Great gods in Guinea, you are beautiful," the driver said as he stopped under a breadfruit tree in the middle of the sheds, stands, and clusters of women in the open marketplace.
I lowered my head and pretended not to hear, but he persisted.
"I would crawl inside your dress and live there. I can feed on your beauty like a leech feeds on blood. I would live and die for you. More than the sky loves its stars. More than the night loves its moon. More than the sea loves its mermaids. Strike me, thunder, it's no lie. We do not know one another, I know. Still I must tell you. You can be the core of my existence. The 'I' of my 'We.' The first and last letter of my name, which is 'Yours,' your humble servant and transporter."
It was a stifling August day. The sun, which was once god to my ancestors, slapped my face as though I had done something wrong. The fragrance of crushed mint leaves and stagnant pee alternated in the breeze. Body-raking soka blared from the car radio as passengers hopped off the colorful van in which I had spent the last four hours.
The sides of the van were painted in steaming reds, from cherry scarlet to crimson blood. Giraffes and lions were sketched over a terra cotta landscape, as though seeking a tint of green.
I wouldn't have gotten the coveted seat next to the driver had it not been for what he termed my "young charcoal-cloaked beauty." Otherwise, I would have been forced to sit with the market women, their children, livestock, wicker baskets, and the flour sacks that shielded their backs from the sugar cane stalks.
DIEU SI BON proclaimed the letters on the van's front plate. God is good indeed. Otherwise, my daughter, Brigitte, and I would have never made it this far.
"A wonderful trip, pa vrè?" asked the driver, as he unloaded my suitcase.
"At least we arrived," I said.
"It is not my fault, lovely star, if we rocked a little. There are dunes and ridges on the road that I did not put there."
"I am not blaming you for those. On the contrary, I am very grateful we've arrived safely."
"All my trips have not been safe. You must be an angel. You bring good blessings. I have been in a ravine or two in the past."
"And your passengers?"
"I would hope they are in heaven."
He peeled a white T-shirt off his chest. Sweat rolled in dancing ripples from his neck to his belly. His skin was a bright chestnut, like mine and Brigitte's.
"You hot too?" he asked.
"It's dangerous for a woman to undress in public," I said.
"Still, I would love to see if you look like a goddess naked. Is there any way you can be persuaded?"
"Mwin, I am a married woman."
"I see that," he said, pointing first to my wedding ring and then to my daughter. "She is as perfect as you are, the child."
"Ou byen janti." You are very kind.
"I find your Creole flawless," he said.
"This is not my first trip to La Nouvelle Dame Marie. I was born here."
"I still commend you, my dear. People who have been away from Haiti fewer years than you, they return and pretend they speak no Creole."
"Perhaps they can't."
"Is it so easy to forget?"
"Some people need to forget."
"Obviously, you do not need to forget," he said.
"I need to remember."
An old hunchbacked lady walked over to pay her fare. He straightened out the dirty gourdes and counted them quickly.
She walked to the back of the van and pointed out her load of sorghum to a sweaty teenage boy. The boy had a bouret, a handcart made out of two tires and a slab of plywood. He had a group of helpers, younger lads with dust-crusted feet. A young boy followed them with a kite. He ran ahead, tugging the kite string, trying to force it to fly above his head. The old woman nearly tripped over the kite as it crashed to the ground.
Brigitte stirred in my arms. She opened her eyes, fluttered her long eyelashes, and then closed them again. A mild breeze rustled the guava trees that now lined the unpaved road. The breeze swept the soil from the hills down to the valley, back to my grandmother's home.
Brigitte opened her mouth widely, stretching her lips to their limits as she yawned.
"I think Mademoiselle needs to eat again," the driver said.
He was looking across the road, at a woman sitting in a stand that was the size of a refrigerator. She was plump and beautiful with a bright russet complexion. She had a sky blue scarf wrapped around her head and two looped earrings bouncing off her cheeks.
It was Louise, Man Grace's daughter. At the window in front of her was a row of cola bottles.
"While you wait for your people, would you like something to drink?" asked the driver.
"I could drink an ocean," I said.
"If Mademoiselle over there is selling an ocean, I will surely buy it for you."
The female street vendors called to one another as they came down the road. When one merchant dropped her heavy basket, another called out of concern, "Ou libéré?" Are you free from your heavy load?
The woman with the load would answer yes, if she had unloaded her freight without hurting herself.
…
I sat in the shade of a crimson flamboyant tree, at the turn of the forked road. Brigitte quickly tightened her lips around the bottle of milk that I gave her. She sucked the warm liquid as though she hadn't been fed for days.
A few Tonton Macoutes climbed into the van and settled in the empty seats to eat their lunch. The steaming banana leaves and calabash bowls were in sharp contrast to their denim militia uniforms. They laughed loudly as they threw pieces of grilled meat and small biscuits at each other.
"I have a pig to sell you," whispered a voice behind me.
I was startled. My body plunged forward. I tightened my grip on Brigitte and nearly pushed the bottle down her throat. Brigitte began to cry, spitting the milk out of her mouth.
"Do you have all your senses?" I shouted at the woman.
Her face was hidden behind the flamboyant's drooping branches.
I raised Brigitte over my shoulder and tapped her back to burp her.
"Pardon. Pardon," Louise said, walking out from behind the tree. "I did not mean to scare you."
The driver was sitting at the stand, in her place, collecting coins and popping the caps off before handing foaming bottles to her customers.
I rocked Brigitte until she quieted down.
"I have a pig," Louise said, sitting on the rusty grass patch next to me.
The tree bark scraped my back as I tried to slide upright.
"Will you look at my pig?" she insisted. "I look at you, I see one who loves all God's creatures."
"I have no use for a pig," I said.
"It's a piyay, a steal, for five hundred gourdes."
"I don't need one." I said, shaking my head. "Please, have you seen my Tante Atie?"
"I know you. I do," she said.
"You know Atie too."
"For sure, I know Atie. We are like milk and coffee, lips and tongue. We are two fingers on the same hand. Two eyes on the same head."
"Do you know where she is? She was supposed to meet me here. I sent her a cassette from America."
"How is there?" Her eyes were glowing. "Is it like they say? Large? Grand? Are there really pennies on the streets and lots of maids' jobs? Mwin rélé Louise."
"I know who you are."
"My mother was Man Grace."
"I know," I said.
"Gone, my mother is dead now," she said. "She is in Guinea ahead of me. Now I know you too. You are Sophie. Atie can never make herself stop talking about you. I am teaching Atie her letters now and all she can write in her book is your name."
"I hope she will recognize me when she sees me."
"Folks like Atie know their people the moment they lay eyes on them."
"I have changed a lot since the baby. I bet she has changed too."
"Atie? That old maid, change?"
"You are friends, you say?"
"We are both alone in the world, since my mother died."
"What could be keeping Tante Atie," I wondered out loud.
"The wind will bring her soon. It will. Can I ask you a question?"
"What is it?"
"What do you do in America, Sophie? What is your profession?"
"I am dactylo," I said.
"Ki sa?"
"A secretary."
"You make money?"
"I haven't worked since I had the baby."
"Had enough for this journey, non?"
"I didn't plan on this journey."
I laid Brigitte on my lap. Her cheeks swayed back and forth like flesh balloons.
"I want to go to America," Louise said. "I am taking a boat."
"It is very dangerous by boat."
"I have heard everything. It has been a long time since our people walked to Africa, they say. The sea, it has no doors. They say the sharks from here to there, they can eat only Haitian flesh. That is all they know how to eat."
"Why would you want to make the trip if you've heard all that?"
"Spilled water is better than a broken jar. All I need is five hundred gourdes."
"I know the other side. Thousands of people wash up on the shores. They put it on television, in newspapers."
"People here too. We pray for them and bury them. Stop. Let us stop talking, so sad. It is bad luck in front of a baby. How old is your baby?"
She reached over and tickled Brigitte's forehead.
"Twenty weeks."
"The birthing? What it feel like?"
"Like passing watermelons."
"Wou." She cringed. "You look very meg, bony. Not like women here who eat to fill a hole after their babies come out. When you were pregnant, you didn't eat corn so the baby could be yellow?"
"I never thought of that."
"You should have eaten honey so her hair would be soft."
"I will remember that."
"The next time, maybe?"
"Maybe."
"Your daughter? What is her name?"
"Brigitte Ife Woods."
"Woods? It is not a Haitian name."
"No, non. Her father, he is American."
She called the boy with the kite over and squeezed a penny between his muddy fingers. With a few whispers in the child's ear, she sent him dashing down the road.
She rushed across to her stand and came back with a bottle of papaya cola.
My whole body felt cooler as the liquid slipped down my throat.
"I know you will pay me later," she said.
Tante Atie was standing at the crossroads, with a very wide grin on her pudgy face. She had not changed at all. She walked with her hands supporting her back, as if it hurt her. A panama hat tightly covered her head. On her shoulder was a palmetto sewing basket, flapping against her wide buttocks.
"She must have been on the way," Louise said.
"Mim mwoin!" I shouted to Tante Atie. I'm over here!
Tante Atie raced towards us. She had to look at me closely to see the girl she had put on the plane. It seemed so very long ago. The years had changed me.
"You are already chewing off my niece's ear," she said, tapping Louise's behind. "Always trying to give away your soul."
Louise sprang back to her stand.
"I would throw myself around you," my aunt said. "I would, just like a blanket, but I don't want to flatten the baby."
I handed Brigitte to her, as I raised myself from the ground.
"Who would have imagined it?" she said. "The precious one has your manman's black face. She looks more like Martine's child than yours."
Leaves were still piling up on the creeks along the road.
A tall girl passed us with a calabash balancing on her head.
I carried a small suitcase, mostly filled with Brigitte's things. Brigitte napped as Tante Atie carried her in her arms.
The women we met on the road called Tante Atie Madame, even though she had never married.
"I cannot see this child coming out of you," Tante Atie said, rocking Brigitte in her arms.
"Sometimes, I cannot see it myself."
"Makes me think back to when you were this small and I had you in my arms. Feels the same too. Like I am holding something very valuable. Do you sometimes think she is going to break in your hands?"
"She is a true Caco woman; she is very strong."
A woman was sitting by the road stringing factory sequins together, while her daughter braided her hair.
"Louise tells me you've learned your letters," I said to Tante Atie.
"She must think I want that shouted from the hills."
"I was very happy to hear it."
"I alway felt, I did, that I knew words in my head. I did not know them on paper. Now once every so often, I put some nice words down. Louise, she calls them poems."
An old lady was trying to kill a rooster in the yard behind her house. The rooster escaped her grasp and ran around headless until it collapsed in the middle of the road. We walked around the bloody trail as the lady picked up the dead animal.
"Have you brought your daughter to Martine?" Tante Atie asked.
"She never answers my letters. When I called her, she slammed the phone down on me. She has not seen my daughter. We have not spoken since I left home."
"That's very sad for both of you. Very sad since you and Martine don't have anybody else over there. And Martine's head is not in the best condition."
A man hammered nails into a coffin in front of his roadside hut.
"Honneur, Monsié Frank," Tante Atie called out to the coffin builder.
"Respect." He flashed back a friendly smile.
"We have always heard that it is grand there," said Tante Atie. "Is it really as grand as they say, New York?"
"It's a place where you can lose yourself easily."
"Grand or not grand, I am losing myself here too."
We passed Man Grace's farm, with the bamboo fence around it. The house was worn out and wind-whipped. There were large wooden boards on the windows.
"When did Man Grace die?" I asked Tante Atie.
"Almost the day I came back to live here," she said.
"What was wrong with her?"
"She went to bed and just stopped breathing. It must have been her time. It was very hard on Louise when her monman died. Louise and Grace, they had slept in the same bed all her life. Louise was in the bed when Grace went to Guinea. To this day, it tears her open to sleep alone."
My grandmother's house still looked the same. I dropped my suitcase on the porch and followed Tante Atie out to the back.
Grandmè Ifé was sprinkling water in the dust, before doing her sweeping.
"Old woman, I brought your children," Tante Atie said.
"Age and wedlock tames the beast," said my grandmother. "Am I looking at Sophie?"
I moved closer, pressing her fingers against my cheeks.
"Did you even have breasts the last time I saw you?" asked my grandmother.
"It has not been that long," Tante Atie said.
My grandmother's eyes were filled with tears. She buried her face in my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist.
"I called my daughter Brigitte Ife," I said. "The Ife is after you."
She stretched her neck to get a closer look.
"Do you see my granddaughter?" she asked, tracing her thumb across Brigitte's chin. "The tree has not split one mite. Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?"
The lights on a distant hill glowed like a candle light vigil. We ate supper at the small table on the back porch, A New York skyline was emblazoned in sequins across Tante Atie's chest. I had hurriedly bought a matching pair of i LOVE NEW YORK sweatshirts for her and my grandmother, forgetting about the lifelong deuil, which kept my grandmother from wearing anything but black, to mourn my grandfather.
My grandmother chewed endlessly on the same piece of meat, as her eyes travelled back and forth between my face and Tante Atie's chest. I swallowed a mouthful of soursop juice, savoring the heavy screen of brown sugar lingering on my tongue.
"Does your mother still cook Haitian?" asked Tante Atie with a full mouth.
"I am not sure," I said.
My grandmother lowered her eyelids, sheltered her displeasure, and continued chewing.
"And you? Can you make some dishes?" Tante Atie asked.
"You will have to let me cook a meal," I said.
A small draft blew the cooking embers through the yard. My daughter eagerly clawed my neck as I slipped her bottle into her mouth.
"Do you go there again tonight?" my grandmother asked Tante Atie.
"The reading, it takes a lot of time," Tante Atie said.
"Why do you not go to the reading classes?"
"You want me to go the whole distance at night?"
"If you had your lessons elsewhere," said my grandmother, "they would be during the day. The way you go about free in the night, one would think you a devil."
"The night is already in my face, it is. Why should I be afraid of it?"
"I would like it better if you were learning elsewhere."
"I like where I am."
"Can you read only by moonlight?"
"Knowledge, you do not catch it in the air, old woman. I have to labor at it. Is that not right, Sophie?"
My grandmother did not give me a chance to answer.
"You can only labor in the night?"
"Reading, it is not like the gifts you have. I was not born with it."
"Most people are born with what they need," said my grandmother.
"I was born short of my share."
"You say that to your Makers when you see them in Guinea."
"Do not send me off to my Makers, old woman. Besides, my Makers should hear me from this place." My aunt raised her head to the star-filled sky. "Hear me! Great gods that made the moon and the stars. You see what you have done to me. You were stingy with the clay when you made this creature."
"Blasphemy!" spat my grandmother. "Why can't the girl come here and teach you your letters?"
Tante Atie got up from the table and walked to the yard. She poured some juice over the cooking ashes as she came back to collect our plates.
She took the plates to the yard, scrubbed them with a soap-soaked palm leaf, then laid them out to dry.
"Before you go into the night, why don't you read to us from your reading book?"
My grandmother shut both her eyes as she twirled a rooster feather in her ear.
Tante Atie walked into the house and came back with a composition notebook wrapped in brown paper. She raised the notebook so it covered her face and slowly began to read. At first she stuttered but soon her voice took on an even flow.
She read the very same words as those I'd written on the card that I had made for her so long ago, on Mother's Day.
My mother is a daffodil, limber and strong as one.
My mother is a daffodil, but in the wind, iron strong.
When she was done, she raised her head from behind the pages and snapped the notebook shut.
"I have never forgotten those words. I have written them down."
She got up and began walking away. "I am off into the night," she said. "The spirits of alone-ness, they call to me."
They put me in my mother's room. It had the same four-poster bed and the same mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mirror on the wardrobe had a wide reflection so that you could see what was happening out on the front and back porches. Even as far as the tcha tcha tree out towards the road.
The mattress sank as I sat on the bed, changing my daughter by the light of a tet gridap, a tin-can lamp, named after bald-headed girls.
My grandmother was sleeping in the next room. She mumbled in her sleep, like an old warrior in the midst of a battle. My mother used to make the same kinds of sounds. Lagé mwin. Leave me alone.
I lay on the mattress with my daughter on my belly. Her breath felt soothing and warm against my bare skin. All we were missing was Joseph.
When I was pregnant, Joseph would play his saxophone for us, alone in the dark. He would put the horn very close to my stomach and blow in a soft whisper. Brigitte would come alive inside me, tickling like a feather under my skin. Joseph would press his ear against my stomach to hear her every move. He was always afraid that her sudden rotations would hurt me inside. We would both get real quiet, to give her a chance to calm down. Sometimes if she had trouble going to sleep, he would stroke my belly and both she and I would doze off immediately.
I put on one of Joseph's old shirts to sleep in. Tracing my fingers across my daughter's spine, I asked her questions that she could not possibly answer, questions that even I didn't know the answers to.
"Are you going to remember all of this? Will you be mad at Mommy for severing you from your daddy? Are you going to inherit some of Mommy's problems?"
My daughter was shaking slightly beneath her night shirt. I felt a sudden urge to tell her a story. When I was a little girl, Tante Atie had always seen to it that I heard a story, especially when I could not sleep at night.
"Crick."
"Crack?"
"Honor?"
"Respect."
There was magic in the images that she had made out of the night. She would rock my body on her lap as she told me of fishermen and mermaids bravely falling in love. The mermaids would leave stars for the fishermen to pick out of the sand. For the most beloved fishermen, the mermaids would leave their combs, which would turn to gold when the fishermen kissed them.
Brigitte woke up with a loud wail. She moaned, reaching up to touch my face. I picked up a wet towel and rubbed it over her body.
After her feeding, I opened the window a crack. My grandmother would scold me if she knew I was letting the night air into the house.
Tante Atie was standing in the yard, waving to an invisible face. I walked away from the window and lay back down on the bed with my daughter.
My grandmother was pacing loudly in the next room as Tante Atie giggled loudly in the yard. It sounded like she had been drinking. Tante Atie walked up to the house, her feet pounding the cement.
"Is the lesson over?" asked my grandmother.
"Old woman, you will wake up Sophie," Tante Atie said.
"White hair is a crown of glory," said my grandmother.
"I don't have white hair," said Tante Atie.
"Only good deeds demand respect. Do you not want Sophie to respect you?"
"Sophie is not a child anymore, old woman. I do not have to be a saint for her."
I got up to watch the sun rise. I sat on the back steps, as clouds of smoke rose from charcoal pits all over the valley. A few small lizards darted through the dew-laden grass, their gizzards bloated like bubble gum. A group of women came trotting along the road, sitting side-saddle on overloaded mules.
I walked into a small wooden shack, split by a wall of tin into a latrine and a bathing room. In the bathing room was a metal basin filled with leaves and rainwater.
Even though so much time had passed since I'd given birth, I still felt extremely fat. I peeled off Joseph's shirt and scrubbed my flesh with the leaves in the water. The stems left tiny marks on my skin, which reminded me of the giant goose bumps my mother's testing used to leave on my flesh.
I raised a handful of leaves to my nose. They were a potpourri of flesh healers: catnip, senna, sarsaparillas, corrosol, the petals of blood red hibiscus, forget-me-nots, and daffodils.
After the bath, I wrapped a towel around me and ran back inside the house. My grandmother was sitting on the edge of her canopy bed. Her mattress had open seams where she stuffed her most precious belongings.
"Sophie, sé ou?"
"It's me." I said, standing in the doorway.
Her room was crowded with old baskets, dusty crates, and rusting steel drums. On an old dresser was a statue of Erzulie, our goddess of love who doubled for us as the Virgin Mother. Her face was the color of corn, and wrapped around her long black hair was a tiny blue handkerchief.
I went to Tante Atie's room to get Brigitte. Tante Atie was bouncing up and down on her four-poster bed with Brigitte between her legs. Her room had no windows. Instead, she had large quilts with bird and fish patterns, over the louvers on her wall.
I took Brigitte back to my room for a sponge bath. She giggled as I sprinkled scented talc between her legs. Her body was a bit warmer than usual. I looked for the infant thermometer that I had brought with me. I found it, broken in its case, the mercury scattered in the container.
There was splash in the bath house outside the window. My grandmother was naked in the bath shack, with the rickety door wide open. She raised a handful of leaves towards the four corners of the sky, then rapped the stems under her armpits. She swayed her body several times, shaking the leaves loose from her buttocks.
My grandmother had a curved spine and a pineapple-sized hump, which did not show through her clothes. Some years earlier, my mother had grown egg-sized mounds in both her breasts, then had them taken out of her.
We ate cassava sandwiches for breakfast. I dunked mine in a ceramic cup, steaming with dense black coffee. The cassava melted in the coffee, making one thick brew.
When I was younger, Tante Atie would always pass me more cassava once I had completely drowned my own.
Both Tante Atie and my grandmother ate their cassava properly. They chipped off the fragile ends with their teeth and then ventured a sip of the scalding coffee.
I kept my daughter on my lap as I dunked a spoon in the cup, trying to rescue the cassava. My grandmother glanced over at Tante Atie, then quickly looked away.
Tante Atie kept her head down as she ate. In the distance, a bell tolled from the cathedral in the town, the bell that early in the morning signaled indigents' funerals.
…
I abandoned the cassava and ran a small brush through Brigitte's hair, placing a small white barrette at the tip of a pigtail in the middle of her head.
My grandmother threw her head back and swallowed her coffee in one gulp. She reached into her blouse, pulled out a cracked clay pipe, and slipped the mouthpiece between her lips.
"I'm going to do the maché," announced my grandmother. She unhooked her satchel from the back of her chair as she got up from the table. One of her legs dragged slighdy behind the other. The inside of her lagging foot was so callused that it had the same texture as the red dust in the yard.
"Can I come too?" I asked my grandmother.
"Surely," she said. "You just follow my shadow."
Brigitte let out a loud cry as I handed her to Tante Atie.
"Mommy will bring you a nice treat from the market," I said, hearing Tante Atie's voice echo from my childhood.
Brigitte shrieked loudly, her face tied up in tear-soaked knots.
"Hurry, go," urged Tarite Atie.
I rushed down the road to catch up with my grandmother.
In the cane fields, the men were singing songs, once bellowed at the old konbits.
"Bonjou, Grandmè Ifé," they chanted.
"Bonjou, good men," replied my grandmother.
"This here is my granddaughter, Uncle Bazie," my grandmother said to an old man sitting on the side of the road.
He was slashing a machete across a thin piece of sugar cane. He took off his hat and bowed in my direction.
"Whereabouts she from?" asked the old man.
"Here," answered my grandmother. "She's from right here."
My grandmother shopped like an army general on rounds.
"Man Legros. Time is God's to waste, not ours. I want a few cinnamon barks, some ginger roots, and sweet potatoes to boil in my milk. Make the potatoes sweet enough so I won't need to put sugar in the milk."
"Only the Grand Master, He can do that," answered Man Legros, as she tugged at an old apron around her waist.
"I want me a mamit of red beans too," said my grandmother. "The beans don't need sweetness."
She watched closely as Man Legros dug a tin cup into a hill of beans, spread out on a piece of cardboard on the ground.
"Give those beans some time to settle in the cup," said my grandmother. "Let them rest in the cup. Between you, between me. We know half of them is pebbles."
"No pebbles here," said Man Legros. She had a blackened silver tooth on either side of her mouth.
My grandmother reached inside her blouse and pulled out a small bundle. She unwrapped a cord around the little pouch, fished out a handful of crumpled gourdes and paid Man Legros.
Louise was sitting at her stand, selling colas to a few Macoutes dressed in bright denim uniforms and dark sunglasses. They were the same ones who had gotten in the van yesterday. Louise was chatting and laughing along with them, as though they were all old friends.
One of them was staring at me. He was younger than the others, maybe even a teenager. He stood on the tip of his boots and shoved an old man aside to get a better look. I walked faster. He grabbed his crotch with one hand, blew me a kiss, then turned back to the others.
The kite boy was tugging at the young Macoute's starched denim pants, begging for a penny. The Macoute reached inside his pocket and handed the child a coin. The boy dashed across the road to buy a piece of sugar cane and mint candy.
My grandmother grabbed my hand and pulled me away. We walked up to a line of cloth and hat vendors with samples draped across their chests, and hats piled on their heads.
"I have this at home," said my grandmother, rubbing the edge of a white fabric against her face. "It will be for my burial."
"Have you come to buy my pig?" Louise asked. She followed us as we toured the fruit stands. My grandmother refused the mango chunks that the vendors handed to her, preferring instead to squeeze and pump the custard apples she wanted to buy.
"You well, Grandme Ife?" Louise asked, jumping in front of my grandmother.
"Oui, I got up this morning. I am well."
"And you Sophie, you well?"
"Very well," I answered. "Thank you."
"Will you buy the pig?"
"Don't you have things to look after?" snapped my grandmother.
The boy with the kite was sitting in Louise's stand for her. Louise kept following us, ignoring my grandmother's coldness.
"My foot, you see, you stepped on it!" The baby-faced Macoute was shouting at a coal vendor.
He rammed the back of his machine gun into the coal vendor's ribs.
"I already know the end," said my grandmother. She grabbed my hand and pulled me away. She wobbled quickly, her sandals hissing as the lazy foot swept across the ground.
Louise rushed back to her stand. My grandmother and I hurried to the flamboyant and started on the road home.
I turned back for one last look. The coal vendor was curled in a fetal position on the ground. He was spitting blood. The other Macoutes joined in, pounding their boots on the coal seller's head. Every one watched in shocked silence, but no one said anything.
My grandmother came back for me. She grabbed my hand so hard my fingers hurt.
"You want to live your nightmares too?" she hollered.
We walked in silence until we could hear the konbit song from the cane fields. The men were singing about a platon-nade, a loose woman who made love to the men she met by a stream and then drowned them in the water.
My grandmother spat in the dirt as we walked by Louise's shack.
"Are you mad at Louise?" I asked.
"People have died for saying the wrong things," answered my grandmother.
"You don't like Louise?"
"I don't like the way your Tante Atie has been since she came back from Croix-des-Rosets. Ever since she has come back, she and I, we are like milk and lemon, oil and water. She grieves; she drinks tafia. I would not be surprised if she started wearing black for her father again."
"Maybe she misses Croix-des-Rosets."
"Better she go back, then. You bring a mule to water, but you cannot force it to drink the water. Why did she come back? If she had married there, would she not have stayed?"
"If she had married there, then you would be living with her and her husband."
"Those are the old ways," she said. "These days, they go so far, the children. People like me, we look after ourselves."
"Tante Atie wants to look after you."
"I looked after myself all the years she was in Croix-des-Rosets. I look after myself now. Next when we hear from your mother, I will ask her to send for Atie, so Atie can go and see New York, see the grandness like you have."
"Don't you want to go?"
"I have one foot in this world and one foot in the grave. Non, I do not want to go. But Atie, she should go. She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love."
"Do you tell her that you do not want her to stay?"
"I would tell her if she ever engaged me in talk. Your Tante Atie she has changed a lot since she was with you. The reading, it is only one thing."
"I think it is very good that she has learned to read," I said. "It is her own freedom."
"There is a story that is told all the time in the valley. An old woman has three children. One dies in her body when she is pregnant. One goes to a faraway land to make her fortune and never does that one get to come back alive. The last one, she stays in the valley and looks after her mother."
Tante Atie was the last.
Tante Atie was stretched out in an old rocker. Brigitte lay on her lap. My grandmother took her beans to the yard to pick out the pebbles. She fanned a small fire with her hat, washed the beans, then put them to boil in a pot.
Brigitte yawned in her sleep as I picked her up. Tante Atie got up, grabbed her notebook from the floor, and peered at the pages. She held the notebook so close to her face, I thought there was a mirror inside.
"I did not realize you would remember the words of my card this long," I said.
"When you have something precious, you do not forget it."
She pressed her notebook against her chest as she started for the road.
"Are you going to the maché?" my grandmother called out.
"You need something?" asked Tante Atie.
"The Macoutes were doing damage," my grandmother said.
"Fighting?" asked Tante Atie.
"You just wait awhile," said my grandmother. "Don't go there now."
"Fighting who?" Tante Atie looked worried.
"I did not ask," said my grandmother.
"They hurt anybody?"
"The coal man, Dessalines."
"Dessalines? Why?"
"When people hate you they beat your animals. I don't know'
"Old woman, I am going to get a remedy for a lump in my calf and it cannot wait." Tante walked down the road, racing towards the marketplace.
"You have a lump on your calf?" asked my grandmother.
By then, Tante Atie was already gone.
My grandmother and I spent the day watching the beans boil. The kite boy wandered into the yard with a slingshot. He aimed his pebbles at a few small birds lodged in the tcha tcha tree. He had no successes, but kept trying, encouraged by an occasional cheer from my grandmother and me.
"Eliab, come get some water," my grandmother called out.
Eliab crawled under the porch where my mother kept a clay jug full of water. He soaked his stomach as he raised the jug to his lips.
…
The beans were cooked as the sun set. My grandmother mixed them with some maize, which we ate with chunks of avocado.
Tante Atie did not come home for supper. My grandmother put some food aside for her and left the rest in the pot.
I bathed Brigitte in a large pan that my grandmother dug out from under her bed, then gave her some formula before sitting down for supper. I felt both fat and guilty after eating my supper.
Eliab and two other boys crawled under the porch for some tin plates and spooned out their portions of the meal. They sat in a circle and ate quietly, like a clan of midget chiefs.
Brigitte tried to bring her left foot to her mouth, in order to suck her toes.
"She's a quiet child," my grandmother said.
"She's been like that since she was born."
"Crabs don't make papayas. Your mother, she was a quiet child too."
Brigitte reached over to grab my grandmother's nose.
"Your husband?" asked my grandmother, "Why did you leave him so suddenly?"
"I did not leave him for good," I said. "This is just a short vacation."
"Are you having trouble with any marital duties?"
"Yes," I answered honestly.
"What is it?"
"They say it is most important to a man."
"The night?"
"Oui."
"You cannot perform?" she asked. "You have trouble with the night? There must be some fulfillment. You have the child."
"It is very painful for me," I said.
She pulled her pouch from her pocket, pinched a few dabs of tobacco and stuffed them in her nostrils.
"Secrets remain secret only if we keep our silence," she said. "Your husband? Is he a good man?"
"He is a very good man, but I have no desire. I feel like it is an evil thing to do."
"Your mother? Did she ever test you?"
"You can call it that."
"That is what we have always called it."
"I call it humiliation," I said. "I hate my body. I am ashamed to show it to anybody, including my husband. Sometimes I feel like I should be off somewhere by myself. That is why I am here."
"Crick?" called my grandmother.
"Crack," answered the boys.
Their voices rang like a chorus, aiding my grandmother's entry into her tale.
"Tim, tim," she called.
"Bwa chèch," they answered. "Tale master, tell us your tale."
"The tale is not a tale unless I tell. Let the words bring wings to our feet."
"How many do you bring us tonight?"
"Tonight, only one story."
The night grew silent under her commanding tone. I lay on the bed with Brigitte, the open window allowing us a clear view of the sky. The stars fell as though the glue that held them together had come loose. They were not the stars you could wish upon. In Dame Marie, each time a star fell out of the sky, it meant that somebody would die.
"The story goes," said my grandmother, "that a lark saw a little girl, who he thought was the most beautiful little girl he had ever seen, from the top of his pomegranate tree."
She clapped her hands to the rhythm of the words.
"Now the lark, he wanted more than anything to have the little girl. So one day she was on the road, going to school. The lark stopped her and said to her, How would you like a nice sweet pomegranate, you pretty little girl? When she looked up at the tree, the girl was charmed by the lark. So handsome it was, with its red and green wings and long purple tail. It was a sight. And the pomegranate, it was a beauty too. Big as your head, it was. The girl thought she could eat for weeks and not be done eating that pomegranate, so she told the bird, Yes, I would like to have that pomegranate. The bird, it said, I will give it to you for the honor of just looking at your face.
"Every day it went like this. The girl got a pomegranate and the bird, it looked at her face. One day, the bird, it said, I will give you two pomegranates if only you would kiss me. The girl thought of how sweet the pomegranates were and how everyone was nice to her at school for her sharing the fruit with them, so that one day she kissed the bird and from then on always got two pomegranates.
"This went on for a while until one day the bird, it said, Would you like to go to a faraway land with me? You are so sweet and lovely. I would like to take you to a faraway land. The girl, she said, I don't know if I want to go away. The bird, it says, We will go by sea. The girl was afraid. She said, I do not want to leave my family, my village. The girl, she says, It is wet in the sea. You can go on my back-that is what the bird says. The girl, she said, I will not go. The bird, it got mad. It said, I am good enough to talk to. I am good enough to kiss. You eat my pomegranates, yet you will not go with me across the sea. The bird looked so sad, it looked like it was going to die of sadness. So the girl, she gave in to the bird and let him have his way. She said, I will go.
"As soon as the little girl got on the bird's back, the bird said to the girl, I didn't tell you this because it was a small thing, but in the land I am taking you to, there is a king there who will die if he does not have a little girl's heart. The girl she said, I didn't tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don't want to lose them. The bird, clever as it was, it said to the girl, You might want to return to your home and pick up your heart. It is a small matter, but you may need it. So the girl, she said, Okay, let us go back and get my heart. The bird took her home and put her down on the ground. He told her he would wait for her to come back with her heart. The girl ran and ran all the way to her family village and never did she come back to the bird. If you see a handsome lark in a tree, you had better know that he is waiting for a very very pretty little girl who will never come back to him."
The boys cheered and applauded the pretty little girl's cleverness.
"Is your story true?" they cried in unison.
"As true as this old woman's hair is blue," answered my grandmother.
They pleaded for another story, but she told them to go home before the werewolf on the sugar cane cart came out, the one who could smell you from miles away and would come and kill you, unless you ran in a rage through the fields and hollered a list of all his crimes.
Tante Atie's feet pounded the porch a few minutes later.
"Would you read me something?" asked my grandmother.
"I am empty, old woman," she said. "As empty as a dry calabash."
Tante Atie was very cheerful as she stood in my doorway the next morning.
"Did you sleep all right?" she asked.
She was wearing her i LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt, this time with a long white skirt. Her hair was brushed back and tied in a tiny bun, resting like a porcupine on the back of her neck.
"Are you going somewhere?" I asked.
"Atie speaks to city folks today," she said. "Louise asked me to go with her to have her name put on the archives as having lived in this valley."
My grandmother crept up behind her, gently brushing a broom across the cement.
"What's the use her getting registered?" asked my grandmother. "She is leaving soon, non?"
"Her name can be on some piece of paper for future generations," said Tante Atie. "If people come and they want to know, they will know she lived here."
"People don't need their names on a piece of paper for that," said my grandmother.
"I will list my name too," Tante Atie said.
"If a woman is worth remembering," said my grandmother, "there is no need to have her name carved in letters."
Louise hollered Tante Atie's name from the road.
"That child has lungs like mountain echoes," said my grandmother.
"You have lungs like mountains echoes," she shouted from the house.
Tante Atie rushed out to the porch. My grandmother followed closely behind her. I watched through the window, while Brigitte moved her head in all directions, trying to figure out what all the commotion was about.
Louise was standing in the middle of the road, waiting for Tante Atie. She had on a crisp lavender dress with a butterfly collar. "Atie, you come now," she shouted, ignoring stares from the men on their way to the fields.
"Atie, can't the girl walk up to the house?" asked my grandmother. "We're not a spectacle. You tell her to come to the house. She's frightening the leaves off the trees."
Tante Atie motioned for Louise to come. Louise dashed across the road and entered the yard.
I walked out on the porch with Brigitte. Louise ran up to play with her.
"I remember you," Louise said, grimacing. Brigitte pursed her lips, trying to copy Louise's facial expressions.
The broom fibers whistled as my grandmother furiously raked them in the dust.
"If a person is worth remembering," mumbled my grandmother, "people will remember. It need not be cast in stone."
"We should go," Atie said, taking Louise's arm.
My grandmother went on with her sweeping as Tante Atie and Louise rushed down the road.
My grandmother walked around the yard, collecting sticks and dry leaves. I let her hold Brigitte while I walked across the road to throw some of Brigitte's used diapers over the cliff.
Later, I took my camera out of my suitcase and took a few pictures of my grandmother holding Brigitte.
"They do scare me, those things," she said. "The light in and out. The whole thing is suspect. Seems you can trap somebody's soul in there."
I took a few more shots.
"Now how many is that?" she asked. "Are you afraid that your grandmother will blend into thin air?"
"I want Brigitte to know you when she gets older," I said. "I want her to know how much of each of us is in her."
"Do you suppose she will have any recollection of today?" asked my grandmother.
"You can ask her yourself in a few years."
"If I live so long," she said. "Now go on and put your daughter down. Let her rest a bit."
I took Brigitte inside and laid her down for a nap. While she slept, I looked through my wallet for some pictures that I had brought with me. There was one of Brigitte, all shriveled up, a few hours after she was born. I almost refused to let Joseph take pictures of me with her. I was too ashamed of the stitches on my stomach and the flabs of fat all over my body.
I looked at a small picture of Joseph's and my "wedding." The two of us were standing before a justice of the peace, a month after we had eloped. I had spent two days in the hospital in Providence and four weeks with stitches between,my legs. Joseph could never understand why I had done something so horrible to myself. I could not explain to him that it was like breaking manacles, an act of freedom.
Even though it occurred weeks later, our wedding night was painful. It was like the tearing all over again; the ache and soreness had still not disappeared.
Joseph asked me several times if I really wanted to go through with it. He probably would have understood if I had said no. However, I felt it was my duty as a wife. Something I owed to him, now that he was the only person in the world watching over me. That first very painful time gave us the child.
When Brigitte and I woke up, I took her to the old rocker on the porch. Eliab was flying a kite in the yard. There were a few other colorful kites in the sky, but his was the closest to the ground. He shuffled around a lot, trying to maintain his balance and keep the kite in the air. He slowly released the thread, allowing his kite to venture closer to the clouds.
Another kite swooped down like a vulture. There were pieces of glass and broken razors on the other kite's tail. One of the razors slashed his thread and sent Eliab's kite drifting aimlessly into the breeze. The kite drifted further and further out of sight. Finally it dived down and disappeared, crashing like a lost parachute at an unknown distance.
Eliab reined in his thread. He pulled it with all his might, tying it around the stick as it came to him. The thread suddenly seemed endless. He got tired of coiling, dropped the stick, broke down and cried.
Louise came home for supper that night. She brought with her a furless grey pig that looked like a wild rat. My grandmother was cooking in the yard, her fried dumplings sizzling as she turned them over in the pan.
"I brought you one of my pigs," Louise said, holding the animal towards me. "This is one of my smaller ones, a recent born."
"Mèsi mil fwa. How very nice." I said.
"It's a gift, not for money," she said.
Brigitte reached up to grab the pig's brown eyes. Louise quickly pulled the pig away from my daughter's wandering fingers.
"Mèsi," I said. "Thank you very much. Are you listed in the town record book now?"
"Listed for certain," she said. "Atie listed herself and your grandmother too."
Louise gently stroke the pig's back, letting his tail dart across her chin.
"They had this for us at the Poste and Telegramme bureau." Tante Atie pulled an International Express letter out of her satchel.
The letter bore my mother's Nostrand Avenue address.
"Old woman, where's the cassette machine?" shouted Tante Atie.
My grandmother pointed to her room. Tante Atie rushed inside and came back with their cassette player. She laid it on the steps and ripped open the envelope.
My grandmother walked over and sat on the bottom step. She kept her eyes on the clouding sky as my mother's voice came through the small speakers.
"Allo, Manman, Atie. Good morning or good night, if it's morning or night. I hope your health is good. Me, you know how it goes. I am swimming with the current. At least I'm not in a mental hospital. I hope you got the money I sent last month, Manman. No, I haven't forgotten that little extra you asked me to send, so you can plan your funeral. In any case, there is no hurry. Manman, you are still a young woman.
"Speaking of young people, I don't want to trouble your spirits, but I received a telephone call from Sophie's husband not too long ago, telling me that he was on some sort of musical tour. He left Sophie at home with their child and it happens he keeps calling Sophie at their house and she is not there. He is very uneasy."
I wanted to stop the tape, but my grandmother was listening closely, her wrinkled forehead drawn into a knot.
The pig squealed loudly, momentarily drowning out my mother's voice. My grandmother reached over and yanked the pig's tail. Louise pulled the pig away and buried its face in her chest. The pig whimpered and oinked even louder. Louise placed her hands over its snout and tried to drown out its bawl.
"The husband thought she might have come to spend the time with me. I am already having panic attacks about this. Could be she came to her senses, but not to return to me. I have already lit some candles for her. Green for life, like you've always said."
I tapped the stop button with my toes. The pig began to wail more loudly as though it suddenly felt it could. My grandmother got up and went back to her cooking.
"Isn't it time you reconciled?" Tante Atie said.
Louise tied the pig to a pole in the yard. My grandmother fed it a pile of old avocado peels before we ate.
"How much money do you still need to pay for the trip?" I asked Louise.
"I made only ten gourdes since the last time you saw me," she said.
Brigitte stretched out her hand to grab the fireflies buzzing around us.
After the meal, we sat on the back porch and listened as Atie read from her notebook.
She speaks in silent voices, my love.
Like the cardinal bird, kissing its own image.
Li palé vwa mwin, Flapping wings, fallen change Broken bottles, whistling snakes
And boom bang drums.
She speaks in silent voices, my love.
I drink her blood with milk And when the pleasure peaks, my love leaves.
Louise had helped her paraphrase the poem from a book of French poetry that Louise had read when she was still in school.
"You're a poet too," I said to Tante Atie.
She pressed her notebook against her chest.
After her reading, she and Louise strolled into the night, like silhouettes on a picture postcard.
My grandmother took the cassette player to her room to listen to the rest of my mother's message.
I heard my mother's voice coming through the thin walls.
"I am not having the short breath anymore, but every so often, I do find myself dreaming the bad dreams. I thought it would end, but lately it seems to be beginning all over again."
Brigitte was still awake, even after my grandmother fell asleep. I wrapped her in a thick blanket, took her outside to show her the sky. Tante Atie was sitting on the steps feeding the pig.
"Is it male or female?" I asked.
"What difference does it make to the pig?" she asked.
"I want to give it a name."
"Call it Paul or Paulette, Jean or Jeanne. The pig will not protest. You do not have to name something to make it any more yours."
"Are you in a sour mood?"
"My life, it is nothing," she said.
"What is the matter? Do you miss Croix-des-Rosets?"
"Croix-des-Rosets was painful. Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars."
There were drums throbbing in the distance. Some staccato conch shells answered the call.
"I wish I had never left you," I said.
"You did not leave me. You were summoned away. We must graze where we are tied."
"I wish I had stayed with you."
"You must not go back and rearrange your life. It is no use for what has already happened. Sometimes, there is nothing we can do."
"Do you want to go back to Croix-des-Rosets?" I asked.
"I know old people, they have great knowledge. I have been taught never to contradict our elders. I am the oldest child. My place is here. I am supposed to march at the head of the old woman's coffin. I am supposed to lead her funeral procession. But even if lightning should strike me now, I will say this: I am tired. I woke up one morning and I was old myself."
She threw a small green mango at the pig.
"They train you to find a husband," she said. "They poke at your panties in the middle of the night, to see if you are still whole. They listen when you pee, to find out if you're peeing too loud. If you pee loud, it means you've got big spaces between your legs. They make you burn your fingers learning to cook. Then still you have nothing."
The pig jumped up in the air to catch an avocado peel. The jump tightened the cord around its neck, nearly causing it to choke. Tante Atie rushed over and loosened the rope.
"Take your baby inside," she said. "I know you have heard them, the frightening stories of the night."
The pig oinked all night. Tante Atie woke up several times to check on it. My grandmother got up to see what all the commotion was about.
"That Louise causes trouble." My grandmother turned her wrath to Tante Atie. "Everything from her shadow to that pig is trouble."
"Don't trouble me tonight, old woman." Tante Atie strained to control her voice.
The pig started a slow nasal whine.
"I will kill it," said my grandmother. "I will kill it."
My daughter woke up with a sharp cry.
I fed her and rocked her back to sleep. The pig, it was still crying, but there was nothing I could do.
Louise was out of breath when she ran up to the house the next morning. Her face was reddened with tears and her blouse soaked with sweat.
My grandmother motioned for me to take the baby inside the house. I backed myself into the doorway while clinging tightly to my daughter.
I watched from the threshold as Tante Atie gave Louise a cup of cold water from the jug beneath the porch.
"Li allé. It's over," Louise said, panting as though she had both asthma and the hiccups at the same time. "They killed Dessalines."
"Who killed Dessalines?" asked my grandmother.
"The Macoutes killed Dessalines."
Louise buried her head in Tante Atie's shoulder. Their faces were so close that their lips could meet if they both turned at the same time.
"Calm now," said Tante Atie, as she massaged Louise's scalp.
"That's why I need to go," sobbed Louise. "I need to leave."
"A poor man is dead and all you can think about is your journey," snapped my grandmother.
"Next might be me or you with the Macoutes," said Louise.
"We already had our turn," said my grandmother. "Sophie, you keep the child behind the threshold. You are not to bring her out until that restless spirit is in the ground."
In the fairy tales, the Tonton Macoute was a bogeyman, a scarecrow with human flesh. He wore denim overalls and carried a cutlass and a knapsack made of straw. In his knapsack, he always had scraps of naughty children, whom he dismembered to eat as snacks. If you don't respect your elders, then the Tonton Macoute will take you away.
Outside the fairy tales, they roamed the streets in broad daylight, parading their Uzi machine guns.
Who invented the Macoutes? The devil didn't do it and God didn't do it.
Ordinary criminals walked naked in the night. They slicked their bodies with oil so they could slip through most fingers. But the Macoutes, they did not hide. When they entered a house, they asked to be fed, demanded the woman of the house, and forced her into her own bedroom. Then all you heard was screams until it was her daughter's turn. If a mother refused, they would make her sleep with her son and brother or even her own father.
My father might have been a Macoute. He was a stranger who, when my mother was sixteen years old, grabbed her on her way back from school. He dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound. When he was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up.
For months she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep. She was terrified that he would come and tear out the child growing inside her. At night, she tore her sheets and bit off pieces of her own flesh when she had nightmares.
My grandmother sent her to a rich mulatto family in Croix-des-Rosets to do any work she could for free room and board, as a rèstavèk. Even though my mother was pregnant and half insane, the family took her in anyway because my grandmother had cooked and cleaned in their house for years, before she married my grandfather.
My mother came back to Dame Marie after I was born. She tried to kill herself several times when I was a baby. The nightmares were just too real. Tante Atie took care of me.
The rich mulatto family helped my mother apply for papers to get out of Haiti. It took four years before she got her visa, but by the time she began to recover her sanity, she left.
Tante Atie took me to Croix-des-Rosets, so I could go to school. And when I left, she moved back here, to Dame Marie, to take care of my grandmother.
Somehow Dessalines's death brought to mind all those frightening memories. My grandmother would not let me take Brigitte outside until Dessalines was laid to rest in the ground. That night, I opened the window to listen to the night breeze rustling through the dry tcha tcha bean pods in the distance.
Tante Atie was talking to Louise. Her voice was muffled, her breathing quickened, as she sobbed loudly.
"It is the calm and silent waters that drown you. I never thought it would make me so sad to look in Sophie's face."
The pig gave a sudden cry as Louise rushed away. Tante Atie slipped inside the house through a side door.
"Nothing should have taken you out into that black night." My grandmother was waiting inside. "Did a bird nest in your hair? You seem to have lost your mind."
"Maybe a good death would save me from all this," Tante Atie said.
I heard a thump, like a slap across the face.
Tante Atie stormed out of the house and marched out to the porch.
When I came out, Tante Atie was sitting with a lamp and her notebook on her lap. I folded the flaps of Joseph's shirt between my legs and sat on the top step next to her.
"Do you ever visit Mr. Augustin?" I asked.
"No," she said. "Sometimes people just disappear from our lives and it is not a bad thing."
We sat silently and looked at the stars for a while.
"I am going to excuse myself and go back inside," I said. "I do not want to leave the baby alone for long."
"The old woman, she is going to send word to your mother that you are here," she said.
"My mother does not concern herself with where I am."
"You are judging her much too harshly."
"When Joseph and I first married, I used to write her every month. I have sent her pictures of Brigitte. She keeps the letters, but makes no reply."
"She will come," said Tante Atie.
"Come where?"
"She will come here. She has promised for a long time to come and arrange the old woman's funeral and the old woman will place on the cassette words begging her to come, so you can settle this quarrel."
Brigitte got up early the next morning, ready to bounce and play. I lay her on the bed and tried to make her do some baby exercises.
In the next room, my grandmother was recording her reply cassette to my mother.
"Martine, ki jan ou yé?" How are you? "We are doing fine here, following in the shadow of Father Time. I am well, except for the old bones that ache sometime. Dessalines has died. Macoutes kill him. Do you remember him? He was the coal man.
"I don't even need to talk about Atie. She is carrying on like she has got a pound of rocks on her chest. Sadness is now her way of life. You needn't worry about Sophie. Could be she is on a little holiday. The bird, it always returns to the nest."
My grandmother stopped to clear her throat. Brigitte grabbed my fingers and held them tightly as she rolled on her side.
"Is Atie in her room?" yelled my grandmother.
"She is out!" I shouted back.
Brigitte shrieked, trying to scream along.
"Is there something you want to say to your mother?"
"No!"
The recorder clicked to a stop.
"Any more you want to say?" asked my grandmother.
"I think we've already said enough."
In the distance, the bells tolled, announcing Dessalines's funeral. Tante Atie stumbled into her room, her body rocking from side to side. She lowered herself to the ground, her large feet barely sidestepping my outstretched leg and Brig-itte s toes. Tante Atie's eyes were red; she blinked quickly trying to keep them open. She snapped her fingers and made faces at Brigitte, to get her attention.
"Are you all right?" I asked her.
"Fine, good."
Her breath smelled like rum. She stretched her body out on the floor and within a few seconds, fell asleep.
She woke up at noon with a panic-stricken look in her eyes.
"My notebook?" she asked. "You seen it?"
I shook my head no. Brigitte was asleep on the bed. I was afraid that Tante Atie's sudden movements would wake her up.
"Maybe the book's in my room," she mumbled, heading for the door.
"Were you drinking?" I asked.
"I drink a little to forget my troubles," she said. "It's no more a vice than the old woman and her tobacco."
She walked out to the yard, splashed some water over her face, then started towards the road.
She came back in the very early morning hours. The voices in the yard kept me awake.
"You can go now," said Tante Atie.
"Let me see you enter," insisted Louise. "That calf of yours, go and rest that calf of yours."
"People do not die from aching calves," said Tante Atie. "You think I am an old lady. I do not need a walking cane."
"Be pleasant, Atie. Go inside."
I heard Tante Atie walk inside.
The bed squealed under her body as she crashed on it. Louise walked home alone in the fading dusk.
The next morning, a pack of rainbow butterflies hovered around the porch. I was sitting on the steps, watching the sun rise behind the shack spotted hills.
My grandmother's face was powdered with ashes as she left the house. Walking past me, she tapped my knee with the tip of her cane. She lowered a black veil over her face as she twirled a rosary between her fingers.
The baby let out a sudden cry from Tante Atie's room. I rushed back in. Tante Atie was pacing as she carried her around the room. Brigitte stretched out her hands when she saw me. She pressed her face down on my neck when I held her against my body.
"Did the old woman leave for the cemetery?" Tante Atie asked.
"Is that where she's going?"
"She is going to pay her last respects to Dessalines."
Brigitte clawed my neck with her fingernails.
"You and Louise, you are very close, aren't you?" I asked Tante Atie.
"When you have a good friend," she said, "you must hold her with both hands."
"It will be hard for you when she leaves, won't it?"
"I will miss her like my own skin."
My grandmother had her veil on her arm as she walked back towards the house. Eliab ran to her and took a heavy bundle from her hand. He pulled out its contents, sniffing the coconuts before setting them down.
"Did you have a nice visit to the cemetery?" I asked.
"There are two ways to go to the cemetery. One is on your two feet, the other is in a box. Each way, it is a large travail. Where is your Tante Atie?"
"She is visiting with Louise."
"Why do I even ask?"
She picked up a machete from under the porch and chopped a green coconut in half. Eliab pushed an open gourd beneath the coconut and caught the cloudy liquid flowing out of it. My grandmother carved out the flesh with a spoon and stuffed it in her mouth.
She chopped another coconut and brought it over to me. The coconut milk spilled all over my chest as I raised the shell to my lips.
My daughter reached up to grab the coconut. My grandmother and Eliab sat on an old tree stump, sharing the soft mush inside the coconut. My grandmother threw some at the pig, which it leaped up to swallow.
…
Tante Atie did not come home for supper. My grandmother and I ate in the yard, while Brigitte slept in a blanket in my arms. My grandmother was watching a light move between two distant points on the hill.
"Do you see that light moving yonder?" she asked, pointing to the traveling lantern. "Do you know why it goes to and fro like that?"
She was concentrating on the shift, her pupils traveling with each movement:
"It is a baby," she said, "a baby is being born. The midwife is taking trips from the shack to the yard where the pot is boiling. Soon we will know whether it is a boy or a girl."
"How will we know that?"
"If it is a boy, the lantern will be put outside the shack. If there is a man, he will stay awake all night with the new child."
"What if it is a girl?"
"If it is a girl, the midwife will cut the child's cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light."
We waited. The light went out in the house about an hour later. By that time, my grandmother had dozed off. Another little girl had come into the world.
A rooster crowed at the next morning's dawn. I peeked into Tante Atie's room. Her bed was still made, without a wrinkle on it. She had not come home at all the night before. My grandmother made herself some bitter black coffee with a lump of salt to prepare her body for the shock of bad news.
I sat out on the porch with Brigitte waiting for the food vendors to come by. They trickled by slowly, each chanting the names and praises of their merchandise.
My grandmother bought some bananas, boiled eggs, and hard biscuits, Louise and Tante Atie came up the road. Tante Atie was ahead. Louise marched a few feet behind her.
My grandmother looked up without acknowledging their presence. Louise walked into the yard, charged towards the tree, untied her pig, picked it up, and walked away.
"Why? What are you doing?" I called after her.
She did not turn back.
"What is the matter with her?" I asked Tante Atie.
"Manman told her to come get the pig or she would kill it," Tante Atie said.
Tante Atie was carrying a small jar of water with three leeches inside.
"Is it true Grandme Ife? Did you say that?" I asked.
"We need a pig, we buy a pig," said my grandmother.
"I will buy it," I said.
"Non non," Tante Atie jumped quickly. "The money, it will surely go for her boat trip to Miami."
"You think you can keep money out of her hands?" asked my grandmother.
"I do not want to push her into the ocean," Tante Atie said.
She raised the leech jar towards the sun. The animals squirmed away from the light, their black slippery bodies coiling into small balls. She raised her skirt and stretched out her calf. Opening the jar, she tipped it over so that the water was soaking her skin. The leeches slowly crawled out of the jar and climbed on a lump on her calf.
She ground her teeth when one of the larger leeches bit into her skin. She leaned back against the porch railing, pulled her notebook from her sack, and began writing her name. She wrote it over and over, following a pattern at the top of the page.
The leeches sucked the blood out of her lump, until they were plump and full. She pulled them away one by one, slid her fingers down their backs, and pumped the blood into an empty jar. I felt my head spinning, my stomach about to turn inside out. Tante Atie noticed the pained expression on my face.
"It's no loss, angel," she said. "It's only blood, bad blood at that."
I asked my grandmother if I could cook supper for us that night.
Tante Atie offered to take me to a private vendor where food was cheaper than the maché. She put the leeches in some clean water and we started down the road.
"What are you making for us?" she asked.
"Rice, black beans, and herring sauce," I said.
"Your mother's favorite meal."
"That's what we cooked most often."
We followed a footpath off the road, down to a shallow stream. An old mule was yanking water vines fromtheedgeof the stream while baby crabs freely dashed around its nostrils.
A woman rilled a calabash a few feet from where my sandals muddied the water. Tante Atie chatted with the women as she went by. Some young girls were sitting bare-chested in the water, the sun casting darker shadows into their faces. Their hands squirted blackened suds as they pounded their clothes with water rocks.
A dusty footpath led us to a tree-lined cemetery at the top of the hill. Tante Atie walked between the wooden crosses, collecting the bamboo skeletons of fallen kites. She stepped around the plots where empty jars, conch shells, and marbles served as grave markers.
"Walk straight," said Tante Atie, "you are in the presence of family."
She walked around to each plot, and called out the names of all those who had been buried there. There was my great-grandmother, Beloved Martinelle Brigitte. Her sister, My First Joy Sophilus Gentille. My grandfather's sister, My Hope Atinia Ife, and finally my grandfather, Charlemagne Le Grand Caco.
Tante Atie named them all on sight.
"Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire."
From the cemetery, we took a narrow footpath to the vendor's hut. On either side of us were wild grasses that hissed as though they were full of snakes.
We walked to a whitewashed shack where a young woman sold rice and black beans from the same sisal mat where she slept with her husband.
In the yard, the husband sat under the shade of a straw parasol with a pipe in his mouth and a demijohn at his feet. He was pounding small nails into leather straps and thin layers of polished wood to make sandals.
The hammering echoed in my head until I reached the cane fields. The men were singing about a woman who flew without her skin at night, and when she came back home, she found her skin peppered and could not put it back on. Her husband had done it to teach her a lesson. He ended up killing her.
…
I was surprised how fast it came back. The memory of how everything came together to make a great meal. The fragrance of the spices guided my fingers the way no instructions or measurements could.
Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.
According to Tante Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.
I rushed back and forth between the iron pots in the yard. The air smelled like spices that I had not cooked with since I'd left my mother's home two years before.
I usually ate random concoctions: frozen dinners, samples from global cookbooks, food that was easy to put together and brought me no pain. No memories of a past that at times was cherished and at others despised.
By the time we ate, the air was pregnant with rain. Thunder groaned in the starless sky while the lanterns flickered in the hills.
"Well done," Tante Atie said after her fourth serving of my rice and beans.
My grandmother chewed slowly as she gave my daughter her bottle.
"If the wood is well carved," said my grandmother, "it teaches us about the carpenter. Atie, you taught Sophie well."
Tante Atie was taken off guard by my grandmother's compliment. She kissed me on the forehead before taking the dishes to the yard to wash. Then, she went into the house, took her notebook, and left for her lesson with Louise.
My grandmother groaned her disapproval. She pulled out a small pouch and packed pinches of tobacco powder into her nose. She inhaled deeply, stuffing more and more into her nostrils.
She had a look of deep concern on her face, as her eyes surveyed the evening clouds.
"Tandé. Do you hear anything?" she asked.
There was nothing but the usual night sounds: birds finding their ways in the dark, as they shuffled through the leaves.
Often at night, there were women who travelled long distances, on foot or on mare, to save the car fare to Port-au-Prince.
I strained my eyes to see beyond the tree shadows on the road.
"There is a girl going home," my grandmother said. "You cannot see her. She is far away. Quite far. It is not the distance that is important. If I hear a girl from far away, there is an emotion, something that calls to my soul. If your soul is linked with someone, somehow you can always feel when something is happening to them."
"Is it Tante Atie, the girl on the road?"
"Non. It is really a girl. A younger woman."
"Is the girl in danger?"
"That's why you listen. You should hear young feet crushing wet leaves. Her feet make a swish-swash when they hit the ground and when she hurries, it sounds like a whip chasing a mule."
I listened closely, but heard no whip.
"When it is dark, all men are black," she said. "There is no way to know anything unless you apply your ears. When you listen, it's kòm si you had deafness before and you can hear now. Sometimes you can't fall asleep because the sound of someone crying keeps you awake. A whisper sounds like a roar to your ears. Your ears are witness to matters that do not concern you. And what is worse, you cannot forget. Now, listen. Her feet make a swish sound and when she hurries it's like a whip in the wind."
I tried, but I heard no whip.
"It's the way old men cry," she said. "Grown brave men have a special way they cry when they are afraid."
She closed her eyes and lowered her head to concentrate.
"It is Ti Alice," she said.
"Who is Ti Alice?"
"The young child in the bushes, it is Ti Alice. Someone is there with her."
"Is she in danger?"
My grandmother tightened her eyelids.
"I know Ti Alice," she said. "I know her mother."
"Why is she in the bushes?"
"She must be fourteen or fifteen years now."
"Why is she out there?"
"She is rushing back to her mother. She was with a friend, a boy."
I thought I heard a few hushed whispers.
"I think I hear a little," I said, rocking my daughter with excitement.
"Ti Alice and the boy, they are bidding one another goodbye, for the night."
My grandmother wrapped her arms around her body, rocking and cradling herself.
"What is happening now?" I asked.
"Her mother is waiting for her at the door of their hut. She is pulling her inside to test her."
The word sent a chill through my body.
"She is going to test to see if young Alice is still a virgin," my grandmother said. "The mother, she will drag her inside the hut, take her last small finger and put it inside her to see if it goes in. You said the other night that your mother tested you. That is what is now happening to Ti Alice."
I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers' obsession with keeping us pure and chaste. My mother always listened to the echo of my urine in the toilet, for if it was too loud it meant that I had been deflowered. I learned very early in life that virgins always took small steps when they walked. They never did acrobatic splits, never rode horses or bicycles. They always covered themselves well and, even if their lives depended on it, never parted with their panties.
The story goes that there was once an extremely rich man who married a poor black girl. He had chosen her out of hundreds of prettier girls because she was untouched. For the wedding night, he bought her the whitest sheets and nightgowns he could possibly find. For himself, he bought a can of thick goat milk in which he planned to sprinkle a drop of her hymen blood to drink.
Then came their wedding night. The girl did not bleed. The man had his honor and reputation to defend. He could not face the town if he did not have a blood-spotted sheet to hang in his courtyard the next morning. He did the best he could to make her bleed, but no matter how hard he tried, the girl did not bleed. So he took a knife and cut her between her legs to get some blood to show. He got enough blood for her wedding gown and sheets, an unusual amount to impress the neighbors. The blood kept flowing like water out of the girl. It flowed so much it wouldn't stop. Finally, drained of all her blood, the girl died.
Later, during her funeral procession, her blood-soaked sheets were paraded by her husband to show that she had been a virgin on her wedding night. At the grave site, her husband drank his blood-spotted goat milk and cried like a child.
I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fingernail.
Like Tante Atie, she had told me stories while she was doing it, weaving elaborate tales to keep my mind off the finger, which I knew one day would slip into me and condemn me. I had learned to double while being tested. I would close my eyes and imagine all the pleasant things that I had known. The lukewarm noon breeze through our bougainvillea. Tante Atie's gentle voice blowing over a field of daffodils.
There were many Cases in our history where our ancestors had doubled. Following in the vaudou tradition, most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives.
After my marriage, whenever Joseph and I were together, I doubled.
"The testing? Why do the mothers do that?" I asked my grandmother.
"If a child dies, you do not die. But if your child is disgraced, you are disgraced. And people, they think daughters will be raised trash with no man in the house."
"Did your mother do this to you?"
"From the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me."
"When you tested my mother and Tante Atie, couldn't you tell that they hated it?"
"I had to keep them clean until they had husbands."
"But they don't have husbands."
"The burden was not mine alone."
"I hated the tests," I said. "It is the most horrible thing that ever happened to me. When my husband is with me now, it gives me such nightmares that I have to bite my tongue to do it again."
"With patience, it goes away."
"No Grandme Ife, it does not."
"Ti Alice, she has passed her examination."
The sky reddened with a sudden flash of lightning. "Now you have a child of your own. You must know that everything a mother does, she does for her child's own good. You cannot always carry the pain. You must liberate yourself."
We walked to my room and put my daughter down to sleep.
"I will go soon," I told my grandmother, "back to my husband."
"It is better," she said. "It is hard for a woman to raise girls alone."
She walked into her room, took her statue of Erzulie, and pressed it into my hand.
"My heart, it weeps like a river," she said, "for the pain we have caused you."
I held the statue against my chest as I cried in the night. I thought I heard my grandmother crying too, but it was the rain slowing down to a mere drizzle, tapping on the roof.
The next morning, I went jogging, along the road, through the cemetery plot, and into the hills. The sun had already dried some of the puddles from the drizzle the night before.
Along the way, people stared at me with puzzled expressions on their faces. Is this what happens to our girls when they leave this place? They become such frightened creatures that they run like the wind, from nothing at all.
Three days later, my mother came. When I first caught a glimpse of her, she was sitting on the back of a cart being pulled by two teenage boys.
Eliab raced to the yard, grabbed my grandmother's hand, and yanked her towards the road.
My mother was shielding her face from us, hiding behind a red umbrella.
My grandmother followed Eliab to the edge of the road.
"That lady," Eliab said, pointing at the umbrella guarding my mother's face. "That lady, she says she belongs to you."
Tante Atie was in the yard boiling some water for our morning coffee. She got up quickly when my grandmother started screaming my mother's name.
"Min Martine!"
"Tololo. Tololo," Eliab chimed in as though it was his long-lost mother who had come back.
My grandmother grabbed her broom and speared it in the ground to anchor herself.
My mother folded the red umbrella and laid it on top of a large suitcase on the cart next to her.
Some of the road vendors gathered around her to say hello.
My mother kissed them on the cheek and stroked their children's heads. They looked curiously at her cerise jumper, ballooned around her small frame.
My grandmother was trembling on the spot where she was standing. Tante Atie put her hands on her hips and stared ahead. She did not look the least bit surprised.
A plantain green scarf floated in the breeze behind my mother. She skipped through the dust and rushed across the yard. Eliab circled around her like a wingless butterfly.
My mother walked over and kissed my grandmother. Tante Atie moved slowly towards her, not particularly excited. My mother was glowing.
Tante Atie tapped her lips against my mother's cheeks, then went back to fanning the cooking sticks with my grandmother's hat.
"Sak pasé, Atie?" asked my mother.
"You," answered Tante Atie fanning the flames. "You're what's new."
I clung to the porch railing as my anchor. It had been almost two years since the last time we saw each other. My mother's skin was unusually light, a pale mocha, three or four shades lighter than any of ours.
Brigitte's body tightened, as though she could sense the tension in mine.
"I see you still wear the deuil," my mother said to my grandmother.
"It is all the same," answered my grandmother. "The black is easier; it does not get dirty."
"Mon Dieu, you do not look bad for an old lady," said my mother. "And you have been talking about arranging your funeral like it was tomorrow."
"Your skin looks lighter," said my grandmother. "Is it prodwi? You use something?"
My mother looked embarrassed.
"It is very cold in America," my mother said. "The cold turns us into ghosts."
"Papa Shango, the sun here, will change that," my grandmother said.
"I am not staying long enough for that," my mother said. "When I got your telegram, I decided to come and see Sophie and take care of your affairs at the same time. I plan to stay for only three days. This is not the visit I owe you. This is just circumstance. When I come again, I will stay with you for a very long time."
I watched her from the railing, waiting for her to look over and address me personally.
She looked very young and thin, but for the most part healthy. Because of the roomy size of her jumper, I couldn't tell whether or not she was wearing her prosthetic bra.
"Sophie, walk to your mother," said my grandmother.
They were all staring at me, even Eliab. My mother put her hands in her pockets. She narrowed her eyes as she tried to see my face through the sun's glare.
Brigitte began to twist in my arms. She sensed something.
"Sophie, walk to your mother." My grandmother's voice grew more forceful.
My mother looked uncomfortable, almost scared.
I did not move. We stared at each other across the yard, each waiting for the other to yield. As her daughter, I was expected to walk over and greet her first. However, I did not trust my legs. I wasn't sure I could make it down the steps without slipping and hurting both myself and Brigitte.
"Walk to your mother." My grandmother was becoming angry.
"It is okay," my mother said, coming towards me. "I will walk to her."
She climbed onto the porch and kissed me on the cheek.
Brigitte reached up to grab a large loop earring on my mother's right lobe.
"You didn't send word you were coming," I said.
"Let me see her," she said, extending her hands for Brigitte. Brigitte leaned forward. I let her slip into my mother's grasp.
"How old is she now?" she asked.
"Almost six months."
She made funny faces at Brigitte.
"I got all the pictures you sent me," she said.
"Why didn't you answer?"
"I couldn't find the words," she said. "How are you?"
"I've been better."
She went back to the yard to pay the cart boys and took Brigitte with her.
"You're not staying here, are you?" she asked when she came back to the porch.
She tickled Brigitte's armpits as she spoke, giggling along with her.
I reached for my daughter. She pressed Brigitte's body against her chest and would not give her back.
"Manman asked me to come here and make things better between us. It's not right for a mother and daughter to be enemies. Manman thinks it puts a curse on the family. Besides, your husband came to me and I could not refuse him."
"You've seen him?"
"Oh, the flames in your eyes."
"How is he?"
"Worried. I told him we would be back in three days."
"You can't make plans for me."
"I did."
We were speaking to one another in English without realizing it.
"Oh that cling-clang talk," interrupted my grandmother. "It sounds like glass breaking."
Brigitte was pulling at my mother's earrings. My mother took them off and handed them to me.
"You and I, we started wrong," my mother said. "You are now a woman, with your own house. We are allowed to start again."
The mid-morning sky looked like an old quilt, with long bands of red and indigo stretching their way past drifting clouds. Like everything else, eventually even the rainbows disappeared.
My mother changed into a sun dress to parcel out what she had brought. Under the spaghetti straps, I could see the true unbleached ebony shade of her skin. In contrast, her face looked like the palm of a hand.
My grandmother reached over and cupped her hands over my mother's prosthetic bra.
"Do they hurt?" asked my grandmother.
"No," my mother answered, "because they are not really part of me."
She had brought cloth for my mother and Tante Atie to share. Packaged rice and beans and packaged spices for my grandmother.
I got the diapers and underclothes that Joseph had sent for the baby, along with some T-shirts and shorts for me.
"If you were not such a stubborn old woman," my mother said to my grandmother, "I would move you and
Atie to Croix-des-Rosets or the city. I could buy you a bougainvillea. You would have electricity, and all kinds of modern machines."
"I like myself here," said my grandmother. "I need to see about my papers for this land and I need to have all the things for my passing. With all my children here, this is a good time."
Tante Atie was writing in her notebook. My mother leaned over to look. Tante Atie pulled her notebook away and slammed it shut.
"We will see the notary about the land papers," said my grandmother. "We will do it tomorrow."
"What will you do with the land?" asked Tante Atie.
"I want to make the papers show all the people it belongs to."
Tante Atie did not go to Louise's house, but spent the evening in the yard, staring at the sky.
My mother could not sleep. She went outside and sat with Tante Atie. They looked up for a long time without saying a word.
Finally my mother said, "Do you remember all the unpleasant stories Manman used to tell us about the stars in the sky?"
"My favorite," said Tante Atie, "was the one about the girl who wished she could marry a star and then went up there and, as real as her eyes were black, the man she wished for was a monster."
"Atie, you remember everything."
"I liked what Papa said better. He thought, Papa, that the stars were brave men."
"Maybe he was right," my mother said.
"He said they would come back and fall in love with me. I wouldn't say that was right."
"We used to fight so hard when we saw a star wink. You said it was winking at you. I thought it was winking at me. I think, Manman, she told us that unpleasant story about the stars to stop the quarrels."
"Young girls, they should be allowed to keep their pleasant stories," Tante Atie said.
"Why don't you sleep in your bed?" asked my mother.
"Because it is empty in my bed."
"You had flanneurs, men who came to ask for your hand."
"Until better women came along."
"How could you not be chosen? You are Atie Caco."
"Atie Caco to you. Special to no one."
"You were so beautiful, Atie, when you were a girl. Papa, he loved you best."
"I have then the curse of a girl whose papa loved her best."
Tante Atie rubbed the scar on the side of her head. They looked up at the sky and pointed to a blinking star.
"You can keep the brightest ones," said Tante Atie. "When you are gone, I will have them all to myself."
"We come from a place," my mother said, "where in one instant, you can lose your father and all your other dreams."
My mother and grandmother left early for the notary's. Tante Atie was not in her room. Eliab was playing with pieces of brown paper, stuffing them with leaves to make cigars.
I called him to buy me some milk from the market.
"The new lady," he said, "does she belong to you?"
"Sometimes I claim her," I said, "sometimes I do not."
I gave him some money to buy me some goat milk from the market. He came back with some milk in a cut-off plastic container and a large mango for himself.
"That young fellow, he wants to marry your daughter," my grandmother said as she and my mother walked into the yard.
Eliab looked embarrassed.
"Does that fellow know?" my mother laughed. "My daughter has a very old husband."
My mother was carrying a few large bundles.
I had never seen my grandmother so happy. My mother was glowing.
"We are now landowners," my mother said. "We all now own part of La Nouvelle Dame Marie."
"Did this land not always belong to you and Tante Atie?" I asked my mother.
"Yes, but now you have a piece of it too."
She flashed the new deed for the house.
"La terre sera également divisée," she read the document. "Equally, my dear. The land is equally divided between Atie and me and you and your daughter."
My grandmother pulled out a dressy church hat that she had bought for Tante Atie.
"Sunday we go to the cathedral," said my mother. "We meet Manmans priest."
My mother kissed the bottom of Brigitte's feet.
"Where is Atie?" asked my mother. "I got her a hat that will make her look downright chic."
"She went out," I said.
"The gods will punish me for Atie's ways." My grandmother moaned.
Tante Atie kept her eyes on the lantern on the hills as we ate dinner that night. She was squinting as though she wanted to see with her ears, like my grandmother.
"I look forward to the Mass on Sunday," my grandmother said, breaking the silence. "I want that young priest. The one they call Lavalas. I want him to sing the last song at my funeral."
Brigitte shook the new rattle that my mother had brought her.
My grandmother took Brigitte from me and put a few rice grains in her mouth. My daughter opened her mouth wide, trying to engulf the rice.
Tante Atie walked up the steps and went back to her room.
"I don't know," my grandmother said. "Her mood changes more than the colors in the sky. Take her with you when you return to New York."
"I have asked her before," my mother said. "She wants to be with you."
"She feels she must," my grandmother said. "It's not love. It is duty."
Everything was rustling in Tante Atie's room, as though she were packing. She was mumbling to herself so I dared not peek in. In the yard my mother and grandmother were sitting around the table, passing my grandmother's old clay pipe back and forth to each other.
"Manman, will you know when your time comes to die?" my mother asked sadly.
"The old bones, they will know."
"I want to be buried here when I die," my mother said.
"You should tell Sophie. She is your daughter. She will respect your wishes."
"I don't want much," my mother said. "I don't want a Mass like you. I want to be buried the day after I die. Just like the old days when we kept our dead home."
"That is reason for you and Sophie to be friends," my grandmother said. "She can carry out your wishes. I can help, but she is your child."
My mother paced the corridor most of the night. She walked into my room and tiptoed over to my bed. I crossed my legs tightly, already feeling my body shivering.
I shut my eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep.
She walked over to the baby and stood over her for a long time. Tears streamed down her face as she watched us sleep. The tears came harder. She turned and walked out.
My mother walked into the room at dawn while I was changing Brigitte's diapers.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Fine," she said.
"Do you still have trouble sleeping?" I tried to be polite.
"It's worse when I am here," she said.
"Are you having nightmares?"
"More than ever," she said.
My old sympathy was coming back. I remembered the nightmares. Sometimes, I even had some myself. I was feeling sorry for her.
"I thought it was my face that brought them on," I said.
"Your face?"
"Because I look like him. My father. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father."
She seemed shocked that I remembered.
"When I first saw you in New York, I must admit, it frightened me the way you looked. But it is not something that I can help. It is not something that you can help. It is just part of our lives.
"As a woman, your face has changed. You are a different person. Besides, I have always had nightmares. Every night of my life. It was just stronger then, because that was the first time I was seeing that face."
"Why did you put me through those tests?" I blurted out.
"If I tell you today, you must never ask me again."
I wanted to reserve my right to ask as many times as I needed to. I was not angry with her anymore. I had a greater need to understand, so that I would never repeat it myself.
"I did it," she said, "because my mother had done it to me. I have no greater excuse. I realize standing here that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day."
"You're not dressed yet?" My grandmother was standing in the doorway. "I am ready to go."
My mother placed her hand on my grandmother's shoulder and signaled for her to wait. She turned back to me and said in English, "I want to be your friend, your very very good friend, because you saved my life many times when you woke me up from those nightmares."
My mother went to my grandmother's room to dress and soon they left for the road.
They came back a few hours later with a pan full of bloody pig meat.
In our family, we had come to expect that people can disappear into thin air. All traces lost except in the vivid eyes of one's memory. Still, Tante Atie had never thought that Louise would leave her so quickly, without any last words.
That night, Tante Atie had a glazed look on her face as she ate the fried pork.
"Forgive me if I don't go to Mass ever again. I will choke on the Communion if I take it angry."
Louise had sold her pig, taken my grandmother's money, and left the valley, without so much as a good-bye to Tante Atie.
I asked Tante Atie if Brigitte and I could sleep in her room with her, the night before we were to return to New York. We put down some sheets on the floor and stretched out with the baby between us.
Tante Atie turned her back to the wall as though she did not want me to see her cry. We heard my mother pacing the front room's floor, back and forth waiting for the sun to rise.
"Louise would have found her money, somehow, someway," I told Tante Atie. "She would have done anything to make that trip. Sometimes, when people have something they want to do, you cannot stop them. Even if you want to."
"I was a fool to think she was my friend," Tante Atie said. "Money makes dogs dance."
"At least she taught you how to read your letters."
"Anyone could have taught me that. A lot of good letters will do me now."
"Sometimes I wish I could go back in time with you, to when we were younger."
She closed her eyes, as though to drift off to sleep.
"The past is always the past," she said. "Children are the rewards of life and you were my child."
The next day, Tante Atie led the cart that took my mother's and my bags to the marketplace. The sun was shining in Tante Atie's eyes as she carried my daughter for me. My grandmother and my mother had their arms wrapped around one another's waists, clinging as though they would never see each other again.
When we got to the van that would take us to Port-au-Prince, my grandmother just stepped back and let go. My mother kissed her on both cheeks and then walked over and kissed Tante Atie. Tante Atie tapped my mother's shoulder and whispered for her to be careful.
As Tante Atie handed me my daughter, she said, "Treat your mother well, you don't have her forever."
My grandmother tapped the baby's chin.
"The faces in this child," she said, fighting back her tears.
My mother paid the tap tap driver for us to have the van all to ourselves. It was all ours except for the old hunchback, whose charcoal bags had already been loaded on it.
Tante Atie was standing under the red flamboyant tree, clinging to a low branch, as the van pulled away. Slowly, everything in Dame Marie became a blur. My grandmother and the vendors. Tante Atie at the naming red tree. The Macoutes around Louise's stand. Even the hill in the distance, the place that Tante Atie called Guinea. A place where all the women in my family hoped to eventually meet one another, at the very end of each of our journeys.