Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [47]
Like most people, my uncle had voted for Aristide.
“He’s certainly the best man,” he’d said. “But in my old age, I’m no longer interested in best men. I’m interested in the people around me and what he can do for them.”
But only seven months later, on September 30, 1991, Aristide was ousted by a military coup. Aristide fled to Venezuela, then Washington, where he stayed for three years. Still, like most of the population, which had eagerly elected him, Bel Air residents remained steadfast in calling for his return through protests and demonstrations. In retaliation, the army raided and torched houses and killed hundreds of my uncle’s neighbors.
My uncle managed to stay out of harm’s way by avoiding the demonstrations and all other overtly political activity, including speaking out against the military from the pulpit of his church. Still, every morning he got up to count the many bloody corpses that dotted the street corners and alleys of Bel Air. During the years when he couldn’t speak, he had developed a habit of jotting things down, so he kept track of the cadavers in the small notepads he always carried in his jacket pocket. In his notebooks, he wrote the names of the victims, when he knew them, the condition of their bodies and the times they were picked up, either by family members or by the sanitation service, to be transported to the morgue or dumped in mass graves.
Jonas, pt. 20 ans, main droite absente, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, pt. 35 ans, nue, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 ans, chany, 5:42 p.m.
Male inconnu, pt. 25 ans, visage mutilée, 9:17 p.m.
Jonas, maybe 20 years old, missing right hand, 11:35 a.m.
Gladys, maybe 35 years old, naked, 3:09 p.m.
Samuel, 75 years old, shoeshine man, 5:42 p.m.
Unknown male, 25 years old, face mutilated, 9:17 p.m.
Over the first weeks of the coup, my father called nearly every day, begging my uncle and Tante Denise to leave Bel Air. They’d go to Léogâne for a few days to visit with Tante Denise’s sister, Léone, but would always return in time for Sunday services.
Anxious, my father became angry, shouting at the end of their conversations, “You’re responsible. Whatever happens to you there, you’re responsible if you don’t leave.”
I’m not sure why my uncle and Tante Denise never left for good. Maybe it’s as simple as not wanting to be driven out of their home.
After Marie Micheline died, I asked my uncle why they, and in turn Marie Micheline, hadn’t tried to move to New York like my parents did.
“It’s not easy to start over in a new place,” he said. “Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
Plus he had more work to do, more souls to save, more children to teach.
In the fall of 1994, Aristide returned to Haiti, accompanied by twenty thousand U.S. soldiers. Citing the brutality of the military regime and the menace of a mass exodus of Haitian refugees to nearby Florida, then president Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy.
The day Aristide returned, Tante Denise suffered a mild stroke. After more than two decades away, my cousin Maxo returned to Bel Air. That fall, I too went back to Haiti for the first time, at twenty-five years old.
On the ride to Bel Air, I looked through the cracked windshield of a hired car and saw more people on the now rutted streets than I ever remembered. On nearly every wall was a mural of a rooster, the symbol of Aristide’s Lavalas Party, or of the American military helicopter on which Aristide had flown back to the national palace. There were also monuments to losses everywhere: the charred shantytowns of La Saline and Cité Soleil, the busts and friezes of the murdered: a justice minister, a campaign financier and a beloved priest among thousands of others. Piles of brick and ashes stood where homes and offices had been, places that had been both constructed and destroyed in the time I’d been gone. Chunks of Port-au-Prince,