children.”
“Wi,” we answered, a weak chorus of five-and six-year-olds.
Looking at Nick, my uncle said, “Maxo, I’ll be sad to die without seeing you again.” Then turning to Bob, he said, “Isn’t that right, Mira?”
He called me Ino, the name of his dead sister.
“Ino knows I’m right,” he said. Then closing his eyes once more, he added, “Kite zetwal yo tonbe.” Let the stars fall.
His words evoked a loud wail from Tante Denise, who grabbed us by the hands and pulled us away from the bed.
“He’s gone,” she wailed. “My husband’s dying. He’s only speaking to people who aren’t here.”
The fact that my uncle had asked the stars to fall was also not lost on Tante Denise, who believed, and had groomed us to accept, that each time a star fell out of the sky, it meant someone had died.
I wasn’t looking at the sky when my uncle died at Jackson Memorial Hospital, but maybe somewhere a star did fall down for him.
Thinking, as Pratt had been told, that my uncle was only being tested and observed, I spent the day waiting for his discharge and release. But late in the afternoon, I had a terrible feeling and began to frantically call the hospital until I reached a nurse in Ward D, the hospital’s prison ward.
My uncle was resting, she said, but she couldn’t allow me to speak to him since any contact with the prisoners, either by phone or in person, had to be arranged through their jailers, in my uncle’s case, through Krome. While Pratt pleaded with the higher-ups at Krome to let us visit, I pleaded with the nurse to let me speak to my uncle. But neither one of us got anywhere, not even after my uncle died.
When a close friend of Maxo’s, whom Maxo had used his one allowable phone call from Krome to tell, telephoned to break the news to me, I called Ward D again to ask if indeed it was true that a Haitian man named Joseph Dantica had just died there. The man who answered curtly told me, “Call Krome.” And when I did telephone Krome-thinking I should have an official answer before calling my relatives-I was told by another stranger that I should try back in the morning.
By then it was nearly midnight.
“Don’t tell your family now,” my husband said, rocking me as I sobbed in his arms. “At least let them get
We spent most of the night awake, cradling along with my large belly this horrendous news that those who most loved my uncle were not yet aware of. Some, like my father, were probably still praying for his release and recovery. Others, like his sisters in Haiti, were surely worrying, dreading perhaps, yet never expecting this particularly heartbreaking ending.
Waiting for daybreak, we reorganized the room in which my uncle was to have stayed, removing the paintings from the walls and stripping the bed of the sheets he was supposed to have slept on. As we slid the bed from one side of the room to the other, I worried for my father. Would he survive the shock? Placing a new set of curtains on the windows, after my husband had collapsed into bed, I worried for my daughter too. How would this stress, my sleeping so little, my lifting and lowering things and stooping in and out of closets in the middle of such a painful night affect her?
The next morning, my first call was to Karl, who conferenced the rest of the calls with me. We called Uncle Franck, who moaned loudly over the phone, then my mother, who, as always, was the most composed.
It was best that she, Bob and Karl tell my father in person, she said.
My father was in bed, weakened but tranquil after yet another sleepless night, when they told him. For a moment he was absolutely still, then he pushed his head back and looked up at the ceiling and then again at my mother and brothers. He didn’t say anything at all. Perhaps he was numb, in shock. He didn’t appear surprised either, my mother said. It was, she said, as if he already knew.
Brother, I’ll See You Soon
Though we had been concentrating most of our efforts on getting my uncle released before tackling what we expected to be Maxo’s much more challenging case, Maxo was freed from Krome to bury his father. While calling some of my uncle’s friends in Port-au-Prince to make funeral arrangements, he was told not to bring the body back to Haiti. News of my uncle’s detention and death had already spread in Bel Air and the gangs had rejoiced, all the while vowing to do to my uncle in death what they’d been unable to in life, behead him.
“They don’t want him back in Haiti,” Man Jou shouted loudly over the phone. “Neither alive nor dead.”
At the same time, Maxo was reluctant to bury his father here in the United States, where in the end he had been so brutally rejected. He also felt bound by his father’s wish to have his remains in the family mausoleum, next to Tante Denise’s.
Cremation was to me the obvious choice.
“When things are calmer,” I told Maxo, “we can all go back and bury his ashes on his own soil with Tante Denise.”
My uncle’s religious beliefs wouldn’t allow it, Maxo said.
“In the final day of judgment,” he added, “when the dead rise out of their tombs, we want his body there.”
In the final day of judgment, will my uncle care from whence he’d rise?
Uncle Joseph’s most haunting childhood memory, and the only one he ever described to me in detail, was of the year 1933, when he was ten years old. The U.S. occupation of Haiti was nearing its final days. Fearing that he might at last be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps formed to build bridges and roads, my grandfather, Granpe Nozial, ordered him never to go down the mountain, away from Beausejour. Uncle Joseph wasn’t even to accompany his mother, Granme Lorvana, to the marketplace, so that he might never lay eyes on occupying marines or they him.
When he left home to fight, Granpe Nozial never told my uncle and his sisters, Tante Ino and Tante Tina, where he was going. (The other siblings, including my father, were not born yet.) Granme Lorvana told them, however, that their father was fighting somewhere, in another part of the country. She also told them that the Americans had the power to change themselves into the legendary three-legged horse Galipot, who, as he trotted on his three legs, made the same sound as the marching, booted soldiers. Galipot was also known to mistake children for his fourth leg, chase them down and take them away.
Still, my uncle and his sisters were never to let on that they knew anything about their father’s whereabouts. If they were ever asked by an adult where Granpe Nozial was, they were supposed to say that he had died, bewildering that adult and sending him/her directly to Granme Lorvana to question her. But when Granpe Nozial returned from his trips, they were not to ask him any questions. Instead they were to act as though he’d never left, like he’d been with them all along. This is why they knew so little of Granpe Nozial’s activities during the U.S. occupation. This is why I know so little now.
One day while Granpe Nozial was away and Tante Ino and Tante Tina became ill, Granme Lorvana had no choice but to send my uncle to a marketplace down the mountain. As Uncle Joseph walked to the market, following the road that his mother had indicated, what he feared most was running into Granpe Nozial, who’d threatened him with all manner of bodily harm if he ever found him on the road leading out of Beausejour.
When my uncle finally reached the marketplace at midday, after hours and hours of walking, he saw a group of young white men in dark high boots and khakis at its bamboo-fenced
