I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings,… - Edwidge Danticat

It wasn't easy, but it was the lot of so many of us, and even in the house where I was growing up, my aunt and uncle were looking after my cousins whose mother was in Canada, and another cousin whose father was in the Dominican Republic. And our parents had made this choice so that we could have a better life. You know, they could have either stayed with us and struggled and tried to make a living, or they thought that they could carve out a future for us by going abroad and leaving us behind, and then later sending for us…

America’s relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, “Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934.” But what I know from having lived here this long is that not all of America did this. In the same way, I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did. My fight was with those policies and those particular people and what they were doing to other people.

The person she'd been when the three of them, she and her husband and her son, had gotten on that boat and left Haiti-that person was also lost at sea.