“It sounds like yon robo,” he replied. A robot.
My father was trying to be more exact than heartening. My uncle was not fazed.
“To my ear,” my uncle said, “it sounds like two voices, my own voice inside my head and the one you hear. I know that voice is going to sound strange to people.” He was smiling now, showing all of his false teeth. “But it’s better than not speaking at all.”
That summer when my uncle went back to Haiti, he sold his first house, the one Bob and I and everyone else in the family had lived in with him and Tante Denise. The house was beginning to fall apart and, since everyone had left, it felt too large for just Tante Denise and him. He then built a small three-bedroom apartment for Tante Denise and himself in the courtyard behind the school and church. He also got a home telephone on which he used to call us often. Sometimes I’d call him just to say hello, which felt like a miracle unto itself.
At first I’d say, “Can you believe we’re talking to each other?” And he’d say, “Can you?” But after a few minutes, as he caught me up on things, his life, Tante Denise, political news from Haiti, his voice seemed no more unusual than mine or anyone else’s. He was expanding his work, he said, adding to the school and church in Bel Air a clinic that was run by Marie Micheline.
Marie Micheline had left her job as head nurse at the other neighborhood clinic and was now helping him with his work. They were together more than ever. She was thirty-seven years old but, from the pictures I saw of her, looked no older than she did at twenty-two. She’d had three boys after Ruth, with two men who, as my uncle put it, again had not loved her enough. I often imagined myself all grown up and my father talking about me in the same forgiving way that my uncle talked about Marie Micheline. Perhaps because he had rescued her not once, but twice, he loved her even more deeply, more unconditionally.
After he left for Cuba, Marie Micheline’s biological father had never contacted them, prompting Tante Denise to call her their Moses girl. She was their baby, but unlike Tante Denise, who thought Marie Micheline was spoiled, Uncle Joseph thought she could do no wrong.
“She needs to realize she’s not a girl playing with boys anymore,” Tante Denise would say even after Marie Micheline had had four children.
“She attracts bad, just like she did Pressoir,” Uncle Joseph would say, “but she’s not a bad person.”
On February 7, 1986, my uncle’s sixty-third birthday, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled Haiti for France, leaving a military junta in charge of the country. The junta, which ruled for two years, was led by an ambitious army officer, Lieutenant General Henri Namphy. A new president, Leslie Manigat, was sworn in on February 7, 1988, my uncle’s sixty-fifth birthday. Because Baby Doc’s departure had taken place on February 7, my uncle’s birthday had become the official date for Haitian presidential inaugurations and swearings in.
Four months after he was inaugurated, Leslie Manigat was ousted by Lieutenant General Namphy. Soon, Namphy was himself deposed by a military rival, General Prosper Avril. In April 1989, a group of former Tonton Macoutes and hard-line Duvalier loyalists tried to topple Avril in a failed coup, creating hostilities within the army.
The battle between the opposing military factions came to Bel Air one April afternoon when one group chased the other to Rue Tirremasse and the wrought-iron gate of the church clinic. Marie Micheline was sitting alone, behind her desk, looking through some notes she’d scribbled on the twenty or so patients she’d seen that day. They were all minor cases, for once, mostly cuts and scrapes and two infants with low-grade fevers. She’d not had to send anyone to the public hospital.
She was probably just reaching over to slip the files into a small metal cabinet beside her when she heard one gunshot followed by a volley of bullets. Looking up, she would have seen a whirl of camouflage racing past the open metal gate. At this point, she may have thought of the forty people who according to newspaper reports had died that week, caught in the crossfire of such battles all over Port-au-Prince. She may have thought of Ruth or of her three young sons, Pouchon, Marc and Ronald, who were due back from school at any time. She may have thought of Tante Denise, to whom she was to give an insulin shot in a few minutes. Of Uncle Joseph, whose blood pressure she also monitored daily at the same time.
She got up from her desk and ran to the gate, hoping to close it before one of the soldiers barged in. But what if someone needed her help? And how would she feel if Ruth, Pouchon, Marc or Ronald was shot because the gate was closed and they couldn’t come in?
Neighbors saw her standing in the doorway with beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. Then a bullet whizzed by, bouncing off the gate with a spark.
The street was suddenly blurry, a cloud of dust descending in the wake of speeding military pickups. Had she been shot? In the heart? She clutched her chest and fell to the floor. She never regained consciousness.
Because Ron Howell, a New York journalist, happened to be covering the military shoot-out in Bel Air that afternoon, Marie Micheline’s death was the subject of a Newsday article published on April 17, 1989. Headlined HAITI STILL STRUGGLING TO SHINE, it was printed next to a color photograph of her funeral procession slowly winding through downtown Port-au-Prince.
Marie Micheline, wrote Howell, was in many ways “a reflection of Haiti and its potential, a flicker of light frustrated in its attempt to shine.”
When you hear that someone has died whom you’ve not seen in a long time, it’s not too difficult to pretend that it hasn’t really happened, that the person is continuing to live just as she has before, in your absence, out of your sight. The day of Marie Micheline’s funeral, when I spoke to my uncle on the phone, I experienced the biggest failing of his new voice. Like distance, it masked pain. Still, his pauses were like sobs, the expansion or contraction of his words mechanical traces of sorrow.
That night I told my uncle a story that I’d just remembered myself. Of being eight years old and carrying a note home from school requesting that my parent or guardian come to my class to spank me, because I hadn’t finished all my homework. That afternoon when I got home, I’d given Marie Micheline the note, thinking that she’d go a lot easier on me than either my uncle or Tante Denise. However, the next morning when she went to the school, Marie Micheline took Mademoiselle Sanon, my very tall, slim and prim teacher, aside, and under an almond tree in a corner of the bustling recess yard, whispered in her ear for five minutes.
“What did you tell her?” I asked Marie Micheline as she walked me back to class with a broad smile on her face.
I gripped her soft, small hands, unable to imagine them pounding me with the stiff cow leather whip, the rigwaz, with which parents and teachers often thrashed their children’s behinds or palms.
“I’m going to take care of her and her entire family at the neighborhood clinic for a year,” she said. “They’ll never have to wait and they’ll never have to pay. For that, she won’t send anyone in your class home with spanking letters for a month.”
“Just a month?” I asked.
“That’s the best I could do,” she said.
“Her own children,” my uncle said at the end of my story. “How can four children lose their mother in an instant like that?”
Fearful of losing them too, he was going to try and get a visa for Ruth and the boys to join some of Marie Micheline’s biological mother’s relatives who were now living in Canada.
Before she was buried, a coroner had determined that Marie Micheline died from a heart attack. But when I spoke to Tante Denise, who cried as though she were hollering to the heavens in protest, she said that no one could convince her of a simpler truth: that watching the bullets fly, the violence of her neighborhood, the rapid unraveling of her country, Marie Micheline had been frightened to death.
The Angel of Death and Father God
In 1990, General Prosper Avril resigned, making room for the December 1990 elections, in which a young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had de
veloped a massive following through his bold sermons against the Duvaliers, won 67 percent of the vote. Aristide was sworn in on February 7, 1991, my uncle’s sixty-eighth birthday.
I remember talking to my uncle that night. After accepting my birthday wishes, he moved on to Aristide, saying that in the young priest he saw flickers of his onetime hero, Daniel Fignolé. Aristide’s firebrand speeches and his political party, the Lavalas or Flood Party, echoed what Fignolé used to call his woulo kompresè, or steamroller, his throng of rabidly loyal supporters, to which my uncle had belonged.
Like most people, my uncle had voted for Aristide.
“He’s certainly the best man,” he’d said. “But in my old age, I’m no longer interested in best men. I’m interested in the people around me and what he can do for them.”
But only seven months later, on September 30, 1991, Aristide was ousted by a military coup. Aristide fled to Venezuela, then Washington, where he stayed for three years. Still, like most of the population, which had eagerly elected him, Bel Air residents remained steadfast in calling for his return through protests and demonstrations. In retaliation, the army raided and torched houses and killed hundreds of my uncle’s neighbors.
My uncle managed to stay out of harm’s way by avoiding the demonstrations and all other overtly political activity, including speaking out against the military from the pulpit of his church. Still, every morning he got up to count the many bloody corpses that dotted the street corners and alleys of Bel Air. During the years when he couldn’t speak, he had developed a habit of jotting things down, so he kept track of the cadavers in the small notepads he always carried in his jacket pocket. In his notebooks, he wrote the names of the victims, when he knew them, the condition of their bodies and the times they were picked up, either by family members or by the sanitation service, to be transported to the morgue or dumped in mass graves.
Jonas, pt. 20 ans, main droite absente, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, pt. 35 ans, nue, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 ans, chany, 5:42 p.m.
Male inconnu, pt. 25 ans, visage mutilée, 9:17 p.m.
Jonas, maybe 20 years old, missing right hand, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, maybe 35 years old, naked, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 years old, shoeshine man, 5:42 p.m.
Unknown male, 25 years old, face mutilated, 9:17 p.m.
Over the first weeks of the coup, my father called nearly every day, begging my uncle and Tante Denise to leave Bel Air. They’d go to Léogâne for a few days to visit with Tante Denise’s sister, Léone, but would always return in time for Sunday services.
Anxious, my father became angry, shouting at the end of their conversations, “You’re responsible. Whatever happens to you there, you’re responsible if you don’t leave.”
I’m not sure why my uncle and Tante Denise never left for good. Maybe it’s as simple as not wanting to be driven out of their home.
After Marie Micheline died, I asked my uncle why they, and in turn Marie Micheline, hadn’t tried to move to New York like my parents did.
“It’s not easy to start over in a new place,” he said. “Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
Plus he had more work to do, more souls to save, more children to teach.
In the fall of 1994, Aristide returned to Haiti, accompanied by twenty thousand U.S. soldiers. Citing the brutality of the military regime and the menace of a mass exodus of Haitian refugees to nearby Florida, then president Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy.
The day Aristide returned, Tante Denise suffered a mild stroke. After more than two decades away, my cousin Maxo returned to Bel Air. That fall, I too went back to Haiti for the first time, at twenty-five years old.
On the ride to Bel Air, I looked through the cracked windshield of a hired car and saw more people on the now rutted streets than I ever remembered. On nearly every wall was a mural of a rooster, the symbol of Aristide’s Lavalas Party, or of the American military helicopter on which Aristide had flown back to the national palace. There were also monuments to losses everywhere: the charred shantytowns of La Saline and Cité Soleil, the busts and friezes of the murdered: a justice minister, a campaign financier and a beloved priest among thousands of others. Piles of brick and ashes stood where homes and offices had been, places that had been both constructed and destroyed in the time I’d been gone. Chunks of Port-au-Prince, I realized, had been wholly assembled and disassembled in my absence.
In many other ways, however, very little had changed. The crippled beggars were still lined up on the steps of the national cathedral and the used-booksellers’ scattered stands across from it. The water women still carried water by the bucket on their heads. The colorfully painted lottery stands were still selling hundreds of tickets to hopeful dreamers. The visa applicants still gathered in droves at the gates of the American consulate.
My uncle’s street was now crammed with oddly shaped unfinished concrete homes. The alleys were gutted and filled with trash. Yet, when he showed me his list of casualties, written in handwriting so tiny he had to help me decipher them, all I could see was Jonas, Gladys, Samuel and the hundreds of men and women who’d died, their mutilated bodies eternally rotting under the boiling sun.
Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s apartment was painted pink like the old house, except the dining room overlooking the tiny courtyard, which was a bright turquoise. Tante Denise was considerably thinner, her movements measured and slow. Her hair, which she’d begun and then stopped dyeing was bright red at the tips and gray at the roots. She touched it self-consciously when she saw me.
“I don’t have my wig.” She winced and pushed her head forward even as I moved closer.
She was sitting on a cot in the living room, where she took her naps and sometimes also spent the night. Her swollen legs were propped on a low stool and an open-toed sandal dangled from them. A pedestal fan was spinning in a semicircle in a corner by the window and occasionally blew a stream of warm air into her face. She was wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, which I was told she wore most of the time. She smelled of castor oil and camphor just as her Granmè Melina had. Her glamour, her elegant dresses, her pretty face, her wigs, her gloves now seemed very far in the past. She, like those buildings, had been disassembled while I was gone. She didn’t recognize me at first.
“It’s Edwidge,” I said, feeling like a stranger now not just to her but to Bel Air and to Haiti itself.
“Mira’s daughter, Edwidge?” she said. Her lower lip was drooping, slightly slurring her speech.
Grabbing my hand with more strength than I expected, she pulled me down on her lap as if I were still a child.
“Edwidge, let me tell you a story,” she said, pressing her elbows hard into my ribs.
The story she told, slowly, haltingly, with her arms braced tightly around my body, was about God and the Angel of Death. It was one of Granmè Melina’s stories, one that Granmè Melina said you told to keep death away. In the end, Granmè Melina stopped telling that story because she had wanted to die.
“One day,” began Tante Denise. A line of drool trickled from one side of her mouth, which I kept dabbing with a towel that draped the back of her chair.
“Father God and the Angel of Death were strolling together in a neighborhood like Bel Air, in a very crowded city like Port-au-Prince,” she continued.
During their walk, the Angel of Death would stop in front of many houses and say, “A man died here last month. I took him.” Then as they continued down the street, the Angel of Death added, “I removed a grandmother from this house yesterday.”
“I make people and you take them,” said Father God. “That’s why they like me more than they like you.”
“You think so?” asked the Angel of Death.
“I certainly do,” said Father God.
“If you’re so sure,” said the Angel of Death, “why don’t we both stop here on Rue Tir
remasse and each ask the same woman for a drink of water and see what happens?”
So Father God rapped on the nearest door and when the lady of the house opened it said, “Madame, can I trouble you for some water?”
“Non,” the woman answered, irate. “I don’t have any water to spare.”
“Please,” said Father God. “I’m parched.”
“Sorry,” said the woman, “but I can’t spare any water. The public tap has been dry for days and I have to buy water by the bucket from the water woman, who’s doubled the price. So I only have enough water for myself and my family.”
“I’m sure you’d give me some water if you knew who I was,” said Father God.
“I don’t care who you are,” said the woman. “The only one I’d give my water to right now is the Angel of Death.”
“But I’m God,” insisted Father God. “Why would you give your water to the Angel of Death and not to me?”
“Because,” the woman said, “the Angel of Death doesn’t play favorites. He takes us all, lame and stout, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. You, however, give some people peace and put some of us in war zones like Bel Air. You give some enough food to stuff themselves, while others starve. You make some powerful and others defenseless. You make some healthy and let some get sick. You give some all the water they need while some of us have very little.”
Bowing his head in shame, Father God walked away from the woman, who, when the Angel of Death came to her door, gave him all the water she had in the house.
“And because of this,” Tante Denise concluded, unaware, it seemed, of even my body, as heavy and limp now as hers, on her lap, “the Angel of Death did not visit this particular woman again for a very long time.”
You’re Not a Policeman
Tante Denise died from a massive stroke the day after my uncle’s eightieth birthday, in February 2003. She was eighty-one years old. My father and I flew to Haiti together for the funeral.
Brother, I'm Dying Page 11