showing all of his false teeth. “But it’s better than not speaking at all.”
That summer when my uncle went back to Haiti, he sold his first house, the one Bob and I and everyone else in the family had lived in with him and Tante Denise. The house was beginning to fall apart and, since everyone had left, it felt too large for just Tante Denise and him. He then built a small three-bedroom apartment for Tante Denise and himself in the courtyard behind the school and church. He also got a home telephone on which he used to call us often. Sometimes I’d call him just to say hello, which felt like a miracle unto itself.
At first I’d say, “Can you believe we’re talking to each other?” And he’d say, “Can you?” But after a few minutes, as he caught me up on things, his life, Tante Denise, political news from Haiti, his voice seemed no more unusual than mine or anyone else’s. He was expanding his work, he said, adding to the school and church in Bel Air a clinic that was run by Marie Micheline.
Marie Micheline had left her job as head nurse at the other neighborhood clinic and was now helping him with his work. They were together more than ever. She was thirty-seven years old but, from the pictures I saw of her, looked no older than she did at twenty-two. She’d had three boys after Ruth, with two men who, as my uncle put it, again had not loved her enough. I often imagined myself all grown up and my father talking about me in the same forgiving way that my uncle talked about Marie Micheline. Perhaps because he had rescued her not once, but twice, he loved her even more deeply, more unconditionally.
After he left for Cuba, Marie Micheline’s biological father had never contacted them, prompting Tante Denise to call her their Moses girl. She was
“She needs to realize she’s not a girl playing with boys anymore,” Tante Denise would say even after Marie Micheline had had four children.
“She attracts bad, just like she did Pressoir,” Uncle Joseph would say, “but she’s not a bad person.”
On February 7, 1986, my uncle’s sixty-third birthday, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled Haiti for France, leaving a military junta in charge of the country. The junta, which ruled for two years, was led by an ambitious army officer, Lieutenant General Henri Namphy. A new president, Leslie Manigat, was sworn in on February 7, 1988, my uncle’s sixty-fifth birthday. Because Baby Doc’s departure had taken place on February 7, my uncle’s birthday had become the official date for Haitian presidential inaugurations and swearings in.
Four months after he was inaugurated, Leslie Manigat was ousted by Lieutenant General Namphy. Soon, Namphy was himself deposed by a military rival, General Prosper Avril. In April 1989, a group of former Tonton Macoutes and hard-line Duvalier loyalists tried to topple Avril in a failed coup, creating hostilities within the army.
The battle between the opposing military factions came to Bel Air one April afternoon when one group chased the other to Rue Tirremasse and the wrought-iron gate of the church clinic. Marie Micheline was sitting alone, behind her desk, looking through some notes she’d scribbled on the twenty or so patients she’d seen that day. They were all minor cases, for once, mostly cuts and scrapes and two infants with low-grade fevers. She’d not had to send anyone to the public hospital.
She was probably just reaching over to slip the files into a small metal cabinet beside her when she heard one gunshot followed by a volley of bullets. Looking up, she would have seen a whirl of camouflage racing past the open metal gate. At this point, she may have thought of the forty people who according to newspaper reports had died that week, caught in the crossfire of such battles all over Port-au-Prince. She may have thought of Ruth or of her three young sons, Pouchon, Marc and Ronald, who were due back from school at any time. She may have thought of Tante Denise, to whom she was to give an insulin shot in a few minutes. Of Uncle Joseph, whose blood pressure she also monitored daily at the same time.
She got up from her desk and ran to the gate, hoping to close it before one of the soldiers barged in. But what if someone needed her help? And how would she feel if Ruth, Pouchon, Marc or Ronald was shot because the gate was closed and they couldn’t come in?
Neighbors saw her standing in the doorway with beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. Then a bullet whizzed by, bouncing off the gate with a spark.
The street was suddenly blurry, a cloud of dust descending in the wake of speeding military pickups. Had she been shot? In the heart? She clutched her chest and fell to the floor. She never regained consciousness.
Because Ron Howell, a New York journalist, happened to be covering the military shoot-out in Bel Air that afternoon, Marie Micheline’s death was the subject of a
Marie Micheline, wrote Howell, was in many ways “a reflection of Haiti and its potential, a flicker of light frustrated in its attempt to shine.”
When you hear that someone has died whom you’ve not seen in a long time, it’s not too difficult to pretend that it hasn’t really happened, that the person is continuing to live just as she has before, in your absence, out of your sight. The day of Marie Micheline’s funeral, when I spoke to my uncle on the phone, I experienced the biggest failing of his new voice. Like distance, it masked pain. Still, his pauses were like sobs, the expansion or contraction of his words mechanical traces of sorrow.
That night I told my uncle a story that I’d just remembered myself. Of being eight years old and carrying a note home from school requesting that my parent or guardian come to my class to spank me, because I hadn’t finished all my homework. That afternoon when I got home, I’d given Marie Micheline the note, thinking that she’d go a lot easier on me than either my uncle or Tante Denise. However, the next morning when she went to the school, Marie Micheline took Mademoiselle Sanon, my very tall, slim and prim teacher, aside, and under an almond tree in a corner of the bustling recess yard, whispered in her ear for five minutes.
“What did you tell her?” I asked Marie Micheline as she walked me back to class with a broad smile on her face.
I gripped her soft, small hands, unable to imagine them pounding me with the stiff cow leather whip, the rigwaz, with which parents and teachers often thrashed their children’s behinds or palms.
“I’m going to take care of her and her entire family at the neighborhood clinic for a year,” she said. “They’ll never have to wait and they’ll never have to pay. For that, she won’t send anyone in your class home with spanking letters for a month.”
“Just a month?” I asked.
“That’s the best I could do,” she said.
“Her own children,” my uncle said at the end of my story. “How can four children lose their mother in an instant like that?”
Fearful of losing them too, he was going to try and get a visa for Ruth and the boys to join some of Marie Micheline’s biological mother’s relatives who were now living in Canada.
Before she was buried, a coroner had determined that Marie Micheline died from a heart attack. But when I spoke to Tante Denise, who cried as though she were hollering to the heavens in protest, she said that no one could convince her of a simpler truth: that watching the bullets fly, the violence of her neighborhood, the rapid unraveling of her country, Marie Micheline had been frightened to death.
The Angel of Death and Father God
In 1990, General Prosper Avril resigned, making room for the December 1990 elections, in which a young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had developed a
