Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [46]
Neighbors saw her standing in the doorway with beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. Then a bullet whizzed by, bouncing off the gate with a spark.
The street was suddenly blurry, a cloud of dust descending in the wake of speeding military pickups. Had she been shot? In the heart? She clutched her chest and fell to the floor. She never regained consciousness.
Because Ron Howell, a New York journalist, happened to be covering the military shoot-out in Bel Air that afternoon, Marie Micheline’s death was the subject of a Newsday article published on April 17, 1989. Headlined HAITI STILL STRUGGLING TO SHINE, it was printed next to a color photograph of her funeral procession slowly winding through downtown Port-au-Prince.
Marie Micheline, wrote Howell, was in many ways “a reflection of Haiti and its potential, a flicker of light frustrated in its attempt to shine.”
When you hear that someone has died whom you’ve not seen in a long time, it’s not too difficult to pretend that it hasn’t really happened, that the person is continuing to live just as she has before, in your absence, out of your sight. The day of Marie Micheline’s funeral, when I spoke to my uncle on the phone, I experienced the biggest failing of his new voice. Like distance, it masked pain. Still, his pauses were like sobs, the expansion or contraction of his words mechanical traces of sorrow.
That night I told my uncle a story that I’d just remembered myself. Of being eight years old and carrying a note home from school requesting that my parent or guardian come to my class to spank me, because I hadn’t finished all my homework. That afternoon when I got home, I’d given Marie Micheline the note, thinking that she’d go a lot easier on me than either my uncle or Tante Denise. However, the next morning when she went to the school, Marie Micheline took Mademoiselle Sanon, my very tall, slim and prim teacher, aside, and under an almond tree in a corner of the bustling recess yard, whispered in her ear for five minutes.
“What did you tell her?” I asked Marie Micheline as she walked me back to class with a broad smile on her face.
I gripped her soft, small hands, unable to imagine them pounding me with the stiff cow leather whip, the rigwaz, with which parents and teachers often thrashed their children’s behinds or palms.
“I’m going to take care of her and her entire family at the neighborhood clinic for a year,” she said. “They’ll never have to wait and they’ll never have to pay. For that, she won’t send anyone in your class home with spanking letters for a month.”
“Just a month?” I asked.
“That’s the best I could do,” she said.
“Her own children,” my uncle said at the end of my story. “How can four children lose their mother in an instant like that?”
Fearful of losing them too, he was going to try and get a visa for Ruth and the boys to join some of Marie Micheline’s biological mother’s relatives who were now living in Canada.
Before she was buried, a coroner had determined that Marie Micheline died from a heart attack. But when I spoke to Tante Denise, who cried as though she were hollering to the heavens in protest, she said that no one could convince her of a simpler truth: that watching the bullets fly, the violence of her neighborhood, the rapid unraveling of her country, Marie Micheline had been frightened to death.
The Angel of Death and Father God
In 1990, General Prosper Avril resigned, making room for the December 1990 elections, in which a young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had developed a massive following through his bold sermons against the Duvaliers, won 67 percent of the vote. Aristide was sworn in on February 7, 1991, my uncle’s sixty-eighth birthday.
I remember talking to my uncle that night. After accepting my birthday wishes, he moved on to Aristide, saying that in the young priest he saw flickers of his onetime hero, Daniel Fignolé. Aristide’s firebrand speeches and his political party, the Lavalas or Flood Party, echoed