During that time, while listening to a New York– based Haitian radio program with my mother one night, I heard the story of a young woman who got on a boat with her newborn baby in her arms. The baby died during the trip, and when the young woman was told by the others on the boat to throw the baby’s body into the sea, she did, then she jumped into the sea soon after that. In my version of the story, the child is born on the boat and then dies. One of the story’s two narrators recounts what happens next.
She threw it overboard. I watched her face knot up like a thread, and then she let go. It fell in a splash, floated for a while, and then sank. And quickly after that she jumped in too. And just as the baby’s head sank, so did hers. They went together like two bottles beneath a waterfall.
This story was written in epistolary form, as a series of letters being exchanged between lovers, one of them—the one narrating above—writing from a sinking vessel, so the quick and detail-less descriptions seemed appropriate. Though he does not initially want to reveal this in his letters, this man is writing what could possibly be his final words. He cannot afford to be pensive and detailed-oriented. He has time only for the essentials.
Looking back now, I realize that I preferred to tackle suicide from a distance. I felt it was more believable that way.
When I was writing those stories, I did not yet know anyone who had committed suicide. I would later spend two weeks teaching in the same spring workshop as a beautiful and gifted poet who would end up killing herself and her two-year-old son a few weeks after the seminar ended. Her father had committed suicide when she was a child and she’d never believed he was gone for good. When she was a little girl, she thought suicide was an illness and that her father was in a foreign country being treated for it. She expected him to come back one day. She also said that the only place she felt she truly belonged was in books.
Our two meetings had been five years apart, the first on a panel at my college alma matter and the second at the workshop. I didn’t know her very well, but I enjoyed her poems, many of which addressed similar themes to those in my work: migration, dislocation, and sometimes death.
We were barely able to speak to each other the first time we met—there were four of us on the panel—but at the workshop we spent more time together, at meals and receptions and parties. I had recently gotten married and my husband and I were thinking about having children. The poet and I shared a few conversations about balancing children and writing. Her son was brilliant and beautiful. He drew pictures that seemed more vivid and recognizable than those the average toddler might draw. If you asked him, he’d tell you what type of art and music he liked. He knew the names of some famous musicians and painters.
“It’s not easy,” I remember her saying about child rearing and writing, but she did not make it sound impossible.
After she killed her son and then herself, I kept wondering if she’d been trying to confide in me about what she was going to do, by saying that being a woman writer with a small child was not easy. She might as well have been quoting from Anne Sexton’s poem “The Black Art”:
A woman who writes feels too much,
Those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough …
Because her life had been cut short, our brief encounters expanded in my mind. Still, I tried to be careful when speaking about her to the other people who’d spent those weeks with us. They all knew her better than I did. Some were sad. Some were angry.
When a reporter who was writing a long article about the murder-suicide called to interview me, I managed to talk only about her brilliant and beautiful boy and how he had always seemed so happy. We all, students and faculty alike, always wanted to hug him. “Everyone was always reaching for him,” I told the reporter, even as I replayed the poet’s words in my mind: It’s not easy. It’s not easy.
Before it was disconnected, I called the cell phone number she’d given me, yearning to hear her voice. Then I worried that whoever ended up in charge of her phone might wonder why I was stalking a dead woman. Rereading her work after she died, I felt as though every one of her poems needed to be read with her final actions in mind. Wasn’t each word an essential clue to solving the mystery of how both she and her son had ended up dead?
It might not have made a difference, but I now wish I’d had this verse from Nikki Giovanni’s “Poets” to share with her:
Poets shouldn’t commit
Suicide
That would leave the world
To those without imaginations
Or hearts
The message on her answering machine had been recorded in a soft voice. Still, there was a lilt to that voice. She said her name, then added, “Please leave a message,” or something to that effect. Reading her poems at the workshop’s closing evening, she’d mimicked many accents. She did accents well. She had a beautiful voice. I longed to hear that voice. I wanted the news of her death and of her son’s death to not be true.
One of the things the students in her workshop liked to say about her was that she encouraged them to write freely. “Don’t worry about it too much,” she told them. “Just write.” In my mind I would keep hearing those words in her voice, with her particular lilt and accent: It’s not easy. Just write.
Another summer, ten years later, an old friend of my husband’s (and a newer friend of mine) shot herself on a Florida beach near her home. Though she’d been open about her struggles with depression, our friend seemed to have conquered the ghosts that haunted her, including a brutal childhood in which she’d been abused by people who should have loved and protected her, people from whom she eventually distanced herself by shedding her birth name. A Texan, she gave herself a new name that made her sound like an heir to the British throne.
Our friend was a photojournalist who’d seen, and had perhaps sought out, all types of horrors but also moments of extreme beauty during the time she’d spent visiting or living in over thirty countries. Her photographs were published in national newspapers and magazines. She loved music and art and was a mentor to many young people who wanted to be artists. Every year on Memorial Day, she hosted a party at her house that people traveled to from miles away. She was forty-seven years old when she died.
Some of her friends wondered how they could so easily have missed the pain behind her constant and vibrant smile, the agony behind her seemingly sparkling eyes. Was she good at hiding or were we terrible at seeing? I imagine her, a fervent and passionate lover of poetry, possibly quoting this brief but resolute poem, “Suicide’s Note” by Langston Hughes, as a kind of explanation:
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
Or, in her case, the calm, cool face of the gun barrel demanded a kiss. And there’s no way any of us could have gotten between her and that kiss. Some of her friends said they wished they’d been on the beach that day. They believed they could have stopped her. But we couldn’t have been with her every second of every day, standing between her and the lure of that final kiss. We would never be as close to her as the edge of that gun barrel. She’d always be distant, far away, beyond our reach.
I’m not being evasive here by not mentioning names. Theirs are not fully my stories to tell. There’s also no way for me to say any more about them without claiming false intimacy or without embellishment, without turning them into fiction.
Linda Gray Sexton—the daughter of the poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her car at age forty-six—has written about her mother’s suicide and her own suicide attempts. One of her memoirs, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, began as a letter to her mother, “a personal message of mourning and celebration that meditated on our complicated life together,” a life that included periods of abandonment, physical abuse, sexual impropriety—Gray Sexton writes that her mother would masturbate while pressed against her body in be
d—as well as the ups and downs of living with and loving someone who is suffering from severe depression, which Gray Sexton also battled after her mother’s death.
When readers asked if writing the memoir had been cathartic for her, Gray Sexton said no. “The catharsis had happened before I wrote the book, in my analyst’s office. Writing it had been more like testifying, to myself as well as others, that such things had happened to me.”
In her follow-up memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, Gray Sexton broaches the subject again.
Like so many other suicides, my mother left no note of explanation as to why she poisoned herself with carbon monoxide, and like so many of the family members of successful suicides, I wanted to know, fervently, why she had done it—even though her life had been pockmarked with the attempts necessary for a final successful production, even though her trademark poetry demonstrated time and again, in one metaphor after another, the pain that drove her toward death.
One trademark poem, “Wanting to Die,” was written in February 1964, when Gray Sexton was eleven years old. As if anticipating her daughter’s later quest for impossible answers, Anne Sexton writes:
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
In a letter to her friend Anne Clark, in which she discusses “Wanting to Die,” Anne Sexton explained that she was trying to explore, among other things, “the sex of death” in that poem.
When (to me) death takes you and puts you thru [sic] the wringer, it’s a man. But when you kill yourself it’s a woman. And it goes on from there to this discovery that 1. I don’t think the dead are dead 2. that I certainly don’t think I’ll die even tho [sic] I’m dead 3. that suicides go to a special place … asleep for instance. 4. that suicide is a form of masturbation!!!
Having met at a graduate writing workshop early in their careers, Anne Sexton and the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath were acquaintances, or at least drinking buddies. (They would go drinking after their writing seminar to keep the discussions going.) After Plath committed suicide by gassing herself in her oven with two small children nearby, Sexton wrote an elegiac poem for her.
“I think I have finished the poem for Sylvia Plath and I think it is pretty good,” she wrote to the poet Robert Lowell in June 1963. “I tried to make it sound like her but, as usual, this attempt was not fruitful; the spirit of imitation did not last and now it sounds, as usual, like Sexton.”
When Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist and Sylvia Plath’s second child, hanged himself in March 2009 at forty-seven years old, Gray Sexton penned an editorial for the New York Times called “A Tortured Inheritance.”
“Did it surprise me to read about his suicide?” she writes. “Not in the least.… Nicholas Hughes’s mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe.”
Both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath saw dying as part of their oeuvre.
In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath writes,
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
In “Sylvia’s Death,” the poem Sexton wrote for Plath, Sexton refers to suicide, a common obsession that haunted them both, as their “boy.” Sexton writes,
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long …
In spite of her inclination toward suicide, Anne Sexton seemed to disapprove of euthanasia and other types of killing. “I do think that killing people for any reason is perfectly terrible,” she wrote to Anne Clarke. “I don’t care what they did, even Hitler for instance. And I think that being killed is perfectly terrible, even dying softly in your sleep.”
While on an airplane on her way to a reading, five years before she died, Anne Sexton penned a letter to her daughter that read like yet another suicide note.
“This is my message to the 40-year-old Linda. … Life is not easy. … Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart—I’m in both: if you need me.”
Gray Sexton would of course need more than her mother’s poems. Though the poet remained alive through her poems, the mother was gone. Reflecting on her mother’s letter when she is actually forty years old, Gray Sexton writes, “Mother may always talk to me from that airplane high in the sky, but finally I am able to answer her. … I cast my feelings into ‘Language’—the shared medium in which Mother and I reveled—to find freedom.”
Even though Anne Sexton is dead, both she and her daughter continue to do language and that, in the end, may be the measure of both their lives.
Condemned to Die
“The contrary of suicide,” Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “in fact, is the man condemned to death.”
Camus and Tolstoy felt similarly about capital punishment. In “I Cannot Be Silent,” Tolstoy’s response to the 1908 hanging of twenty peasants who’d revolted against their landlords, he wrote, “They arrange to do these things secretly, at daybreak, so that no one should see them done, and they arrange that the responsibility for these iniquities shall be so subdivided among those who commit them that each may think and say it is not he who is responsible for them.”
My novel-in-stories, The Dew Breaker, is about a torturer and executioner during Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship. From the late 1950s to the 1980s, soldiers and paramilitary men and women, called choukèt laroze (“dew breakers”), would routinely take people to some of the country’s worst prisons and torture chambers, often coming for them late at night or at dawn. Growing up in Haiti, I knew many of them as well as their victims. Some were our acquaintances and neighbors.
I wrote this book to explore what it was like to both live in a dew breaker’s skin and be one of his victims. What made these dew breakers think they had the power to condemn people to death, anyway? I wondered. If these executioners did not bring these people into this world, as my mother used to say, what made them think they could take them out of it?
When I was younger, I was a bit confused about the “bringing people into the world” part of the equation. Did this mean that an exception could be made for our parents, that they might possibly have license to kill us? Might there be a few extraordinary circumstances in which the person who’d given birth to us could also be the one to end our lives? What if your judge and executioner also happened to be your parent? This is contrary to the notion of birth itself, which brings to mind hope and a future. Our children, the cliché goes, are our future. The contrary of a future seems to be a child who is condemned to die.
“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession,” the journalist and memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, his 2015 National Book Award–winning letter to his teenage son, Samori. The book poetically and powerfully describes Coates’s upbringing and his intellectual coming-of-age as well as America’s painful history of racism and white supremacy and the way all this manifests itself in the present.
“You are all we have and you come to us endangered,” Coates writes to his son. “I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made.”
“That is a philosophy of the disembodied,” Coates admits, “of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.”
During slavery, slave patrols were the police, and the law itself was deadly for people like Coates’s ancestors and mine, who were considered property. One of the most powerful scenes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the infanticide scene, in which Sethe, a former slave, kills her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. The novel circles around and hinges on one particular moment when Sethe’s daughter, a toddler, becomes the gho
st who haunts the book.
Sethe’s story is based on that of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who ran away from a plantation in Kentucky and who, after slave catchers tried to take her and her family back, slit the throat of her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife. Margaret Garner would probably have killed herself too, had she not been stopped.
In the corresponding scene in Beloved, four white men, like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, come for Sethe and her family. The small posse consists of Schoolteacher, a sadistic slave owner, his nephew, a slave catcher, and a sheriff. The scene is written from the point of view of Schoolteacher, who runs the plantation from which Sethe has fled. A merciless and brutal man, Schoolteacher encourages his nephews to explore Sethe’s “animal characteristics” by drinking her milk while she’s lactating, milk that is intended for Sethe’s baby daughter.
The infanticide scene opens broadly with the arrival of the four white men on Bluestone Road, where Sethe is now living. Based on his past experience, Schoolteacher speculates on what might happen next. Many fugitives make a run for it, he thinks, so he and his party must be careful. “Otherwise you ended up killing what you were paid to bring back alive.”
When Schoolteacher reaches the shed where Sethe is hiding with her children, he and the others find a bloody scene that Morrison describes rather sparingly. That scene has some of the most deliberately unadorned language in an otherwise densely lyrical novel. The moment is both horrible and powerful enough, Morrison seems to be indicating, that there’s no need to sensationalize it further.