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. Granme Lorvana had died soon after everyone had moved to Bel Air and was the first member of our family to be buried outside of Beausejour. 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.
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 bientot 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.”
