In the summer of 1997, I flew to Port-au-Prince from New York a few days after my cousin Marius had flown in the cargo section of a similar American Airlines jet from Miami. Once I’d slept past the first half hour after takeoff, I’d strapped on the free headphones and chosen from the in-flight radio selection a pop station playing a song by the rock group Midnight Oil.
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How can we sleep while…
Across the aisle from me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers in and out of a large manila envelope onto the tray table in front of him. He wiped his brow with a monogrammed blue handkerchief and then rang the flight attendant call button. When a plump blond woman hurried over, he asked her for a glass of water. When she brought it to him, he asked her when we were going to land.
I recognized the man, who had been escorted by immigration officers past the security checkpoint, right through the gate and to his seat on the airplane. He seemed to be in his late forties, was russet brown and thin with a gaunt face, his jaws speckled with the remnants of a beard that looked as though a shave had been attempted on it but had failed. He was a deportee.
While looking over at him, I thought of my cousin Marius, who in his own way had also been deported. I had foreseen the two of us, Marius and me, traveling on the same day and my New York flight arriving a few hours before his Miami one so that I could be there to greet him at the airport in Port-au-Prince, but the obstacles to Marius’s flight had been abruptly lifted and he’d gone ahead on his own, before me, to be buried.
Originally, Marius’s departure had been delayed because the undertaker could not locate his papers. Before his mother called us in New York-from Haiti-to announce his death to my father and to ask for our help in getting the body sent to her from Miami, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Marius in years. Only two years younger than he was, I had barely interacted with him when I was a girl because his parents had divorced when I was quite young and he lived mostly with his father, who’d rarely mingled with our family. My father could barely remember Marius at all, as he was still a boy when Papa left Haiti for the United States. A decade after I’d moved to the United States, I heard that Marius had taken a boat to Miami. A few days before my flight from New York to Port-au-Prince, his mother had called to tell us that he was dead.
Once he’d offered his condolences to Tante Zi over the phone, my father asked me to pick up the extension and tell her that I would take care of things, would get Marius’s body sent to her in Haiti.
After offering my own condolences to a tearful and hiccupping Tante Zi, I asked her where Marius was living before he died.
She paused as if to breathe past a large lump in her throat, and then whispered, “Miami,” sounding puzzled, as if wondering why I was making her repeat something she’d already repeated many times.
“Do you have the address of the place where he was living in Miami?” I asked.
“No,” she said. But she did have the telephone number of Marius’s roommate of two years. His name was Delens.
I would call Delens, I told her, and get back to her.
I dialed Delens’s number soon after I hung up with Tante Zi and asked in Creole if I could speak with him. The young man who answered replied, “Would you mind speaking English? I grew up here. It’s hard for me to speak Creole.”
It turned out that he was Delens. I told him, in English, that I was Marius’s cousin and was trying to help locate his body to send it back to Port-au-Prince. Could he help me?
He gave me the number of the Freeman Funeral Home, where Marius’s body had already been placed while awaiting expatriation. He didn’t have the amount of money the funeral home charged and Tante Zi didn’t trust him enough to send it to him, accusing him of being responsible-in some way that he could neither comprehend nor explain-for Marius’s death.
At the end of the conversation, I cautiously asked Delens in my most polite voice, “Can you please tell me what Marius died of?”
“When did it happen?” I asked. “When did he get it?”
“I don’t know.” He switched back to hip-hop-toned English. “Maybe he had it even before he left Haiti. I don’t know. But he’s been living wild here, man, made some stupid-ass mistakes.”
“Did he leave anything behind?” I thought Tante Zi might want to know. Maybe he had some assets that could help mitigate the transportation and funeral costs. But I wasn’t thinking only about money. Perhaps there were more personal effects, legal papers, letters, photographs, journals, keepsakes that later on might comfort his mother.
“He had nothing,” Delens replied harshly. “He was living it up and wasted everything. All he had when he died was sixty dollars.”
Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t accept that a thirty-year-old man had left nothing else behind. When I hung up and summarized the other end of the conversation for my father, he told me that Tante Zi believed that Marius had been poisoned by his roommate, but almost everyone in the family had different theories. There were those who thought he had committed suicide and others who were certain he’d died of a drug overdose. I didn’t know what or whom to believe, but it really didn’t matter. A grieving mother was waiting to be reunited with her son. And since she couldn’t come to him, we had to find some way to bring him to her.
The funeral, if held in Miami, would cost three thousand dollars, Mr. Freeman told me when I called. But for Marius’s body to be shipped back to Haiti, the price would go up to five thousand. He’d already had Marius for a day or two now and would be happy to ship him to the funeral home of our choice anywhere in the Haitian capital, but he needed “papers.”
“What kind of papers?” I asked.
Because Marius had come to Miami by boat and had never received asylum or legalized his status some other way, he was undocumented.
“I have to get him exit papers from the Haitian consulate,” explained Mr. Freeman. “The U.S. authorities will want to see these papers at the airport before he leaves and the Haitian authorities will want to see them when he arrives.”
“He’s a dead man whose cadaver needs to be shipped to the country where he was born. Why is it so complicated?” I asked.
“In part,” he answered calmly, “because he’s an alien.”
Were we still aliens in death, I asked, our corpses unwanted visitors still?
Fortunately, Delens managed to find Marius’s Haitian passport, so Marius would certainly be granted exit papers by the Haitian consulate, Mister Freeman assured me. It was simply a matter of time.
“But that’s not the only thing,” he continued in the same unruffled ministerial voice. “It’s also complicated because of the disease he died of. There are some special procedures involved with these types of corpses.”
Even though it was probably written in large bold letters on Marius’s death certificate, no one wanted to name the disease that had killed him. It was as if in some bizarre way they were all respecting his dying wish. Silence at all costs.
The next day, I called Tante Zi and explained all that I’d learned about Marius’s return to Haiti. Tante Zi was aware of the funeral home cost, she said; she just wanted to confirm that Delens was telling the truth. She was ready to make a money transfer. She even had Mister Freeman’s information.
“Marius should be home soon,” my father told her.
Before she hung up, Tante Zi began sobbing again and then added, “Look how they took my boy from me and took everything he owned on top of it.”
Marius had been sending her a few hundred dollars each month, Tante Zi said. There was no way he could have been broke. And he didn’t die of the “bad disease” either. He’d called her once a week, every Sunday, and promised her he’d come back to see her as soon as his papers were in order. During those talks, he was always full of laughter and hope. He never sounded like a sick person.
My father abruptly interrupted Tante Zi’s tearful recollection and told her to calm down, to make sure she had her head on straight so she could face what lay ahead.
