shame whose only reprieve is silence.
“I have to go,” he said. “Others are waiting.”
“How do you feel?” I asked. “If you don’t feel well, tell them.”
“I will,” he said. “I have to go.”
I heard a muffled voice in the background, someone demanding a turn at the pay phone.
“You’re strong,” I said. “Very strong. You have so much more strength than even you know.”
And reluctantly he agreed and said, “Oh yes. It’s true.”
“Just get through tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow, God willing, you’ll be free.”
Afflictions
My father every now and then would quote from the book of Genesis, paraphrasing his favorite lines from the story of Joseph, the youth who was ousted and sold into unfriendly territory by his brothers. My uncle Joseph was named after the rainbow-coated man, but I’d never heard Papa look for parallels between my uncle’s life and the biblical story before.
“Uncle is in his own Egypt this morning, in his land of afflictions,” my father said, when we talked just before nine a.m. the next day.
“He’s going to be all right,” I said. “You just concentrate on Columbia Presbyterian.”
As I was talking to my father, my uncle was waiting with John Pratt outside an asylum unit trailer office at Krome. Leaning over to one of three other detainees also waiting for hearings, my uncle asked the English-speaking Haitian man to tell Pratt that his medication had been taken away. Before Pratt could respond, he and my uncle were called in by asylum officer Castro, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties. The asylum interview was about to begin.
My uncle and Pratt were seated at a desk close to the back wall, facing Officer Castro. A certified translator was needed for the proceedings, and since there wasn’t one on the premises, a telephone translation service was called and the interpreter put on speakerphone. The phone was on the desk in front of my uncle, next to Pratt’s lawbooks, notepads and other materials.
The interpreter had trouble understanding my uncle’s voice box, so Officer Castro asked my uncle to move his mouth closer to the phone. As my uncle leaned forward, his hand slipped away from his neck and he dropped his voice box.
The records indicate that my uncle appeared to be having a seizure. His body stiffened. His legs jerked forward. His chair slipped back, pounding the back of his head into the wall. He began to vomit.
Vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole in his neck. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overalls. There was also vomit on his thighs, where a large wet stain showed he had also urinated on himself.
“Somebody call for help!” Pratt jumped from his chair and pulled his papers away from the spreading vomit.
Officer Castro rushed over to the desk and grabbed the sleeves of my uncle’s uniform. She pulled his body forward, straightening his head. Grabbing a nearby wastebasket, she placed it in front of my uncle. My uncle continued to vomit into the wastebasket as he opened and closed his eyes, which wandered aimlessly in their sockets.
When he stopped vomiting, my uncle’s body grew rigid and cold, his arms falling limply at his side. Officer Castro called out to the guards keeping watch over the other detainees outside her office and asked them to call the medical unit. A guard radioed for help but said that Krome was in lockdown and that it might take some time for help to arrive.
Officer Castro grabbed the phone in front of my uncle to see if the interpreter was still there. The phone was dead. She asked if there was anyone around who could speak to my uncle in Creole. The guard brought the English-speaking Haitian detainee to whom my uncle had spoken about his medication into the asylum office. The man said a few words to my uncle, but there was no reaction. Pratt asked Officer Castro to send for Maxo. The guard said he needed special permission from his supervisor to have Maxo come. The guard radioed for special permission.
Fifteen minutes had passed since my uncle first started vomiting. A registered nurse and medic finally arrived. By then my uncle looked “almost comatose,” Pratt recalled. “He seemed somewhat unconscious and couldn’t move.”
Pratt told the medic and nurse that right before he became sick, my uncle had told him his medication had been taken away. Pratt then turned to Officer Castro and asked if my uncle could be granted humanitarian parole given his age and condition.
“I think he’s faking,” the medic said, cutting Pratt off.
To prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said. Besides, my uncle would open his eyes now and then and seemed to be looking at him.
“You can’t fake vomit,” Pratt shot back. “This man is very sick and his medication shouldn’t have been taken away from him.”
The medications were indeed taken away, replied the medic, in accordance with the facility’s regulations, and others were substituted for them.
The medic and the nurse then moved my uncle from the asylum office to a wheelchair in the hallway.
When Maxo arrived, he ran over to his father and seeing him slumped over in the wheelchair and leaning over the side, began to cry. Except for the occasional flutter of his eyelids, it seemed to Maxo that his father was unconscious. The first thing Maxo wanted to do was clean the vomit from his face. Though his father was in distress, he knew that underneath the sticky heave and chunks of still undigested food, this very proud man would feel humiliated by his appearance.
“He wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t taken away his medication,” Maxo said, sobbing.
“He’s faking,” repeated the medic. “He keeps looking at me.”
The medic then turned to Pratt and told him that based on his many years of experience at Krome, he could easily make such determinations.
“Please just let me clean him,” Maxo sobbed.
The medic told him that he’d been called only to help his father communicate with them. “If you can’t help, then we’ll send you back.”
“He can’t speak without his voice box,” Maxo said. Covered in vomit, the voice box was no longer operable.
During that discussion, it seemed to Maxo that his father’s eyes were fluttering a bit more. Maybe he could hear them. Maybe he was getting better, coming out of whatever had overcome him.
“Papa,” Maxo pleaded, “please try to move. Maybe they’ll let you go.”
My uncle opened his eyes and looked up at Maxo. He raised his hands from his lap, but they fell limply back to his knees. It seemed to Maxo that he was trying to mouth, “M pa kapab.” I can’t.
My uncle’s eyes remained open, but they seemed cloudy and dazed, set
