As we waited for Papa to find another job, every Sunday afternoon my uncle, Bob and I would walk to a calling center near the fabric shop where my uncle worked, and the three of us would squeeze into a narrow telephone booth with cardboard-thin walls and try to talk with my parents. The conversations were always the same. My uncle would scribble a few notes on the small notepad he kept in his shirt pocket: instant letters that in a few sentences updated our parents on the state of our health, our schoolwork, our grades, the latest on our immigration application. I would carefully repeat my uncle’s scrawled phrases, watching his lips for modifications as I went on. It was hot and cramped with the three of us in there and every once in a while my uncle would have to change places with us on the narrow bench as we passed the phone around. My parents would interrupt me now and then to make a comment or ask a question and I’d have to stop and wait for my uncle to respond before speaking again. The remaining time was for our parents to speak directly to us.
“Now tell me how you are,” my mother would ask me.
“Byen,” I’d answer. Fine.
On another extension, my father asked, “You’re being a good girl, aren’t you?”
“Wi papa,” I’d answer, feeling that I had already spoken to them enough, using my uncle’s words.
“I’ve found a job,” my father announced one Sunday afternoon.
“Bravo!” my uncle wrote.
“Bravo,” I repeated.
I could almost imagine the look on my father’s face, a broad smile that showed how proud he too was of himself.
A few weeks later, a letter arrived at the house in Bel Air announcing that we had an appointment at the American consulate in a few days.
At the center of so many families’ lives, the focus of so many thoughts and prayers, le consul, in the flesh, was just a very tanned, nearly bronzed white man with what seemed like bottle green eyes. Was he the consul himself or just one of the many employees that formed the pastiche of that identity? I didn’t know then and don’t know now. However, the man we appeared before that day was wearing a thin white shirt with no undershirt. His fingernails were brownish red, with what looked like terra-cotta underneath.
As I sat with my brother and uncle, separated from the green-eyed man by a polished wooden desk, he looked through our papers, a thick file accumulated over the last five years, the blood tests to prove my father’s paternity, the TB diagnosis and treatments, even the X-rays of our lungs, both before and after treatment, and later I would learn, character references from my parents’ friends, employers and pastor, my parents’ pay stubs, bank statements, tax returns, a summary version of who they had to be in order to be allowed to live in the same country as all their children.
“Ta maman, ton papa te manquent?” Do you miss your mother and father? The man leaned across the desk to ask me, then my brother.
Hanging on the wall behind him was a large American flag, the stars literally bursting from the corner square, their spiky edges merging into the wall. Sensing that it was the right thing to do, we both nodded, as if bowing to the flag that our grandfather had once fought against, that our mother and father had now embraced for nearly ten years, that we were about to make our own. As my head bobbed up and down, I felt my old life quickly slipping away. I was surrendering myself, not just to a country and a flag, but to a family I’d never really been part of.
“I’m going to make you very happy.” The man picked up a stamp and dangled it in the air in front of us before lowering it on the top sheet in each of our files.
“You’re both approved,” he said in what must have been official singsong. “You’re now free to be with your parents. For better or for worse.”
Pour le meilleur et pour le pire, he’d said. Why? I wondered if he knew something we didn’t. Besides, what could be worse than waiting most of our lives to spend five minutes with a person who would say something like that?
That evening, we returned to the call center to share the news with my parents.
My uncle furiously scribbled things down, detailing tasks that needed to be performed before we could leave.
“We have to buy the plane tickets,” I said, deciphering his words.
“Tell your uncle to buy them. I’ll send him the money.” My father spoke louder than he needed to, his voice energetic, animated.
“Are you happy?” my father asked me toward the end of the conversation.
I pretended not to hear.
“Here’s Bob,” I said.
My brother too came to life on the phone with my parents. The three of them were already chatting like old friends, plotting all the things they were going to do.
“Edwidge has promised a bunch of gifts, something for everyone,” he tattled.
I reached over and pinched him on the back of the hand that was holding the phone. My uncle slapped my hand away, all the while shooting me a reprimanding glare. Even though we had been expecting it, how could I tell him that I didn’t want to leave him? What difference could it make? For better or for worse, I had to go. These were my parents, my real parents, and they wanted me to come and live with them.
Later that week, Tante Denise took me to a pricey shop on Grand Rue to buy me a new dress. I picked one I thought rather fancy. It was bright yellow with a satin camisole and a flounced skirt. Bob’s light blue suit was made by my uncle’s tailor, whom he’d engaged since he’d stopped taking work to Monsieur Pradel.
On our departure day, we were overfed before being taken to the airport. Tante Denise cooked a large pot of cornmeal and herring and blended beet juice with condensed milk for us to wash it down.
When Nick, sobbing in his cornmeal, asked, “Why do I have to go back to school after my lunch? Why can’t I go with them?” Tante Denise wrapped her arms around Bob’s and my necks, kissed our cheeks from behind our chairs and ran into her room. Liline’s father, Tante Denise’s brother Linoir, who’d spent three years working as a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic, had recently come home to die. That grief compounded by our leaving was too much for her to bear.
Liline, however, was taking things a lot better. She barely knew her father and was terrified of the sunken eyes, dried-up skin, and convulsions through which his cholera was manifesting itself. Just as Tante Denise locked her bedroom door, Liline had blocked the door to her heart. She went to see her father only once and swore she would never see him again. And as Bob and I left the house, even though I’d left my treasured copy of Madeleine tucked under her pillow, which I knew she had seen that morning while making her bed, she simply told us “Na wè,” See you later, while never looking up from her plate.
At the airport, Bob and I tried to keep up with my uncle as he hurried to one of the long lines winding their way to the counters. My uncle was holding our single small suitcase in one hand and a mustard-colored envelope filled with our papers in the other.
Waiting on the line, my uncle began sweating and kept wiping his face until his blue monogrammed handkerchief was soaked. Was he sad? Angry? Nervous? For himself? For us?
Over the years, in my travels, I have spoken to three middle-aged Haitian flight attendants who claimed they were the ones who met my brother and me at the airline counter, took our hands and led us away from my uncle, guiding us to our seats on the airplane.
“You didn’t cry at all,” one of them said. “You both simply gave your uncle a kiss on the cheek and walked away.”
“You didn’t make any noise about it,” another one said, “but the front of your dress was wet from your tears.”
“You both refused to move. Your uncle had to order you to come with me and he got really mad and yelled,” the last one said, not knowing that by then my uncle could not yell.
Their faulty recollections have wiped out whatever certainty I’ve had, if ever, about that day. At different stages my brother and I were probably all of those children—the ones who didn’t cry, the ones who quietly sobbed and the ones who refused to leave.
&
nbsp; Over the years, I have also met other passengers who believed they saw my brother and me, him in his pale blue suit, me in my lemon-colored dress, tightly gripping each other’s hands and pushing our heads back into the seats as the plane took off.
I only remember wishing as we soared into the clouds that my uncle had cried a torrent of tears, had thrown himself on the ground and made a scene, all the while forbidding us to go. He should have blurted out, in his old voice, the sudden revelation that I was really his daughter and that he couldn’t live without me.
Sitting in a middle seat next to my brother, who had insisted on the window I had really wanted, I had looked out at the white clouds only once when suddenly it occurred to me that since my uncle couldn’t speak on the phone and probably wouldn’t write letters to us children, we would likely never be in touch again.
This realization was distressing enough to make me want to close my eyes forever. I encouraged my brother to do the same. In the process we fell asleep, waking up only when one of the flight attendants nudged us to rouse for supper.
By then it was too dark out to see the clouds again. Bob marveled at the fact that it didn’t seem as though we were moving. Though we’d eaten what was probably the biggest lunch of our lives, we still cleaned up our tray of plane food, relishing the novelty of the tiny plastic plates on which the Haitian-style rice and beans and American-style grilled chicken breasts were served. After having spread one of his small butter squares on his roll, Bob placed the other one in his pocket, where it melted before landing.
We heard our parents before we saw them. Walking on either side of the stewardess who’d taken us from my uncle at the airport in Port-au-Prince, my brother and I made out our names above the din of the people lunging forward, flashing pictures, waving flowers and stuffed animals in the arrival lounge. Our parents’ voices, my father’s firm and resolute, my mother’s brassy and booming, were coming from behind us.
The stewardess loosened her grip on our hands but didn’t completely let go as we turned around to find them.
“Are these your parents?” she asked as they approached, my mother sweeping the crowd aside and my father following more leisurely behind her, apologizing to the shoving victims in her wake.
When she reached us, my mother grabbed us both and pressed us against her chest. I inhaled deeply, taking in her mixed scent of coconut hair pomade and baby powder that formed uneven white lines all around her neck.
My father took care of the logistics, signing a form that the stewardess had until then kept folded in her pocket.
“Bonne chance. Good luck,” she said before walking away.
My father bent down for us to kiss him. His beard, thicker and bristlier now, prickled my lips and nose. Still, I followed my brother’s lead and wrapped my arms around his neck as I kissed him.
“Where are Kelly and Karl?” asked my brother, already displaying the male sibling solidarity I would later come to suspect all my brothers of. A friend from their building was looking after the boys, my mother said. We’d see them when we got home.
In the airport parking lot, I shivered. Even though it was spring—a concept I’d have to grow accustomed to now, the actual manifestation of seasons—there was a biting chill in the air. Later I’d learn that my father had lost a job that day. He’d asked his boss at the New Jersey handbag factory where he was working if he could leave early to pick us up and the boss had said no. My father had left anyway and on his way out was told he was fired. During the drive to the airport, he decided he would never work for anybody again.
While loading our suitcase into the back of an old beaten-up gray station wagon, my father asked, “How’s Uncle?”
“Uncle seemed sad,” Bob answered for me. “I think he was sad to see us leave.”
“I suppose that’s how it is sometimes,” my father said in a whisper of a voice. “One papa happy, one papa sad.”
Gypsy
Our new home was a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of a six-story brick building in a cul-de-sac off Flatbush Avenue called Westbury Court. Beneath the building ran a subway station through which rattled the D, M and Q trains at all hours, day and night.
At first sight, my parents’ living room seemed lavish and plush with its beige wall-to-wall carpeting, its velour-upholstered sofas and chairs, covered in plastic for their protection, and the diagonal mirror cutouts framing a giant velvet print of the Last Supper. I mistook their fire escape, which extended from my parents’ bedroom window to the living room’s, for an outdoor terrace and immediately began to imagine all of us spending summer evenings out there, looking over the neighborhood while sipping American colas and telling each other stories.
“Don’t, and I mean don’t, ever go out there!” was the first thing my father said to Bob and me after he’d shown us the living room. “Kelly and Karl already know this. It’s where the firemen come if there’s a fire and they need to save your lives.”
He was speaking as though he was already saving our lives by giving us that most helpful order. I pressed my fingers against the accordion bars on the windows, watching my dreams of spending evenings floating above Brooklyn evaporate.
My brothers, whom my mother had gone and picked up at her friend’s down the hall, bounced into the room, eager to see us. They were, of course, bigger: Kelly a gangling seven-year-old and Karl a much stouter five.
Karl immediately ran up to me, nearly knocking me off my feet as he wrapped his arms around my hips and squeezed as hard as he could. Looking up, with a broad, crooked smile, he asked, “Are you really my sister?”
I wasn’t used to hugs. It wasn’t really part of my daily interactions even with the people I loved most, but I let my hands fall on his shoulders and stroked his back. Looking down at him, I wondered if my mother had told him about the time we’d first met, he a baby in my arms. Or did he instinctively know that we were supposed to love one another?
My parents were looking on, both with big grins on their contented faces. They were perhaps moved, amused, pleased that Karl had what could only be called a deep sense of thoughtfulness. Over the years, I would grow used to it. I’d even count on it. He was often the first to offer a chair to someone who was standing, start a conversation with someone who seemed shy. He was the person to call immediately when something terrible happened. But back then his attempt at a hug felt like more. It was, and still remains, the best welcome I’d ever had in my life. It felt like love.
“Of course, she’s your sister,” my mother answered when I didn’t. Her hand pressed against Kelly’s back, she was nudging him forward, toward us, but he stood in place, watching Bob. My father’s arm was resting on Bob’s shoulder and he too was trying to move him toward Kelly.
“Why don’t you show your brother one of your toys,” my father told Kelly. Kelly’s face brightened. He motioned for Bob to follow him. Bob looked up at my father for confirmation, then slowly marched behind Kelly, disappearing down the narrow hallway that led to the bedrooms.
They were barely gone a minute when my mother called them back.
“Vini, come, food.” She motioned for us all to move to the kitchen, where the stovetop was crowded with pots and pans. In a corner across from the refrigerator was a small table and four chairs. Since she and my father and the boys had already eaten, she filled two plates with food and put them down in front of Bob and me. Karl was still holding on, slipping onto my lap as I ate my rice and beans, stewed chicken, fried plantains and meatballs.
“I helped cook that,” my father said proudly. “It’s your welcome repas.”
Kelly was watching us with his chin pressed down on the table. Bob ate quickly and asked for more. I wanted to kick him under the table. “They’ll think you haven’t eaten since they left you,” I hissed.
“Let the boy eat,” my father said and laughed. He was leaning against the wall, watching as my mother ladled more food onto Bob’s plate. It wasn’t so much that Bob was hungry, I knew. He wanted to p
lease them. He frankly wanted them to be happy and feeding him was making them happy.
I stuffed my mouth, but didn’t swallow right away. I didn’t want them to ask me any questions. I didn’t want to have to answer anything.
Once we were done eating, Bob ran all over the apartment, with Kelly showing him where everything was. Eventually Karl slipped away and joined them. My father followed. My mother showed me where we were sleeping, in the second bedroom, the one overlooking the train tracks. Aside from the wall with a line of ribbon windows, every other wall had a bed pressed against it. I had inherited a full-size bed from my mother’s sister, Tante Grace, who had been living with my parents before we came. Kelly and Karl shared a metal bunk bed with Kelly sleeping on top and Karl at the bottom. Bob’s bed was a twin-sized cot, but had the advantage of being closest to the twelve-inch television set that stood on top of a wooden dresser.
“Do you want to go to sleep?” my mother asked.
I nodded, adding “wi.” Yes.
She had already placed a flannel nightgown on the bed for me. When I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, my brothers were there.
“I’m so glad you guys speak Creole,” Bob was saying to them. They were already a trio, a team.
My bed smelled of citronella and vetiver, of getting dressed and going out, rather than of falling asleep. (The scent, I would later learn, was of a brand of fabric softener.) Liline was probably sleeping on my mattress that night, I thought, taking a break from her own smelly one. How could this vetiver-and-citronella-scented bed, I wondered, ever really be mine?
My parents turned off the lights and left the four of us in the dark. A few minutes later, I heard their muffled laughter coming from the next room, as well as the occasional sound of our names. They were already telling each other stories about us.
“Do you see how much Bob can eat?” asked my mother.
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