Brother, I'm Dying

by Edwidge Danticat

  “Seven,” Marie Micheline answered, now cradling the belly between her hands. She purposely kept her eyes down, doing her best not to look at a fuming Tante Denise.

  “What have we ever done to you?” Tante Denise cried out in a strained, high-pitched voice. “Haven’t we taken care of you from the time you were a baby?”

  Marie Micheline sat up and lowered her feet off the bed.

  “I knew it,” she shouted. “I knew you’d act like this. I’m pregnant, not ungrateful.”

  My uncle raised his hands, signaling for them to quiet down. Then he motioned for Liline and me to leave the room.

  “Who’s the father?” we heard him ask as we left.

  Liline and I didn’t wander too far from the doorway. The father, Marie Micheline stammered, was Jean Pradel, the oldest of five brothers who lived across the alley from us. Jean had four brothers, our neighbors often whispered, because his mother had been in pursuit of a girl.

  The Pradel boys were handsome young men, well built and, thanks to the financial gains from their mother’s ice and soda shop and their father’s tailoring business, well educated. Their father was somber and fussy and was always well groomed, spending the days when he wasn’t working in a rocking chair on his immaculate front porch.

  “Does Jean know he’s the father?” my uncle asked. “Will he deny it and humiliate us? Or will he own up to it like a man?”

  “I don’t know,” Marie Micheline answered.

  “Get up and get dressed,” my uncle said. “We’re going to have a visit with Monsieur and Madame Pradel.”

  Liline and I scattered as they left Marie Micheline’s room and began to move toward us. While Marie Micheline dressed, Tante Denise and Uncle Joseph waited in front of her bedroom door, not saying a word to one another.

  Marie Micheline came out in her too-large white nursing school uniform. Her belly was still undetectable under her clothes, but now she put less effort into hiding it, letting her body move naturally in a way that clearly showed her struggles with sluggishness and the extra weight.

  Sandwiched between the only parents she’d ever known, she slowly walked toward the Pradels.

  The meeting didn’t last long. When they returned, we could tell by the angry look on Tante Denise’s and Uncle Joseph’s faces and by Marie Micheline’s despondent gaze that Jean Pradel had denied being the father.

  “See what you get when you lie down with pigs,” Tante Denise said loud enough for the Pradels to hear as they sat huddled at a table by their front door.

  “Get your things,” Tante Denise told Marie Micheline. “You’re going to live with one of my cousins in Léogâne. We’ll send you money and food. You can come back when the baby’s born.”

  “Let’s not be rash,” Uncle Joseph interjected. “We can go back and see what the boy says. He’d obviously not told his parents and was taken by surprise.”

  “This is women’s business,” Tante Denise said. “Let me take care of it.”

  We were not allowed to say good-bye to Marie Micheline when she left the next day. Many of our neighbors assumed she was sent abroad to join Maxo. Tante Denise did not send her to Léogâne either, but to live with Liline’s mother in a distant and destitute part of town. Soon the Pradels also sent Jean to Montreal, where he had some relatives, and we never saw him again.

  During the two months that Marie Micheline was gone, Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise visited her several times but never took any of us children with them. After one of the visits I overheard Tante Denise telling her sister Léone that Marie Micheline, heartbroken over Jean Pradel’s rejection, had gotten married in a civil ceremony.

  “Who would marry a pregnant girl?” asked Léone.

  “A kind man who wants to give an abandoned child a name,” Tante Denise answered proudly.

  “He must want something,” Léone countered.

  The next piece of news was that Marie Micheline’s baby was born, healthy and a girl. My uncle rented a small apartment for Marie Micheline, her new husband and the child, then he and Tante Denise went to pick them up and bring them back to Bel Air. They paid a few months’ rent, then the husband was supposed to pick up the rest.

  We knew little about Marie Micheline’s new husband except his name, Pressoir Marol, and the fact that he was in his thirties. After my uncle had moved them into their new place, I overheard him telling one of his friends that Pressoir spoke some Spanish, which indicated that he might have spent some time working as a cane laborer or construction worker either in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic. The fact that Pressoir walked with a slight limp also hinted at the possibility of an injury acquired doing that type of work.

  Marie Micheline, Pressoir and the baby, whose name was Ruth, often came to eat at the house. As she walked over from her place to ours, Marie Micheline would have to pass by the Pradels’ house, where Monsieur Pradel was frequently sitting out on the porch, either pedaling at his sewing machine or watching the street.

  One afternoon, Marie Micheline stopped right in front of Monsieur Pradel and waited for him to look up and acknowledge her. When he didn’t, she turned the baby’s tiny face toward him and said, “I’m not interested in Jean anymore, Monsieur Pradel. Wherever he is, I just want him to acknowledge his daughter.”

  “Don’t you already have a husband?” Monsieur Pradel asked scornfully.

  Dressed in the indigo denim uniform of the Tonton Macoutes, Pressoir was waiting on our front gallery, where Nick, Bob and I were playing, and he too overheard this exchange. He was wearing the macoute’s signature dark reflector glasses, which completely hid his eyes. Enraged, he dashed toward Marie Micheline and grabbed her by the elbow, nearly shaking Ruth out of her grasp. Pressoir hadn’t yet been assigned a gun, which is perhaps the only reason he didn’t shoot both Marie Micheline and Monsieur Pradel on the spot.

  “You whore, you shameless bouzen,” he yelled as he pushed Marie Micheline into our house.

  My uncle went to Marie Micheline’s aid. By then, Ruth had woken up and was wailing.

  “What’s happening here?” My uncle seemed as perplexed by Ruth’s distress and Marie Micheline’s sobs as he was by Pressoir’s menacing uniform.

  “You’re a macoute?” my uncle asked Pressoir, all the while shaking his head, showing his shock and disapproval.

  “My wife will no longer be coming here,” Pressoir said, ignoring my uncle’s question. “From now on, if you want to see her and the baby, you’ll have to come to us.”

  Tante Denise stumbled out from the kitchen and wiped the sweat from her crinkled forehead with a corner of the flowered scarf around her head.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, also sobbing now. “She’s our daughter. This is our grandchild.”

  “Just what I say,” Pressoir replied. “I thought she was coming here to see you. That’s not what she’s doing. So she’s no longer allowed to come.”

  Two days later, Pressoir moved Marie Micheline and Ruth out of the place my uncle had rented for them. He left word with their landlord for my aunt and uncle that he now had bullets and that Marie Micheline was forbidden to see anyone. To keep them from finding Marie Micheline and Ruth, he moved them constantly, staying with other macoutes only a few days at a time, sometimes separating them and placing Ruth in the temporary care of strangers.

  My uncle eventually managed to track them down near the ocean a few miles south of Port-au-Prince and visited with them when Pressoir was away. When Pressoir heard that he’d been there, he moved them back to the outskirts of Latounèl, a small village in the mountains of Léogâne.

  After two months with no word from Marie Micheline, my uncle finally learned where she was from a family friend who lived in the same area. He decided that no matter what the risks, he would go there and bring her home.

  Climbing the rugged mountain trails on a borrowed mule at high noon, my uncle thought he’d never make it to the village. The mule was hiking at a steady gait, but my uncle was hot, thirsty, and cover
ed with sweat and his head and backside ached. Still, all he could think of was seeing Marie Micheline and the baby again. He blamed himself for letting Tante Denise send her away when she was pregnant. Why hadn’t he forced her to annul her marriage? He should have been more diligent, much more suspicious. Who marries a pregnant girl—as Léone had asked—even one as pretty and smart as Marie Micheline, unless there’s something else behind it? In Pressoir’s case, that something seemed to have been cruelty and madness.

  When he reached the village, my uncle walked to the house of its highest official, the section chief, a toothless old man, who in his own starched denim uniform and dark reflector glasses reminded him of the much younger Pressoir.

  “A man whose eyes you can’t look into is not a man you can ever trust,” his father, Granpè Nozial, had often said.

  The macoutes had a synchronized look, a coarse veneer that made the thin ones seem stout, the short ones seem tall. In the end they were all equally intimidating because they represented the government. Whether it was Pressoir or this old man, each one had the power to decide whether or not my uncle lived or died, whether or not his daughter lived or died.

  Fearfully putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder, my uncle said, “Father, for your hair is white enough and you’re old enough that I can call you father, please help me, another father, free my daughter from her bondage.”

  He gave the old man the equivalent of five U.S. dollars, which he wished he could get back when the old man said, “Pressoir’s a real big chief now, a city macoute. None of us can cross him. Your daughter isn’t the only girl he has in this condition. There are many others. Many.”

  “Then please, father,” my uncle pleaded while trying to maintain his calm, “do me only this favor. Forget you ever saw me, but I’m not leaving without my daughter and her child.”

  “I won’t say anything to him,” the old man said as he pocketed the money. He then reluctantly gave my uncle directions to the one-room house where Marie Micheline was living.

  My uncle found the house on a nearby hill, then secured a secluded grazing spot for the mule, where he too rested until dusk. As the moon started peering out of the sky, he watched Pressoir leave in full uniform, perhaps to attend a meeting. His heart began to race. What if there was someone else in there? What if Pressoir came back? What if he failed and only made things worse for Marie and the baby?

  Finally he built up enough courage to walk up the hill and into the tiny house. Marie Micheline was lying on her back on a woven banana leaf mat, which aside from a small earthen jar and a kerosene lamp was the only thing in the small shack. The limestone walls were covered with sheets of newspaper, snippets of fading bulletins that he imagined she’d read over and over again to keep herself hopeful, and calm.

  “Vini,” my uncle said, reaching down and pulling her up into his arms.

  “Papa, is it really you?” she whispered. Now he could see that her legs were covered with pus-filled blisters, open and discolored wounds. Her gaunt face was hot and moist. She had a fever.

  “He beat me. He beat me on my legs, with a broom, with fire stones when I tried to escape.” She began to cry, her tears even warmer on his arm than her skin.

  “Where’s Ruth?” he asked.

  She pointed out the door, toward another hill. The baby was with a family down the road, she whispered.

  “They’re good. They will give her to me,” she said.

  “Let’s go, then.” As they walked out the door, she stumbled, catching herself just in time before falling nearly flat on her face. He wrapped her body in his arms, thinking that she felt the same to him now as when her father had placed her in his arms as a baby, trusting that he would look after her, that he would always keep her from harm.

  Outside, the night sky was full of stars, the kind of stars that he rarely took time to look up at and examine in the city, the way he had nearly every night when he was a boy.

  “Papa,” she whispered, her mouth now so close to his ears that her breath burned his lobes. “Papa, even though men cannot give birth, you just gave birth tonight. To me.”

  The Return

  One afternoon in October 1976, when I was seven years old, Bob, Nick and I were sitting on my uncle’s front gallery, memorizing, just like every other schoolchild in Haiti, our usual rote lessons for the next school day, when we saw some strange figures turn the corner from Rue Tirremasse and head down the alley toward us.

  One was a man in a brown three-piece suit that looked like it was getting its first wear. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and grasping a boy’s elbow with the other. A plump woman followed with a baby in her arms. Immediately trailing them was a taxi driver and a few other young men who carried four large suitcases up to the gallery and set them at our feet.

  The first thing I noticed when I looked up from their outsized, outstretched luggage was the man’s smile. It was huge, cavernous, two of his top front teeth golden.

  “Edwidge, it’s Papa,” he said, pressing that extensive smile against the side of my face. He smelled of a cologne whose fragrance I couldn’t recognize, of travel and faraway places.

  Was he really my father, I wondered, this thin, happy man with a thick dark beard that caressed his collarbone when he lowered his head? He kept his eyes on me, letting them wander for only a few seconds while he reached into his pocket to pay the driver and the young men who’d helped with the bags.

  Until that moment, aside from the butter cookies and restrained words of his letters, my father had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body, like the one looming over the pecan-hued little boy who was looking up at Nick, Bob and me.

  “Edwidge?” My mother stepped onto the front porch, plugging the remaining hole in the circle that was now all of us.

  “Come and kiss your manman,” she said.

  She looked heavier than I remembered, and her copper-colored skin was a few shades lighter. The baby in her arms was sleeping.

  “Manman?” Bob’s jaw dropped. He ran to her and planted a kiss on the first place his lips reached on her body, the woolen plaid skirt covering her legs. Balancing the baby with one arm, she reached down and with her other hand stroked his head, gently, softly, for a long time. He in turn remained glued to her skirt, burying his face deep into it as though he were crying and didn’t want the rest of us to see.

  I thought he had forgotten her. She’d left when he was two, the age I was when my father left, yet whatever was drawing him to her—yearning, pain, curiosity—was keeping me away from him.

  “Bob.” My father reached over and gently pulled him away.

  Bob turned to my father’s lowered face and kissed his cheek. My father was pleased, rubbing Bob’s head with his palm.

  “This is your brother Kelly,” my father said, introducing him to the little boy by their side.

  It was thanks to Kelly that our parents had been able to return to Haiti. Even though they had overstayed tourist visas, Kelly’s birth in the United States had instantly made them eligible for permanent residency, which is no longer possible today.

  Before things were finalized, however, they had to file the paperwork at the consulate in Port-au-Prince; only then could they petition for Bob and me to join them in New York.

  “Any granmoun here?” my father asked, gently patting my shoulder with his hand.

  It was late afternoon, the near-dinner hour. The water women had just filled up their buckets at the municipal tap near the Lycée Pétion and were calling out in a singsong that we sometimes listened for when our supply was low.

  Dlo, dlo, dlo pou vann.

  I have water for sale!

  At the turn where the alley curved toward the street, Boniface, the blacksmith, was hammering an oil drum into a thin sheet of metal that he would then mold into a metal wreath to sell at the cemetery. Two of the Pradel brothers were taking turns reciting their lessons out loud in a unified refrain. Two others were playing an impro
mptu soccer game on their parents’ front porch with an empty Carnation milk can. Their maid, a girl younger than all of them, began burning her weekly accumulation of trash, suddenly filling the alley with rank white smoke.

  My parents walked inside the house to avoid the smoke. Guided by Bob and Nick, my father shut the jalousies and piled his suitcases next to the few living room chairs.

  Tante Denise was cooking supper and Uncle Joseph lying down for a nap. I told Bob to go and get her, then I rushed to the room where my uncle lay curled on his side, bare-chested. He was startled when I shook him and thrust at him a shirt that was laid out on his night table.

  “My father and mother are here,” I said.

  He looked at me as though I’d grown two heads. Still, he quickly got dressed and followed me.

  “Frè m.” My father ran into my uncle’s arms.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” my uncle said.

  They remained attached for a while, intertwined, as if one might never release the other. Stepping away first, my father left an imprint of his wet face on the front of my uncle’s shirt.

  “Mesi frè m,” my father said. “Thank you for looking after my children.”

  “Mira,” my uncle said, laughing. Mira was my father’s nickname, short for Miracin, his middle name. It was, I learned, what everyone called him. “These children almost look after themselves.”

  Tante Denise ran out of the kitchen, and though uncharacteristically joyful, she still scolded my mother with a wagging finger for not having warned her they were coming. My father asked Bob and Nick to go buy him a pack of cigarettes, and they hurried off to a street stand, happy to have so big a job to do.

  “Come,” my mother said, patting the chair next to hers. She smelled like coconut, which I eventually figured out came from her hair pomade. Her voice, clipped, quick, had slowly been fading from my memory. I wanted to lean over and place my head on her arm, just as I had in the back of the car the day she was leaving, but I was too shy to do it.

  The baby had woken up, his round face creased and crumpled.