entrance. There were perhaps six or seven of them, and they seemed to be kicking something on the ground. My uncle had never seen white men before, and their pink, pale skins gave some credence to his mother’s notion that white people had po lanve, skins turned inside out, so that if they didn’t wear heavy clothing, you might always be looking at their insides.
As my uncle approached the small circle of men and the larger crowd of vendors and shoppers watching with hands cradling their heads in shock, the white men seemed to him to be quite agitated. Were they laughing? Screaming in another language? They kept kicking the thing on the ground as though it were a soccer ball, bouncing it to one another with the rounded tips of their boots. Taking small careful steps to remain the same distance away as the other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.
The head was full of black peppercorn hair. Blood was dripping out of the severed neck, forming dusty dark red bubbles in the dirt. Suddenly my uncle realized why Granpe Nozial and Granme Lorvana wanted him to stay home. Then, as now, the world outside Beausejour was treacherous indeed.
Uncle Franck flew down from New York the next day to help with the funeral arrangements.
“Mira and I think he should be buried in New York,” he said.
We were driving to a funeral home in North Miami, where my uncle’s body had been transferred after an autopsy at the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner had determined that my uncle died from acute and chronic pancreatitis, which it turns out he’d never shown any symptoms of before he became ill at Krome and for which he was never screened, tested, diagnosed or treated while he was at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
The advantage of a New York funeral, Uncle Franck explained on the way to the Miami mortuary, was that my father might be able to attend. Besides, after visiting there for more than thirty years, my uncle had a lot of friends in Brooklyn. It was the next best thing to Port-au-Prince.
When we got to the funeral home, Maxo asked to see his father’s body. The manager was reluctant to allow it, but Maxo insisted.
“I need to see him,” he said. “I just need to see him.”
“A lot of people think they want to view a body,” the manager said, “but then they find it’s too much, especially so soon after an autopsy.”
“I don’t care,” Maxo said, sounding like a little boy pleading for a favor from an adult. “I want to see him.”
“Okay, then.” The manager gave in. He was a tall, slender, butterscotch-colored man wearing a pastel-colored shirt and tie. His jacket was resting on the back of his swivel chair and he’d pick up the jacket and put it on each time he got up, then would take it off when he sat down again.
“I’ll let you see him,” he said, grabbing his jacket, “but we can’t bring you into the room where the other dead are. We must respect them. We must also ask you to speak in a moderate voice and not curse. Here we treat the dead with respect as though they were still alive.”
He should have been at the airport with my uncle, I thought, or at Krome when the medic was twisting his neck and raising his head up and down, or at Jackson, where perhaps because he was a prisoner-an alien prisoner, a Haitian one at that-he received what most doctors to whom I and others have shown his file agree that, given his age and symptoms, was deplorable care.
“You shouldn’t be part of this,” the manager said, pointing to my belly. “You have a life in you. You have no place with the dead.”
“But I’m going to the funeral,” I said.
What I really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me. Still, I agreed not to view the body yet. Besides, the time to have seen my uncle would have been hours, days, weeks earlier, when it could have made a difference, when we could have both been comforted.
The body was brought out on a gurney to a room next to the manager’s office. Maxo and Uncle Franck followed the manager into the room, leaving the door half open. Fighting the urge to peek inside, to see my uncle one more time, I sat with my back to the door. I thought of Granme Melina peacefully slipping away in her sleep across the room from me when I was only a child, of Tante Denise lying naked on a metal table in the morgue on Rue de l’Enterrement, and I marveled at the relative ease of those situations. Surely there was nothing to fear. Of the many ways that death might transform the love that the living had experienced, one of them should not be fear.
I would have to look at my uncle immediately. How could I not? Turning around, I positioned myself to see him. He was covered from his legs up to his hips with what looked like blue tarp. His unshaven face had a thin layer of white cream, which the manager explained was supposed to keep the skin from retracting. There were squared marks with traces of glue spread out across his chest, most likely from adhesive electrocardiogram leads. After the autopsy, a line of gray rope had been used to sew the front of his body, from his neck down to where the blue tarp ended. His tracheotomy hole was sealed. His head was also sewn down the middle, from ear to ear, but with thinner, nearly transparent thread.
My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen. Perhaps it was because his lips were swollen to twice their usual size. He looked as though he’d been punched. He also appeared anxious and shocked, as though he were having a horrible nightmare.
When was he last conscious? I wondered. What were his final thoughts? When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?
My uncle looked even less like himself at his funeral in New York. Dressed in a brand-new tuxedo, he had so much eggplant-colored makeup on his face that he looked like he was wearing an ill-fitting mask. But it was my father who inspired gasps when he entered the church he had attended for more than thirty years. Dragging an oxygen tank behind him, he was panting as he walked toward my uncle’s coffin. He was skeletal, a stick figure. He hadn’t been able to attend services for some time, and most of his friends, the ones who hadn’t visited him at home, had not witnessed his gradual deterioration.
Standing before my uncle’s coffin, my father tugged at the oxygen tube in his nose. He was wobbly, sweating. My three brothers surrounded him, formed a half circle around him, ready to catch him from any angle should he fall.
Tapping my uncle’s cheek, as if to stir him from a fainting spell, my father simply said, “Brother, the last time we spoke, you said you were leaving me with a heavy heart. This time I’m the one leaving you with a heavy heart. We may not see each other again on this earth, but I will see you soon.”
My uncle was buried in a cemetery in Queens, New York. His grave sits by an open road, overlooking the streets of Cyprus Hills and the subway tracks above them. During his life, my uncle had clung to his home, determined not to be driven out. He had remained in Bel Air, in part because it was what he knew. But he had also hoped to do some good there. Now he would be exiled finally in death. He would become part of the soil of a country that had not wanted him. This haunted my father more than anything else.
“He shouldn’t be here,” my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly before drifting off to sleep that night. “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here.”
Transition
