manner of sharing important information annoyed my father, who, before his diagnosis, had never mentioned anything monumental in a casual way.
“We have to chat,” he’d announce days before actually sharing news.
“There’s something we need to discuss,” he’d remind me hours later.
“Let me know when you have some time,” he’d say until we’d finally sit down for a brief but formal talk.
The best place for me to make my announcement would have been at the family meeting the week before. This is probably what both my parents would have expected, and preferred, rather than my spitting something out and scurrying off. But that night I couldn’t look into my father’s face and- though I knew it would come very naturally to him and my mother both-ask that they be happy for me.
The trip from my parents’ house to the airport normally takes about a half hour at midday. I allowed ten minutes to lapse, while waiting for my father to catch his breath from the effort of walking from the house to his car.
“I can take a cab, Papa,” I’d said as I piled in ahead of my mother, who didn’t drive, but even if she did, would have probably not been given the wheel by my father.
His body hunched over, my father placed his head close to the dashboard. He was still panting and unable to reply, but shook his head in protest as he fired up the ignition. Before he became sick, I might have said of my father that driving for him was like breathing. The night before, I had calculated that from 1981 to 2004, working an average ten hours every day, including holidays but not Sundays, he’d spent nearly twenty years driving the streets of Brooklyn.
I knew my father had momentarily recovered from the panting when he asked what my mother had cooked for me to take back with me to Miami.
Whenever I visited my parents, my mother would send me back with an overnight bag filled with food. She’d wake up early the morning of my trip to make sure I had several containers filled with fried snapper, sweet potato cake, codfish patties, a large bag of plantain chips and several packages of cassava bread. My mother, opulently full-figured, broad-shouldered, always presented me with this bounty at the very last minute, sometimes as we pulled up to the curb at the airport. Her food and my father’s ride were part of a send-off that often left me feeling guilty and scared, guilty for leaving them behind and scared that something awful, a stroke or a heart attack, might befall them in my absence.
“What did your mother give you this time?” my father asked.
Having watched my mother pack the bag of food, he knew. But he asked anyway, as he always did, in a half-joking manner, in part to tease my mother about her longing, which she’d perhaps carried since I was a child, to feed me from afar.
I told them between the winding, narrow lanes of the Jackie Robinson Parkway. My father’s old red Lincoln was too wide for one lane, especially at the curves, so he took up both lanes, angering the drivers who couldn’t pass him. Gripping the wheel tightly, he seemed to block the other drivers out as they honked loudly and poked their heads out of windows to curse him. As my father zigzagged around the curves with an angry army of drivers behind him, I told them. I think now that this showed a great deal of confidence in his driving. I must have trusted completely that nothing could have an impact on it.
“I have some news,” I began.
My father was sitting on a square cushion to shield his bony bottom from the painful bumps on the roads, his elbow leaning on the armrest separating him from my mother and me.
My voice cracked. All of a sudden I couldn’t help but think of an alternate scenario, making this happy announcement to an unsick father. Perhaps we might have still found ourselves driving on a curvy road on the way to an airport, but my only unease might have been the mild sense of embarrassment one feels having a sex-related conversation, however celebratory, with one’s parents.
“I’m pregnant,” I mumbled.
“Sa blan an di?” asked my mother. What did the blan say?
This was the way my mother always let my brothers and me know she hadn’t heard or understood something we’d said. The equivalent of a gringo, a blan was not just a white man but any foreigner, especially one who spoke the type of halting and hesitant Creole that my brothers and I sometimes spoke with our parents. “Sa blan an di?” in our house meant “I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
My father, however, had heard me clearly.
“Grandchild,” he said to my mother, while giving me a sideways high five.
“Oh, I knew you were pregnant,” my mother said, clapping her short, wide hands together. “I saw it in a dream.”
“More like a fantasy,” my father said. “A wish.”
“It was a dream,” my mother said, turning to me. “I saw you holding a baby and no one was asking you whose it was.”
The rest of the ride was spent on advice that both my parents would repeat throughout my pregnancy. My mother told me to see a doctor as soon as possible. My father ordered me to stop traveling, get plenty of rest and try to relax.
On the curb at the airport, my father got out of the car to hug me. He was breathing hard when he reached down to touch my still-flat belly.
“Don’t make her sad,” my mother said in a way that was partly brusque and partly playful, which was how she often spoke. “She’s going to be on that plane alone.”
“It’s not a private plane, is it?” my father teased, even while trying to catch his breath.
Not wanting him to stand much longer, I gave each of my parents a hug, then grabbed my luggage and rushed away. From the airport lobby, I saw my father slowly slide behind the wheel and lower his head to cough and cough and cough. Sometimes when he coughed really hard, tears would stream down his face that he would not even notice. Now I could see my mother reaching over and wiping his face with her palm. A strapping policeman walked up to my father’s car and motioned for him to move. As the other passengers walked to the check-in lines, I watched my father, still out of breath, drive away.
Heartstrings, Shoestrings
My father quit school in 1954 at age nineteen to start an apprenticeship with a neighborhood tailor. Not just an ordinary tailor, but a man whose small at-home workshop turned out hundreds of unisex children’s shirts made with the cheapest cloth, thread and labor- apprentices-available. My father was expected to sew two dozen little shirts each day. The shirts were then sold to vendors who resold them all over Haiti.
Papa’s share of the profit was about five pennies per shirt. He quit after six months once he’d saved and borrowed enough money to buy his own sewing machine. He then began working for himself, selling directly to the vendors. That is, until the 1960s, when used clothes from the United States, which were called “Kennedys” because they were sent to Haiti during the Kennedy administration, became readily available.
One afternoon, my father was looking for another job when he stopped by the fabric shop where my uncle Joseph worked. He had become a regular customer there and was on good terms with the boss, who told him about an Italian emigre who’d just opened a shoe store on Grand Rue and was looking for a salesman. My father ran over to the store and, on the recommendation of my uncle’s boss, was hired on the
