words.
In the end, after becoming better acquainted with the machine, I pecked out only one letter to Uncle Joseph. It was brief, telling him that Bob and I were all right, were getting along fine with our parents and brothers and were thinking of him and Tante Denise, Nick and Liline, Tante Zi and Tante Tina, Marie Micheline and Ruth, and everyone else. My letter was really a list of names, an inventory of the people whose faces popped into my head every day and whose voices echoed in my ear every night.
My uncle did not write back, perhaps wanting to allow us some distance, some time to merge into our family without any meddling from him. He had written to my father, however, sending him a note whenever a friend traveled from Haiti to New York. After reading his notes, my father would always tell us that my uncle had told him to say hello to “Edwidge, Bob, Kelly and Karl.” Were Bob and I no longer special to him? I wondered. No longer worth setting apart?
There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bo, kite yon bo.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back. I wonder if after we left for New York, my uncle felt that way.
A few years ago, I discovered, then lost again, a few lines I had typed, in red ink, a couple of summers after we arrived in New York.
Unlike a yellow cab, a gypsy has no medallions or affiliations. It belongs entirely to the driver, who roams the streets all day looking for fares.
Every Saturday morning after we arrived, my father left home extra early, at four or five a.m., to roam for fares.
“Be careful,” my mother called out after him with sleep in her voice.
Stirred awake by the shuffle of both their feet, my brothers and I also wanted to call out, “Be careful,” but we didn’t, because it would have worried my father to think that we too were fretting about him.
After my father left the apartment, my mother would rush back to her room to open the window over the fire escape and watch him start his motor and pull away. My brothers and I would have liked to do this too, but our window did not face the street, and it would have troubled our mother to know that we were also worried about our father.
Once, while working very early on a Saturday morning, my father cut in front of some teenagers in a stolen van and they shot three bullets at his car. He had a passenger dozing off in the back and miraculously neither he nor the passenger was hurt.
He never told us these types of things directly. Instead he recounted what my brothers and I called his street adventures at the Monday-night prayer meetings, where families took turns gathering at one another’s houses each week.
“Even my family hasn’t heard this,” he would begin. “I didn’t want to worry them.”
Another Saturday morning, three men held a gun to his head and forced him to drive to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where they asked him to give them all the money he had in the car. When they found out he had only a few dollars in his pocket, they hit his face with a crowbar and ran away. His face was bruised, black and blue and swollen, but given the circumstances, he made out okay, which is exactly what he told the prayer group the following Monday. “I was only in the emergency room a few hours, most of the time waiting for a doctor to see me. Given the circumstances, I made out okay.”
Once in a while, throughout my teens, I’d find myself riding in the front seat as my father picked up fares. Often he was taking me somewhere, but picked up the fare anyway.
One afternoon, an old man called my father a stupid idiot because my father had mistaken one street for another. Another time my father picked up a woman who, when he asked her to repeat her address, shouted at the top of her voice, “No one who drives a cab speaks English anymore!”
My father rarely talked back. “What would be the use?” he would say. “I need their money more than they need my service.”
Every now and then a passenger would arrive at his or her destination, open the door and run into a building without paying. Others would say they were going to get money and never come back. My father never went after them. His crowbar and gunshot encounters had taught him that something much worse than getting stiffed might be lying in wait.
Yet another Saturday morning, when I was fourteen, as my father was driving me to an extra tutorial at school, I began to ask myself what type of work I wanted to do. Would I be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, as most Haitian adults, including my parents, hoped their children would be? Or would I do something else?
“Do you ever wish you could do something other than drive your cab?” I asked my father.
“Sure,” he answered.
I thought I saw his hands shaking, his lips quivering. He bit down on the lower one, hard, to make the trembling stop. He probably thought I was judging him, telling him that what he was doing was not honorable, prestigious, intelligent enough. However, having started, I couldn’t stop.
“What would you do if you weren’t driving a cab?” I asked, watching his grip tighten on the wheel.
He stared ahead at the busy street as though it were a screen onto which he could project his life. Had his parents wished him to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer? A farmer? A fighter? Had he nursed some other dream for himself?
“If I could do something else,” my father finally said, “I’d be either a grocer or an undertaker. Because we all must eat and we all must die.”
PART TWO. FOR ADVERSITY
A friend loves at all times,
and a brother is born for adversity.
PROVERBS 17:17
Brother, I Can Speak
In the summer of 1983, when I was fourteen and Bob was twelve years old, Uncle Joseph came to New York for a medical checkup. Knowing that we couldn’t wait to see him, my father took Bob and me to the airport to meet him. My mother had insisted that we wear our crisply ironed new clothes, a bright orange sundress for me and a pair of dress pants and an immaculate white T-shirt for Bob. It seemed to me that my parents wanted my uncle to see us at our best, perhaps even to show him that they were taking good care of us, that they’d washed the proverbial part of us that he and Tante Denise might have left dirty. As we stood in the waiting area, I shifted my weight nervously, all the while wondering whether my uncle
