I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members. But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father. Some were told offhand, quickly. Others, in greater detail. What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.
Brother, I’m Dying
Something broke the first time my uncle Joseph met his wife, in May 1946. It was barely dawn, a gray morning over the blue-green hills of Beauséjour. The sun was slowly rising, burning through the fog that merged with the clouds over the highest mountains. My uncle, oval-faced, with a widow’s-peaked hairline, mustached and pudgy, as he would remain for most of his life, was making his way down the winding trail that joined the village where he and his parents and five younger brothers and sisters lived, with the market town in the valley below. He had started from his parents’ farm with a mule loaded with carrots and plantains and newly harvested pigeon peas that he planned to sell at the market. Running late, he tapped the mule’s bottom now and then, encouraging it to hasten its steps. It wasn’t doing much good. The mule was tired and seemed to want to stop and sniff each patch of dew-laden grass and muddy rock it encountered along the way.
Uncle Joseph was growing exasperated when he spotted a young woman on the same path. With her high cheekbones and pouty lips she looked like a calendar girl or carnival queen. She was wearing a thin cotton dress, which seemed glued to her body by the water still lingering from the early-morning bath she’d just taken in a nearby stream. On top of her head was a brown calabash, sealed with a piece of dried corn husk. The calabash was resting on a piece of cloth, wrung into a circle to serve as a base. Ignoring the mule, he stopped to watch her. She was one of the prettiest women he’d come across in his twenty-three years. How could he not have spotted her during all his trips to and from the market?
Unsupervised, the mule wandered into a nearby garden and spilled some of my uncle’s merchandise. The young lady was the one who first noticed the mule stomping through a row of young cocoa plants. Rushing forward, she motioned in its direction. As her body swayed back and forth, her arms waving wildly, she dropped her water-filled calabash and it broke.
My uncle offered to pay for the calabash. She insisted it was not necessary, but he talked her into taking a few pennies, a lot more than the calabash was worth.
“So began a conversation between Denise and me,” my uncle later told me. “Every time I went by afterwards on my way to the market, I had to see her. We talked and talked for a few months and then we took action.”
The action was to notify their families at the beginning of 1947 that they were moving to the capital together. The oldest of his sisters, my aunt Ino, was already living in Bel Air, a hilltop neighborhood overlooking Port-au-Prince harbor, and they decided to settle there.
Though they did not marry, they bought a plot of land together and built a three-room cement house, topped by a corrugated-metal roof. The house had a large front gallery that extended into the alley that curved toward the main road, Rue Tirremasse. The entire house was painted salmon pink, both inside and out, except for the floors, which were covered with terra-cotta clay tiles.
The hill in Bel Air on which the house was built had been the site of a famous battle between mulatto abolitionists and French colonists who’d controlled most of the island since 1697 and had imported black Africans to labor on coffee and sugar plantations as slaves. A century later, slaves and mulattoes joined together to drive the French out, and on January 1, 1804, formed the Republic of Haiti.
More than a century later, as World War I dawned and the French, British and Germans, who controlled Haiti’s international shipping, rallied their gunboats to protect their interests, President Woodrow Wilson, whose interests included, among others, the United Fruit Company and 40 percent of the stock of the Haitian national bank, ordered an invasion. When the U.S. Marines landed in Haiti in July 1915 for what would become a nineteen-year occupation, Haitian guerrilla fighters, called Cacos, organized attacks against the U.S. forces from Bel Air. Bel Air also boasted one of Haiti’s oldest and most beautiful cathedrals, as well as one of the island’s best public schools for boys, the Lycée Pétion, which was named after Alexandre Pétion, one of the leaders in the battle for independence from the French and a mentor to Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar.
When he first moved to Bel Air, my uncle got a job working as a salesman for a Syrian émigré in a fabric shop in downtown Port-au-Prince. There he befriended a fellow salesman, a Cuban émigré named Guillermo Hernandez, who quickly became his best friend. A few months later, my father, then twelve years old, left Beauséjour and moved to the capital to attend school there. My aunts Zi and Tina and Uncle Franck later joined them, along with my grandparents, Granpè Nozial and Granmè Lorvana, who went to live with Tante Ino, the eldest daughter. Encouraged by my uncle, nearly everyone they knew was now living in Bel Air. He and Tante Denise kept adding to the house until it had six bedrooms, still pink. So when their son, Maxo, was born in 1948 there was room for him. And in 1952 there was also room when the Haitian wife of Guillermo Hernandez, his Cuban friend, died, leaving Guillermo with a six-month-old baby to raise alone. It was Guillermo who asked my uncle and Tante Denise to take in his daughter, Marie Micheline, so he could travel back home to Cuba for a visit, a trip from which he never returned.
Uncle Joseph’s hero in the 1950s was a politician named Daniel Fignolé. Uncle Joseph liked to recount how as a young legislator, Fignolé went to the public hospital in Port-au-Prince, and finding poor patients lying on the floor while the rich patients recovered in beds, he forced the rich off the beds and gave them to the poor. Soon after my uncle moved to Bel Air, Fignolé started the Laborers and Peasants Party (Mouvement Ouvriers-Paysans), which my uncle joined. For years, he and Tante Denise opened their house to Fignolé sympathizers for regular meetings, which were lively affairs with plenty of homemade liquor—kleren—and food prepared by Tante Denise, who everyone in their circle agreed was one of the best cooks in Bel Air. When it came time to address the fifty or so people who’d gathered in his pink living room, kept sparsely furnished to fit in the largest possible number of Fignolists, who often brought their own chairs with them, he would model Fignolé’s forceful and direct Creole diction and speak in a clear, powerful bass, allowing only a few well-chosen pauses.
“We have struggled since we became an independent nation in 1804,” my uncle recalled saying. “Certain people think that in order for the country to progress, only the rich minority need succeed. This country cannot move forward without the majority. Without us.”
Hardly earth-shattering, but he considered himself more of a disciple than a chief. All he had to do was echo one of Fignolé’s favorite phrases to get applause.
In his speeches to the group, my uncle sometimes evoked his father, Granpè Nozial, who’d joined the guerrilla resistance against the U.S. invasion and who was often away from home fighting a battle he did his best to keep from reaching his young children. Granpè Nozial would leave my uncle, the oldest, though still a child himself, the task of looking after his mother and siblings for weeks and months at a time. Each time his father left for a campaign, my uncle worried that, like the thousands of Haitian guerrilla fighters who were killed by the Americans and whose corpses were dumped in roads and public parks to discourage others, his father might never come back.
“The men of my father’s generation fought with all their might,” my uncle would declare in a carefully modulated voice as he addressed the Fignolists who’d crowded into his living room, including his father, Granpè Nozial, who, now widowed and looking older than his sixty-five years, sat stoop-s
houldered, his once sinewy body beaten and worn, his head bouncing back and forth as he dozed off in the front row.
“But mostly,” my uncle continued, “these men used their hands and old-fashioned weapons. They used old Krags, slingshots, machetes and spears. They used whatever weapons they could muster up or create. Now we want to fight for progress. We want to fight with our minds. This is where real power lies.”
At that time, the president of Haiti was Paul Magloire, an army general who’d unseated two of his predecessors. Nicknamed Kanson Fé, or Iron Pants, because of a speech he had given in which he’d declared that he must put on “iron pants” to deal with troublemakers, he had graced the February 22, 1954, cover of Time magazine dressed in full golden military regalia over a caption that read: “HAITI’S PRESIDENT PAUL MAGLOIRE. His Black Magic: roads, dams, schools.”
In 1956 Magloire stepped down after a national strike over, among other things, increased dissatisfaction with his extravagant spending. In addition to roads, dams, and schools, it turned out, he spent lots of money on lavish parties, state visits and costly reenactments of famous Haitian battles, mostly to amuse himself and a small circle of likeminded friends. Fignolé was one of many in a slippery line of succession who would eventually replace him. On May 25, 1957, as Fignolé was sworn into office, my uncle and father were part of the massive crowd that dashed to the national palace to dance in celebration. However, after only nineteen days, Fignolé was deposed by the army and forced into exile. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier then assumed the presidency. Tante Denise woke up the next morning to find Uncle Joseph sobbing in their bed. (My father, then twenty-two years old, has no recollection of his own reaction to all this, only of my uncle’s, which was “sad”.)
Before Fignolé’s fall, my uncle had briefly contemplated running for political office, either as a deputy from Bel Air or as mayor of Port-au-Prince. After Fignolé’s ouster, he realized how precarious political power could be and abandoned all notions of being part of it.
Feeling an ideological void, he joined a Baptist congregation that one of his friends belonged to, using the time he would have spent at demonstrations and meetings to go to church. The Baptists offered the promise of a peaceful and stable life. They forbade so many things, including smoking and drinking, that there were few ways for a young man to get in trouble. The Baptists also forbade common-law marriage, so after more than a decade together, when their son Maxo was ten years old, he and Tante Denise finally married in a church ceremony, after which he became a deacon in the church. He then enrolled in a training course for future pastors and while taking the course befriended a group of American missionaries who regularly came to Haiti. He was eager to open his own church and a school. He was still wary of Americans from his memories of the U.S. occupation, but the missionaries were looking to fund a project in his area and he didn’t have enough to do it on his own, so he proposed his idea to them and they gave him some money to help with the building, blackboards, and benches and pledged a monthly contribution for a free lunch program for the students.
My uncle bought another plot of land in Bel Air and spent his evenings designing and then building his church. As the building came up from the ground, he would visit the site daily, both before and after his work at the textile shop. He’d stack bricks and mix cement, hammer wood with the workers. He wanted to feel like he was investing more than his heart and mind, that he was investing his hands and feet, his labor too. Because he believed that the church had redeemed him, saved him from a series of potentially hazardous choices, he named it L’Eglise Chrétienne de la Redemption, the Christian Church of Redemption. The shotgun-style, gable-roofed building, which doubled as a classroom and cafeteria during the week, he hoped, would redeem others as well.
As a child living in his house from the time I was four until I was twelve years old, I remember my uncle’s voice being crisp and distinct: deep and resolute, breathy and jingly when he was angry, steely and muted when he was sad. When he began preaching sermons, my father recalled, sermons which required that he project a wide range of emotions in one hour or less, my uncle had the same effect on the hundred or so people who attended his church as he’d had on those who crowded into his living room to listen to him talk about Fignolé. Many of them were indeed the same people and were surprised now in the church how much passion he could stir in them.
“His preaching style was very straightforward,” remembered my father. “He talked a lot about love. God’s love, the love we should have for one another. He knew all the verses for love. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and think, would I want to hear him if he wasn’t my brother and I’d have to say yes. Yes, he would have made a very good politician, but my brother was a better preacher.”
But one day in November 1977, while preaching a lengthy sermon to commemorate the church’s anniversary, my uncle’s voice began to quiver, then squeak. He shrieked like an adolescent boy at one moment, then could only moan the next. His throat and gums throbbed and hurt. The next day, he went to the local dentist, who decided he needed to remove all of my uncle’s teeth and replace them with dentures.
His voice did not improve even after all his teeth were gone, so he went to see several other doctors. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so he went to herbalists, just as his parents and grandparents had before him. He was after all a child of the countryside—nou se moun mòn—and had been treated by roots and leaves most of his life. But the herbalists too were stumped. Meanwhile his voice grew fainter and his throat continued to ache.
One afternoon, in the spring of 1978, he was listening to the radio when he heard about a hospital in the south of Haiti that was associated with a radio station, Radio Lumière. Some American doctors were coming to the hospital and everyone who wanted to was welcome to come for a consultation. My uncle headed out to meet them.
After a day of slow, difficult travel on pitted, rocky roads, the camion he was on broke down in the early evening. Near the town of Gros Marin, he walked into a small two-room house by the side of a road and asked a peasant woman if he could spend the night on her beaten-earth floor. Her quick yes, so typical of the men and women of the Haitian countryside, reminded him of his own childhood. Lying in her front room on a palm frond mat and one of her best sheets, he thought back to a childhood of working in the fields and the palm-covered classrooms with neither walls nor doors where he learned his lessons sitting on the floor. He thought of a thin yet strapping father whose arms were so taut from a life of farming and fighting that he could render you unconscious with one slap while not even looking in your direction. He thought of the khakied American marines who he was told ambushed guerrilla resisters like his father in the middle of the night while wearing blackface. The Americans had reinstated forced labor to build bridges and roads and had snatched able-bodied men like his father and boys like himself from their homes. They were lucky to have been spared. So determined was he that he would not be taken that whenever Granpè Nozial was away from home, he’d sleep with a well-sharpened machete under his pillow.
The next morning my uncle was startled out of his sleep by the sound of a sisal broom sweeping the woman’s cactus-fenced yard. That gentle sound and the fragrant smell of brewed coffee helped remove his dread, filled him with hope. The woman handed him an enameled basin filled with cold water to wash his face and a handful of mint to brush the dentures she mistook for his own teeth. She then gave him a square of dimpled bread, which looked as though it was made from dough that had been poked with a dozen ice picks. The bread was carefully wrapped in a piece of muslin and lay on a plate that covered a metal cup filled with dark, sweet coffee. His hunger stirred, he gobbled the bread and washed it down with the coffee. He thanked the woman for her kindness and hospitality and with the air still cool from the night and the sun still very low in the sky, he continued on his way.
He had a long wait in the hospital yard. Hundreds of people were milling about, crouched in shaded corners of the concre
te building, squatting under the giant almond trees, waiting. He was with men and women who were suffering from tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid fever and other not so easily recognizable afflictions. It had taken him a good part of the morning to walk from the woman’s house in Gros Marin to the hospital in Bonne Fin. He waited in the hot sun with the others until midafternoon, sweaty, hungry and thirsty now, hoping he wouldn’t be turned back.
At last, he was looked over by a nurse and placed among the least urgent cases. When it was his turn to see a doctor, one of the visiting physicians, a tall white man, pressed his tongue down with a thin wooden stick and told him he saw a mass sitting on top of his larynx. The mass might be a tumor, the doctor explained through a translator, and if not removed could eventually block his airways and suffocate him. He wanted to do a biopsy right away, the doctor said.
“Can you take it out?” my uncle asked.
“We will only do the biopsy now,” explained the translator. “We’re taking a piece, not the whole thing, but when the entire mass is removed, you might lose your voice.”
Stunned, my uncle asked again, just to be sure, “Will I lose my voice today?”
“We’ll only do the biopsy today,” the doctor repeated.
Before my uncle could ask what a biopsy was, the translator, a Haitian doctor, added, “You have to let them cut a piece of the mass in your throat to examine it for cancer. It might be your only chance.”
During the biopsy, for which my uncle was given no more anesthesia than he might have gotten at the dentist’s office while having a tooth removed, he opened his mouth so wide that his face and neck throbbed. Lying there as the doctor clipped a piece of flesh from the back of his throat, he wished he could go back home and have one final conversation with his wife. He also wanted to preach one last sermon to his congregation, speak on the phone with his son and to my father in New York.