1952–1971: (The Boy President: Jean-Claude’s Lonely Childhood in the Palace, Barbot’s Pool and the 1963 Attack, Basket-Head and the Electric Train Set, the D…

1952–1971: (The Boy President: Jean-Claude’s Lonely Childhood in the Palace, Barbot’s Pool and the 1963 Attack, Basket-Head and the Electric Train Set, the Daughters Courted by Noirs Only, and the Young Man Who Did Not Wish to Be President): Few outside the palace really knew the new president, though many thought they did. Jean-Claude Duvalier had been barely five years old when his father entered the Palais; he, like many younger Haitians, had never known any other president — but unlike other Haitians, he had observed the operating methods of Papa Doc firsthand. A robust six feet tall, Jean-Claude favored his mother in coloring and disposition. His growing-up had been a lonely affair: as friends he had been permitted only a few chosen children of Duvalierists and occasionally, in the early days of the U.S. Naval Mission, sons of senior mission members — yet he learned early the transitory nature of such friendships as the parents of his friends fell from palace favor. One of the few people to whom Papa Doc had entrusted his children was Clément Barbot, to whose house in Pacot Jean-Claude would be driven on hot afternoons for a solitary swim; yet it was Barbot who had orchestrated the 1963 attack on the car carrying Jean-Claude to school, an event that made a deep impression on the youngster sequestered in the palace. Duvalier père had loved his family, but the fighting between alliances brought about by his daughters’ marriages had gradually taken its toll; his appetites were constrained by physical ailments, so that palace life was both cloistered and relatively abstemious compared to the Magloire days. Presiding over lunch in the northeast corner of the second-floor living quarters, Papa Doc could have been mistaken for any well-off noir family man, dishing out delicacies — all tasted by a designated taster — in a room littered with toys, books, and papers. Ironically, for a regime that presided over the dismemberment of what remained of Haiti’s railroads, an electric train set sat in one corner. To Papa Doc’s annoyance, his only son had no great interest in the arcana of Haitian history and was an indifferent scholar; one of Jean-Claude’s nicknames about town was basket-head — a Creole term indicating limited intelligence. At recess in grade school, children had been cautioned never to repeat their error of shouting, when Jean-Claude once fell, the fatal words Duvalier tombé. His teachers, afraid of palace opprobrium, gave him passing grades year after year and breathed sighs of relief when unburdened of their unambitious charge. He was shy and insecure, liked music and played the cello, had confrontations with his father over playing his stereo too loudly, possessed a passion for things mechanical, and was learning to drive by age ten, weaving through the palace courtyards in flashy sports cars — motorcycles and hunting followed, anything that would enable him to escape, even momentarily, the stifling atmosphere of the Palais. Ironically, even as his father decimated the ranks of the elite, Jean-Claude found himself thrown together at Collège Bird with scions of the very group whose stranglehold on Haitian society the father sought to break — children whose families could afford the toys he liked and a freedom he could only dream of. Deprived of steady companionship, witness at least at a distance of unspeakable horrors conducted in the palace basement, the young man took refuge in acquiring things, often seeking to one-up friends who sported a new watch, suit, or car. He had been abroad only once, staying six months in France in the late sixties during the family feud that exiled Max Dominique. What he did not wish to be was president.