When I was two years old, my father moved to the United States from Haiti, leaving behind my mother, myself, and my younger brother, André. Papa did not want to leave us; however, he had no choice but to do so, because we were poor and he was having trouble earning enough money to take care of us, as well as our extended family—my three aunts and two uncles—who occasionally turned to him for financial support.

At the time my father left Haiti, in 1971, the country was going through a transition from the rule of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who had died after having been in power for fourteen years, to his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had taken his place.

Both Duvaliers had declared themselves “president for life” and imprisoned, killed, or sent into exile anyone who opposed them. Though my father was not a political exile, there were many others in our family, including my cousin Max, who had to flee Haiti at the same time because of their political views.

Two years after my father left Haiti, he sent for my mother, leaving André and me behind in the care of my uncle Joseph and his wife, Tante Denise. André and I grew up in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel-Air, in a house filled with children whose parents had migrated to other countries—the United States, Canada, and the Dominican Republic—and had promised to send for them as soon as they were settled abroad.

It took eight years for André and me to join our parents in the United States. This was mostly because our parents needed to change their status—they had overstayed tourist visas—then prove to the U.S. Immigration Service that they could support us without help from U.S. government programs. In the meantime, my brothers Kelly and Karl were born in Brooklyn, making us a family of two U.S.-born and two Haitian-born children. When I moved to the United States at age twelve, I missed Haiti very much.

In spite of our poverty, which was alleviated by our parents’ sending us money from New York every month, and the pressures of the younger Duvalier’s dictatorship—our neighbors, parents of our friends, and teachers would sometimes disappear, never to be heard from again—André and I were able to have a decent childhood. We would spend our summers with family members who were living in rural provinces deep in the Haitian mountains, where the wide-open skies, the beautiful streams and rivers, the music of thumping rain on tin roofs, showered us with more beauty and freedom than the city ever allowed.