Brother, I'm Dying

Edwidge recalls how her Uncle Joseph met his future wife, Denise, in 1946 in his hometown of Beauséjour, and it was love at first sight. The following year they move to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, near his oldest sister, Ino, and build a “three-room cement house, topped by a corrugated-metal roof” (24). Soon most of Joseph’s family, including Edwidge’s father, moves to the city. Joseph’s son, Maxo, is born in 1948, and in 1952, Joseph and Denise adopt Marie Micheline, the daughter of his Cuban friend Guillermo.

The Bel Air neighborhood is on a hill where once a battle between mulatto abolitionists and French colonists took place and began what would become the Republic of Haiti in 1804. In 1915, American president Woodrow Wilson “ordered an invasion” (25), and the US occupied Haiti for the next 19 years. Bel Air was once again the center of resistance.

In the 1950s, “Uncle Joseph’s hero” is a politician named Daniel Fignolé (26), and Joseph opens his house for his sympathizers. Joseph begins to hold speeches, evoking his father, who was a guerilla warrior for the resistance. Fignolé comes into power in 1957, only to be “deposed by the army and forced into exile” (27). Disappointed in politics, Joseph joins a Baptist church and becomes a pastor. Working reluctantly with American missionaries, he builds his church and school. 

As a preacher, Joseph has a voice “deep and resolute, breathy and jingly” (29). However, in 1977 he begins to lose it. The herbalists cannot help, and a dentist even removes all his teeth to no avail. From a visiting American doctor, Joseph learns that he has “a mass sitting on top of his larynx” (31). The tumor is cancerous, and he must go to New York to have it removed. Before his operation, Joseph wakes from the sudden pain of his throat closing and calls his brother, uttering his last words, “Brother, I’m dying” (35). After an emergency tracheotomy, the surgeons remove his voice box. At age 55, although the operation is successful, he loses his voice forever. 

Edwidge informs her parents about her pregnancy as they drive her to the airport, “more than a week after I learned my father’s diagnosis” (37). In the past, she sprang news on them in a similar fashion, revealing her engagement on the way to a cousin’s wedding. This habit irritates her father, who “never mentioned anything monumental in a casual way” (37). Her parents react to the news with pieces of advice “that both my parents would repeat throughout my pregnancy” (40). 

The narrator recalls how her father left school in 1954, at 19, to start his tailor’s apprenticeship for a man who expected him to sew “two dozen little shirts each day” at a miserable profit of five pennies per shirt (42). Soon, her father buys a sewing machine and goes to work for himself. When vendors start importing cheap shirts from the US, he starts working for an Italian shoe store owner for a modest salary. During this time, Papa Doc Duvalier becomes president and then refuses “to step down or allow new elections, despite a growing dissatisfaction with his increasingly repressive methods of imprisoning and publicly executing his enemies” (43). He forms a paramilitary force, Tonton Macoutes, which often brutalizes the citizens of Haiti. Edwidge’s father begins to think of leaving Haiti.

He meets his future wife in 1962, and they marry in 1965. Edwidge is born in 1969, followed less than two years later by her brother Bob. The idea of leaving persists: “Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate, like both” (46). Father obtains a one-month tourist visa and leaves for New York with no intention of coming back.

Two years later, Edwidge’s mother obtains a visa as well and joins her husband, leaving four-year-old Edwidge and two-year-old Bob with Uncle Joseph. Before her tearful departure, mother sews several new dresses for Edwidge in different sizes so she will be able to wear them as she grows. 

Edwidge’s flight to Miami is delayed, so she attempts to call her father and gets worried when he does not immediately respond. He responds, and she notes in that moment he “didn’t sound ill at all” (51). She calls her mother to apologize for telling them about her pregnancy in the car, and she then calls her brothers (Bob and Karl already have children) to share the news; “Announcing my pregnancy kept me from talking about my father” (52). One of her friends warns her not to take the doctor’s prognosis too seriously, adding, echoing the words of Uncle Joseph, “we’re all dying” (52).

Uncle Joseph lost his voice when Edwidge was nine, and she now believes he adapted well to his new life. He writes notes for those who can read and uses gestures to indicate his meaning. However, he causes curiosity with his tracheotomy hole—“a perfect circle, it was salmon pink like our house and convulsed outward when he sneezed” (55)—and even faces ridicule, which he stoically ignores.

Uncle Joseph now prefers not to go out alone, so Edwidge or Maxo’s son, Nick, accompany him to “interpret him.” After one such visit to the bank, when they reach used-book sellers, “my uncle asked me to choose one as a gift for myself” (58). Edwidge chooses a book her uncle once bought her already—“that first book was the only birthday gift I’d ever received from my uncle” (58)—and that she lost in the move after her mother left, about a girl named Madeleine, who “lived in an old house with other children” (58).

Granmè Melina, Aunt Denise’s mother, comes to live with them in 1979, at almost a hundred years old. Quiet and observant during the day, “as soon as the sun went down, she would be at the center of things as she livened up and told stories” for the neighborhood children (59). Her favorite story is about a young girl who lived locked in a house because her mother was afraid someone would abduct her. A snake attempted to trick her into letting her in, finally killing the mother, but the girl stayed alone in the house and died. The author notes: “But I see now that the story was more about Granmè Melina than anyone. She was the daughter, locked inside a cocoon of sickness and old age while death pleaded to be let in somehow” (61).

Edwidge and her cousin Liline share a room with Melina, and one morning the children find that she died. During the funeral, Uncle Joseph, who once gave beautiful eulogies, suddenly stands up and mouths the word “Good-bye” in a way that makes everyone sure they have heard it.