Everything Inside

The narrator of “In the Old Days” is Nadia, a first-generation Haitian American teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. Nadia receives a call from her father’s wife, who says that her father, Maurice, is dying and that he wants to see her. Nadia is surprised; she was raised by a single mother and had grown up believing that her father had abandoned them. Nadia’s mother reveals that Maurice left Brooklyn when Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986, hoping he could help to rebuild the country, and that he was actually unaware that she was pregnant. Wondering whether his decision to leave would have been different if he had known about her, Nadia decides to travel to Miami.

Nadia’s father’s wife does not pick her up from the airport as promised, and when Nadia arrives at the house, the wife does not immediately take Nadia to see him. Instead, she offers Nadia lemonade and answers her questions about their life together in Haiti. She is sympathetic to Nadia’s anger and tells her that her father learned of her existence when she was a teenager. He believed that, by dedicating himself to his work in Haitian schools, he could care for hundreds of children, rather than just one.