Brother, I'm Dying

In 1983, Uncle Joseph comes to New York for a checkup. Edwidge and Bob join their father to meet him at the airport, and once they all embrace, father asks him, “‘Do you see your children?’ […] as though he’d been waiting a long time to say it” (114). Edwidge accompanies Joseph to the doctor’s, because “unlike anyone else, I could now doubly interpret my uncle, both from silence to voice and Creole to English” (115). The doctor presents him with a voice box, a machine that will help his vocal cords produce sound, so Joseph can speak for the first time in years, in a metallic, robotic voice.

That summer, Joseph sells the old house in Haiti and builds a new one behind the church and the school. Marie Micheline, now 37, works as a head nurse in a neighborhood clinic. She has three boys with two different men and raises them on her own. Uncle Joseph has a soft spot for her: “Perhaps because he had rescued her not once, but twice, he loved her even more deeply, more unconditionally” (117).

On Joseph’s 63rd birthday, February 7, 1986, President Jean-Claude Duvalier flees Haiti, “leaving a military junta in charge of the country” (118).