Brother, I'm Dying Read online

  That evening, after the biopsy, my uncle lay in a hospital bed, unable to speak. Would his voice ever come back? He wrote that question on little pieces of paper the nurses gave him. They told him once more that this time it would, but probably not when he had the actual operation.

  The next morning, the doctor explained through another translator that the tumor was cancerous. He needed a radical laryngectomy. His voice box would eventually have to be removed. Yes, he would most certainly lose his voice.

  After the doctors left his bedside, my uncle became aware that someone in the hospital bed next to his had a small transistor radio, which was tuned to the same station where he’d first heard about the American doctors. The station had a charter studio on the hospital premises and the sound was coming through loud and clear. Over the airwaves, he heard among the lists of announcements about missing people and lost objects a voice saying, “Reverend Joseph Nosius, please come home. Your family is worried about you.”

  My uncle was staring at the ceiling and wondering whether the doctors with their “biopsy” had done him more harm than good when he heard the announcer’s voice. It reminded him how important voices were. If you had one, you could use it to reach out to your loved ones, no matter how far away. Technological advances could help—the telephone, the radio, microphones, megaphones, amplifiers. But if you had no voice at all, he thought, you were simply left out of the constant hum of the world, the echo of conversations, the shouts and whispers of everyday life.

  As he lay there, listening to the other patients talk to the doctors and nurses, to their family members and to each other, it occurred to him that after the operation, he would never again be able to preach a sermon or scream for help or laugh out loud at a funny joke. He also knew he had to get word to Tante Denise that he was alive.

  Slowly he sat up and wrote a brief message on a piece of paper by his bedside and gave it to one of the nurses to take to the station studio for him. The message simply asked if they could let his wife know that he was all right at the hospital and would be home soon.

  When the doctors came back to see him that afternoon, they told him they couldn’t operate and remove the tumor. It was too large and they didn’t have the right equipment for the procedure. They asked if he had any family or friends abroad. He said that both his son and his brother, my father, were living in New York. The doctor gave him a copy of his medical file and wrote a letter for him to take to the American consulate requesting a visa to travel for the surgery.

  When my uncle returned home to Bel Air and, in a hoarser voice than he’d left with, tried to explain his diagnosis to his wife, his congregation, and even on the telephone to my father and Maxo, with whom he was planning to stay in New York, no one quite understood it. None of our relatives knew what a radical laryngectomy was. We didn’t even know anyone who’d had cancer. As for permanently losing one’s voice, the possibility seemed so remote that it almost appeared to be a curse that, as some of the members of my uncle’s congregation declared, only American doctors could cross an ocean to put on you. People were either born mute or not. They did not become mute, except temporarily if they were struck with a bad case of shock. Usually those cases could be easily cured with herbal remedies. Why not my uncle’s?

  To put everyone at ease, my uncle said that maybe the doctors in New York would know more. Maybe he would discover other options, other solutions. Nevertheless, he gathered all his papers—land titles, everyone’s birth certificates—made out a will, and turned everything over to the daughter of his friend, then twenty-six-year-old Marie Micheline, whom he’d adopted and made his own. He wanted desperately to take Tante Denise to New York with him, but there were two problems. First, she was deathly afraid of flying. Then, because the likelihood of his returning to Haiti increased with his having a wife there to return to, her visa request was denied by the American consulate. Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise hadn’t spent much time apart since he’d broken her calabash thirty-two years before. However, time was of the essence, so he had no choice but to travel without her, even though he feared that he might die and never see her again.

  In New York, Uncle Joseph had been at his son Maxo’s apartment for barely twenty-four hours when he woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp, throbbing pain in his neck.

  Maxo was out with a friend. Uncle Joseph somehow managed to stumble out of bed and over to the only phone in the apartment, which was in the kitchen. He dialed my father’s number. My father was living in East Flatbush, three subway stops, a thirty-minute walk and a fifteen-minute drive from Maxo’s place on Ocean Avenue. My uncle heard a crackling as my father’s phone was picked up.

  “Hello,” my father said, his voice creaking anxiously. No good news could ever come at this hour of the night, he told himself.

  My uncle pressed his lips as close as he could to the mouthpiece to whisper these three words: “Frè, map mouri.” Brother, I’m dying.

  “What’s wrong?” my father asked.

  “Gòj,” he replied. Throat.

  My father told him to open the front door to the apartment and wait. Then he hung up and called an ambulance. When he called back, Uncle Joseph didn’t answer, so my father got dressed, jumped into his car and sped toward the apartment building where my uncle was staying.

  The paramedics made it there before he did. When they arrived, they found Uncle Joseph lying on the floor near the front door, barely conscious, clutching his neck, gasping for breath. They tried to put a breathing tube down his throat, but the tumor was blocking his airway. So while racing toward Kings County Hospital, they performed a tracheotomy, drilling a hole in my uncle’s neck to insert a tube there so he could breathe.

  My uncle had his radical laryngectomy the next day. When he came out, he was never able to use his own voice again. He was fifty-five years old.

  My uncle’s operation cost around thirty thousand dollars, which was negotiated down and paid for by his American missionary friends.

  As my uncle recovered at Maxo’s house, my father advised him to remain in New York for a few months to make sure he was in remission. But he wouldn’t listen.

  “What about my church?” he scribbled on a piece of paper. “My wife? Besides, this was not a good first visit to New York. Not enjoyable.”

  So as soon as the doctors cleared him a month later, he packed his bags and returned to Haiti.

  “Our lives were now even more solidly on different tracks,” my father would later recall. “He believed that his life had been spared for some reason and only in Haiti could he discover why. He could have moved to New York when Maxo and I came and he could have moved after that. But I don’t think he ever really wanted to leave Bel Air for any place in or outside of Haiti.”

  What Did the White Man Say?

  I told my parents I was pregnant in my father’s car, on the way to the airport. It was more than a week after I learned my father’s diagnosis. But whenever I found myself alone with him and my mother, I simply couldn’t find the words.

  I came close to telling them the night before I had to return to Miami. I was sitting on my father’s bed watching television when my mother came in and sat down on the edge of the bed next to me. I opened my mouth and thought the words came out, but they hadn’t.

  The time limit on the car ride would make it easier, I told myself. If I wanted to tell them in person there would be no other opportunity to do so.

  This was not the first time I was sharing important news with my parents in this way. I had rattled off the list of colleges I’d been accepted to in the car one Sunday morning on the way to church. I’d announced my engagement on the way to a cousin’s wedding one Saturday afternoon. This 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 émigré 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 spot.

  My father’s new boss was always covered in jewelry. In addition to a gold necklace as thick as his belt, he wore an equally fat bracelet and two large gold rings on each hand.

  “If men wore earrings back then,” my father used to say, “he’d have worn four.”

  But the boss’s personal extravagance belied what he would pay my father. His salary was modest, less than the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars a month, with the possibility of a commission on sales of more than three pairs of shoes.

  Having worked nonstop both as an apprentice and for himself, my father thought his new job would be a breeze. All he had to do was talk people into buying something they needed anyway.

  The store carried shoes in many styles and price ranges. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, rubber shoes, plastic shoes—and the most expensive of all, leather shoes. He was told to emphasize that all the shoes, like the owner of the shop, were from Italy.

  “Otherwise you can get any street corner cordonier to make you a pair of shoes,” the boss encouraged him to tell the customers.

  But of cours
e very few of the shoes were actually from Italy. The rest, he discovered, came from the United States via Puerto Rico.

  Every once in a while, my uncle would recommend to his growing congregation that they buy their shoes from my father. Papa, in turn, convinced his boss to offer special discounts to my uncle’s parishioners by reminding him that church people were less likely to use birth control, which meant many more potential customers.

  That period in my father’s life, the early sixties, was also shadowed by much larger events. Papa Doc Duvalier, who’d followed Daniel Fignolé into the presidential palace, refused to step down or allow new elections, despite a growing dissatisfaction with his increasingly repressive methods of imprisoning and publicly executing his enemies. Instead he had created a countrywide militia called the Tonton Macoutes, a battalion of brutal men and women aggressively recruited from the country’s urban and rural poor. Upon joining the Macoutes, the recruits received an identification card, which showed their allegiance to Papa Doc Duvalier, an indigo denim uniform, a .38 and the privilege of doing whatever they wanted.

  My father recalled how some macoutes would walk into the shoe store, ask for the best shoes and simply grab them and walk away. He couldn’t protest or run after them or he might risk being shot.

  After losing too many shoes, his boss came up with a solution. He ordered a large number of third-rate, non-leather shoes that looked like the real thing. Most of the macoutes who walked in wanting to steal shoes either didn’t care or couldn’t tell the difference anyway. If they asked to try on a pair of shoes, my father was to let them try on only the three-dollar shoes.