Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [62]
“They’re very angry with us right now,” he told Maxo. “What if they bayonet the children right in front of us? Would you want to see that? Your children torn from limb to limb right before your eyes?”
Maxo paced the perimeter of the room, walking back and forth, thinking.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll make sure the children leave safely, then I’ll come back for you. You call my cell phone as soon as you can and we’ll meet at Tante Zi’s house in Delmas.”
“You should leave with us,” Léone persisted.
I’ll never know whether my uncle thought he was too old or too familiar to his neighbors, including the gang members, to be harmed in any way, but somehow he managed to convince everyone to leave. So when the sun rose the next morning, he was all by himself in a bullet-riddled compound.
Hell
Granmè Melina liked to tell a story about a man who one day fell asleep and woke up in a foreign land where he knew no one and no one knew him. Finding himself on his back in the middle of a dirt road filled with strangers, he looked up at the blurry faces around him, which were framed by a gloomy gray sky, and asked, “Where am I?”
“You’re where you are,” answered a booming voice.
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“Where you need to be,” replied the voice.
“I didn’t ask to be here,” the man said, “wherever it is.”
“No matter how you ended up here,” said the voice, “here you are.”
Tired of the roundabout conversation, the man said, “I want you to tell me right now where I am. If you don’t, I’m going to be angry.”
“Who cares about your anger?” answered the voice. “No one is scared of you here.”
Truly upset now, the man said, “Tell me where I am right now!”
“You are in hell,” replied the voice.
And since these were long ago times, the man didn’t know what hell was, even though he could already see that it was not a happy place.
“What is hell?” he asked.
“Hell,” replied the voice, “is whatever you fear most.”
The next morning, Monday, at four a.m., Maxo, his children, his aunt and uncles reluctantly left for Léogâne. My uncle sat alone in his room and gathered some papers, including his passport and his Miami plane ticket, which he’d purchased weeks before to visit some Haitian churches there. He was scheduled to leave on Friday, October 29, just as he’d told my father.
The plane ticket bookmarked the Lord’s Prayer in his Bible. He would now leave the house, for how long he wasn’t sure, but he hadn’t wanted to put the children’s lives in danger by walking out with them. Besides, he was still hoping that the situation might somehow be resolved. He could talk to the dreads, as the dreadlocked gang leaders were also called, and explain. After all, before they were called dreads or even chimères, they were young men, boys, many of whom had spent their entire lives in the neighborhood. He knew their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts. Some of them had attended his church, his school, had eaten in his lunch program. Many had been to his church for christenings, weddings and funerals. He would often lend them his generator for soccer tournaments and block parties. He had even given many of the U.S. deportees among them jobs as English tutors for his students. The shooting from his roof had destroyed an uneasy equilibrium between him and them, but surely one of them would have a fond memory that could override what they wrongly believed he’d done.
Before heading downstairs, my uncle removed the suit he’d had on since the day before and changed into a maroon pants and gray jacket ensemble he sometimes wore on long trips to the countryside. He put on a pair of old brown leather shoes, which, like all his other shoes, had been repaired and resoled many times. I’m not going anywhere, he wanted his clothes to say. And up