Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [66]
Reaching into an open suitcase laid out by his feet, Ferna pulled out a dark, curly, shoulder-length wig, a wide-rimmed wicker sun hat and a long flowered muumuu large enough to fit over his clothes. He couldn’t figure out why she had all these things packed in the suitcase like that. Maybe she was thinking that one day she too might need to escape.
“You must disguise yourself,” Ferna insisted again. “It will be light soon and someone might see you.”
What choice did he have? He could not let himself be captured. He could not surrender either, to be butchered, to die. So he let Ferna and Anne slip the muumuu over his clothes. As they placed the wig on his head, the hair fell against the side of his face, itching, just as his wife’s wigs had when he would kiss her long ago. Though she wore wigs for a long time, he remembered how she often found them intolerable, yanking them off her head as soon as she got home.
Wearing the wig and with the muumuu over his own clothes, he stepped out into the alley with Anne and Ferna at his side. There was an odd stillness to the neighborhood, the houses merging with the murky shadows in the dark. As they guided him up and down the hills and inclines of the winding neighborhood alleyways, he felt like a blind man being led through a labyrinth. Walking briskly, they would occasionally come across a boy stumbling home, drunk. A girl heading to sleep after a night of selling her body. A man, or was it a woman, who, following a furtive look at his very male shoes, quickly hurried past them, head further bent, face further hidden, this person perhaps also a fugitive, perhaps also fleeing.
Man Jou bore the balloon-shaped jowls of Tante Denise’s clan as they aged. She was often ready with a smile, but even readier with a scowl. She was known for her quick temper, but also for her generosity and sense of humor. So when Uncle Joseph showed up at her door dressed in drag, she opened the door, laughed, then let him in. Her house, like Ferna’s, was small, a living room and one even smaller bedroom. However, she had a large bed, with enough room for someone to disappear under it without suffocating.
My uncle spent the next two days at Man Jou’s house, sleeping on a twin mattress at the foot of her bed. As he lay there, often after attempting a series of phone calls through which he’d been unable to reach either Maxo and the children or Tante Zi, he would listen to Man Jou’s accounts of an increasingly dismal state of affairs. In nearby Rue Saint Martin, the police had ordered four young men to lie facedown on the ground and had shot them at close range in the back of the head. Their bodies were left to rot on the street for more than forty-eight hours, as a gruesome deterrent. In the meantime, the gangs had constructed new barricades near his church with trash and burnt-out cars. Only residents who were on good terms with the gang members were being allowed to enter his street. The gangs had set up residence in his apartment, the school, the church, establishing a base from which to operate on his premises.
“If he ever comes back,” the chief dread was said to have declared, “we’ll burn him alive.”
Limbo
My uncle was able to reach Maxo and Tante Zi on their cell phones the following Wednesday night. They’d exhausted their minutes calling all over town, trying to track him down. Finally they’d refilled their cards and waited for his call.
Once his children were safely settled in Léogâne, Maxo had decided to travel with his father to Miami and planned to meet up with him at Tante Zi’s as soon as his father made it out of Bel Air. When my uncle called Tante Zi, whose stationery stand was on Grand Rue, only a few minutes’ walk from Man Jou’s, Tante Zi decided to go and get her brother.
“Don’t come,” my uncle pleaded. “Not now, Zi. Not yet.”
“We can’t just leave you there,” Tante Zi said. “You have your ticket. You can leave the country tomorrow. We have to get you out.”
The next morning, Thursday, Tante Zi got dressed in one of the all-white outfits she’d been wearing