d suffered. Her aversion to addressing that agony, and my inability to ask about it, corroded our relationship.
When my mother was thirteen, her father, Daniel Fignolé, became the president of Haiti. A fiery orator, he addressed the dreams of an entire generation of voiceless Haitians, impoverished and working class, who worshipped him. He was one of the most charismatic, popular figures in that country’s history—Haiti’s own Juan Perón or Huey Long.
But his presidency collapsed just nineteen days after his inauguration, and he was ejected from his country into America. That coup brought his once-close friend Papa Doc Duvalier to power and launched one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century. Roughly fifty thousand people were imprisoned, tortured, or executed.
That coup brought his once-close friend Papa Doc Duvalier to power and launched one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century.
Even though my mother came from an important political family, she never spoke of her childhood. And when questions about her father came up, she went deaf rather than hear the query. I came to know at an early age that if I persisted, the family temper would be unleashed in an ice-hot slap, a palm of flame stinging my cheek.
“Your grandfather was obsessed with politics—to the point of mental derangement,” my tante Gigine, my mother’s aunt, once told me when I was a boy, shaking her head. “It was his malady.”
This small rant was a notable exception to my family’s studied silence. As I was growing up, my family revealed virtually nothing about this history or their feelings. Only generic snippets of my grandfather surfaced—a vague nod to his legend here, a salute to his good looks there.
Otherwise, he was purged from our dinner-table conversations, banned from Christmas Eve reminiscences, hushed from summer family reunions, when my aunties would sit on the porch, clutching their caftans between their legs, fanning themselves, gossiping about anything but him and their childhoods.
I used to pester my mother for details all the time. Now, mostly, I let her be. She is eighty-one years old. She absolutely does not want to tell this story. It is not her choice to salvage damage from history. It is mine.
As my mother ages, I worry I am squandering a vanishing chance to really know her—our history.
My family’s existence in Haiti, those disremembered years, dwell like a caesura in our minds, lost stanzas in an epic poem. If ever I am to understand my mother, I must speak to that void.
*
June 13, 1957. A hot, clear Thursday night. Daniel Fignolé’s cabinet was waiting for him as he slipped into a sedan, his lips pursed in the purposeful way that his family knew so well. He’d eaten a light supper with his wife, Carmen, and their seven children and was headed back to work.
His three oldest daughters—thirteen, twelve, and ten—had just completed their homework; the four younger children had long since been put down to sleep. Daniel said good night to the older girls—terse, unremarkable—and met his chauffeur in front of the house.
Not far away, the city was crackling as the jet set sipped rum punch at the smartest rooftop bars or petered into the nightclubs. But in Carrefour Feuilles, the hilly Port-au-Prince neighborhood where the Fignolé family lived, all was encased in quiet, a thick, total dark.
No one knows why exactly Daniel assembled his cabinet so late that night. Fine-tuning his plan to stave off recession, finalizing ambassadors for top posts—he had so much to do.
Daniel sat in the back, wedged between Captain Beauvoir and Lieutenant Leon. Daniel decided he would not beg for his life when the two men executed him.
Just before entering the meeting, he talked to Lyonel Paquin, a former student of his. Daniel had offered the businessman and scholar the post of undersecretary of finance—or if not that, almost any diplomatic post he wanted, except Washington. That ambassadorship would go to someone more experienced, more trusted, to be determined once Daniel could suss out the international landscape.
The two were in the hallway considering Lyonel’s options when the secretary of health interrupted them. He nudged the president—the cabinet was waiting.
Daniel began the meeting at roughly eleven o’clock. But just a few moments later, he heard footsteps, slow and heavy, thumping up the stairs. Everyone he’d invited was assembled already. The sound of the heels striking the marble grew louder and louder, the sharp footsteps closer and closer.
The door burst open, kicked in by General Antonio Kébreau, the nation’s chief military officer. A squad of troops waving Thompson submachine guns stormed into the chamber after the general.
“Ti-cock, ou caca,” the general announced to the president. “Little cock, you’re shit.”
Captain Jean Beauvoir, a top officer, approached Daniel. “This meeting is adjourned,” Beauvoir said, staring at him. “Put your hands in the air.”
Daniel turned to his startled cabinet members. “Gentlemen, this session is over,” he said calmly, then raised his hands above his head. Four soldiers—Beauvoir, Leon, Nelson, and Rey—surrounded the president. He was galled when he recognized one of them—a former student.
Determined to remain dignified, he said nothing to the man. The show of force infuriated him. Unlike his predecessors, he had yet to arrest a single person during his presidency.
Officers handcuffed the cabinet members and carted them into waiting trucks. A soldier gathered all the papers scattered across the table and put them into a military satchel. Their machine guns trained at his back, the officers loaded Daniel into one of the presidential vehicles, then sped off into the night.
*
At the same time, soldiers descended on the Fignolé home. My mother, thirteen at the time, had fallen asleep in her room. Natacha, the maid, heard loud knocking and hurried to the door. She cracked it slightly and a soldier demanded to see the First Lady. Shaking, Natacha insisted the stranger tell her what he wanted. But having already heard the racket, my grandmother Carmen came down the stairs and opened the door fully.
“Madame, the president needs you urgently at the National Palace.”
“What is the matter?” Carmen’s breath started to quicken. “Don’t ask any questions, madame!” the man shouted.
She was startled at all the soldiers crowding her front porch and property; she couldn’t tell how many there were. She was still wearing the linen dress she’d had on during the day. She grabbed her purse and took the maid by her shoulders.
“Watch after the children. Please. I’ll be right back.”
When she stepped out of the house, a soldier waved his rifle at a waiting car. “Get in. Your husband needs to speak to you.”
Awakened by the ruckus, Danielle looked out her window as the car disappeared. Soldiers had come to her home before, looking for her father, but not once had they ever taken her maman.
*
The vehicle carrying the president bolted north on the major road leading out of Port-au-Prince. Lieutenant Nelson looked ahead, his foot on the gas, and Lieutenant Rey sat in the front passenger seat.
Daniel sat in the back, wedged between Captain Beauvoir and Lieutenant Leon. Daniel decided he would not beg for his life when the two men executed him. He had no intention of granting them the satisfaction of hearing him plead.
They drove for roughly an hour. Then, rather suddenly, the car pulled onto the shoulder. The officers in front whispered among themselves.
“N’ ap ba li la?” Daniel heard Lieutenant Rey say to the driver. “Let’s give it to him?”
Lieutenant Nelson didn’t respond.
Daniel wondered what the soldier’s silence meant.
Then Lieutenant Nelson restarted the engine and continued driving.
After a while, the sedan slowed, stopped once more. The soldiers parked the car in the entrance to a deserted wood.
Daniel thought that this was his end.
*
Another sedan shuttled Carmen through Port-au-Prince. She wondered why Daniel had summoned her, then grew nervous, slightly, that she might not be able to address, to provide, whatever it was that he needed. She steadied her mind, calmed her annoyance that such an aggressive escort had been sent to deliver her to his office.
But the maneuver was sharp, her realization sudden. When the car made a bad turn, she shouted, “What is going on? The palace is the other way. We are not going anywhere near the direction of the palace.”
“Shut up, madame!” a soldier barked. “And don’t ask questions.”
The car headed north on the highway. What if soldiers have assassinated Daniel at the palace? Carmen wondered. And where are they taking me?
She trembled, knowing that they knew she was a wife and a mother and still they were sneering as they held her, defenseless, at gunpoint, headed to an undisclosed nowhere. She shut her eyes for an instant and made a small prayer that no soldiers would return to her home that night, banging down the door once more, this time coming for her children.
*
Captain Beauvoir took out a piece of paper from his military attaché case and a flashlight from his pocket. From the front seat, Lieutenant Rey pointed his machine gun at the president.
“Sign,” said the captain, showing the president where to put his signature.
Daniel took the paper and read it over. He decided that forged words on a letter should have no value. And if the words had no meaning, he thought, there was no good reason to risk his life by refusing the order.
He signed his resignation to the presidency. It was only nineteen days after his inauguration.
The car made a U-turn out of the woods and continued north.
*
The sedan carrying Carmen rolled to a stop. She looked over her captors and out the window. There was a deserted road—leading where, she could not tell.
“Behave yourself!” one of the officers said with a smirk. He noticed her eyes darting. “And don’t try to escape.”
They’d stopped at the small town of Cazeau, where the four officers got out of the car and whispered among themselves. She could not make out what they’d said. The fear rattled her head more loudly, more urgently. What about my children? Where is Daniel? Where are they taking me? Whatever else might happen to her, she thought, she must keep herself alive for her children.
Whatever else might happen to her, she thought, she must keep herself alive for her children.
And almost as abruptly as it had stopped, the car got back on the road for what seemed like infinite time. When it finally stopped again, she noticed three cars nearby, parked side by side.
The soldiers ordered her out of the sedan and led her over to them. They opened the door of one and Carmen saw Daniel. Daniel took his suit coat off and put it around his wife’s shoulders to shield her from the chill. He shrugged—baffled, silenced.
They’d been taken to a seaside town in northwest Haiti. The soldiers escorted them to a small wharf, where they were forced onto a tiny Coast Guard vessel, the Crête-á-Pierrot, which crossed the Gulf of Gonâve. The soldiers kept their machine guns trained on their backs. Soon after, they were led from the Coast Guard cutter to a rowboat, then rowed to dry land ahead, where a Haitian military plane sat waiting.
Môle-Saint-Nicolas. On the northwestern coast of Haiti, this tiny fishing village was precisely where Christopher Columbus first landed on December 6, 1492. He established a colony, which he named La Isla Española, taken into English as Hispaniola, the first long-lasting European settlement in the Americas.
I don’t know whether the kidnappers told Daniel and Carmen where they were taking them, but if they did, I doubt the irony of being forcibly ejected from his homeland in the exact place where Christopher Columbus had first settled was lost on my grandfather. They were not an accidental couple captured in a senseless stickup. Their bodies bore the weight of empire.
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Excerpted from Talk to Me by Rich Benjamin. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Rich Benjamin.
