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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