Overview:
Images of the funeral of one of the last survivors of the Parsley Massacre, Marcellus Jean. Jean, who died at 102, was 15 when he and family members fled for their lives from the Dominican Republic to Haiti during the massacre. Jean carried the massacre in his mind like a shadow until his grave, his family said.
DOSMONT, Haiti — Elcilie Jean simply could not hold back any longer. As the priest delivered a sermon for her husband Marcellus Jean during his funeral inside the Perpetual Help Church, loud wails burst from the newly widowed woman.
“It hurts,” Elcilie said.
On that Saturday afternoon in September, as she and about 100 people gathered inside the church, Elcilie’s tears opened the floodgates for more tears from family members. Of an advanced age herself, a number she does not know, Elcilie threw herself toward the ground, but two family members held her frail frame.
“I went through so much with him.”
Marcellus died at age 102, after living for six years with an enlarged prostate. In the four months before his life ended, he had become mute and immobile.
During those arduous months and final years, Elcilie wished she could receive funds overdue to her husband — a survivor of the 1937 Parsley Massacre — from the Dominican Republic or the Haitian government. She needed the money to pay about $113 in medical bills every three months for her husband of 39 years. None ever came.
“He lived through that massacre his whole life, carrying it in his mind like a shadow,” Elcilie said. “He would tell us about it everyday like the pain was too deep ever to leave him.”
After returning to Haiti, Marcellus impacted scores of people, including his grandnephew, Uraymond Jean. The younger man sat at the back of the church, with a small bottle of Rhum Barbancourt in his back pocket.
Uraymond lived with Marcellus at times. He recalls how the great uncle often visited him in Paredes, a rural town about 12 miles from Dosmont, riding his horse with oranges as gifts.
“He didn’t let us peel the oranges ourselves,” Uraymond, 36, said. “He used to say ‘I’m your great uncle, if I’m going to give you something I have to peel it for you.”
by Onz Chery/ The Haitian Times
