My uncle nodded, the same blissful nod he used to indicate agreement when something was suddenly clear to him. He smiled broadly, while patting my tightly plaited hair.
On the sidewalk outside the bank was a man selling grated ice sweetened with syrup, a childhood delight called fresko. On the man’s wobbly patchwork cart was a block of transparent ice half buried in sawdust and surrounded by a line of colorful bottles. My eyes followed the man’s shriveled hands as he carefully tapped his grater against the ice, just as he always did, to tempt us. My uncle motioned for him to come and the cart’s rubber wheels screeched against the sidewalk as he moved toward us.
“What flavor?” the fresko seller asked, pointing to the half-full bottles glittering red, blue, yellow and green in the sun. I pointed to the beige bottle. Coconut! I had tried most of the other flavors, including mint and cherry, my other favorites.
Because we were regular customers, the vendor poured me an especially generous amount. I twirled my tongue around the icy fresko until the inside of my cheeks numbed. My uncle was unable to resist and gestured for a fresko too, coconut-flavored like mine. By the time I’d finished my own, nearly three-quarters of his would be left, and reaching down to remove the empty paper cone from my hand, he would give me the rest of his.
On the way home, we passed rows and rows of used-book sellers whose yellowed and stained books were lined up in squares on the pavement and behind ropes on carts across from the national cathedral. Standing before a young man with more children’s books than any other kind, my uncle asked me to choose one as a gift for myself. Leaning down, I picked a book that looked familiar, a book I’d owned before. It had a nun on the cover and on one side of her were eleven little girls in raincoats and on the other, having the luxury of an entire hand to herself, a little girl who was dressed exactly the same as the others but stood apart somehow. The little girl’s name was Madeleine.
I picked up the book, as though picking up Madeleine herself, and quickly pressed it against my chest even as my uncle paid the seller. Unlike my first copy, which was brand-new and smelled of newly printed ink, this one smelled musty and ancient. My uncle didn’t have a chance to look at it long enough to see that he had bought it for me before, as a birthday gift when I was four years old. In my family, we did not have birthday parties and a gift on one’s birthday was not a given. Actually that first book was the only birthday gift I’d ever received from my uncle, who, perhaps knowing that that would be the last birthday I’d be spending with my mother for some time, had unceremoniously given it to her to pass on to me. The book had disappeared with my things when they’d been moved from our place to Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s. But, fearing that he would think me careless, I’d never said a thing. Now as we walked the short distance home, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed and have another visit with my old friend Madeleine, who, like me, now lived in an old house with other children. And though there were not twelve of us, there could have been, breaking our bread and brushing our teeth and going to bed smiling at the good and frowning at the bad and sometimes being very sad.
After his operation, so that things could run smoothly, my uncle hired a principal for the school and two associate pastors to manage his church. Still, there were times when it was painfully clear how much he missed the full participation his voice allowed him. This would be most obvious to me when he would skip an evening service and sit motionless in the darkest corner of the front gallery and while staring blankly ahead listen to Granmè Melina telling her folktales.
Tante Denise’s mother, Granmè Melina, was probably a centenarian when she came to live with us in 1979. Like many rural Haitians of her generation, she didn’t have a birth certificate and could only vaguely recall, as she’d been told by her parents, that she was born when a man named Canal Boisrond was president of Haiti. Boisrond’s three-year rule, from July 1876 to July 1879, put Granmè Melina’s age at somewhere between ninety-seven and one hundred years.
Illness had brought Granmè Melina from the mountains of Léogâne, where she’d been living since her daughter had moved to Port-au-Prince with Uncle Joseph. Ravaged by arthritis, both her pale, liver-spotted hands were curled into clawlike grips, making it impossible for her to do anything for herself. She spent most of her days sitting on the front gallery watching people go by. But as soon as the sun went down, she would be at the center of things as she livened up and told stories. The neighborhood children rushed through their dinner and hastened to learn the next day’s lessons so they could sit on the steps beneath Granmè Melina’s rocking chair and listen to her tales.
One of the stories she told most often was the Rapunzel-like tale of a beautiful young girl whose mother, fearful that she might be abducted by passersby, locked her inside a small but pretty little house by the side of the road while the mother worked in the fields until dusk. Every evening after a hard day’s work, the mother would stand outside the little house and sing a simple song, which would signal to the daughter to open the door and let her mother come inside. After observing this for many weeks, a huge, deadly serpent waited until the mother was at work in the fields and then, hoping to trick the girl into coming out, slithered to her doorstep and tried to imitate her mother’s song. But the serpent hissed too loudly, so the daughter could clearly tell that it was not her mother. She did not open the door, and the serpent went away and waited for another day. When the girl’s mother came home later that day from the fields, the mother sang the song and the girl joyfully opened the door to the little house, letting her mother in.
Granmè Melina’s voice would grow shrill with excitement from the dangers that might lie ahead for this young girl, who was, after all, our representative in the story, the one from whose choices we were meant to extract our lesson.
The next day, after the mother left for her work in the fields, the serpent returned to the girl’s doorstep and once again tried to sing the mother’s song. This time the serpent hissed too softly, so the daughter knew not to open the door. So the serpent went away, to wait for another day.
Granmè Melina’s stories didn’t always have happy endings. One day, it occurred to the serpent that he could simply kill the mother and force the girl to come outside. And so he killed her, leaving the girl all alone in the world. Still the girl never left her little house, preferring instead to die fresh and pure alone inside rather than risk facing the snake outside.
Those nights, sitting at Granmè Melina’s feet with the other children and listening to her often frightening stories, I would close my eyes and imagine it was my mother, who never cared for such tales, telling me one of them. One night, after Granmè Melina had received a group of children on the porch, she complained of achy joints and asked Tante Denise to massage her body with camphor and castor oil before bed. Propping her up against a mound of pillows, Tante Denise, who’d recently developed diabetes and was starting to look a bit sluggish and a lot less youthful herself, asked her niece Liline to slip Granmè Melina’s nightgown over her head. Liline’s father, Tante Denise’s youngest brother, Linoir, had left Léogâne the year before to work as a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic. Liline’s mother had six other children to look after and very little money with which to do it, so Linoir asked Tante Denise to look after Liline until he came back. Like Marie Micheline, Bob, Nick and me, Liline was yet another child that Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise had not been able to turn away.
Liline and I shared a metal bunk bed across the room from Granmè Melina. Thankfully Granmè Melina’s fragrant poultices and rubdowns would overpower the stench of urine rising from Liline’s bottom bunk. At ten, Liline was still wetting her bed, always explaining when she was scolded by Tante Denise that she had dreamed herself peeing in a latrine when she’d soaked her mattress. I don’t know how it was decided that Liline and I should share a room with Granmè Melina, but we liked having her all to ourselves those nights when she’d send everyone home but still had more stories in her before she fell asleep.
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That evening, while Tante Denise dabbed Granmè Melina’s wrinkled forehead with camphor and wrapped a scarf around her plaited cotton-white hair, Granmè Melina told us the story of the singing mother, the shut-in daughter and the snake, a story I thought was meant only to scare the neighborhood children. But I see now that the story was more about Granmè Melina than anyone. She was the daughter, locked inside a cocoon of sickness and old age while death pleaded to be let in somehow. That night, Granmè Melina didn’t finish the story, slipping into an abruptly sound sleep. Edging closer to the kerosene lamp that served as Granmè Melina’s nightlight, I leafed through my Madeleine, which managed to make even sickness—in Madeleine’s case it was appendicitis—seem like a lot of fun.
The next morning, a Saturday, my brother Bob came to wake me to go out and play with him. Bob was then nine and small for his age. A skinny, accident-prone little kid, he once had to be taken to the neighborhood clinic two times in one day, one for a tetanus shot after he stepped on a rusty nail walking barefoot outside and the other for sticking a wad of cotton too far up his nose. Bob was, as always, with Maxo’s son, Nick, who was ten, like Liline and me. Nick’s parents had separated soon after Nick was born, his mother leaving for Canada when his father moved to New York.
Nick was carrying a small tray with a piece of bread and a thermos full of coffee. Walking to his great-grandmother’s bed, he lowered the tray and placed it on a flat surface at her feet.
“She’s still sleeping?” Nick looked down at her face. It was paler than usual, wizened and pitted. Her lips were puckered and her jaws fastened tightly as though wired together. The sheet was raised over her chest in the same place Tante Denise had carefully tucked it the night before.
I checked beneath her cot. Her chamber pot was empty. She’d been unusually quiet throughout the night, I told the boys, never waking up to pee.
“I thought she asked for coffee,” Nick said. “Or did Manman [as he now called his grandmother] just send it?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that she might be dead. I had seen lots of dead bodies, not in their beds at home but at viewings and funerals at my uncle’s church.
Before my uncle’s operation, a big part of his job was to eulogize the dead. And even after his operation, he faithfully attended all church funerals, and believing that children shouldn’t be shielded from either the idea or the reality of death, he often brought Nick, Bob and me with him. So the sight of a corpse was not new to us. But the task of identifying one, recognizing the transition from the living to the dead, was.
“Let’s hold a mirror to her nose,” Bob suggested.
Had he heard about someone doing this? Had he seen it in one of the comic books he and Nick were always reading?
He ran out of the room and came back with one of Tante Denise’s pocketbook mirrors. When he lowered the mirror to Granmè Melina’s nose, the glass remained unchanged. There was no mist, no fog. Granmè Melina was not breathing.
“Check her eyes,” Nick suggested.
Moving his face closer to Granmè Melina’s, Bob pulled back one of her eyelids. Leaning in, I saw what looked like a brown marble with bright red veins wrapped around it.
“Li mouri,” he said calmly. She’s dead.
“Are you sure?” Nick asked.
The eyelid did not snap back by itself, so Bob had to lower it with the same index finger with which he’d raised it. By then we were all sure.
Until his operation, a death meant an eloquent homily from my uncle, a sermon that echoed my friend’s declaration that indeed, every day, we are all dying.
“Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born,” he’d say. “An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother’s womb. Thank God those around us are too blinded by joy then to realize it. Otherwise there would be weeping at births as well. But if we weep at a death, it’s because we do not understand death. If we saw death as another kind of birth, just as the Gospel exhorts us to, we wouldn’t weep, but rejoice, just as we do at the birth of a child.”
My uncle’s funeral homilies had rarely varied from this. Still, during Granmè Melina’s funeral, as he sat quietly in his usual seat at the altar, he might have had more personal words in mind for his mother-in-law. For at some point during the service, when one of the associate pastors was announced, my uncle got up from his seat and raced to the pulpit.
Sitting in the front pew with her sister Léone and two of her brothers, Tante Denise moved from side to side, shifting her weight uneasily. Unlike Léone, who wore a plain, short-sleeved, black cotton dress, Tante Denise wore a black lace dress with matching gloves and veil.
Nick leaned over and whispered to Bob and me, “What’s Papa”—as he called his grandfather—”doing?” We were sitting in the second row, behind Tante Denise, who turned back and gave us a scolding glance as Uncle Joseph stood motionless behind the pulpit. Tante Denise wasn’t one to coddle children and could have easily pulled any one of us aside for a spanking, even in the middle of her own mother’s funeral service.
Tante Denise turned her eyes back to the front of the church and along with the entire congregation was once again looking up at my uncle. Had he forgotten that he couldn’t speak? Should they expect some kind of miracle? But standing there as though stunned into silence, his face sullen, his eyes circling the room—Granmè Melina’s death perhaps a reminder of how close he himself had come to dying—he appeared a lot more distressed than the rest of the mourners. Reaching for the microphone, he unhinged it from its stand and raised it to his lips. He opened his mouth and just as he did every morning along with his Berlitz record, he mouthed one word: “Good-bye.”
A few gasps rose from the congregation, perhaps from people who thought they heard the same breathy murmur that those of us who were used to reading his lips and speaking for him often thought we heard. This, he seemed to want to say, was not like all the other funerals he’d attended, where he wished he’d been able to speak but couldn’t: those of the kids who died from microbes and viruses in infancy, the adolescents crushed by careless drivers on their way to or from school, the women who fell to malaria or typhoid fever or tuberculosis, the men who were beaten or shot to death by the henchmen of François Duvalier and later after his death in 1971, his replacement, son Jean-Claude. This was a woman, an old woman, who had traveled a long way from home and who had lived a long life. He too was hoping to live a long life. He had traded his voice for a cure. But now he couldn’t even properly say good-bye.
Giving Birth
Marie Micheline, Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s adopted daughter, was secretly pregnant in 1974, the year I turned five and she twenty-two. Wiry and slight, she was nevertheless able to hide her growing belly for nearly twenty-eight weeks, until the morning she overslept and didn’t wake up for an important nursing school exam.
When Tante Denise went to rouse her, she found her in her room, lying on her back, her stretched-out navel pointing straight up at the ceiling.
“Joseph Nosius!” Tante Denise cried out for my uncle, as though both she and Marie were in mortal danger.
Uncle Joseph was slow in coming, but Liline and I ran to Marie Micheline’s bedside. Liline and I both adored Marie Micheline because she was kind and pretty. But above all because of this: even though she was much older than us, she occasionally took time to ask us to her room or to sit down next to us at a meal and whisper in our ear a story that proved how much our absent parents loved us. Mine was the story of the butter cookies, which she told me over and over again. I don’t know what the details of Liline’s story were, but it had something to do with her father leaving her with us.
“He loved you so much,” she would say out loud at the end of the story, “he left you with us.”
With Tante Denise panting over her, Marie Micheline stirred and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. Her short hair was curled in tight sponge rollers and wrapped in the thic
k dark web of a fishnet. When she removed her hands from her eyes she seemed unsure of what we were all doing there.
“You can’t stay in this house now.” Tante Denise grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her. “Your father’s a pastor. How is it going to look if his daughter is pregnant without the benefit of marriage?”
Of course, Tante Denise herself had been pregnant and had given birth to Maxo without the benefit of a church ceremony. But her status back then had been different. Hers had been, even if not a religious marriage, a common-law one. She was in love with and living with her man and she was not yet in the church.
Marie Micheline looked down at her stomach, quickly lowered the nightgown and raised the sheet that had slipped off her body during the night. She did not immediately look up as Uncle Joseph at last walked into the room. He still had his crisp and muted voice then and lowered it even more to signal calm.
Sitting at the foot of the bed, he gently stroked Marie Micheline’s covered feet.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Marie Micheline looked into his eyes. I want to understand, they seemed to say. Her long, narrow face, which sometimes looked as smooth and peaceful as a plastic doll’s, crumpled into sobs.
“She’s pregnant,” Tante Denise yelled, pulling the sheet and nightgown aside to show him Marie Micheline’s stomach.
My uncle gasped at the sight. Marie Micheline’s belly was small but heavily veined. Still it looked as though it might soon creep up and swallow the space occupied by her breasts.
“How many months?” he asked.