Black Man on the Titanic. Serge Bile

believed that death would take them back to the motherland, where they would be reunited with the parents from whom they had been torn. Because of the feverish desperation in which they lived, it made sense for enslaved men to contemplate suicide, Joseph thought, although at his age these concepts were still a little over his head. In the case of Uncle Bertrand, though, he couldn’t understand the willful, self-inflicted death of a man who’d been deeply loved, and whose family lived right here, in this country, in Haiti.

      The wake for Bertrand Laroche became the occasion for a big family reunion, as such circumstances usually warranted. The entire family gathered in the house where he’d lived, at the corner of Rue Royale and Rue du Hasard. The women, assembled around the body, prayed the rosary and sang hymns.