Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [12]
“His preaching style was very straightforward,” remembered my father. “He talked a lot about love. God’s love, the love we should have for one another. He knew all the verses for love. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and think, would I want to hear him if he wasn’t my brother and I’d have to say yes. Yes, he would have made a very good politician, but my brother was a better preacher.”
But one day in November 1977, while preaching a lengthy sermon to commemorate the church’s anniversary, my uncle’s voice began to quiver, then squeak. He shrieked like an adolescent boy at one moment, then could only moan the next. His throat and gums throbbed and hurt. The next day, he went to the local dentist, who decided he needed to remove all of my uncle’s teeth and replace them with dentures.
His voice did not improve even after all his teeth were gone, so he went to see several other doctors. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so he went to herbalists, just as his parents and grandparents had before him. He was after all a child of the countryside—nou se moun mòn—and had been treated by roots and leaves most of his life. But the herbalists too were stumped. Meanwhile his voice grew fainter and his throat continued to ache.
One afternoon, in the spring of 1978, he was listening to the radio when he heard about a hospital in the south of Haiti that was associated with a radio station, Radio Lumière. Some American doctors were coming to the hospital and everyone who wanted to was welcome to come for a consultation. My uncle headed out to meet them.
After a day of slow, difficult travel on pitted, rocky roads, the camion he was on broke down in the early evening. Near the town of Gros Marin, he walked into a small two-room house by the side of a road and asked a peasant woman if he could spend the night on her beaten-earth floor. Her quick yes, so typical of the men and women of the Haitian countryside, reminded him of his own childhood. Lying in her front room on a palm frond mat and one of her best sheets, he thought back to a childhood of working in the fields and the palm-covered classrooms with neither walls nor doors where he learned his lessons sitting on the floor. He thought of a thin yet strapping father whose arms were so taut from a life of farming and fighting that he could render you unconscious with one slap while not even looking in your direction. He thought of the khakied American marines who he was told ambushed guerrilla resisters like his father in the middle of the night while wearing blackface. The Americans had reinstated forced labor to build bridges and roads and had snatched able-bodied men like his father and boys like himself from their homes. They were lucky to have been spared. So determined was he that he would not be taken that whenever Granpè Nozial was away from home, he’d sleep with a well-sharpened machete under his pillow.
The next morning my uncle was startled out of his sleep by the sound of a sisal broom sweeping the woman’s cactus-fenced yard. That gentle sound and the fragrant smell of brewed coffee helped remove his dread, filled him with hope. The woman handed him an enameled basin filled with cold water to wash his face and a handful of mint to brush the dentures she mistook for his own teeth. She then gave him a square of dimpled bread, which looked as though it was made from dough that had been poked with a dozen ice picks. The bread was carefully wrapped in a piece of muslin and lay on a plate that covered a metal cup filled with dark, sweet coffee. His hunger stirred, he gobbled the bread and washed it down with the coffee. He thanked the woman for her kindness and hospitality and with the air still cool from the night and the sun still very low in the sky, he continued on his way.
He had a long wait