spot.
My father’s new boss was always covered in jewelry. In addition to a gold necklace as thick as his belt, he wore an equally fat bracelet and two large gold rings on each hand.
“If men wore earrings back then,” my father used to say, “he’d have worn four.”
But the boss’s personal extravagance belied what he would pay my father. His salary was modest, less than the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars a month, with the possibility of a commission on sales of more than three pairs of shoes.
Having worked nonstop both as an apprentice and for himself, my father thought his new job would be a breeze. All he had to do was talk people into buying something they needed anyway.
The store carried shoes in many styles and price ranges. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, rubber shoes, plastic shoes-and the most expensive of all, leather shoes. He was told to emphasize that all the shoes, like the owner of the shop, were from Italy.
“Otherwise you can get any street corner cordonier to make you a pair of shoes,” the boss encouraged him to tell the customers.
But of course very few of the shoes were actually from Italy. The rest, he discovered, came from the United States via Puerto Rico.
Every once in a while, my uncle would recommend to his growing congregation that they buy their shoes from my father. Papa, in turn, convinced his boss to offer special discounts to my uncle’s parishioners by reminding him that church people were less likely to use birth control, which meant many more potential customers.
That period in my father’s life, the early sixties, was also shadowed by much larger events. Papa Doc Duvalier, who’d followed Daniel Fignole into the presidential palace, refused to step down or allow new elections, despite a growing dissatisfaction with his increasingly repressive methods of imprisoning and publicly executing his enemies. Instead he had created a countrywide militia called the Tonton Macoutes, a battalion of brutal men and women aggressively recruited from the country’s urban and rural poor. Upon joining the Macoutes, the recruits received an identification card, which showed their allegiance to Papa Doc Duvalier, an indigo denim uniform, a.38 and the privilege of doing whatever they wanted.
My father recalled how some macoutes would walk into the shoe store, ask for the best shoes and simply grab them and walk away. He couldn’t protest or run after them or he might risk being shot.
After losing too many shoes, his boss came up with a solution. He ordered a large number of third-rate, non-leather shoes that looked like the real thing. Most of the macoutes who walked in wanting to steal shoes either didn’t care or couldn’t tell the difference anyway. If they asked to try on a pair of shoes, my father was to let them try on only the three-dollar shoes.
Papa would always get a knot in his stomach when a macoute asked him if there were other shoes. He would try not to shake as he replied, “Non,” all the while bending and massaging the cheap shoes to make them appear more supple. In the end, it was this experience of bending shoes all day and worrying about being shot that started him thinking about leaving Haiti.
My parents tell slightly differently the story of how they met in 1962, when they were both twenty-seven years old. In my mother’s version, they met in a Bel Air grocery store owned by one of my mother’s older sisters and where she often went to help out. Back then my mother was slender, beautiful, in a brooding, melancholy kind of way, and painfully shy. One day my father walked into the tiny, dimly lit shop, where my mother greeted him with a smile at the door. A few days later she just happened to visit the shoe store on Grand Rue to buy a pair of shoes. He helped her try on a few women’s shoes, none of which fit. She thanked him and left the store.
My father has no recollection of the first meeting at the grocery store. He simply remembers her walking into the shoe store, too shy to even look up from her dusty old sandals. He wanted to keep her in the store as long as possible, so he gave her shoes to try on that he knew wouldn’t fit her. Finally when, frustrated, she walked out of the store, he followed her home.
They were married three years later.
Before my mother came along, Uncle Joseph wanted my father to marry Tante Denise’s sister Leone, who, though she was five years younger than Tante Denise, looked like her twin. They were nearly identical, except Leone dressed more casually than Tante Denise, for whom being the pastor’s wife meant never leaving the house without her matching hat and gloves and one of her many shoulder-length wigs, which she preferred to her own shortly cropped hair. The fact that Tante Denise made her own clothes and could buy cloth at a discount from my uncle’s fabric shop made it easy for her to maintain her consistently elegant attire. Leone lacked the means and interest and thus always looked like the twin who, though just as pretty, had been abandoned at birth. Though Leone loved my father, he wasn’t interested in her.
Besides, as he told me one night during that visit after his diagnosis, when we happened to stumble on the bride-capture musical
After my parents married, they moved into a small house in an increasingly packed section of Bel Air. The cement floor of their two-room rental was the same drab color as the walls. There were no windows or jalousies, just some diamond-shaped openings in the concrete, which let in some air and also plenty of water when it rained. My mother decorated the best she could, draping the walls with wide ruffled curtains she made herself. They wanted to have children right away, but couldn’t conceive, prompting my uncle and Tante Denise to constantly request prayers for them at church.
My parents were about to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary when I was born, in 1969. Twenty months later, Bob followed. After Bob and I were born, my father started sewing again when he came home from the shoe store. My mother joined him in making school uniforms and tiny flags for schoolchildren to wave on Flag Day.
One afternoon before closing the shoe store, my father was talking to his boss about the boss’s son, who was soon leaving for vacation in New York.
“You think I can get a visa?” my father asked.
Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate, like both.
My father’s boss offered to write him a letter of support for his application.
Because he had a job, a wife and two children as incentives to return to Haiti, my father was granted a one-month tourist visa. But he had no intention of coming back.
I have no memory of my father’s departure, or of anything that preceded it. Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s adopted daughter, Marie Micheline, liked to tell me how the year before my father left, he would often buy a small pack of butter cookies on his way home from work in the evening, which he intended to give me. I didn’t like the cookies. But my face would light up when I saw them, and I’d laugh and laugh when he’d give me one and I’d return it to him only to hoot even more when he popped it in his mouth.
I’ve since discovered that children who spend their childhood without their parents love to hear stories like this, which they can embellish and expand as they wish. These types of anecdotes momentarily put our minds at ease, assuring us that we were indeed loved by the parent who left. Unfortunately, I wasn’t told many stories like that. What I did often hear about was the future, an undetermined time when my father would send for my mother, Bob and me.
Once my father was gone, Uncle Joseph would stop by every now and then to see us after work, and of course my mother, Bob and I continued to attend services at his church. Fiercely independent and too proud to seek his involvement or ask for loans when the monthly allowance my father sent her ran out, my mother continued my father’s work, sewing school uniforms and flags. One Sunday morning when she had no money at all, my mother dropped us on my uncle’s lap after church so we could have a proper Sunday meal with him and Tante Denise.
