Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [84]
Cremation was to me the obvious choice.
“When things are calmer,” I told Maxo, “we can all go back and bury his ashes on his own soil with Tante Denise.”
My uncle’s religious beliefs wouldn’t allow it, Maxo said.
“In the final day of judgment,” he added, “when the dead rise out of their tombs, we want his body there.”
In the final day of judgment, will my uncle care from whence he’d rise?
Uncle Joseph’s most haunting childhood memory, and the only one he ever described to me in detail, was of the year 1933, when he was ten years old. The U.S. occupation of Haiti was nearing its final days. Fearing that he might at last be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps formed to build bridges and roads, my grandfather, Granpè Nozial, ordered him never to go down the mountain, away from Beauséjour. Uncle Joseph wasn’t even to accompany his mother, Granmè Lorvana, to the marketplace, so that he might never lay eyes on occupying marines or they him.
When he left home to fight, Granpè Nozial never told my uncle and his sisters, Tante Ino and Tante Tina, where he was going. (The other siblings, including my father, were not born yet.) Granmè Lorvana told them, however, that their father was fighting somewhere, in another part of the country. She also told them that the Americans had the power to change themselves into the legendary three-legged horse Galipòt, who, as he trotted on his three legs, made the same sound as the marching, booted soldiers. Galipòt was also known to mistake children for his fourth leg, chase them down and take them away.
Still, my uncle and his sisters were never to let on that they knew anything about their father’s whereabouts. If they were ever asked by an adult where Granpè Nozial was, they were supposed to say that he had died, bewildering that adult and sending him/her directly to Granmè Lorvana to question her. But when Granpè Nozial returned from his trips, they were not to ask him any questions. Instead they were to act as though he’d never left, like he’d been with them all along. This is why they knew so little of Granpè Nozial’s activities during the U.S. occupation. This is why I know so little now.
One day while Granpè Nozial was away and Tante Ino and Tante Tina became ill, Granmè Lorvana had no choice but to send my uncle to a marketplace down the mountain. As Uncle Joseph walked to the market, following the road that his mother had indicated, what he feared most was running into Granpè Nozial, who’d threatened him with all manner of bodily harm if he ever found him on the road leading out of Beauséjour.
When my uncle finally reached the marketplace at midday, after hours and hours of walking, he saw a group of young white men in dark high boots and khakis at its bamboo-fenced entrance. There were perhaps six or seven of them, and they seemed to be kicking something on the ground. My uncle had never seen white men before, and their pink, pale skins gave some credence to his mother’s notion that white people had po lanvè, skins turned inside out, so that if they didn’t wear heavy clothing, you might always be looking at their insides.
As my uncle approached the small circle of men and the larger crowd of vendors and shoppers watching with hands cradling their heads in shock, the white men seemed to him to be quite agitated. Were they laughing? Screaming in another language? They kept kicking the thing on the ground as though it were a soccer ball, bouncing it to one another with the rounded tips of their boots. Taking small careful steps to remain the same distance away as the other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.
The head was full of black peppercorn hair. Blood was dripping out of the severed neck, forming dusty dark red bubbles in the dirt. Suddenly my uncle realized why Granpè Nozial and Granmè Lorvana wanted him to