massive following through his bold sermons against the Duvaliers, won 67 percent of the vote. Aristide was sworn in on February 7, 1991, my uncle’s sixty-eighth birthday.
I remember talking to my uncle that night. After accepting my birthday wishes, he moved on to Aristide, saying that in the young priest he saw flickers of his onetime hero, Daniel Fignole. Aristide’s firebrand speeches and his political party, the Lavalas or Flood Party, echoed what Fignole used to call his woulo komprese, or steamroller, his throng of rabidly loyal supporters, to which my uncle had belonged.
Like most people, my uncle had voted for Aristide.
“He’s certainly the best man,” he’d said. “But in my old age, I’m no longer interested in best men. I’m interested in the people around me and what he can do for them.”
But only seven months later, on September 30, 1991, Aristide was ousted by a military coup. Aristide fled to Venezuela, then Washington, where he stayed for three years. Still, like most of the population, which had eagerly elected him, Bel Air residents remained steadfast in calling for his return through protests and demonstrations. In retaliation, the army raided and torched houses and killed hundreds of my uncle’s neighbors.
My uncle managed to stay out of harm’s way by avoiding the demonstrations and all other overtly political activity, including speaking out against the military from the pulpit of his church. Still, every morning he got up to count the many bloody corpses that dotted the street corners and alleys of Bel Air. During the years when he couldn’t speak, he had developed a habit of jotting things down, so he kept track of the cadavers in the small notepads he always carried in his jacket pocket. In his notebooks, he wrote the names of the victims, when he knew them, the condition of their bodies and the times they were picked up, either by family members or by the sanitation service, to be transported to the morgue or dumped in mass graves.
Jonas, pt. 20 ans, main droite absente, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, pt. 35 ans, nue, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 ans, chany, 5:42 p.m.
Male inconnu, pt. 25 ans, visage mutilee, 9:17 p.m.
Jonas, maybe 20 years old, missing right hand, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, maybe 35 years old, naked, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 years old, shoeshine man, 5:42 p.m.
Unknown male, 25 years old, face mutilated, 9:17 p.m.
Over the first weeks of the coup, my father called nearly every day, begging my uncle and Tante Denise to leave Bel Air. They’d go to Leogane for a few days to visit with Tante Denise’s sister, Leone, but would always return in time for Sunday services.
Anxious, my father became angry, shouting at the end of their conversations, “You’re responsible. Whatever happens to you there, you’re responsible if you don’t leave.”
I’m not sure why my uncle and Tante Denise never left for good. Maybe it’s as simple as not wanting to be driven out of their home.
After Marie Micheline died, I asked my uncle why they, and in turn Marie Micheline, hadn’t tried to move to New York like my parents did.
“It’s not easy to start over in a new place,” he said. “Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
Plus he had more work to do, more souls to save, more children to teach.
In the fall of 1994, Aristide returned to Haiti, accompanied by twenty thousand U.S. soldiers. Citing the brutality of the military regime and the menace of a mass exodus of Haitian refugees to nearby Florida, then president Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy.
The day Aristide returned, Tante Denise suffered a mild stroke. After more than two decades away, my cousin Maxo returned to Bel Air. That fall, I too went back to Haiti for the first time, at twenty-five years old.
On the ride to Bel Air, I looked through the cracked windshield of a hired car and saw more people on the now rutted streets than I ever remembered. On nearly every wall was a mural of a rooster, the symbol of Aristide’s Lavalas Party, or of the American military helicopter on which Aristide had flown back to the national palace. There were also monuments to losses everywhere: the charred shantytowns of La Saline and Cite Soleil, the busts and friezes of the murdered: a justice minister, a campaign financier and a beloved priest among thousands of others. Piles of brick and ashes stood where homes and offices had been, places that had been both constructed and destroyed in the time I’d been gone. Chunks of Port-au-Prince, I realized, had been wholly assembled and disassembled in my absence.
In many other ways, however, very little had changed. The crippled beggars were still lined up on the steps of the national cathedral and the used-booksellers’ scattered stands across from it. The water women still carried water by the bucket on their heads. The colorfully painted lottery stands were still selling hundreds of tickets to hopeful dreamers. The visa applicants still gathered in droves at the gates of the American consulate.
My uncle’s street was now crammed with oddly shaped unfinished concrete homes. The alleys were gutted and filled with trash. Yet, when he showed me his list of casualties, written in handwriting so tiny he had to help me decipher them, all I could see was Jonas, Gladys, Samuel and the hundreds of men and women who’d died, their mutilated bodies eternally rotting under the boiling sun.
Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s apartment was painted pink like the old house, except the dining room overlooking the tiny courtyard, which was a bright turquoise. Tante Denise was considerably thinner, her movements measured and slow. Her hair, which she’d begun and then stopped dyeing was bright red at the tips and gray at the roots. She touched it self-consciously when she saw me.
“I don’t have my wig.” She winced and pushed her head forward even as I moved closer.
She was sitting on a cot in the living room, where she took her naps and sometimes also spent the night. Her swollen legs were propped on a low stool and an open-toed sandal dangled from them. A pedestal fan was spinning in a semicircle in a corner by the window and occasionally blew a stream of warm air into her face. She was wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, which I was told she wore most of the time. She smelled of castor oil and camphor just as her Granme Melina had. Her glamour, her elegant dresses, her pretty face, her wigs, her gloves now seemed very far in the past. She, like those buildings, had been disassembled while I was gone. She didn’t recognize me at first.
“It’s Edwidge,” I said, feeling like a stranger now not just to her but to Bel Air and to Haiti itself.
“Mira’s daughter, Edwidge?” she said. Her lower lip was drooping, slightly slurring her speech.
Grabbing my hand with more strength than I expected, she pulled me down on her lap as if I were still a child.
“Edwidge, let me tell you a story,” she said, pressing her elbows hard into my ribs.
The story she told, slowly, haltingly, with her arms braced tightly around my body, was about God and the Angel of Death. It was one of Granme Melina’s stories, one that Granme Melina said you told to keep death away. In the end, Granme Melina stopped telling that story because she had
“One day,” began Tante Denise. A line of drool trickled from one side of her mouth, which I kept dabbing with a towel that draped the back of her chair.
“Father God and the Angel of Death were strolling together in a
