neighborhood like Bel Air, in a very crowded city like Port-au-Prince,” she continued.
During their walk, the Angel of Death would stop in front of many houses and say, “A man died here last month. I took him.” Then as they continued down the street, the Angel of Death added, “I removed a grandmother from this house yesterday.”
“I make people and you take them,” said Father God. “That’s why they like me more than they like you.”
“You think so?” asked the Angel of Death.
“I certainly do,” said Father God.
“If you’re so sure,” said the Angel of Death, “why don’t we both stop here on Rue Tirremasse and each ask the same woman for a drink of water and see what happens?”
So Father God rapped on the nearest door and when the lady of the house opened it said, “Madame, can I trouble you for some water?”
“Non,” the woman answered, irate. “I don’t have any water to spare.”
“Please,” said Father God. “I’m parched.”
“Sorry,” said the woman, “but I can’t spare any water. The public tap has been dry for days and I have to buy water by the bucket from the water woman, who’s doubled the price. So I only have enough water for myself and my family.”
“I’m sure you’d give me some water if you knew who I was,” said Father God.
“I don’t care who you are,” said the woman. “The only one I’d give my water to right now is the Angel of Death.”
“But I’m God,” insisted Father God. “Why would you give your water to the Angel of Death and not to me?”
“Because,” the woman said, “the Angel of Death doesn’t play favorites. He takes us all, lame and stout, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. You, however, give some people peace and put some of us in war zones like Bel Air. You give some enough food to stuff themselves, while others starve. You make some powerful and others defenseless. You make some healthy and let some get sick. You give some all the water they need while some of us have very little.”
Bowing his head in shame, Father God walked away from the woman, who, when the Angel of Death came to her door, gave him all the water she had in the house.
“And because of this,” Tante Denise concluded, unaware, it seemed, of even my body, as heavy and limp now as hers, on her lap, “the Angel of Death did not visit this particular woman again for a very long time.”
You’re Not a Policeman
Tante Denise died from a massive stroke the day after my uncle’s eightieth birthday, in February 2003. She was eighty-one years old. My father and I flew to Haiti together for the funeral.
This was my father’s third trip to Haiti in the thirty-two years since he’d first left and my twentieth-fifth in nearly a decade. After that first trip in 1994, I returned often, not always to the capital but also to other parts of the country, to help teach a beachside summer abroad course for American college students. I also traveled with documentary filmmakers, went to interview artists for art catalogs, attended academic conferences and even went back for several weeks to write a short book on carnival in a southern city, Jacmel.
During those trips, when my workload and logistics didn’t allow me to make it to Bel Air, my uncle came to see me, in hotel rooms, conference halls, libraries and university classrooms. I felt guilty, however, when I didn’t make it to the apartment in Bel Air because it was the only way I would get to see Tante Denise, who no longer ventured outside because she was not steady on her feet.
Whenever I could, though, I would add a few extra days to my trips for a stay in Bel Air. During those visits, my uncle liked for me to attend Sunday services at his church, where he would introduce me to his congregation, which over the years had more or less capped at about seventy-five people, most of them middle-aged or older.
During those Sunday-morning services, I would stand awkwardly in front of this group, filled with faces I barely recognized and who, without my uncle’s introduction, would not have known me at all, and I would tell them how happy I was to see them. After I returned to my seat, my uncle would share a bit of my family history, how my father and mother had met, how they’d left me and my brother Bob with him when they’d gone lot bo dlo, to the other side of the waters.
“We’re here for a funeral,” my father told the immigration officer who silently examined our American passports at Toussaint Louverture Airport. My father and I had both become naturalized U.S. citizens exactly ten years after we’d received our green cards and we both felt a bit traitorous as the officer hastily scribbled his signature on our foreigners’ designated customs forms.
Pushing our luggage cart out into the sunlight, my father seemed to shrink a bit, the way he always did in unfamiliar surroundings. In the parking lot outside the airport, Uncle Joseph walked toward us and grabbed his hand, pumping it a few times before letting go. At eighty, Uncle Joseph looked a lot younger than my father. Unlike Papa, he was neither balding nor graying, and he was robust-looking and muscular as a result of a lifelong habit of walking pretty much everywhere. Soon, my aunt Zi parted a crowd of greeters, screaming my father’s name. Tante Zi and Uncle Joseph had the same deep dark skin, the same pronounced, calabash-shaped forehead. Shorter than my father by at least a foot, Tante Zi grabbed him by the shoulder, kissed him all over his face, then tried to lift him off the ground. When she couldn’t raise him, she turned my way and, while nearly toppling me over, buried her face in my neck the way she used to when I was a girl.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, my uncle pulled out his voice box and said, as if we were learning this for the first time, “Mira, Edwidge, you heard? Madam mwen mouri.” My wife is dead.
During the ride into Bel Air, we were stopped at a roadblock by two policemen with Uzis, who scolded the taxi driver for having an outdated driver’s license but released him for a bribe of twenty Haitian dollars, which the cabdriver told us, rather forcefully, would have to be added to the fare. My uncle and Tante Zi said they wouldn’t pay the bribe, but before the driver could ask us to step out, my father agreed. The ride was already costing us so little, my father said. The policeman probably would not have stopped the driver had he not noticed that he was carrying people from abroad.
I have rarely had these types of encounters outside of Bel Air, outside of Port-au-Prince, I told my father.
Nowhere are these types of things more likely to happen than in Bel Air, Tante Zi echoed.
“My wife just died,” Uncle Joseph told the driver when he dropped us off in front of his church. My uncle wanted the policeman’s voluntary consideration, the driver’s sympathy. He wanted to believe that his loss could change the way others acted toward him.
“My condolences,” replied the driver as he accepted double the fare plus the bribe money.
My father was rarely on the other end of this type of exchange. He was usually the driver, not the one being driven. It occurred to me that perhaps he felt he had to make up with this one man for some of the wrongs that had been done to him at the wheel of his cab.
My father was staying with my uncle in his room, sleeping on a cot near the wide platform bed that my uncle and Tante Denise had often shared. I would sleep in a room off the kitchen, not far from theirs.
Soon after we arrived, my father accompanied my uncle to the cemetery
