“His name is Karl,” she said, “and he’s two months old.”
Looking down at Karl, snugly cradled in our mother’s arms, I couldn’t help but feel envious. If she could bring him here from New York, why hadn’t she been able to take Bob and me with her when she left? At the same time, I could tell from the way she stopped now and then to run her fingers over both his face and mine that she meant him to be a link between us.
“Can I hold him a little?” I asked.
Not used to holding babies then, I was shocked when she leaned over and actually placed his doughy wriggling little body in my arms.
Our extended family gathered quickly as news of my parents’ arrival spread. Crowding the living room were my father’s sisters, Tante Zi and Tante Tina, Tante Denise’s brothers George and Bosi, Marie Micheline and two-year-old Ruth, who along with Kelly skipped and hopped and crawled between our legs. Dragging on a cigarette, my father sprinted around and beamed at everyone. Family members, including my aunts, and even strangers who saw my father during that visit tell me they’d found his charm magnetic and contagious, almost like a movie star or a politician. But then again, my father would later tell me, it was easy to be charming when you returned home on a trip that you’d been dreaming about, practicing and rehearsing in your mind for years. Even the cigarette was like a prop in a play. He was an actor playing the part of someone who wished he wasn’t a factory worker or a taxi driver.
That night, between cigarettes, my father recounted New York to us.
“What does snow feel like?” Tante Denise’s oldest brother, George, asked.
My father didn’t talk about how cold and damp snow could be or how slippery and dangerous it could become when gelled and frozen. He didn’t talk about the beauty of the individual flakes or how a few feet of them could look like a pasty rug over a lumpy bed. The only thing we have to compare it to, he simply said, was hail.
“I hear it can be just as dangerous in New York,” Tante Denise’s other brother, Bosi, said. “As dangerous as it can be with the macoutes here.”
This led my father into two urban legends from New York’s Haitian community. A woman was robbed weekly by a masked young man in the elevator of her apartment building. One day she carried a kitchen knife, which she used to stab her robber. When she removed the thief’s mask, she realized it was her son. In the other story, a young man had led some school pals to five thousand dollars that his mother was hiding in her mattress and in a struggle for the money the mother had been shot.
My father told these stories as though he had seen them happen, in the elevator, in the bedroom. As he spoke, his audience gasped, in awe, in fear, in admiration of his pluck.
“New York, like today’s Haiti,” he said, while bouncing a tired-looking Kelly on his lap, “is a place where only the brave survive.”
My father yawned, reminding us that he, my mother and Kelly and Karl had an appointment at the American consulate early the next morning. Dressing for bed, I wondered whether Bob and I would be excused from our usual sleeping arrangements—he with Nick and me with Liline—to bunk with our prodigal family. But there wasn’t enough space. In one of the spare rooms, my father and Kelly were already sharing a cot so my mother and Karl could have a bed to themselves.
I waited until everyone else in the house was in bed before going in to say good night. Walking on the tips of my toes, I rapped softly on the door so I wouldn’t wake the baby. My mother was already asleep with Karl at her side. Before my mother had left us, one night she and Bob had dozed off together in bed tucked tightly against each other, just as she and Karl were now. This was my first experience of nearly heart-shattering jealousy.
There was only my father to say good night to now, and Kelly, whose eyes were barely open, his super-long eyelashes batting between wakefulness and sleep. Fearing the wiry hairs on my father’s prickly beard, I closed my eyes when I kissed his cheek. And even as he pulled me into his arms and poked at my ribs and tried to make me laugh, I was still certain that I would open my eyes and he’d be gone.
The next morning my parents left for the consulate at dawn. As Bob, Nick and I ate our breakfast, the house seemed strangely empty, void of their sudden, but now vital presences.
Fidgeting on the edge of his seat, Bob said, “Manman and Papa had an appointment. They’ll be back.”
“Be quiet,” I ordered. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know,” he said. His mouth curled up and he looked like he was going to cry.
I could imagine him announcing to the other children in his class that his parents, who his classmates knew were living in New York, had come back. He didn’t seem to understand that they’d not come to stay.
Returning from school, we found my father sitting in the living room next to my uncle, the two of them sifting through a handful of pictures from their mother’s funeral. Granmè Lorvana had died soon after everyone had moved to Bel Air and was the first member of our family to be buried outside of Beauséjour. Hers was our clan’s first funeral procession with hired musicians trailing her hearse as it crept toward a newly constructed city mausoleum. In their mother’s funeral pictures, my father, mustached and youthful, was photographed standing next to the brand-new mausoleum with his brothers and sisters.
“Look at this one.” My father held out one of the pictures to my uncle, suddenly reminding me of the way Bob and I sometimes sought my uncle’s attention. For most of my father’s life, my uncle had been more a parental than a fraternal figure. With twelve years between them—in his time, my uncle liked to say, a twelve-year-old was already a man—neither one of them had any memory of ever playing together. When my father was born, my uncle had been too busy studying, working, and doing his best to help look after the family.
“How was school?” my uncle asked, looking up from the pictures at Bob and me.
“How was it?” echoed my father.
Bob walked over and, ignoring my uncle completely, jumped on my father’s lap.
“Okay, I’m not going to forget this,” teased my uncle.
I leaned over and kissed them both on the cheek, making sure, after my brother’s slight, to kiss my uncle first. As I did this, my father reached into his pants pocket and handed Bob a fistful of American pennies. Some of the copper coins were bright and new, others older and darker. As my brother tried to balance them in his small hand, many of the pennies slipped and fell to the floor, rolling into unseen corners under the sofas and chairs.
Weeks, months after my father had left, I would find his pennies all throughout the house, in sunken corners of the living room floor, between the mattresses on the cot where he slept. Before deciding what to do with them, I would drape pieces of white paper over them and trace the outline of the man on one side, a man with a beard just like my father’s.
Once they’d been granted their residency papers, my parents planned to stay another week. But they had to cut their trip short when both Kelly and Karl got sick with diarrhea. My uncle took them to the neighborhood clinic where Marie Micheline worked as the head nurse. The doctor there advised my parents to quickly take the boys back to their own doctors in the United States.
This time at the airport, my mother looked anxious as she clutched a fidgety Karl to her chest. Walking to the outdoor staircase leading to the plane, my father made Kelly wave toward the second-floor patio, where Uncle Joseph, Tante Denise and Bob and I were standing. At the airplane’s entrance, my mother adjusted Karl in her arms and freed one of her hands to wave back. They hadn’t told us anything. Would they be back? Would we soon be joining them? We were never told things directly, I thought even then. That would imply that we had a say when we really had none.
At the airport, I thought I might cry, throw another tantrum as I did the first time my mother left, but I didn’t, and neither did Bob. We were much older now and were more accustomed to being without them than being with them. At least, I remember thinking, we had seen them again.
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One Papa Happy, One Papa Sad
In 1980, four long years after my parents’ visit, the American consulate wrote to my uncle requesting that Bob and I take a physical to see if we were in good enough health to travel to the United States. I was eleven years old.
Usually a physical was the last step in approving an application, so everyone began to speak to me as though I were already gone.
“In New York,” Tante Denise said, “you’ll have to be good and help your mother.”
“In New York,” Marie Micheline said, “you must write me every week so you can keep up your French.”
“In New York,” Nick said, “be sure to buy me a nice watch.”
“In New York,” Liline said, “be sure to find me a gold necklace.”
I agreed to everything, of course. When I get to New York, I thought, I’ll have to become a slave to fulfill all the promises I’ve made.
Between us and New York, however, stood a list of consulate-approved doctors and the extensive examination they were required to perform.
My uncle chose a doctor whose clinic had the feel of a transitional middle world between our parents’ and ours. On the walls of his examining room were hygiene posters in Creole, French and Spanish, and diplomas and certificates from both Haitian and American universities.
The doctor was short and barrel-chested with skin the same color as his curly black hair, which he wore parted on one side. As he pushed my head back and pried open my mouth, he spoke to me in French, then repeated himself in English.
“Parce qu’il faudra bientôt apprendre l’anglais,” he said. Because you’ll soon have to learn English.
While Bob and my uncle looked on, he made me push out my tongue, palpated my neck for swollen glands, listened to my heart and lungs with his stethoscope, then hit my knees with a small hammer, making my legs rise involuntarily. After he’d done the same to Bob, he wrote out a referral for chest X-rays to be taken at the public hospital down the street.
The small windowless waiting room in the public hospital’s radiography department was filled with many more patients than it could hold comfortably. More were already interned in the hospital and were lying on gurneys in the narrow hallway. Others were sitting on the few available chairs or on the chipped cement floor, their fractured limbs wrapped in homemade bandages and slings. Others tried to cough discreetly even as they held their chests and hid the bright red spots they’d spat into their handkerchiefs, a sure sign of tuberculosis.
When my turn came, I followed the attendant into a dark room with a giant machine. My uncle and Bob were told to wait outside, leaving me in the dark with the stranger. The spark was like a flash of lightning. The attendant came around again, this time putting me in profile.
My uncle and I waited in the hallway as Bob had his turn. Pacing back and forth, my uncle kept his head down and both his hands in his pockets. Since his surgery, hospitals made him extremely nervous.
A few days later, the doctor sent word for us to return to his office. When we entered the examining room, he was wearing a white surgical mask.
“The X-rays have returned,” he said, looking only at my uncle. His voice was slightly distorted by the mask, so he raised it slightly to make sure my uncle heard him. “There’s a problem.”
He knew that Uncle Joseph couldn’t speak and did not expect a reply.
“These children,” he said, glancing momentarily at Bob and me, “appear to have tuberculosis.”
My uncle raised both his eyebrows to display shock. I too was surprised. After all, we didn’t have a cough that made us spit up blood. Would we now have to be quarantined, be sent to the sanatorium?
One of Liline’s cousins, who was named Melina after Granmè Melina, had gotten full-blown tuberculosis at sixteen. She had visited Liline now and then, and I’d watched as she’d regularly stop whatever she was doing to double over and cough. She was eventually sent to the sanatorium and died a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday.
Sleeping on the top bunk above Liline and her, those few times she’d spent the night, I’d probably caught the tuberculosis from her and passed it on to my brother. Or maybe Bob had caught it from a kid at school, a kid who didn’t even know he had it, and had passed it on to me.
“Fortunately their tuberculosis is not active,” the doctor said, “but we have to treat them immediately to be sure it stays that way. The treatment will last six months.”
Does that mean I’m not going to die? I wanted to ask.
My uncle’s mouth narrowed into a small O. Six months of treatment meant six more months in Haiti. That would mean six more months with our uncle and aunt and our cousin and friends, but also six more months away from our parents and brothers. Just then, sitting in the doctor’s old and prickly wicker chair, I was not concerned about any of that. I simply didn’t want to have tuberculosis and I certainly did not want to die.
I would think back to this moment when, early in my father’s illness, after a weeklong hospitalization following an emergency room visit for shortness of breath, he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital because his skin test was positive. The doctors had not yet eliminated the possibility of tuberculosis, and all the hospital workers, along with my father’s visitors, were ordered to wear surgical masks before they approached his bed in an isolated section of the ward. Perhaps recalling the horrors of tuberculosis—it was once as deadly as AIDS during the virus’s early years—the specter of mortality it posed, and the fact that in Bel Air the word “tibèkile,” or TB carrier, had often been hurled as an insult, when he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital, my father asked my brother Karl to tell the doctors that a lot of Haitians test positive on the skin test even though they don’t actually have active tuberculosis.
“I don’t have this disease,” he insisted. “Tell them.”
“We don’t have this disease,” I wanted to scream that day as the doctor gave us—rather, gave my uncle—our directives.
“Even though they’re not infectious, we can’t be too careful,” the doctor said. “They must now use their own utensils. No sharing with others.”
Since we all shared meals and utensils at home, this would be a constant reminder both to us and everyone else that our bodies were hosting a potentially deadly contagion.
“They have to follow the treatment closely,” the doctor continued. “They must take the pills every day or the virus will get stronger and will move to other parts of their bodies. Unless their X-rays read differently in six months, they won’t be able to travel.”
He wrote two prescriptions, which he handed to my uncle.
“Don’t forget,” he told us, looking into our faces at last. “Every morning when you take your pills, you’re closer to New York.”
My uncle stopped by a pharmacy on Grand Rue, where his youngest sister, Tante Zi, had a stationery stand. Surrounded by mounds of pens and notebooks, Tante Zi jumped out of her chair and instantly scooped Bob up in her arms.
Of my father’s sisters, Tante Zi was the most playful. Short and plump, and at her roundest looking and feeling like a feather pillow, she liked to pull Bob and me into her arms whenever she saw us and bury her face in our necks, tickling us with the tip of her nose.
She and Bob were caught in just such an embrace when I blurted out, “You can’t do that anymore.”
“Why not?” She released Bob, handing him a brand-new pen and notebook to scribble in as he sat on the footstool in front of her.
“Because we have TB,” I said.
She seemed stunned, looking up at my uncle for confirmation. My uncle shrugged, then slapped one hand on top of the other as if to say, “What are you going to do?”
As if to answer, Tante Zi motioned for me to come to her, and just as she always had, wrapped her arms around my neck and sweetly buried her nose in my neck.
From that day on, every morning before school, even as other children walked by and stared, my uncle would line Bob, Nick and me up on the front g
allery and as Tante Denise held our ceramic cups of water—our own, which we were not allowed to share with anyone else—handed us the aspirin-like pills that were meant to cure us. Nick, it turned out, also “failed” his precautionary X-rays and had to be treated along with us. Liline, however, had tested negative.
Once the pill was in our mouths, my uncle would hand us each a large spoonful of cod-liver oil, which we were to swallow before Tante Denise would surrender the water.
Perhaps fearing that we might gag, Tante Denise would always cry out, “Fè vit, fè vit,” urging us to hurry up and wash the pills down, before she took the cups back.
During our treatment, Bob developed a palm-sized rash on his back that alternately bled and scabbed over. At first the doctor, whom during our monthly checkups I began to think of as Dr. TB, told us that Bob’s rash was unrelated to his medication, but then I developed an even larger lesion on my right buttock, and he was forced to admit some connection. Nick, on the other hand, completely lost his appetite, dropped eight pounds, and constantly complained of cold feet.
Thankfully the rashes, coldness and loss of appetite went away when our treatment ended six months later. After another series of X-rays, Dr. TB gave Bob and me our medical clearance to travel to the United States.
But a new problem emerged. During the six months that we were being treated, my father was laid off from the glass factory where he was working, and because both my parents and Kelly and Karl were now surviving on my mother’s modest income as a textile factory worker, our application was placed on hold until my father could prove that he and my mother had enough income to provide for all of us. Just when my uncle needed them most, my father stopped writing us letters around this time. In his final note, he proposed that we try the now much cheaper call centers run by Teleco, the national telephone company.