Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [49]
“I’m sure you’d give me some water if you knew who I was,” said Father God.
“I don’t care who you are,” said the woman. “The only one I’d give my water to right now is the Angel of Death.”
“But I’m God,” insisted Father God. “Why would you give your water to the Angel of Death and not to me?”
“Because,” the woman said, “the Angel of Death doesn’t play favorites. He takes us all, lame and stout, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. You, however, give some people peace and put some of us in war zones like Bel Air. You give some enough food to stuff themselves, while others starve. You make some powerful and others defenseless. You make some healthy and let some get sick. You give some all the water they need while some of us have very little.”
Bowing his head in shame, Father God walked away from the woman, who, when the Angel of Death came to her door, gave him all the water she had in the house.
“And because of this,” Tante Denise concluded, unaware, it seemed, of even my body, as heavy and limp now as hers, on her lap, “the Angel of Death did not visit this particular woman again for a very long time.”
You’re Not a Policeman
Tante Denise died from a massive stroke the day after my uncle’s eightieth birthday, in February 2003. She was eighty-one years old. My father and I flew to Haiti together for the funeral.
This was my father’s third trip to Haiti in the thirty-two years since he’d first left and my twentieth-fifth in nearly a decade. After that first trip in 1994, I returned often, not always to the capital but also to other parts of the country, to help teach a beachside summer abroad course for American college students. I also traveled with documentary filmmakers, went to interview artists for art catalogs, attended academic conferences and even went back for several weeks to write a short book on carnival in a southern city, Jacmel.
During those trips, when my workload and logistics didn’t allow me to make it to Bel Air, my uncle came to see me, in hotel rooms, conference halls, libraries and university classrooms. I felt guilty, however, when I didn’t make it to the apartment in Bel Air because it was the only way I would get to see Tante Denise, who no longer ventured outside because she was not steady on her feet.
Whenever I could, though, I would add a few extra days to my trips for a stay in Bel Air. During those visits, my uncle liked for me to attend Sunday services at his church, where he would introduce me to his congregation, which over the years had more or less capped at about seventy-five people, most of them middle-aged or older.
During those Sunday-morning services, I would stand awkwardly in front of this group, filled with faces I barely recognized and who, without my uncle’s introduction, would not have known me at all, and I would tell them how happy I was to see them. After I returned to my seat, my uncle would share a bit of my family history, how my father and mother had met, how they’d left me and my brother Bob with him when they’d gone lòt bò dlo, to the other side of the waters.
“We’re here for a funeral,” my father told the immigration officer who silently examined our American passports at Toussaint Louverture Airport. My father and I had both become naturalized U.S. citizens exactly ten years after we’d received our green cards and we both felt a bit traitorous as the officer hastily scribbled his signature on our foreigners’ designated customs forms.
Pushing our luggage cart out into the sunlight, my father seemed to shrink a bit, the way he always did in unfamiliar surroundings. In the parking lot outside the airport, Uncle Joseph walked toward us and grabbed his hand, pumping it a few times before letting go. At eighty, Uncle Joseph looked a lot younger than my father. Unlike Papa, he was neither balding nor graying, and he was robust-looking and muscular as a result of a lifelong habit of walking pretty much everywhere. Soon, my aunt Zi parted a crowd of greeters, screaming my father’s name.