Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [68]
“He was so tired,” Tante Zi recalled, “it’s as if he had surrendered.”
She tried to stay as close to the road that was being patrolled as possible. There would be fewer people down those alleyways and certainly very few gang members. Still, every face seemed menacing. Even the oldest woman peering out from her porch. Even the youngest child jumping rope next to her. Her grip tightened on my uncle’s fingers with every step. They had only to make it to the Lycée, to one of the patrolling tanks, she kept reminding herself.
While still in the alleys, they got as close to the road as they could, then Tante Zi dashed across an empty street, still tugging at my uncle. Walking quickly, they followed the footpath by the square in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, just in case they had to run inside the church for shelter. Within a few short minutes, they were in front of the Lycée, but the UN patrol was no longer there. Racing past the old cathedral, they merged into the crowd of vendors and slow-moving cars.
That wasn’t so hard, Tante Zi remembers reading on my uncle’s face. Why hadn’t I tried it myself?
“You couldn’t have, brother,” she said, reassuring him. “They didn’t just take your things. They took your legs. They took your heart. You could have walked out of Man Jou’s house alone and dropped dead from the shock of seeing the few people who did not want to kill you.”
She held him by the elbow as they walked to her stationery stand. She hadn’t been able to work every day in the weeks since the demonstrations had started. Catching his breath, my uncle removed the towel from his head. He sat down on a footstool in front of her stand and began wiping the mud off his shoes with a piece of newspaper. Tante Zi offered him water that she was using to clean her own feet and he accepted some. He turned down the food she offered him when they were done. He was suddenly full of plans. He needed to go to the police’s anti-gang unit to report what had taken place, to the UN to file a complaint. Maxo was even now traveling from Léogâne and was going to go with him to Miami. My uncle had to stop by a bank to get some money, then a nearby travel agency to confirm that his flight was still leaving, then buy a ticket for Maxo. Were the flights even operating? he wondered. But then again, chaos in Port-au-Prince was often restricted to certain areas only. There could be a war raging in some neighborhoods, while others were as peaceful as…usually one might say as a church or perhaps a cemetery, but peace was hard to find now in some churches and cemeteries too.
He also had to stop at a pharmacy for a refill of the medications he was constantly taking for his inflamed prostate and high blood pressure. That same pharmacy had herbal remedies too, tree-bark-soaked tonics mixed with liquid vitamins that, he believed, if not cures, helped the body fight certain illnesses. While there, he picked up a large bottle for my father and another one for himself. These were not very different from the types of hope-laden potions my father’s New York herbalist might have prepared, but my uncle, having used such potions all his life, was certain that they would work better simply because they were homegrown.
Once he’d picked up his medication, he took a taxi to the anti-gang unit across from the white-domed presidential palace. During the early Duvalier years, in the late fifties, early sixties, you were not supposed to stop even for a minute in front of the presidential palace or you might be suspected of plotting against the government and risk being shot. Also at that time, if your hair was not closely cropped or if you had something that was beginning to resemble an Afro, you could be arrested.