Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [11]
At that time, the president of Haiti was Paul Magloire, an army general who’d unseated two of his predecessors. Nicknamed Kanson Fé, or Iron Pants, because of a speech he had given in which he’d declared that he must put on “iron pants” to deal with troublemakers, he had graced the February 22, 1954, cover of Time magazine dressed in full golden military regalia over a caption that read: “HAITI’S PRESIDENT PAUL MAGLOIRE. His Black Magic: roads, dams, schools.”
In 1956 Magloire stepped down after a national strike over, among other things, increased dissatisfaction with his extravagant spending. In addition to roads, dams, and schools, it turned out, he spent lots of money on lavish parties, state visits and costly reenactments of famous Haitian battles, mostly to amuse himself and a small circle of likeminded friends. Fignolé was one of many in a slippery line of succession who would eventually replace him. On May 25, 1957, as Fignolé was sworn into office, my uncle and father were part of the massive crowd that dashed to the national palace to dance in celebration. However, after only nineteen days, Fignolé was deposed by the army and forced into exile. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier then assumed the presidency. Tante Denise woke up the next morning to find Uncle Joseph sobbing in their bed. (My father, then twenty-two years old, has no recollection of his own reaction to all this, only of my uncle’s, which was “sad”.)
Before Fignolé’s fall, my uncle had briefly contemplated running for political office, either as a deputy from Bel Air or as mayor of Port-au-Prince. After Fignolé’s ouster, he realized how precarious political power could be and abandoned all notions of being part of it.
Feeling an ideological void, he joined a Baptist congregation that one of his friends belonged to, using the time he would have spent at demonstrations and meetings to go to church. The Baptists offered the promise of a peaceful and stable life. They forbade so many things, including smoking and drinking, that there were few ways for a young man to get in trouble. The Baptists also forbade common-law marriage, so after more than a decade together, when their son Maxo was ten years old, he and Tante Denise finally married in a church ceremony, after which he became a deacon in the church. He then enrolled in a training course for future pastors and while taking the course befriended a group of American missionaries who regularly came to Haiti. He was eager to open his own church and a school. He was still wary of Americans from his memories of the U.S. occupation, but the missionaries were looking to fund a project in his area and he didn’t have enough to do it on his own, so he proposed his idea to them and they gave him some money to help with the building, blackboards, and benches and pledged a monthly contribution for a free lunch program for the students.
My uncle bought another plot of land in Bel Air and spent his evenings designing and then building his church. As the building came up from the ground, he would visit the site daily, both before and after his work at the textile shop. He’d stack bricks and mix cement, hammer wood with the workers. He wanted to feel like he was investing more than his heart and mind, that he was investing his hands and feet, his labor too. Because he believed that the church had redeemed him, saved him from a series of potentially hazardous choices, he named it L’Eglise Chrétienne de la Redemption, the Christian Church of Redemption. The shotgun-style, gable-roofed building, which doubled as a classroom and cafeteria during the week, he hoped, would redeem others as well.
As a child living in his house from the time I was four until I was twelve years old, I remember my uncle’s voice being crisp and distinct: deep and resolute, breathy and jingly when he was angry, steely and muted when he was sad. When he began preaching sermons, my father recalled, sermons which required that he project a wide range of emotions in one hour or less, my uncle had