In 1994, he didn’t know what was to come.

To say my relationship with my father is strained is like saying the Grand Canyon could hold a few gallons of water.

My father left when I was four. I woke up and came downstairs to my father exiting with a half-dozen heavy duty garbage bags in tow. He cheated, lied, and drank his way through his short marriage to my mother.

He stayed about fifteen minutes away, and I spent the weekend with him whenever he was sober enough to have me. It was supposed to happen every weekend, but I went whole months without making the trip to Dorchester or Roxbury.

I remember my living room. A maroon carpet stretched wall to wall beneath my mother’s furniture set adorned with red and pink roses. The Last Supper was centered on the far wall, baby pictures of my sister and I were staggered between fine crystalware.

I remember that my dad was never welcomed back into the house once he was put out. I don’t remember why, but for whatever reason he was in the living room, sitting on the couch and speaking to my mother on that day in 1994. The news had been playing in the background for the whole conversation on what I remember to be an overcast, chilly day. That was normal, as the news, or some old-time sitcom always seemed to blare in the background whenever me and my mother sat together in the living room.

I remember my dad hearing something that set him off. I remember my dad hearing some silver-haired news anchor mention Haiti. I remember my dad darting toward my mother, snatching the remote, and turning the television up to a deafening volume. I remember him getting up and running to the TV, standing so close I waited for my mother to tell him to back up like she would had I done the same. I remember seeing helicopters and planes, people dancing and cheering, and a skinny, bespectacled man, Aristide.

My dad shouted. He shouted often, as Haitian men tend to banter at a tone reminiscent of carnival barkers or town criers, but never like this. This shout wasn’t a shout like the shout over Pele vs. Maradona. This was a shout like God himself had touched down on Haitian soil. He danced like the scriptures say David danced with the Ark of the Covenant. And he cried. Cried like they tell me he did when I was born. He cried like he didn’t when my older brother died. He wasn’t broken then like he is now. Haiti wasn’t broken then like it is now.

My dad cried and danced for the same reason his home did—salvation had come. The man they’d elected, that thugs had forced out, that America had come to reinstate, had returned from exile. That man had yet to embezzle millions, Clinton’s army had yet to overstay its welcome, Haiti had yet to descend into the madness that followed 2010's earthquake.

I don’t know if my dad cried for all of those things. And I don’t know if he’ll ever get to cry like he did in 1994, if God himself will ever step off another plane or helicopter, if he’ll ever dance like David. If it does happen, I hope God is who he says he is.

To say our relationship is strained is to say France only wanted a little money back from its former colony. But if I want one good thing for my father, it’s to see him cry again.

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