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Dominican Republic five years ago and never returned.
    The school is Uncle Joseph’s latest passion, the last thing he wants to accomplish, he says, before he dies. He has zealously collected money from family members and friends to build it so that some of the children of Beauséjour, both boys and girls, can learn to read and write.
    We make our way en masse to the schoolhouse, a large open room with a dirt floor and tin roof. Tante Ilyana watches closely, narrowing her eyes, as Uncle Joseph gives special instructions to the headmistress and the builder. The headmistress puts in a plea for a blackboard for each of the new room’s four walls to enable children on different levels to work independently. The schoolmistress also asks the builder to assure her of a roof that won’t leak. She doesn’t want to have to stop classes and send the children home whenever it rains. Tante Ilyana, who had been cooking the occasional midday meal for the children since the school first opened, volunteers herself again.
    “I’ll continue to do it,” she says almost to herself.
    I reach over and rub her shoulders, thinking, perhaps over-thinking, that this is her way of making sure that other children are able to get the education that she had not.
    After the schoolhouse, we walk over to the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. The tombs are made of cracked marble among knee-high weeds. Some of the names and dates, carved deeply on some tombstones and more superficiallyon others, have faded. There is no birth date for my great-grandmother Mirazine, from whom my father gets his name, Miracin, and his nickname, Mira. It is possible that her birth was never recorded at all in any public register. My great-grandmother died in 1919, during the 1915–1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti. My great-grandfather, Osnac, died after his wife did, my Tante Ilyana tells us, but the year of his death has long faded from his tombstone and her memory.
    I announce that when I die, I too want to be buried in Beauséjour.
    “Where would you find someone to carry you this far?” asks Tante Ilyana. “First from New York to Port-au-Prince, and then this two-day trudge up the mountains. It would be a lot of carrying.”
    I assure her that there would be less carrying if I were cremated and my ashes scattered from the peak of one of the mountains.
    “There is already enough dust in Haiti,” she says very matter-of-factly. “You should be buried where you die.”
    Where I die will probably not be here in this place, I think, unless the descent from the mountain proves as fatal as I had believed the climb might be.
    “Enough now,” says Tante Ilyana. “This is too much talk about dying.”
    I return a few more times to my great-grandparents’ graves, often by myself. The year before, my first novel,
Breath, Eyes, Memory
, had been chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s famous book club, generously exposing the book to thousands more readers than I had ever dreamed or imagined. The novel attemptsto tell the story of three generations of Haitian women. Ifé Caco, the grandmother, loses her husband to a chain gain. Martine Caco, the older daughter, as a teenager is raped by a brutal Tonton Macoute whose face she never sees. Atie Caco, Martine’s sister, harbors a secret unrequited love for another woman. Sophie Caco, the granddaughter, the narrator of the book, is the child who is born as a result of her mother’s rape. All of these women share a trauma: all had mothers who regularly inserted the tips of their fingers into their daughters’ vaginas to check that they were still virgins.
    The virginity testing element of the book led to a backlash in some Haitian American circles. “You are a liar,” a woman wrote to me right before I left on the trip. “You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits.”
    “Why was she taught to read and write?” I overheard a man saying at a Haitian American fund-raising gala in New York, where I was