Page 12 of Brother, I'm Dying


  This was my father’s third trip to Haiti in the thirty-two years since he’d first left and my twentieth-fifth in nearly a decade. After that first trip in 1994, I returned often, not always to the capital but also to other parts of the country, to help teach a beachside summer abroad course for American college students. I also traveled with documentary filmmakers, went to interview artists for art catalogs, attended academic conferences and even went back for several weeks to write a short book on carnival in a southern city, Jacmel.

  During those trips, when my workload and logistics didn’t allow me to make it to Bel Air, my uncle came to see me, in hotel rooms, conference halls, libraries and university classrooms. I felt guilty, however, when I didn’t make it to the apartment in Bel Air because it was the only way I would get to see Tante Denise, who no longer ventured outside because she was not steady on her feet.

  Whenever I could, though, I would add a few extra days to my trips for a stay in Bel Air. During those visits, my uncle liked for me to attend Sunday services at his church, where he would introduce me to his congregation, which over the years had more or less capped at about seventy-five people, most of them middle-aged or older.

  During those Sunday-morning services, I would stand awkwardly in front of this group, filled with faces I barely recognized and who, without my uncle’s introduction, would not have known me at all, and I would tell them how happy I was to see them. After I returned to my seat, my uncle would share a bit of my family history, how my father and mother had met, how they’d left me and my brother Bob with him when they’d gone lòt bò dlo, to the other side of the waters.

  “We’re here for a funeral,” my father told the immigration officer who silently examined our American passports at Toussaint Louverture Airport. My father and I had both become naturalized U.S. citizens exactly ten years after we’d received our green cards and we both felt a bit traitorous as the officer hastily scribbled his signature on our foreigners’ designated customs forms.

  Pushing our luggage cart out into the sunlight, my father seemed to shrink a bit, the way he always did in unfamiliar surroundings. In the parking lot outside the airport, Uncle Joseph walked toward us and grabbed his hand, pumping it a few times before letting go. At eighty, Uncle Joseph looked a lot younger than my father. Unlike Papa, he was neither balding nor graying, and he was robust-looking and muscular as a result of a lifelong habit of walking pretty much everywhere. Soon, my aunt Zi parted a crowd of greeters, screaming my father’s name. Tante Zi and Uncle Joseph had the same deep dark skin, the same pronounced, calabash-shaped forehead. Shorter than my father by at least a foot, Tante Zi grabbed him by the shoulder, kissed him all over his face, then tried to lift him off the ground. When she couldn’t raise him, she turned my way and, while nearly toppling me over, buried her face in my neck the way she used to when I was a girl.

  Reaching into his shirt pocket, my uncle pulled out his voice box and said, as if we were learning this for the first time, “Mira, Edwidge, you heard? Madam mwen mouri.” My wife is dead.

  During the ride into Bel Air, we were stopped at a roadblock by two policemen with Uzis, who scolded the taxi driver for having an outdated driver’s license but released him for a bribe of twenty Haitian dollars, which the cabdriver told us, rather forcefully, would have to be added to the fare. My uncle and Tante Zi said they wouldn’t pay the bribe, but before the driver could ask us to step out, my father agreed. The ride was already costing us so little, my father said. The policeman probably would not have stopped the driver had he not noticed that he was carrying people from abroad.

  I have rarely had these types of encounters outside of Bel Air, outside of Port-au-Prince, I told my father.

  Nowhere are these types of things more likely to happen than in Bel Air, Tante Zi echoed.

  “My wife just died,” Uncle Joseph told the driver when he dropped us off in front of his church. My uncle wanted the policeman’s voluntary consideration, the driver’s sympathy. He wanted to believe that his loss could change the way others acted toward him.

  “My condolences,” replied the driver as he accepted double the fare plus the bribe money.

  My father was rarely on the other end of this type of exchange. He was usually the driver, not the one being driven. It occurred to me that perhaps he felt he had to make up with this one man for some of the wrongs that had been done to him at the wheel of his cab.

  My father was staying with my uncle in his room, sleeping on a cot near the wide platform bed that my uncle and Tante Denise had often shared. I would sleep in a room off the kitchen, not far from theirs.

  Soon after we arrived, my father accompanied my uncle to the cemetery to have the family mausoleum cleaned, to the florist to order the wreaths, to the photocopier to have the funeral programs printed. And of course I followed them both everywhere. My father was just beginning to show signs of shortness of breath, which we took to be an allergic reaction to the dust in Port-au-Prince, panting every now and then as we zigzagged through the sweltering, jam-packed streets. But as each errand brought my uncle closer to his final farewell to his wife, it was he who often stopped to rest. Finding a lamppost on the occasional street corner, he would wrap his arms around it and weep.

  Tante Denise had died the week before Haiti’s national carnival would begin. On the eve of carnival celebrations, her neighborhood, her city, was loud and boisterous, with carnival tunes blaring from nearly every other house but hers. We were still two days from Tante Denise’s funeral when, wanting a bit of peace and quiet, my father decided to accompany Tante Zi’s son, my cousin Richard, the director of the funeral cooperative in charge of Tante Denise’s burial, to another funeral in Grand-Goâve, a small town south of Port-au-Prince. I offered to go with them.

  I didn’t realize how complicated the Grand-Goâve burial would be until we went to pick up the coffin. After parking the car on a pebbly and hilly street and walking down a damp, slippery alley, then climbing a wobbly ladder up to a second-story workshop, we found the coffin maker putting the last touches on a cedar casket, stapling a piece of white cloth to the inner lining and adding a velvet-draped sponge to serve as a pillow. As soon as the casket was done, Richard climbed down to the ground floor and the coffin maker and his apprentice lowered the cedar coffin down to him, carefully balanced on ropes.

  Our next stop was a private morgue on Rue de l’Enterrement—Burial Street—that was used by Richard’s cooperative. It was the same morgue where Tante Denise’s body was being kept. A few days later I would see her there too, just as I was seeing this naked, white-haired stranger being dressed and powdered before he was placed in his brand-new casket.

  As we edged into the busy traffic with the coffin and its occupant roped to the roof of the car, my father, still shocked, whispered to my cousin, “No hearse?”

  He couldn’t get one in time, my cousin explained, and for such a long trip. But he assured us that Tante Denise would have one for her journey to the cemetery.

  I could imagine what my father was thinking. It was a hot day. Won’t the sun spoil the corpse? I, in turn, was worried about the coffin slipping through the ropes and the body falling on the ground and my cousin having to pick it up and put it back and in his haste not removing every speck of dust from the old man, adding to his family’s anguish at the viewing. But the old man stayed put through the ninety-minute journey and we arrived in Grand-Goâve without incident.

  After he’d dropped the body off at the church, Richard took us to the house of a female colleague for lunch. As they discussed cooperative business under a giant avocado tree in the cactus-fence yard behind her house, I realized that Richard was not just an undertaker but also an aspiring politician, whose work was indirectly connected to President Aristide.

  After leaving office in 1996, the former priest had won a second term in 2000, in an election whose results were contested by a coalition of opposition parties. Three years later, in 2003, with international funds still frozen over
the outcome of the elections, there were massive demonstrations demanding his resignation. His supporters, a large number of them from Bel Air, also rallied in huge numbers, sometimes resulting in deadly clashes between the two groups. An active member of several anti-Aristide groups, Richard, like most future politicians, was hoping to barter for goodwill with good works. This put him in direct conflict with some of the pro-Aristide gangs in Bel Air, many of whom, Richard casually noted to his colleague, wanted him dead.

  There were signs, though, that things might be turning around for him, Richard explained. A few weeks back he was coming home late one night when someone flagged down his car, ordered him to roll down the window and pressed a gun to his temple. He heard the slow clicking of the trigger and quickly identified himself. When he heard Richard’s name, his would-be assassin begged his forgiveness saying, “Chief, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you. You buried my mother a few months back.”

  Through the entire funeral service for the old man in Grand-Goâve, with family members crying and wailing around him, Richard, who had told the story of his near assassination in such a calm, even amused voice, sat with my father and me in the last pew and with his head leaning against the wall, he slept. Afterward he drove us back to Bel Air at breakneck speed so he could make it to his house before the gangs had a chance to ambush us in the dark.

  There was no wake for Tante Denise. Fearing that some of the neighborhood gangs might take advantage of a wake to storm the house, Uncle Joseph sent all his visitors home at eight o’clock and locked his doors.

  After everyone left, my father and I stayed up with Léone and Tante Denise’s brothers, George and Bosi. They passed around a few pictures of Tante Denise looking stylish in many of the dresses she’d sewn herself over the years. My father, Léone, and Bosi and George looked at these pictures and reminisced late into the night about Tante Denise’s love of clothes and her making her own, rather badly sometimes when she was in a hurry.

  As I dozed off, their laughter startled me again and again.

  “Denise, that old goat,” Léone said and laughed. “She was a stubborn one.”

  The morning of Tante Denise’s funeral, I took a few pictures of my father and Uncle Joseph getting dressed in the room that my uncle and Tante Denise had shared. As he pulled a navy suit from their shared mahogany armoire, Uncle Joseph waved my father over.

  “First time I’m wearing this suit,” he told my father.

  My father reached for the suit and, like the tailor he once was, expertly examined the material between his fingertips. It looked like silk but was actually a combination of cotton and Lycra, which my uncle had chosen because it allowed the jacket to stretch without losing its shape.

  “The next time I wear it,” said my uncle, “will be at my own funeral.”

  When I look at those pictures now, if not for my father’s and uncle’s solemn faces, I can almost imagine that my father was simply helping his brother with the knot in his tie. Maybe this was something they’d done when they were younger, help each other dress for joyful and sorrowful occasions. But had they? They’d both worked so hard when they were living in the same country that they’d had little time for camaraderie and leisure. Then they’d spent so many years apart that they’d shared very few moments that many other brothers might take for granted.

  My uncle assigned me the job of carrying to the morgue the exquisite white, pearl-beaded, two-piece suit that Tante Denise had chosen a few weeks back for her burial.

  When I got to the morgue, I hesitated before entering the small dressing room. But hadn’t I, just two days before, watched the undertakers place a suit on a total stranger on the very same metal table that Tante Denise would now be lying on?

  Laid out naked, in a perfectly straight line, her body rigid, her eyes sealed shut, Tante Denise actually looked like she was sleeping. But when my eyes wandered down from the folds on her neck to the larger folds on her belly and farther down to her still dark and thick pubic hair, the illusion was gone. The dresser, a cross-eyed young man who looked like he was barely out of his teens, reached between her thighs and brusquely spread her legs apart. He then lifted her arms, letting them drop with a thump once he’d placed her gloves on them. Her head fell back as he slipped her undershirt over it and I reached for it, quickly placing my hand between Tante Denise’s pageboy wig and the metal table.

  “Leave it to me, please, miss,” the young man said in a voice so deep it sounded like it was coming out of someone else’s mouth. Straightening the wig, which had been sliding off one side of Tante Denise’s head, he used a thin sponge to apply a thick layer of dark brown foundation to her face, then brushed two lines of rouge against her cheeks. As he traced some maroon coloring over her lips, she finally began to look like her old self. In death, she’d regained a hint of the elegance and glamour of her youth, before the diabetes, before the high blood pressure, before the strokes, the departures and unbearable losses, which, according to my uncle, had troubled her much more than her physical ailments.

  Tante Denise’s funeral was a success. It was a hot afternoon, yet still the church was packed, filled beyond its capacity to comfortably seat around two hundred people. Because she was the pastor’s wife and had for many years, before she became ill, cooked the free meals for the school’s lunch program, many people came to pay their respects. Those who couldn’t fit inside the church, neighbors, former and current students at the school, lined up on both sides of Rue Tirremasse.

  During the service, my uncle got up from his usual seat at the altar and stumbled to the pulpit’s microphone.

  “She was my friend, my wife, the woman who stood by me both when I could speak and when I was silent,” he said.

  I remembered how much he had wanted to speak at Granmè Melina’s funeral. At least now he could, I thought. But he was unable to say more, and he walked back to his seat with his face in his hands.

  After the service, the mourners packed into cars and buses and followed the hearse through the winding streets leading past the old cathedral, toward the cemetery. I was in the car immediately behind the hearse and watched as some people stopped and looked in, nodding and waving their condolences at my uncle and father, who were sitting up front with the driver. Nearing the giant wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, we got out of the cars and, as is the custom, lined up in several rows to walk the last mile to the gravesite.

  I was walking next to my father and uncle when three shots rang out in quick succession. The mourners scattered in a nervous stampede, leaving us in the middle of the suddenly empty street. The flurry of people disappearing around street corners and down alleys seemed hazy and unclear. My heart was beating fast, a pool of sweat gathering on my face. Was this how Marie Micheline felt before she died?

  My father’s fingernails were digging into my forearm.

  “Edwidge!” he called out, alarmed.

  “Papa,” I said, trying hard to focus on his worried face.

  “You look like you’re about to faint,” he said.

  My uncle had drifted away toward a group of church ushers who were trying to gather our mourners together again. The trouble was over, the ushers were calling out. The storm had passed. We could proceed.

  Suddenly people began to emerge, from behind parked cars, store galleries, alleys, porches. Our procession was slowly moving again, where only my uncle, my father, the hearse and I had stood.

  Later we’d learn that the gunshots had been the result of an attack on a cemetery guard by members of a neighborhood gang. The guard had fired three shots in the air to scare them off. But as we finally headed for the gravesite, I will never forget hearing Léone shout, “Denise, sè mwen, sister, what is this, a twenty-one-gun salute? You’re not in the military, Denise. You’re not a policeman. Why is there shooting at your funeral?”

  Brother, I Leave You with a Heavy Heart

  In late August 2004, Uncle Joseph came to New York for a summer visit. At eighty-one years old, and wit
hout Tante Denise to keep him company, he wanted a respite from the increasing number of protests in Bel Air. Uncle Joseph’s trip also coincided with my father’s first hospitalization since his diagnosis.

  I was nearing the end of my first trimester and though I had no morning sickness, I felt fatigued and on some hot Miami mornings found myself weeping uncontrollably when I woke up alone in bed after my husband had left for work. Suddenly being separated from others felt like a much more drastic form of isolation, a sentence of banishment for not being near my dying father. So when Bob called to tell me that Papa was in the hospital, I leaped out of bed and boarded the next plane to New York.

  Karl picked me up. (And even that felt odd, for it was my father who always did the picking up from airports.) My mother and Uncle Joseph were in the backseat of Karl’s car. I could see that Uncle Joseph had lost a few pounds since Tante Denise’s funeral—mostly from eating less, he said, now that his wife was gone—yet he looked sporty and fit. Like my mother’s, his face also betrayed a hint of fear, which I immediately recognized: it was about my father.

  “So how’s the patient?” I asked, trying to ease the obvious gravity of the moment.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” Karl said, his face unreadable in profile. “We’re taking you to him now.”

  Could it have happened so quickly? I wondered. Only a few weeks after my father’s diagnosis was I being ushered to his bedside to say good-bye?

  “What does the doctor say?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Karl answered. “He’s getting IVs. He’s also getting respiratory treatment, but they’re not going to keep him there long. The doctor’s already told us that.”