Brother, I'm Dying

  When I woke up, I wasn’t sure whether this was reverie or dream. However, when I looked at the digital clock on my bedside table, it was after three p.m.

  The phone was ringing, which is why I’d woken up in the first place. I picked it up, expecting my uncle and Maxo. Instead it was Tante Zi.

  “Are they with you?” she asked.

  “Non,” I said.

  Perhaps they’d called and I’d missed them. I looked for the flashing message button on the phone. The call log also registered no calls.

  “Their plane should have landed by now,” Tante Zi said. They’d gone to the airport very early, but their plane had left sometime after noon.

  “I took them to the airport myself.” She was speaking loud and fast. There was an edginess to her voice, a strain of anxiety. “I took them in a camionette.

  “I sent you tablèt,” she added, “the kind I know you like. “Uncle has them for you.”

  That she remembered to send me some peanut confections at such a stressful time amazed me.

  “I thought you might have some cravings,” she said. “Unsatisfied cravings can lead to birthmarks on the baby.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then started again in the same quick and loud voice.

  “Listen, take good care of your uncle,” she said. “He’s lost everything.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” I said.

  “I don’t think he should come back to Haiti for a long time,” she continued. “It’s crazy here now. No peace.”

  I attributed the fact that I didn’t hear from my uncle and Maxo to a plane delay. Then I called the airline, American Airlines, and found out that the plane my uncle and Maxo had meant to be on had left and landed. Because of privacy laws, they couldn’t tell me whether my uncle and Maxo had been on it or not. As it got later and my husband returned from work, I grew increasingly nervous. Maybe they’d missed their plane altogether, my husband said, and were bumped to the next day.

  The early evening went by with no news. Then more calls, first from Uncle Franck in New York, then from my father. Worrying me even more, my uncle’s pastor friend also called. His wife had waited three hours at Miami International Airport and had seen no sign of either my uncle or Maxo.

  Around nine p.m., the calls suddenly stopped. Cell phones in tow, Fedo and I went for what we’d come to call our daily pregnancy walk on the boardwalk on Miami Beach. It was a balmy night, but a cool breeze was coming off the ocean. We didn’t walk long. Worried that my uncle might remember only the house telephone number, we hurried home to wait by the phone. Intermittently, I called Tante Zi on her cell phone, but I got no reply.

  Fedo and I lay down and tried to brainstorm some possibilities. I wanted to have at least one likely explanation for my father.

  “They’re probably coming tomorrow,” I told my father when he called.

  My father had merely called to check on my uncle and Maxo. He was too weak to continue talking. I fell into a deep, sad sleep.

  My phone rang at one thirty the next morning. Ever since my father had become ill, late-night and early-morning phone calls sent my now very large body leaping straight out of bed. Still, I missed the call.

  On the voice mail was a message from a female U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer. She could have read from a Contact Advisory of CBP Detention form, which contains a script provided by Customs and Border Protection that would have had her say, “I am Officer So-and-so of U.S Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport. Your uncle, who has arrived in the United States on American Airlines flight 822, has asked that we contact you…” However, what she said instead was “Ms. Danticat, we have your uncle here.”

  She then paused, and it sounded as though she moved her mouth slightly away from the phone to ask my uncle, “What is your name, sir?”

  My uncle’s voice box came through clearly as he replied, “Joseph Dantica.” He pronounced his name in the French way, putting the most emphasis on the last syllable. Though an error on my father’s birth certificate had made him a Danticat, giving us a singular variation of the family name, we still pronounced our surnames the same. In French and Creole our t was silent, though I often joked with my uncle that in English we were “cats” and he was not.

  “We have him here,” the female officer continued on the message, “at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He’s requested asylum and we’re completing his paperwork.”

  There was hope, kindness in her voice, a matter-of-fact impression of normalcy and routine. But her number had not registered on my phone, and she hadn’t left it for me to call back.

  My husband searched the Internet while I leafed through the Yellow Pages for a Customs and Border Protection listing at Miami International Airport. After a while we got through.

  “Someone just called me,” I said. “About an elderly man and his son.”

  “I’m familiar with them,” the man who replied said. In his few words, I could hear the disdain, which perhaps was always in his voice, but seemed nevertheless particularly directed at me. “They came here with no papers and tried to get in—”

  “They have papers,” I tried to explain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have two flights coming in.” Then he hung up.

  “We have to go to the airport,” I told my husband. We were only fifteen minutes away and were not getting anywhere on the phone.

  At the closed American Airlines counter at the airport, we found a Haitian janitor who directed us to the entrance to the Customs and Border Protection offices. They too were closed. Standing outside the metal doors, I dialed the offices’ number again.

  Another male officer picked up.

  “Someone called me,” I said, ”about my uncle, Joseph Dantica. He should be with his son, Maxo.”

  “They’re right here in front of me.” This was the kindest and most polite-sounding voice yet.

  “I’m in the airport,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve come to pick them up.”

  His long pause indicated some kind of misunderstanding on my part. Something had been said to me that I’d obviously not fully grasped.

  “We only called to notify you that they’re here,” he said. “They’re not being released. They’re going to Krome.”

  My heart sank. The year before, I had been to the Krome detention center as part of a delegation of community observers organized by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. A series of gray concrete buildings and trailers, Krome was out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, in southwest Miami. During our visit, a group of men in identical dark blue overalls had been escorted into a covered, chain-link-fenced, concrete patio rimmed by rows of barbed wire. The men walked in two straight lines, sat at the long cafeteria-style tables and told our delegation their stories. They were Haitian “boat people” and in addition to their names identified themselves by the vessels on which they’d come.

  “My name is…,” they said. “I came on the July boat.” Or “I came on the December boat.”

  Some invented parables to explain their circumstances. One man spoke of mad dogs—gang members—threatening him and forcing him to seek shelter at a neighbor’s house, the neighbor being the United States. Another sang about a mud slide, meaning the Lavalas or Flood Party, that had washed everything away. Another asked us to tell the world the detainees were beaten sometimes. He told of a friend who’d had his back broken by a guard and was deported before he could get medical attention. Some detainees fought among themselves, sometimes nearly killing each other as uninterested guards looked on. They spoke of other guards who told them they smelled, who taunted them while telling them that unlike the Cuban rafters, who were guaranteed refuge, they would never get asylum, that few Haitians ever get asylum. They said that the large rooms where they slept in rows and rows of bunk beds were often so overcrowded that some of them had to sleep on thin mattresses on the floor. They were at times so cold that they shivered all night
long. They told of the food that rather than nourish them, punished them, gave them diarrhea and made them vomit. They told of arbitrary curfews, how they were woken up at six a.m. and forced to go back to that cold room by six p.m.

  I’d seen some men who looked too young to be the mandatory eighteen years old for detention at Krome. A few of them looked fourteen or even twelve. How can we be sure they’re not younger, I’d asked one of the lawyers in our delegation, if they come with no birth certificates, no papers? The lawyer answered that their ages were determined by examining their teeth. I couldn’t escape this agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were pried open to determine worth and state of health.

  One man, who had received asylum but had not yet been released when we visited, showed us burn marks over his arms, chest and belly. His flesh was seared white, with rows and rows of keloid scars. It seemed like such a violation, to look at his belly, the space where the scars dipped farther down his body. But he was used to showing his scars, he said. He had to show them to a number of immigration judges to prove he deserved to stay.

  I’d sat across from an older man, a man who looked like he might be around my father’s age, who’d said, “If I had a bullet, I’d have shot myself already. I’m not a criminal. I’m not used to prison.”

  The shame of being a prisoner loomed large. A stigma most couldn’t shake. To have been shackled, handcuffed, many said, rubbing that spot on their wrists where the soft manacles were placed on them soon after they made it to the American shore, “I have known no greater shame in my life.”

  I’d met a young man from Bel Air. His eyes were red. He couldn’t stop crying. His mother had died the week before, he said, and he couldn’t even attend her funeral. He told me his mother’s name, and when he described her house, the house where he used to live in Bel Air, I could see it. It was not far from my uncle’s house.

  “Can I speak to my uncle?” I asked the customs officer, who, it seemed, was patiently waiting for me to get off the phone.

  “That’s not allowed,” he said.

  “Please,” I said. “He’s old and—”

  “He’ll contact you when he gets to Krome.”

  Alien 27041999

  My uncle was now alien 27041999. He and Maxo had left Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture Airport on American Airlines flight 822. The flight was scheduled to leave at 12:32 p.m., but was a bit delayed and left later than that.

  On the plane, my uncle attempted to write a narrative of what had happened to him on a piece of white paper. He titled his note “Epidemie du 24 octobre 2004.”

  “Un groupe de chimères ont détruit L’Eglise Chrétienne de la Rédemption,” it began. “A group of chimères destroyed Eglise Chrétienne de la Redemption.” He then gave up writing sentences to simply list what had been removed or burned from the church, including the pews, two padded ballroom chairs used at wedding ceremonies, a drum set, some speakers and microphones.

  Once they got off the plane at around two thirty p.m., my uncle and Maxo waited their turn with a large group of visitors in one of the long Customs and Border Protection lines. When they reached the CBP checkpoint, they presented their passports and valid tourist visas to a CPB officer. When asked how long they would be staying in the United States, my uncle, not understanding the full implication of that choice, said he wanted to apply for temporary asylum. He and Maxo were then taken aside and placed in a customs waiting area.

  I don’t know why my uncle had not simply used the valid visa he had to enter the United States, just as he had at least thirty times before, and later apply for asylum. I’m sure now that he had no intention of staying in either New York or Miami for the rest of his life. This is why, according to Maxo, he had specified “temporary.” Had he acted based on someone’s advice? On something he’d heard on the radio, read in the newspapers? Did he think that given all that had happened to him, the authorities—again those with the power both to lend a hand and to cut one off—would have to believe him? He planned to stay at most a few weeks, a few months, but he was determined to go back. This was why he’d gotten his police report from the anti-gang unit. This was why he had wanted the officer, a justice of the peace or an investigative judge, to go to Bel Air to witness and inspect, so he could return when things were calmer and reclaim his house, school and church. He had said as much to Tante Zi the day before.

  I can only assume that when he was asked how long he would be staying in the United States, he knew that he would be staying past the thirty days his visa allowed him and he wanted to tell the truth.

  Maxo and my uncle were approached by another Customs and Border Protection officer again at 5:38 p.m., at which point it was determined that my uncle would need a translator for his interview. Maxo, a fluent English speaker, could not as his son act as his translator.

  Documents from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection indicate that my uncle was interviewed by an Officer Reyes with help from a translator. A standard CBP interview form would have had Officer Reyes begin by saying, “I am an officer of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. I am authorized to administer the immigration laws and take sworn statements. I want to take your sworn statement regarding your application for admission to the United States.”

  A digitized picture attached to my uncle’s interview form shows him looking tired and perplexed. His head is cropped from the tip of his widow’s peak down to his chin. The picture shows a bit of his shoulder, which is slumped back, away from the frame. He is wearing a jacket, the same one that, according to Maxo, he’d been wearing since he left his house in Bel Air. Though he is facing the camera, his eyes are turned sideways, possibly toward the photographer.

  The interview began with Officer Reyes asking my uncle, “Do you understand what I have said to you?”

  “Yes,” answered my uncle.

  “Are you willing to answer my questions at this time?”

  After making my uncle swear and affirm that all the statements he was about to make would be true and complete, Officer Reyes asked him to state his full name.

  “Dantica Joseph Nosius,” answered my uncle.

  “Of what country are you a citizen?”

  “Haiti.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe you are a citizen of the United States?”

  “NO.”

  “Do you have any family, mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, or child who are citizens or permanent residents of the United States?”

  My uncle replied that he had two brothers in the United States, one—my father—a naturalized U.S. citizen, and the second—my uncle Franck—a permanent resident.

  “What is your purpose in entering the United States today?” asked Officer Reyes.

  “Because a group that is causing trouble in Haiti wants to kill me,” my uncle answered.

  According to the transcript, Officer Reyes did not ask for further explanation or details.

  “How much money do you have?” he asked, proceeding with the interview.

  My uncle answered that he had one thousand and nine U.S. dollars with him.

  “What is your occupation?” asked Officer Reyes.

  The transcriber/translator has my uncle saying, “I am a priest,” but he most likely said he was an evèk, a bishop, or elder pastor.

  “What documents did you present today to the first Customs and Border Protection officer that you encountered?” asked Officer Reyes.

  “My Haitian passport and immigration forms,” my uncle answered.

  “What name is on those documents?”

  “Dantica Joseph Nosius.”

  “Is the name on the documents your true and correct name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever used any other names?”

  “No.”

  “Are you currently taking any prescription medication for any health condition?” asked Officer Reyes.

  The transcriber/translator has my uncle saying, “Yes, for b
ack pain and chest.” And in parentheses, writes, “ibuprofen.”

  The transcript has neither my uncle nor the interviewer mentioning two rum bottles filled with herbal medicine, one for himself and one for my father, as well as the smaller bottles of prescription pills he was taking for his blood pressure and inflamed prostate.

  “How would you describe your current health status?” Officer Reyes continued.

  According to the transcript, my uncle answered, “Not bad.” He had probably said, “Pa pi mal,” just as my father continued to, even as he lay dying.

  “Have you ever been arrested before at any time or any place?”

  “No.”

  “Why exactly are you requesting for [sic] political asylum in the United States today?”

  “Because they burned down my church in Haiti and I fear for my life.”

  Again no further explanation or details were requested and my uncle did not offer more.

  “Have you had [sic] applied for political asylum before in the United States or any other country?”

  “No.”

  “Have anyone [sic] ever petition for you to become a United States Legal Permanent Resident”

  “No.”

  “Were you in the United States in the year 1984?”

  “Yes, but I do not remember.”

  (I couldn’t remember either whether or not he’d been in the United States in 1984. I knew he had been the year before, during the summer of 1983, when he got the voice box, but could not recall if he’d returned the following year.)

  “Have you have any encounter [sic] the United States Immigration Services before?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you leave your home country of last residence?”

  “Because I fear for my life in Haiti. And they burned down my church.”

  “Do you have any fear or concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you be harmed if you are returned to your home country of last residence?”

  “YES.”