Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [73]
“Someone just called me,” I said. “About an elderly man and his son.”
“I’m familiar with them,” the man who replied said. In his few words, I could hear the disdain, which perhaps was always in his voice, but seemed nevertheless particularly directed at me. “They came here with no papers and tried to get in—”
“They have papers,” I tried to explain.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have two flights coming in.” Then he hung up.
“We have to go to the airport,” I told my husband. We were only fifteen minutes away and were not getting anywhere on the phone.
At the closed American Airlines counter at the airport, we found a Haitian janitor who directed us to the entrance to the Customs and Border Protection offices. They too were closed. Standing outside the metal doors, I dialed the offices’ number again.
Another male officer picked up.
“Someone called me,” I said, ”about my uncle, Joseph Dantica. He should be with his son, Maxo.”
“They’re right here in front of me.” This was the kindest and most polite-sounding voice yet.
“I’m in the airport,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve come to pick them up.”
His long pause indicated some kind of misunderstanding on my part. Something had been said to me that I’d obviously not fully grasped.
“We only called to notify you that they’re here,” he said. “They’re not being released. They’re going to Krome.”
My heart sank. The year before, I had been to the Krome detention center as part of a delegation of community observers organized by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. A series of gray concrete buildings and trailers, Krome was out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, in southwest Miami. During our visit, a group of men in identical dark blue overalls had been escorted into a covered, chain-link-fenced, concrete patio rimmed by rows of barbed wire. The men walked in two straight lines, sat at the long cafeteria-style tables and told our delegation their stories. They were Haitian “boat people” and in addition to their names identified themselves by the vessels on which they’d come.
“My name is…,” they said. “I came on the July boat.” Or “I came on the December boat.”
Some invented parables to explain their circumstances. One man spoke of mad dogs—gang members—threatening him and forcing him to seek shelter at a neighbor’s house, the neighbor being the United States. Another sang about a mud slide, meaning the Lavalas or Flood Party, that had washed everything away. Another asked us to tell the world the detainees were beaten sometimes. He told of a friend who’d had his back broken by a guard and was deported before he could get medical attention. Some detainees fought among themselves, sometimes nearly killing each other as uninterested guards looked on. They spoke of other guards who told them they smelled, who taunted them while telling them that unlike the Cuban rafters, who were guaranteed refuge, they would never get asylum, that few Haitians ever get asylum. They said that the large rooms where they slept in rows and rows of bunk beds were often so overcrowded that some of them had to sleep on thin mattresses on the floor. They were at times so cold that they shivered all night long. They told of the food that rather than nourish them, punished them, gave them diarrhea and made them vomit. They told of arbitrary curfews, how they were woken up at six a.m. and forced to go back to that cold room by six p.m.
I’d seen some men who looked too young to be the mandatory eighteen years old for detention at Krome. A few of them looked fourteen or even twelve. How can we be sure they’re not younger, I’d asked one of the lawyers in our delegation, if they come with no birth certificates, no papers? The lawyer answered that their ages were determined by examining their teeth. I couldn’t escape this agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were pried open to determine worth and state of health.
One man, who had received asylum but had not yet been released when we visited, showed us burn marks over his arms, chest and belly.