After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn't conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, "We have to do something about this."
She hasn't visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn't remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.
Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother's Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy-year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.
Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother's grave,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor's gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight, I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me, sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.
It was like a reunion with a stranger. Like many children of immigrants born and raised in the United States, I have skated precariously along the hyphen of my Haitian-American identity. On one side, I bask in the efficiencies of American life: mail-order catalogs, direct-deposit checking, and interoffice envelopes. From the other side, I take the comfort food of Haitian oatmeal and tap into the ongoing debate Haitians love more than any other: politics. It's an endless menu of traits and qualities that I access and draw from, mixing and matching to fit the situation. But I knew that my return to Haiti wouldn't allow me to pick and choose as I pleased. My identity would no longer be defined by me; it would be defined by the Haitians around me.
Eleven years had passed since I had visited the many relatives who still live on the island. I longed to see them and store up new, vivid memories to replace the ones time had turned into faded snapshots.
"Why Haiti?" colleagues in the newsroom asked. Why should a Hampton Roads newspaper report on a third-world Caribbean island? The question made me impatient.
Why Haiti? Because one year before, Americans had changed the lives of its seven million people by sending twenty-one thousand troops there. Because one year later, Haitians continued to live with-and in spite of-that intervention. And because Haiti's social and cultural landscape is far more textured than the images offered by network television: Haitians as boat people, as AIDS carriers, as PWoH-enthralled zombies. There was no excuse for Americans to know so little about, or think so little of, a neighbor whose history and future are so intertwined with theirs.
Still, as I packed my bags, I felt more like an intruder trespassing onto property that was in no way mine, not a proud descendant carrying the torch back to the mainland. What could I tell Americans about a country whose poverty was not my poverty?
My claim to Haitianness was about to be tested. As the airplane touched down on Haiti's cracked soil, the hyphen that held me together started to feel more like the fulcrum of a seesaw whose plank was about to tip on one end or the other.
Haiti, from the window of American Airlines flight 1291, is white sun, blue ocean, brown mountains. Even from this high, the color of the soil is barren and unkind. Since the last time I had this view, much of Haiti's land has been deforested.
Inside, a flight attendant goes into an unusually long explanation about customs forms. She walks through the aisles, where some Haitians flag her down with raised hands. The fact that she is helping them fill out forms they can't read won't come to me until days later.
Outside the airport, the parking lot is a dusty chaos of barbed wire, begging crowds, and obliquely parked cars. The boy begging for money by our car is too young to be a hustler. His fingers hang inside my window; the nails are blunt and crusted with coal-colored dirt. As the car begins to pull away, he doesn't let go. He hangs on and runs with the car, pleading. That is when I make my choice. I stop asking myself how old he is, where his parents are, and when his last meal was. I block him out; I make him disappear. It will be the hardest choice of the entire journey, but it's so easy compared with the life this boy must live.
Beth Bergman, a white American photographer who works for the newspaper, is also here. For Beth, who has never been to Haiti and understands little of its ways, I am an interpreter, a buffer, and a bridge. But to a passerby who eyes us as we make our first forays into the street, I am a traitor. I am the one who has "brought whites to photograph our trash and ask us how much it smells."
To a homeless woman washing off her plate with sewage water, I am an opportunity, for money, for food, for water. Here in this isolated country, where electricity and phone lines are chancy, some of the most media-sawy people I have ever met work their spin of survival on the foreign press.
"I have no money," she says, coming toward us. "I built a house and they tore it down. I have to take my son to the hospital and I can't afford it. What are you going to do for me?"
Without knowing why, I start listing my Haitian credentials: my relatives who live here, my trips here as a child. But this woman is too smart and too poor to care. To her, I am still a stranger. An American stranger.
Beside her, her son, no older than five, looks up into the lens of the camera. Across his face comes the slow realization that he is no longer the same person he was a second ago. He is a commodity now. He's the face of poverty that we will capture and bring back with us to sell newspapers. So he acts accordingly: The liquid brown eyes grow wider, the small hand tugs at mother's skirt, the head tilts with innocence.
I have no right to be surprised at this. As a reporter, I want them to tell me their story; I don't want them to implicate me in it. But how can I fault them? This mother knows already what I am afraid to admit to myself: A one-year anniversary story about Haiti that enlightens Hampton Roads readers won't do anything for her or her baby.
It's 7:10 a.m. Sunday. Beth and I stand outside Saint Gerard Church in the cool breeze before the day's punishing heat sets in. It took hours to pick out the one nice blouse I knew I would need to bring for church. Dressing up is part of Sunday worship, no matter how rich or how poor one is. Etched in my mind are black-and-white images of my mother as a young girl in a ruffled white dress bordered with lace, her cotton socks perfectly folded over.
Today, women file in through the church doors in long, cotton dresses and checkered skirts; the men wear paisley ties and leather shoes.
Just before I take my seat inside, a woman next to me points to my sleeveless silk shirt and whispers, "They're not going to give you communion dressed like that. You didn't cover your arms enough. You need sleeves."
But later as we wound our way of the capital's main cemetery, where Catholic rites merge with Vodou rituals in sacred beauty, I realize that I would need far more than a pair of sleeves to belong.
For many Haitian immigrants and their children, Vodou is a loaded word. Nine years ago, I watched an episode of Miami Vice through what I thought were Haitian eyes. I hated it. In my mind, it invoked pretty much every stereotype of Vodou and the Haitians who practice it. By the third commercial break, Vodou serum had turned Detective Tubbs into a zombie. Dazed by the pounding chants of crazed Haitian worshippers, the rogue cop became possessed. He twitched miserably with fever. Even his partner, Crockett, couldn't snap him out of it. From the TV in the basement of my parents' house, I smoldered in anger. No one watching this would understand the complexity of this African-based religion that meant so much to Haitians, nor the symbolism of the gods that made up its hierarchy.
At the entrance to the main cemetery in Port-au-Prince, a sign in black letters reads, YOU ARE NOTHING BUT DUST. On any given day here, solemn processions of mourners draped in rosaries prop each other up as they walk beside caskets. But today, what we find is an angry woman determined to curse an enemy.
It's the first Vodou ceremony I've ever seen, and I can't make sense of it. The woman splashes clear moonshine and dark rum around a charred stone cross. On a straw chair in front of the cross, a flame burns inside a metal bowl. Her thin, tough arms tie a rope around the cross into a tight knot. Later, she will toss salt and crack eggs around the cross to ward off any bad spirits that could interfere with her mission.
"She's calling on the god Baron," Faubert, our driver, tells me. "Baron is a Vodou god. When she ties the rope around the cross, it's like she's tying it around a person. And from now on, when that person tries to do anything, he won't do it right. He can do nothing good anymore because Baron has that person tied up."
Beside me, Beth is crouched down, snapping pictures. I hear the opening and closing of the shutter in slow motion, and my thoughts split off in all directions. How is what comes through my lens any different than the view from Hollywood cameras that once enraged me? I try to unravel the symbols and chants, but I keep hitting a cultural wall. I don't have the knowledge.
In the warped recesses of my mind, I ask myself this question: If I were ever put on trial by a Committee for Haitian Authenticity, how would I defend myself? How would I explain what has led me and my friend to this place, scribbling and shooting furiously for an American audience?
At the end of my workday, a battery of questions awaited me at my grandmother's house in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. Was I doing well in my career? How is my older brother, her godson? Did I have a boyfriend? Would I ever bear her great-grandchildren? And why did I cut my hair so short?
"You've accomplished too much in your young life to be walking around with a head like that," she says, inspecting my closely cropped cut. "You've got to think about getting married."
When I used to come to Haiti with my family, this is where we would stay. Each step through the house brings back another memory: the blue-green bathroom tiles where I nursed mosquito bites with Caladryl and cotton swabs; the kitchen where my grandmother stirred long sticks of cinnamon and vanilla extract into the breakfast oatmeal; my uncle Eddie's room off in the comer where no one was ever supposed to go.
Standing over the dining-room table, she shows us pictures of her cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II and her journeys in the Spanish countryside. "I am eighty years old," she says, "and I have lived a good life." That is all she wants for her children and her grandchildren.
When I graduated from college three years ago, my grandmother came for the long day of ceremonies. When they called my name to receive my diploma, my grandmother shouted louder than anyone else. I could actually hear her cheering as I climbed the steps and reached for my degree. I am the granddaughter who has succeeded in America.
"You were made outside." This is the way many Haitians speak of those of us who were born or grew up in the United States. It is as much a badge of pride as it is a stinging resentment. The ones made outside have proven how well Haitians can flourish in the land of opportunity. But, in all our successes, we have also abandoned them. For Haitians who have struggled through the poverty and terror of daily life, there is no room for hyphens in a person's identity. Because I have not suffered with them, I can never be of them. The best I could hope for was to make my journey count. To take everything I was told and shown and tell a story in which both Haitians and Americans could see a sliver of themselves and of each other. A story that didn't tell the truth, but told the many truths I could never tell alone.
It was about 10:30 p.m. or a little bit later when I started walking down the hill to the convenience store at the Mobil Station on Broadway. I couldn't figure out what snacks to buy for the trip because I didn't get to take trips very often. I can count on one hand how many times I've left town.
I took the long way down the hill, and ran into a friend of mine from Albany who was already two hours into his journey by the time he'd made it to Nyack.
"You going to the March?" he asked me. This brother had these big eyes and as I peered into his car in the darkness, they looked like floodlights. I felt something beginning to pump in me. I wanted to hop in the car with him and start the road trip right then and there, but I had a ticket for the bus, and about an hour longer to wait before it left. I looked again at his eyes and we started talking the way brothers talk sometimes. It's in the eyes. Like, say the both of us were checking out the same girl. The eyes might say, "Did you catch that?" Or if I was looking at some other cat's girl, the brother might stare me down or UPS me a quick message with his eyes like, "Bro, she's with me. You can stare up and down, but ain't nothin' you can do about it-might hurt your eyes, too." It's all in the eyes sometimes.
Anyway, I told him to watch out-there was going to be a massive police force all over the highways on the route to D.C. I hoped to convey this warning to him with my eyes, "It's October fifteenth, brother. Be careful on the road. Everyone knows about the March." There was way too much electricity in the air between us to even mouth that.
It finally started to click that I, too, was headed to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The March was all over the news. I had caught a clip on CNN of some brothers who were from Seattle; they were already there. When I saw my boy jet off with a carload of folks to D.C, I felt like I was late even though the march hadn't really started yet. There was a current running through my body, pulling me like a chain. Get to D.C.
The street felt quiet, as if something was going to happen, that this something was so massive that a path would have to be cleared in order to move through it-I left the Mobil with a couple of snacks-some pudding, chips, a Snapple. I had a turkey sandwich at home. On the way back to my house, I ran into this cat who I only knew by sight.
"You know where we were lining up?"
"Corner of Franklin and Depew."
I walked with him around the corner and back to Franklin Street. I lived one block up from Franklin. As we walked up the street together, he started telling me about how he'd said good-bye to his folks. He asked me if I had said good-bye to my folks yet.
"Good-bye?"
"Yeah, man. I told my moms and all my folks that if I don't make it back from D.C.-if something happens to me down there-I told them that I loved them."
"Word?"
"You gotta say good-bye to them."
Until he'd said that, I'd had every intention of making it back from D.C.-I hadn't thought about just how much could go wrong down there.
We were on Franklin talking and I was going to see him again pretty soon on Franklin. And the thing about Franklin-or at least the part of it where the bus was going to pull up-is that it's undeniably black. It's a pretty safe bet that if you walk or drive down Franklin, something in the air will give you the sense that it's a black neighborhood. It may be a couple of cars parked on the street corner playing music. Or a small crew of fellas talking on the corner, shooting dice, or just hanging out next to the laundromat. Or it may just be an unmarked police car circling the block. You might find some older folks sitting on porches, too. There are loud conversations here, and a person passing by might get to hear the way black folks can transform English. It can sound dirty, but crisp and proper too, on Franklin, and whichever way the language comes out, it seems somehow to lurk along the street. When kids play or yell down this way, it feels like their voices stick to the metal bars that surround the projects. In the same way, when the older folks talk, their words drift into the wall and live deep inside the brick and cement. A good chunk of black culture resonates at this intersection of Franklin and Depew. And because of that, this particular intersection makes the rest of the town look lily white.
Franklin is the first street you hit coming from the city, and it stretches from one side of town to just about the end of it-it goes from the rich to the poor sections, and it holds truth, with blood and footsteps smeared all over it. Footsteps can go any direction on Franklin Street. Space is tight here at this intersection. Everything here happens right on top of everything else. The projects form an imaginary border on Franklin Street, and they are surrounded by parking lots. The only vacant piece of land has been fenced off and transformed into a community garden. It's the only lush, green place in the area. At any given moment during the spring and summer, you'll find people in the garden nursing the vegetation. They have come to Franklin to do that.
I lived just off the intersection of Franklin and Cedar Hill when I was little. A couple of Rolls-Royces were always parked across the street in front of a garage. They were a customary part of the view from my living-room window. When I was a kid, I was poor and happy. As I got older, I began to feel poor and desperately hurt somehow by that feeling. I began to see differences, I began to feel what being poor was really about; and there was a constant blur in my vision because of that feeling. It made everything else feel blurry. The feeling gnawed at me, and for a long time being poor was the only detail I could actually focus on. I could almost hear it ringing in my head all day long. "I'm poor." It all looked poor. Everything. Every day I thought about it. I thought about the grime and the roaches and I thought about being called Haitian like that was a bad word. There is a woman who I still see now and then on Franklin Street. When I was little, she used to bang on our windows and scream, "Haitians, go home!"
There is very little distance between Franklin Street and myself. I grew up having to pass along Franklin every day, and however the street felt, it affected me. If it felt Haitian, then I did too. If it felt American, then it became a problem for me because I was an American who felt like a Haitian. If the street was quiet, then somehow I felt a little quiet also. Franklin Street was dead the day the rapper Scott La Rock was shot. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. I remember that much.
But the cat I was talking to right there on Franklin, and myself; any other cat who has crossed through Franklin, laughed on Franklin, fought on Franklin, or cried on Franklin; and anyone who has spent a hot summer night on Franklin trying to keep cool-about being poor or about being-makes up a part of this street. And anyone who has feared Franklin or felt the white on Franklin, or anyone who has felt Haitian on Franklin or anyone who has felt strong because of Franklin has meshed with the voices of this street and become part of it. And for whatever subtle, American reason, the bus to the Million Man March was going to pull up right on the corner where, if you want, you can get a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor or a three-dollar bottle of scented Muslin oil.
The electricity had me rattling off to my aunt when I got home from the Mobil. I had an uncle there too; he was visiting from Haiti and this was his first trip to America. He wanted to go to the March and I had been scrambling to try and find him a ticket for the bus. I even tried to get him a ride with the first brother I met on Broadway who I knew I could trust. My uncle didn't speak any English, so I couldn't send him down with just anyone. So when my boy told me that he wouldn't have room, I felt like that was it, there wasn't any way to get him to D.C. Maybe if there was space on the bus I could buy him a ticket at the lineup. I asked him if he was willing to go to the lineup, but by then the idea of going to the March was over for him.
"Lese sa," (Forget it, no big deal) he said to me.
When I got home, I crisscrossed the apartment trying to get everything together. I had maybe a half hour before the lineup. The battery to one of my cameras was still charging when I picked up the phone to call my mother. It was one of those calls I didn't want to make because the woman panics even when I go into the city for the day. She told me to be careful and underneath her voice I could hear her deepest thoughts. Boy, I wish you wouldn't go. This doesn't even concern you. Your entire family is Haitian. The March is for Americans. You're not an American, not entirely. Why do you always have to he the activist? What are you going to the March for? I didn't tell her that I loved her because I couldn't bring myself to believe I wouldn't be back and that this phone call was the last time I would speak to her.
But in the far outer left corner of my mind, I pictured a sudden unexplainable gas pipe explosion occurring on October 16, under D.C., in which a million plus black men die-story at eleven. With that idea in my head somewhere, I took my bus ticket out of its envelope. I had bought it the week before the March and every day when I came back from class I'd check the envelope because I'm neurotic. I needed to see that it was where I had left it. The first time I brought it home I snapped a picture of it and then put it in a drawer underneath some folders. My heart would start to race if I didn't see it immediately when I opened the drawer. Every day the envelope slipped underneath more folders. By the end of the week I checked it a couple of times a day. It looked like an invitation that someone might get for a graduation party. The ticket had put an end to about a year and a half of just talk. I said good-byes to my aunt and uncle and walked down the hill.
There were two brothers standing on the corner. The street was still a little quiet. I had the time and the space to try and set up a shot of the two guys, so I stepped out in the street and took the picture. A red jeep pulled up and then all of a sudden a caravan of cars pulled up to the curb. There was a mass of black people standing on Franklin, which is to say that aside from the actual physical bodies on the street there was also in the night a monstrous spiritual presence almost shaking the ground the way the floor shakes during a fraternal step show. It felt that spiritual-like somewhere above us there were slaves floating by and maybe there were some porters in the area with some railroad workers. There had to have been a few souls watching us on Franklin, maybe even the spirits of those who drowned in the sea on the way over here. I would love to believe that there was a whole congregation up there watching us and elbowing themselves in a frenzy, thinking themselves that this was what they waited four hundred years to see.
There were footsteps everywhere, and all sorts of brothers about to board the bus. There were women waiting too. They had come to send off their mates and husbands, their fathers and their sons. The scene was a little chaotic now, but at the same time it was very calm. The hustling and bustling on the corner of Franklin felt great. No one got angry and several fire engines crisscrossed the intersection where the bus was about to pull up-it was odd to see them driving by, particularly since an alarm hadn't gone off at all that night.
I started snapping pictures randomly. I took a shot of a woman looking out into the street; she was clutching her daughter from behind. The little girl smiled for me. Her tiny face and her half-shut eyes spill out from underneath the hat she's wearing. The mother looks pensive, she doesn't even notice the camera. The look on her face reminds me of how worried my own mother must have looked when she spoke to me on the phone.
A large gray bus rumbled over to the corner, and the line moved across the street to where the bus pulled up. A brother with a bow tie, a representative from the Nation of Islam, walked by real quiet and it felt like everyone's eyes were watching him and waiting for his instructions. He was going to ride on the bus with us to D.C.
The noise died down. We were told that we should have our bags opened so they could be searched. The search was about not taking chances. We could get stopped by the police at any point on the road for whatever reason. It was a light search, a happy search- I've been searched by the police before, and it feels much different. I was searched by the police for less than twenty seconds, but as I put my hands on the hood of the car that night, I had this swelling underneath the muscles in my eyes because it was clear there was nothing I could do about the search and about always feeling like I was under suspicion just for being a young black male. That night I was with a couple of friends and the police pulled us over for not having our headlights on. I can't say what I was thinking, but as the white policeman approached the car I had stepped out. It was a silly mistake, because as soon as I stepped out of the car, I became suspicious to him and he frisked me. I must admit, to the officer's credit, he was incredibly professional. I guess I just wanted him to see me as an individual, not as a suspect. Another time, I was walking down Broadway to get a cup of coffee; I watched a police officer follow me in his squad car all the way up the street. Finally he pulled over and asked me for identification. "You look like someone I might be looking for," he said. I have never committed a crime. But I showed the officer my I.D. that American night.
By now it was a liquid black night and if the ticket could talk it would have said that my fingers felt like bricks against its skin because I clutched onto it until the time came to fork it over. I got on the bus and moved toward the middle. Years ago I thought the back of the bus was the only place I could sit. It was where the cool people sat. It was from these folks that I learned a thing or two about having dark skin and about having nappy hair. These were all the things that belonged somewhere in the back. They were supposed to be underneath, hidden away in a trunk in some closet. They felt connected somehow, and they never left my mind even when I was trying to be cool-and being cool was the most important thing for me back then. Being cool meant that I was accepted. Among these people, all of whom were pretty much marginalized by poverty, I had another layer of blackness. I was one of these Haitians-those boat people, those funny-clothes-wearing people, those cats with AIDS, those people who speak funny. My uncle, not the one who asked to go to the March with me, had to fight his way back and forth to school when he first came to America from Haiti. Once, another uncle told me that I was from Africa. I didn't buy it for a second. When I was about nine, I developed an answer if someone asked if I was Haitian: I would say that I was West Indian. I was born here, and had never stepped out of this country, but no one accepted me as an American.
My favorite subject in grade school was history-I loved Washington, I loved Jefferson, I loved the war cards that Time/Life used to sell because they had stories on the back of them. I loved the American Revolution. I didn't love Crispus Attucks, a black hero of the American revolution, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre. I didn't know who he was. I loved the War of 1812. And in a school chock full of Haitian-American kids, we didn't learn a thing about the Haitian trinity of revolutionaries Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, and Henri Christophe. It was only after getting out of the school system that I learned about American blacks and about myself. I was angry then, because when I finally began to get a sense of who I was and what I wanted to become, I regretted all the time I had wasted believing what other histories and other institutions said about me.
The bus got quiet for a couple of minutes before we rolled off. The elder cat on the bus led a prayer-we asked God for a safe trip. A couple of seats away there was a father sitting with his son, and I studied them hard. A part of me always studies a father sitting with his son. It's an involuntary act. As I watched them talking back and forth, my mind slipped back to another time when I was on the phone with a friend of mine. I made a joke and he started laughing and in the background his father started laughing too. The sound of the two of them laughing in clumsy union kept playing in my head. It became like music to me, listening to them laugh. Those notes of a father and son's laughter blended with the voices of the father and son next to me on the bus. The sound conveys a certain feeling to me. It's a certain sound that I have never had with my own father. When I heard my friend on the phone with his dad laughing, I realized there was a key sound that was missing whenever I shared a laugh with my father. Every laugh I've ever had with my father has been guarded. It's always been a weary laugh with him. There has never been just an easy, natural laugh between us. When I laugh with him on the phone or when I'm sitting in front of him, there's always something triggered, something underneath, and it always cancels out any comfort or ease that we might have felt. Every laugh has always been like two strangers breaking the ice, but over and over again. When I heard my friend on the phone with his father and when I saw the father and son on the bus together, I was overwhelmed by a sense that this laughter happened for these fathers and sons on a regular basis.
The men on the bus were like an extended family. Some of them I already knew; some had lived on or around Franklin. The word brother was used over and over. We were all brothers at this point, bound together by the same goal. The buzz on the bus felt a tiny bit divine. The last thing I remember before dozing off was the cool and steady purring of the bus engine. A brother was at the wheel and a brother owned the bus.
I woke up once to hear the bus driver arguing with a truck driver over the CB. The trucker had a southern drawl. He had said over the air, "I hear a whole bunch of niggers are heading down to D.C." It didn't sound real. I woke up to hear this drawl over the driver's CB and in that drawl I heard some of the reason I was going to the March. The casual and deceptive way that the trucker used the word nigger over the airwaves really got to me. It wasn't so much him, but more the general feeling that what he was saying was accepted in a broad American sense. It was that attitude I was hoping to counter by going to the March. I did not want to end up just as another American statistic. I did not want to show up in some American catalog as another young black male dead or in prison. I did not want to be beaten or disgraced by a cop who felt that it was okay to brutalize or kill a black male based on an accepted American suspicion of him, which on any given day, could mean me. On any given day my mother could get the call. Mrs. Calypso? We found your son with a gun. (I've never carried a gun or any weapon). Ma'am, your son looked suspicious. (I wear my hair in long dreadlocks.) We questioned him. He resisted the arresting officer. Please come and identify the body.
I wanted America to know that if my only crime was being black, then my mother would never survive that call. I wanted America to know that no mother can survive that call, and that call destroys families every day. I wanted America to know that there are families all over America trying to pick up the pieces that some Lone Ranger left behind while on his shift. I wanted America to know that I just want to work and live without any interruption of that. I wanted America to feel Franklin Street. I wanted America to know that I had been at a job for close to seven years and a white male on the job less than six months made more than I did. I wanted America to try to understand the kind of humiliation I went through every time I went to the bank to cash my check. There was more. There was much more.
By daylight we were in D.C. Radio reports stated that at least half a million other black men were pouring into the place at that very moment. Women waved to us on their way to work. They had a gleam in their eyes and I'm sure I did too. Part of the March was about this; it was about reconciling with women. And for me, it was just the first step. Maybe this would help me laugh-just laugh a good clean laugh. We got off the bus and walked toward the subway.
The train ride had everybody laughing somehow because the cars were packed-I don't think our car could have held another body. There was a young white woman on the platform who stood right next to me. In front of all these black faces, her own color must have gone through her mind, but I didn't get the feeling that she felt threatened. I spent the rest of the day obsessed with observing white people who were at the March. I would watch them and try to snap their picture.
As we emerged from the train, two Muslim women watched us from a trailer window. They never looked at me. One woman in particular had beautiful, piercing eyes. Our group dispersed into a sea of black men. By eight o'clock in the morning it was impossible to get to the front of the Washington Mall. I could not fathom the number of people I saw whenever I looked back into the crowd. Every tree was occupied; every statue framed with bodies; there were even people perched on stoplights. I was drawn to a group of Rastafarians who had formed a circle and were playing drums. I moved around with my uncle the entire day. We just kept moving as we met brothers from everywhere. I met a woman from the Bahamas. I looked up to one of the massive monitors to see who was speaking. The man said he'd just received a fax from Africa, and they were watching us. There was thunderous applause. Sometime later Rosa Parks stepped up to the microphone. I was awed to think that this tiny, delicate woman had helped bring us to the mall by refusing to sit in the back of a southern bus and starting the Civil Rights Movement. Without her, the March might have never existed. I saw her on the monitor and it was the first of many times that day I wanted to start crying. Her frail voice rang in my ears. I could feel my eyes getting really moist and I fought to keep from crying.
I fought that feeling all day. As a race of men, I felt like we had never really arrived until that day. The March was a step toward being seen as human. It felt like redemption to me. At no time did I feel nervous. Even if a bomb went off in the middle of the crowd, it felt like the spiritual presence of all our souls and those watching from above could and would contain it. And maybe the absence of that paranoia was what made me feel like crying. I didn't cry though. I had been holding back the water of my eyes long before the March. I still have the water from the March and water from before. I still have these tears. I have new ones, too.
I went off to one side and was about to sit down when I saw a white man standing like a pillar in the ground. He was frozen. He was holding an American flag upside down and he held a cardboard sign in front of the flag. The sign read: A MILLION AND ME. Scrawled on the flag were the words: UNITED WE STAND DIVIDED WE FALL. The man had large, ice-blue eyes and somehow he looked cornered. I didn't want to get too close because I was unsure just what he would do. He looked like a real-life Marlboro man. I guess I was scared of this man's courage, too. If someone called for a million white men to come to Washington, D.C., I would never show up, and I have good reason not to. At first, I figured this guy was some zany, white-boy leftist. I walked away from him, but I kept thinking about him. It took a couple of years and an incidental conversation before I realized what message he was conveying with the flag. In the military an upside-down flag is a distress signal. The truth of it shook me hard. There could never be an all-white or an all-black concern, we can't escape each other that way.
As we were leaving the mall and heading back toward the bus, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam began speaking. I only caught bits and pieces of his speech as I made my way through the streets of D.C. His voice floated through the air, his tone dipped into a subtle call, and he paused elegantly, then shifted as his speech became more serious. He spoke about responsibility, and the word hammered over the P.A. system and it sank into my eardrums and that was the message I carried home with me. I heard it over and over as I left the mall. Thousands of people registered to vote at the March, hundreds of thousands latched onto ideas and a million plus probably felt reborn or at least rejuvenated somehow. For me the March happened in tiny clips. Every step I had taken led me to D.C, and what America was moving toward and how it changed and how it stayed the same led me to D.C.
Most of the group from my neighborhood in Rockland County walked back together to where the bus was parked. Minister Farrakhan could be heard for what seemed like miles around. We boarded the bus and he was still talking. The sign on the bus read: THE CHICKENBONE EXPRESS. Someone next to me remarked that he was offended by the stereotypical implications of the sign, that all black people love chicken. The sign didn't bother me at all; what had happened on the mall that day had stomped all over any stereotype someone might have wanted to use. To me, the sign was harmless. Besides, I love chicken and I'm black. Pass me some chicken, I'll deal with the stereotype in my own way. Gracias.
I was going home reconciled. I felt American. I felt I had taken part in an American tradition. I felt our numbers couldn't be ignored and I felt that a lot of discussion that day all over the country would have to include black males and it would have to include a different way of looking at us. I didn't go home "angry" at anyone. In fact I felt better about America as a whole. I sensed from all the eyes around me that something very deep had been resolved for a lot of brothers. There hadn't been any violence to disrupt the March. And we were alive. There was no bomb under D.C.
I saw a brother the next day walking with his son on Franklin. I had never seen him walking with his son before. He had been on the bus. I made my way to the deli where I usually eat lunch and got into a conversation with a family from Tennessee. It was probably that drawl of theirs that provoked me into conversation with them. I had been talking about the March to someone else and the older southern woman looked at me and said with an intriguing twang that she had been "praying for us." I believed her. I believed what her eyes were saying to me, and I thanked her for her prayers because her prayers had fused with the spirit I was carrying from the March. I believed her because I imagined that everyone had been watching and praying for us. The slaves had been watching. The Quakers had been watching, and so had John Brown, Nat Turner, and George Jackson. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe were watching. So was Crispus Attucks. Servicemen like him were watching from their posts. And heroes were watching from their graves. The white man with the distress signal was watching somewhere. I believed her drawl. I believed her eyes. And for that moment, it felt impossible to be invisible.
1980
My first nightmare was provoked by a doll. She sat on my toybox, regal in her peasant dress and scarf. I dreamt that she cackled, and attacked my Spiderman comic book, then went after me. My mother saved me. She took the doll away and sent it back to my father.
I imagined my father as a bogeyman, like the macoutes my mother described to me from her childhood-they would take you away in the night. My father would arrive unannounced, with the court order, to take me for the weekend, even if I kicked and screamed, even if my mother cried.
1986
In the fourth grade, we presented our family stories to the class. I announced that my parents were from Haiti. I repeated what my mother had taught me in singsong tones, "Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It is next to Puerto Rico and Cuba." My classmates laughed. They had already decided that I was an alien. The only Haiti they could imagine was an island where "everybody hates each other."
1986 was the year my father left. I remember he drove by our house in Los Angeles on his way to New York with his new family. He sent for me during Easter. I remember not caring. Maybe a father was like a first cousin-someone you played with once a year.
On one trip my father and I explored the city together, recording everything we saw. There is still a magic that takes over when I remember holding his camera for the first time. As we stood on the edge of Central Park, I narrated, "Here we are in New York City, across from the Natural History Museum, and Central Park. Let's see how many interesting things there are. There are dogs, there are bus-waiters, and fathers." As I zoomed in on his face, he cautioned, "I think you are little bit too close."
1986 was also a big year for Haiti. Mommy and I watched as Baby Doc and his wife fled with the national treasury in a silver Mercedes. Baby Doc really was a big baby-a boy, whose father made him president at nineteen, who ran away when his toy soldiers began to burn.
I finally thought to ask my mother how long it had been since she was home. "Twenty years," she replied. I could not imagine time that long.
1989
When I turned thirteen, I was finally allowed to watch The Serpent and the Rainbow, the horror movie everyone had seen but me. I remember feeling captivated by Marielle, the young Haitian doctor who guides an American on his journey to find the "zombie drug." I was taken in by her elegance, her ability to move so fluidly between this world and the beyond. She was a dancer, the embodiment of Erzulie Freda. This was the type of Haitian woman I wanted to be.
My dream ended when I viewed her making "love" to the American, scratching at him gently like a lioness eating her pray. I understand now that Marielle is just another black exotic, and the story is not about her. I searched for other images. What I found was the Haiti of an American imagination, an island of a million horrors. Haitians were zombies, mobsters, and angry witches. The movies I found failed to depict the true horror: that we were a prideful people being eaten by the shadow of colonialism, unable to speak for ourselves.
1991
At fifteen, I started to care more about Haitian politics. I read everything I could about Aristide. He was like my Nelson Mandela. I saw him as the only hope for democracy in Haiti. I watched as he rose from champion of the poor to president of the nation, then was plucked from his pedestal and muzzled like a rabid dog. I learned not to put all of my eggs in one basket.
On my fifteenth birthday, my father reappeared. He brought me more rice and beans and cake than I could eat. He told me the story of how he met my mother at a wedding in Brooklyn-she was wearing an orange dress.
We took a picture together, and for the first time I realized our smiles were the same. My mother accused me of betrayal. "Your father's family are Duvalierists," she said, warning me that he could not be trusted.
1994
In the middle of the coup, my mother taught me to speak out about the way we were treated. She put me on stage one night a meeting of peace activists, and told me to describe what I knew about the raping and killing of dissenters in Haiti. My voice cracked and my knees shook as I felt her pass on the burden to me, to represent us.
I thought of taking my mother's name, Bateau. Boat. I imagine the boat, floating on the seas with no place to land. How could I take that name when even she chooses not to associate with the father who gave it to her?
1995
Twenty years have passed, and now it is my turn to go home. As I board the plane to Port-au-Prince, I am suddenly conscious of my bent shoulders and drab clothing. The woman ahead of me in a bright blue dress holds her head high, despite the weight of the sacks she grips in each hand. If someone at this moment were to ask me who I am, I would not know how to respond.
When we arrive, a small band plays ballads on the runway. The man checking my passport stares at me then decides to speak English instead of Kreyol. I am an election observer, an American who brings some semblance of justice by recording the voting process. We hover over college students as they count ballots at midnight in Les Cayes. We count them again, and write down our results. The answer is easy: Rene Preval has won. Twenty percent of voters have voiced their opinion. The other eighty percent watch silently as "democracy" changes hands.
The morning after the elections in Les Cayes, a man approaches me to ask my name. I tell him, "Miriam Neptune." He says I am his second cousin, the daughter of his first cousin. The Neptunes live here, he tells me. I smile at the coincidence, but cry inside because the name is only a name, not a family.
1998
Does name determine lineage? The only lineage I embrace is the one that raised me: my mother, her mother, and the mothers who created her. What is nation? What is my nation? Nation is in part, the imagination. Nation exists only where we create boundaries. My nation lives in the waters between spiritual and physical homes.
I make a living by telling other people's stories. These people are all strangers to me, a newspaper reporter, yet I am often able to convince them to pour out some of their most intimate thoughts, dreams, and miseries-details that are usually shared between close relatives, passed on from grandmother to granddaughter, mother to daughter, father to son. I can look grieving women in their watery eyes and ask them to describe their murdered sons or husbands- their ambitions, their scent. And amazingly enough, they will comply. I am moved to tell their stories for I am not certain of my own.
Details about my family have avoided me all of my life. In my twenty-nine years, I have been trained not to expect to learn much about the women and men who came before me. They are dead, my only surviving grandmother often insists. What would be the point in raising the dead? Leve mo. This is an expression I have heard over and over again. An expression I have grown to accept. A phrase that angers me. Frustration from not knowing much about my family, frustration that is now making me numb. For I have learned those words have helped shield my grandmother from pain and regret, as if their spirits would come back to haunt her and me.
From losing her home to a cyclone to struggling to put food on the table, her life's wounds still are fresh. And this American-born girl, this ti ameriken, who in recent years has professed a committed interest in Haiti, has no right-I suppose-to expect my grandmother to accommodate my curiosity as to her life before coming to America, the promised land, where money could supposedly be found on the streets and in public fountains, ready for the taking. When she got off that plane from Port-au-Prince nearly thirty years ago, she left behind a part of herself. And I cannot blame her for discarding a painful past. But it is not only her life she is guarding, it is mine as well, one that is filled with gaps and vague accounts of things, information scooped up along the years through passing mentions and aunts' conversations at the kitchen table. I can't get my grandmother to even mention my late grandfather's name above a whisper. Jotting down his name on pieces of paper helps me to envision this faceless man. I keep his name written in all my journals- otherwise I would forget.
During my college years in Florida, I would beg my grandmother to speak onto the blank cassette tapes that I sent her. But they would go unrecorded, collecting dust on top of the refrigerator. Our phone conversations would be full of awkward pauses when I would ask questions about her life, about how she had raised my own mother in a southern town in Haiti that is surrounded by breadfruit trees, about raising eight children for a man who lived in another house with his wife and children in that very same neighborhood. How my mother barely knew that man. She only would see and smell the cologne-scented man in the white linen suit, who would come by for late evening supper.
"I'll explain everything to you some day," my grandmother insists, changing the subject as she sits in her well-worn leather easy chair, for hours. That day has never come. Her silence infected my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles. They all share something that is unspeakable: our family's history. Sad stories are not good to be passed down from generation to generation, my mother reasons, siding with her mother who didn't tell her much either.
The only time I could get people in my family to speak freely about their past was when a relative would come back from Haiti, bearing gifts. I don't remember when I came to realize how important it was to receive these items: food, liquor, embroidered cotton bed sheets, even a pair of plastic slippers. But I now know those things helped them to remember where they came from, to relive their cherished memories. For it was through those items that I was able to catch glimpses of a sweet and bitter Haiti, of my grandmother and parents. The bites of molasses candy packed with cashews, the sips of egg yolk liquor, the spices, loosened their tongues and they would speak about hunting for pheasants, horseback riding, and summers spent on family farms. My parents would tell us fragmented stories from their childhoods. Pasts that were broken in tiny pieces just like the jars that carried the pickled peppers and fine-shredded cabbage soaked in white distilled vinegar, the fiery odor clinging to the gift-bearers' shirts. Of my father's father abandoning his five children to start another family in neighboring Santo Domingo or Havana, Cuba. No one is really certain where he ended up. Only thing that is for sure is that he came back to Haiti, dying of cancer, so that his children, the ones who made it to America, could bury him. It was as if the odors wafting from the soaked, rickety suitcase brought to our home stirred memories in my parents' minds that were otherwise kept buried deep. In their new lives, in their home on a street called Phillips on the South Side of Chicago, these items served as a truth potion that helped soothe their ripped hearts, as they were transplanted to new jobs where they swept up powdered gum at a Wrigley factory and lifted sharp, cold iron parts at a steel mill.
"You realize how much you miss everything," one family member explained. "How life hasn't been what you expected it to be."
Now that I live on my own, catching my family reflecting on their lives is rare. Instead, when we get together now, we sit at tables, talking about who got married, when will I get married, and who is sick. Superficial topics I can easily discuss with the strangers I now interview. Aside from blood, my family is not connected by much else. Not like a Korean friend of mine, who at a young age was given a book about his lineage that spans thirty-three generations. That's a lot of history, permanence, and family pride. I, on the other hand, cannot even break the silence past my own mother's generation. However, I have jotted down notes, and bits and pieces of stories. And I fill blank cassettes daily on my job, fill them with stories. None of them my own.
A few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I was born in a Brooklyn hospital during a hot summer. Early in my life, my father introduced me to the civil-rights leader, for a picture of Dr. King hung on the living room wall of my parents' one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Although my father never spoke to me about why he displayed a picture of the slain activist next to that of John F. Kennedy in our home, I later came to understand the significance of their portraits.
In elementary school, I started to understand that the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. symbolized the struggle for racial equality. During Black History Month, my classmates and I sang "We shall overcome" as loudly as we could and recited poems resonating, "I have a dream…" Still, honoring Black History Month had a somber tone, not as exciting to me as the other cultural events celebrated at my bilingual public school. With great anticipation, I looked forward to celebrating Haitian Flag Day at school.
On Haitian Flag Day I always felt special marching in the auditorium wearing my Haitian folkloric attire, a red bandanna covering my head and a blue dress tucked in at the waist with a red scarf, while chanting the national anthem of Haiti. That was the only time I truly believed I was no different from my peers, as we all marched in unison, showing off the same colors of blue and red. My Haitian-born parents were there singing along with me while we paraded down the aisle. Celebrating Haitian history and culture at this elementary school seemed to foster a great sense of ethnic pride among many students in the French and Spanish bilingual programs, including the few students who were neither of Haitian nor Hispanic descent.
Other times, however, some of my schoolmates, notably the boys, reminded me that I was different. Instead of addressing me as "Annie" they preferred to call me "Blackie." Their teasing began to sound natural, since the term "Blackie" was often used by black people to describe their darker peers. Although I learned to tolerate the taunting, I was somewhat confused about how dark a person needed to be in order to be called "Blackie" since many of the individuals who belittled me were just a shade or two lighter.
As my preteen years approached, I wanted to interact more with young people of different cultural backgrounds. I grew tired of studying French and celebrating Haitian Flag Day. One day I convinced my parents to enroll me in a Catholic grammar school attended by some of the children living on my block. I was hoping to start anew. To my dismay, attention to my dark hue followed me to Catholic school. On the first day of class at my new school, I was greeted with loud laughter by a group of boys sitting in the back of the classroom. Thereafter, one of the boys from that group, who was of Jamaican descent, also chose not to address me as "Annie." This time my new name was "Crispy." He stopped calling me "Crispy" the day I exploded in Language Arts class and cried out loud before all my classmates. From then on, he referred to me by my proper name. The insults by some of the other students did not end though. Occasionally, I was "the Creature from the Black La- goon" or the child whose mamma left her "in the toaster too long." One time a female classmate snidely remarked, "It's getting darker in here," as I entered the classroom and when I was leaving she said, "It's getting lighter in here." A girl with fair complexion asked me one day, "Do you ever wish you were light-skinned?"
At this grammar school, I did have the opportunity to make more friends of different cultural backgrounds: African-American, Trinidadian, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and others. But there was also a large student population of Haitian descent. Being of Haitian descent at my school brought little pride and prestige, however. The 1980s rolled in with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, linking the disease to Haitians. Meanwhile, numerous Haitians were fleeing their homeland in shabby boats to reach American shores. Unfortunately, the Haitian-American students were not exempt from being stigmatized even in a school in which they dominated. Some students pretended they couldn't speak a word of Haitian Kreyol while others tried to distance themselves from their Haitian-born parents, identifying themselves as Americans.
From grammar school, I moved on to a high school with a mixed student population of African, European, Hispanic, and Asian origins. Although the different ethnic groups were tolerant of one another, they hardly intermingled. Occasionally I heard "ethnic jokes" told by students of various groups, but I was only truly affected by the derogatory remarks about dark-skinned blacks or people of Haitian descent. In high school, I purposely stayed away from the lunchroom and tried to avoid the comments by taking unpopular and extra classes and working in the school office.
It was not until I entered college that I faced prejudice from some white students and experienced racial discrimination and tensions between black and white people. Dealing with the race issue and black-white relations helped me to better understand the seeds of narrow-mindedness while shedding light on the reasons behind the class and color politics among many black people. The summer after my sophomore year, I studied in Rome. I was the only black person in my program. In Italy, I was so self-conscious that my eyes often dropped as I saw individuals pointing me out in a crowd. I also learned about prejudices within the Italian community, mainly the negative views that southern and northern Italians have about each other. Some southern Italians saw their northern fellow citizens as snooty city dwellers; whereas certain northern Italians looked down at their southern counterparts as lowly peasants or "terroni."
A year later, I embarked on another adventure: I went to study in Paris. The week before I left for France, Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager, was killed by a group of white youths in Brooklyn. At the time, hoping to find solace in the "City of Light," Yussef s death left me indifferent. Unfortunately, France, like all nations, has its share of social problems. Because of my color, I had to obtain the tenants' special approval before moving into an apartment. Likewise, most people in France assumed that I was either domestic help residing in the maid's chamber; an African-American student who loved jazz and came from Harlem; or a Senegalese immigrant to France. Even Senegalese greeted me in Wolof and often seemed insulted that I did not speak their language. There was also some tension between the West African and West Indian communities in France. Based on many conversations with members of both communities, a mutual resentment suggested tension between them. While a number of Africans believed that Francophone West Indians tended to promote their European or Indian ancestry while denying their African roots, some West Indians, particularly Guadeloupians and Martinicans, felt that the African presence in France was a reminder of past slavery and present colonization. Strangers often called out "Africaine!" when I walked by. To retaliate, I proudly let them know of my Haitian heritage, reminding them of the Caribbean colony France had lost through a slave revolt. Ignorance also dwelt in the minds of some American students in the study-abroad program. I was feasting on a French delicacy in a Parisian cafe when an American female student of Hispanic descent scornfully referred to Haitian Kreyol as a "tribal language." Sometimes it seemed safer to simply identify myself as "American." Consequently, during my year in France, I was accused by many different groups of people of lying about my nationality and not being proud to be African. By the time I left Paris, I was very confused about who I was.
All the while, strong racial tensions were brewing in New York City. Reactions to the killing of Yusuf Hawkins, the election of New York City's first black mayor, and the Food and Drug Administration's controversial policy banning Haitians from donating blood in the United States were intensifying. In April 1990, thousands of Haitians marched across the Brooklyn Bridge together, protesting the FDA's policy of labeling Haitians as AIDS carriers. Ironically, the AIDS stigma helped to create a sense of unity among Haitians, transcending social and ethnic backgrounds. Although I was in France at the time, my heart was in New York City that day.
With the arrival of the 1990s, a resurgence of Afrocentric fads in fashion, movies, and music began to appear in urban America: the music of Soul II Soul and Public Enemy; Afrocentric accessories prominent in Spike Lee's films. Lee's socially conscious films helped to expose color and class issues in the black community as well as race relations in America, particularly in New York City. During this revival of black pride, I went from being called "Blackie" and "Crispy" to "Chocolate" and "Dark and Lovely." While I didn't especially find being compared to an edible treat or a brand name of a hair relaxer to be a compliment, at that point I was ready to deal with my feelings of inferiority because of being dark-skinned.
Upon returning to college, I immediately joined the Haitian Student Organization, which had received a negative reputation on campus for protesting the Blood Drive. Learning that the FDA's policy had also banned Americans of Haitian descent from donating blood, I began to question the value of my American citizenship. With the approach of the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. federal government finally listened to the anger of the Haitian community and lifted the ban in December 1990.
The years after college graduation marked a major transition in my life. I had been so busy evaluating myself by people's perceptions of my skin color and ethnic background that I didn't seriously think about what I truly wanted to do with my life. After three years of working at the United Nations, I decided to become a teacher. Strangely, I first taught French at a Catholic high school in Brooklyn attended by a large student population of Haitian descent. Like me, most of these students were American-born of Haitian parentage. They were also proud of their Haitian heritage, often chatting in Haitian Kreyol. While blurting out the lyrics of the latest hip-hop songs, many of them teased one another in the language of their Haitian-born parents. However, the black students at this Catholic high school, whether Haitian or non-Haitian, were still influenced by the color-conscious sentiments of their peers and those who had come before them. I occasionally heard and saw some students being teased about the darkness of their skin; a few still compared the tint of the inner surface of their forearms to determine their true hue. I then realized that cultural pride went beyond one's language, history, traditions, customs, and ethnic makeup. I thought about the irony of Haitian history: the first independent black nation to successfully revolt against oppression and yet, among some of us feelings of inferiority still lurk, keeping Haitians of different classes and skin tones divided.
Although my father was greatly inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King's fight for racial equality, he had already internalized the belief that black people had limitations and could only succeed in certain fields. My father was very disappointed that I had become a teacher, believing that teaching was not prestigious and brought little wealth. Even after I earned a master's degree in foreign language education, my father still wasn't impressed, hoping that I would one day fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor. A few months after receiving my graduate degree, I lost my grandmother and my father; they passed away a few weeks apart. In 1998, a few months after their deaths, I went on a journey to Haiti for the first time. During the time I was there, I reflected on my late grandmother's words, "Vini nou bel, ale nou led." My grandmother believed that our arrival on Earth was beautiful, but our departure from Earth was the contrary. Yet, her passing inspired me to finally visit Haiti; for she had a great love for her country.
I saw so much poverty and injustice in Haiti, but I also watched Haitians who were struggling and surviving despite these limitations. In Haiti, I visited my grandmother's and great-grandmother's homes. Painted in bright pastel colors, their houses stood in the middle of a grassy field surrounded by fruitful plants. There I was also introduced to my mother's cattle, branded with her initials. In the swarming heat, I sat with my cousins, who reminisced about their memorable childhoods in Haiti on our family's land as well as their escapades riding into town on mules and donkeys. I imagined myself climbing the Haitian mountains while carrying heavy baskets atop my head; I envisioned myself bathing in flowing streams while others washed their clothes in the rivers. Nevertheless, my imagination inevitably turned to reality as I remember the people struggling in their daily lives. Wading in the warm, clear-blue waters along a Haitian beach resort, I found comfort in knowing that my mother and siblings were still present in my life.
Overcoming my insecurity about my dark skin has been my greatest obstacle. I have always been proud of my Haitian background, never ashamed of my Haitian roots; never hiding my Haitian identity whenever the topic of AIDS emerged; never silencing the African sounds of the Haitian Kreyol; never feeling disgraced by the Haitian refugees who were risking their lives in choppy waters to come to the United States. Likewise, I have always found warmth in embracing the spiritual drive of black people. However, for a long time, believing that my dark skin was inferior often prevented me from living openly; walking along the beach; dancing wantonly at school parties; feeling attractive in a deep red dress; or laughing at someone's joke. Keeping quietly to myself, I hoped to attract as little attention as possible.
Becoming a teacher has been therapeutic for me, helping me to feel more comfortable in my skin. This has helped me to foster confidence and self-esteem in elementary-age students, particularly black students. As a result of working with young people who have greater obstacles to face than the shade of their skin, I am more concerned with preparing children to gain a keener understanding of social problems inherent in all societies-intolerance, war, illiteracy, hunger, poverty, health issues, environmental troubles, abuse, and violence. Every day as I stand before these students, my greatest hope is that they will learn to see beyond stereotypes and misconceptions, respecting each other for who they are as human beings.
I've thought about going home, collapsing into my mother's arms and asking her, without speaking, to comfort me, to tell me that the bad world won't get me. But I know that if I go home-yeah, she'll hold me for a few seconds, but then she'll let out a sigh, with that look in her eyes, that look of decades of working, and worrying and she'll say, "Daughter, since you've been gone …" beginning her own narrative before I can say, "Manman, I'm tired of being alone. I don't speak their language. They don't understand me." But then I would remember that our vocabulary never included words to explain my loneliness or my sense of fear and if I suddenly started crying because of an unspeakable loss, she would offer to do whatever she could to make me "happy" again. In the end I would say "I'm fine really. That was nothing. I'm just tired." In this way, our vocabulary never expanded. I would take a deep breath and suck in the tears, the fear, the reason why I came home in the first place, and listen to her instead. Afterward, I would prepare to go back to the world, still feeling lost and alone despite her promise to pray for me and a reminder to keep the Notre Dame amulet on me always. I would go back into the world with the overwhelming desire to turn around and say "Manman, I still don't speak their language." But home and my mother's arms were always beyond reach and unable to hold me for very long because we had never really developed a vocabulary to discuss what was asked of me.
I wrote these words on the back page of Barbara Johnson's Wake of Deconstruction on October 16, 1994, during my first semester in graduate school. Suddenly, in a theory class about language, I found myself without a true language of my own. In previous environments, ones that called for a different English, I had responded by code switching, quickly learning the jargon and hastily falling in line. This was an invaluable skill and one that I knew, even as early as seventh grade, could push me beyond the limitations of Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn-where I grew up the daughter of Haitian immigrants- to the halls of higher learning at Tufts University. Of course, there was a sacrifice. Only years later would I seriously think about what my sacrifice had been: my mother tongue. I wasn't sure if that language was Kreyol. I just knew I needed to speak something that had eluded me for years. English was not my mother tongue, but I made myself believe it was. I could not remember a time when I didn't speak English.
II n'y a pas de text. There is no text. This small French sentence had become all the rage. I had lived with this concept my whole adult life and suddenly I didn't want to anymore. II n'y a pas de text seemed to clash with my translation of the French words on the Haitian flag: L'union fait la force. In union, there is strength. I set about writing myself into being.
Going through the journals and letters I've written over the years, I see myself expressing over and over the same anxiety about language, the quest to maintain some essential part of myself while shape-shifting and searching for total fluidity. Making simultaneous translations for myself of everything from ways to speak to my mother to the creed on Haiti's flag, I felt myself floating between fragments that I was always rearranging. To keep track of these fragments, I kept journals. I believed then and now that the written word, in whatever form, would ground me and make my fragmented self whole. The words I wrote in my journal were inscribed in secret. These were words I rarely shared with my family, words that I hid even harder once my father asked to know what it was that I was always writing about. I would have had to read it to him and then do the translation. The English that he and my mother had encouraged me to speak and perfect also helped to increase the distance between us.
The truth hit me in theory class one day: I was not just a black girl but a Haitian girl and for the first time I longed for home and home was a bunch of people and a culture I knew by name, accepted at face value, but did not know intimately. Using the back pages of Johnson's Wake, I sent a psychic call to my mother, imagining that only she could explain why I didn't speak anybody's language. I sent out the call and heard my own voice ask why I didn't have any way to speak to my mother about my loss and all that was tearing at me.
I was not blaming my mother but searching for a mother tongue. I had surprised even myself with the words I'd scribbled out of frustration and fear in the back of Johnson's book. I was admitting that my mother and I did not speak the same language and yet I knew that it was my language barrier, not hers, that kept us from understanding each other. I wanted to find a bridge; I wanted to learn to speak a forgotten tongue.
August 1997 Journal Entry:
Ihave always had language issues, have always felt that my voice leaves too much room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations. Having to always negotiate when and where to use my voice often left important things about me unsaid. I think of Billie Holliday with all her problems, living in fragments, breaking down and whispering "Hush now, don't explain." Not having to explain myself or create whole new fictions about who I am or what I want is what I long for, like Billie.
But in my journals I keep trying to explain me, my Haitian family, and our place in this country. Before I started graduate school, my mother asked me when I was going to visit "my country." It took me a moment to realize that she meant Haiti, the place we had all migrated from when I was five years old. Until then, I had never realized that Haiti was a place that people returned to. It was never spoken of except as a place people left or from which they had to be sent for. Rarely did my mother talk about the daughters that she had left behind in Haiti, sisters I remembered vaguely or not at all. All my life, Haiti had seemed an even more distant, mythical place than the lost Africa of African Americans. I never denied being Haitian-born, but it also made sense for me to be considered an African American. After all, Haiti is in the Americas and I am of African descent. Only I knew more about African America than I did about Haiti. In graduate school, I was pursuing formal training in African-American literature, history, and culture. I had mistakenly believed that being Haitian didn't require formal study or inquiry. Haiti was in my name and in my home. Only I kept going farther and farther away from home and I hadn't yet learned how to go back and choose what to hold on to and what to let go of. A crisis was inevitable-and since I had been studying words and language, my crisis came in the classroom. After all those years, I still did not own a particular language. I had to go back to my beginning, yet I didn't want the academic in me to turn my personal dilemma into research. This journey was going to come by way of my mother. I had to humbly step down from my scholarly perch to see what my people could give me-if I asked. To begin fixing my language problem, I had to do the impossible, return home and "step in the same river twice."
I had left home to get a degree and now I wanted to return. I knew it would sound crazy to people who spoke heavily accented English, who often had to ask their children to translate for them or accompany them on appointments that required "good" English. In my family, going back never seemed to be an option. Going back home without a degree was unimaginable. For all my parents' hard work, they needed the children of the new country to do things they'd only dreamed of. I was the first of the new, the fifth child of both my parents but their first together. I had to do more than Fifth Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn allowed and surpass their tentative dreams.
Once I caught myself wondering if my mother ever had dreams that didn't include being the caretaker of a large splintered family. I wondered if she constantly talked to herself like I talked to myself about my future, about the path that I wanted to choose for myself instead of what was expected of me. I was afraid of what I would find out; it was easier to plan in secret for my future than to ask her about her hopes as a girl.
I knew my father conflated U.S. schools with what he remembered of Haitian schools. In his Haiti, school was reserved for the selected few. I knew that my father never forgave his father for forcing him to stop his formal education in order to work. At the beginning of my senior year in high school, out of love and duty, my father had sat me down and said, "Sophia, you can go to whatever college you want."
My heart had contracted and I said "I can?" He took my hand in his and said, "Yes, any college in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, anywhere the bus or the train can take you." My heart had plunged. The world I wanted was bigger than the five boroughs my father offered me.
I'd worked on my applications to faraway colleges at school and forged his and my mother's signatures where necessary. In the spring I received a letter of acceptance from my first choice university in Boston and took that as a sign that I was meant to leave. I'd shared the good news with my teachers and friends. So I wouldn't back out, I'd told my mother. I needed her on my side so she could rally the various family members to speak on my behalf. I still had to be the one to tell my father of my decision to leave his house and go beyond the perimeters he had set for me.
Once I'd told him, two months passed before my father spoke to me again, but when he did he gave his consent. We sat down in his room and he told me that he knew I was a good girl, that I was going to school to study and better myself. I agreed. I had won. Afterward I did something that few Haitian girls my age did: I attended my senior prom and at my father's suggestion arranged to sleep over at my best friend's house to avoid traveling alone late that night. Only when I got to sleep away from home-a serious no-no- did I understand my victory. My father and mother were letting me go.
If I didn't know how to speak to my family before, I certainly couldn't speak to them now. I'd never learned how to talk to my family without being on guard, without always preparing to counteract my father's No in some way. No, Iln'y a pas de text could not explain my foreignness that first year away from home, nor could it explain the place my parents called Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn but I knew as Sunset Park. Back then I wanted to escape the fate of never knowing what I was capable of because I was black, because I was a Haitian girl, because I was poor. That overwhelming desire sustained me through the college years. But in graduate school, I suddenly needed to talk to my mother about what it meant to actually escape. I wanted to speak to her of what I had spent my whole life unconsciously running from: her powerlessness.
During one of my tirades against my family, my mother once asked me, "If we are these terrible things, then what are you?" Only now can I say, I am my mother. I am my father. I am Fifth Avenue- also known as Sunset Park-Brooklyn. And to do what life and graduate school requires of me, I need to make peace with that. I need to learn to speak with a different part of myself. I no longer write unmailed letters to my mother. I call her and tell her things I didn't know I could say.
During the 1995-96 school year, I went looking for Haitians outside of my family. My whole life I'd never had one Haitian friend. I decided to volunteer my Saturday mornings with other Haitian women mentoring Haitian girls who reminded me of myself. Looking back I wondered what, if anything, the great thinkers like Derrida, De Man, Foucault, or Johnson could say that didn't seem to mock me and the things I had done, the circular search I had been on, had always been on, in language. How could they account for what I knew about living in shadows, in crevices, dying each time I remade myself, surviving in gaps or waiting on that one elliptical mark for a space to enter.
There are people whose spirits are destroyed by not being able to conquer a language, people like my parents for example. They speak in heavily accented English, and must sometimes use their children's voices instead of their own. They do not get to talk about their experiences but hope that their children will even things out in the future and make them right. Perhaps my mother had given birth to me so that I could do all the things that she never did. Only now, as I learn to speak forgotten words, am I beginning to understand her bravery. Even among new Haitian friends, some encountered in Boston and others while I spent hours on the prettiest Haitian beach, in the prettiest Haitian sea, I find myself mourning, for her and for myself. Perhaps to really make things right, I have to accept my own version of Haiti, to become my own Haitian daughter.
I am a Nyabinghi Razette. Most people identify me as a Rastafarian. The Nyabinghi was an army of women and men brought together by Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, to fight oppression. Among Rastafarians, Nyabinghi means "death to all oppressors." Razette was coined by Sistren Jahzinine and it refers to a female Rastafarian. As a Nyabinghi Rastafarian, I believe in the divinity of Haile Selassie I and the Empress Menen.
My life as a Nyabinghi Razette has not earned me friends nor has it brought me wealth. However it has connected me even more to my Haitian self and has given me the aesthetic and spiritual freedom that I have always sought. Some people feel that a Haitian cannot be a Rastafarian. I don't see any contradiction between my lifestyle as a Rastafarian and my ethnic identity as a Haitian. Those who do not see the obvious parallels between us have a narrow view of both Haitians and Rastafarians.
Perhaps the closest analogy that can be drawn between Haitians and Rastafarians is through spirituality. Haitians and Rastafarians share spiritual paths (Vodou and Rastafarl) that have roots in Africa and that continue to act as positive forces in the world. Members of the African diasporas from different countries practice their own forms of spirituality such as Obeah, Condomble, and Santeria, just as there are different groups of Rastafarians, from the Twelve Tribe Rastas to the Nazarite Rastas.
Another issue that promotes the separatist view between Haitians and Rastafarians is language. In the Rastafarian trod, or lifestyle, the English language is prominent. Irits, the Rastafarian language, which is not to be confused with Jamaican patois, is overly influenced by English to the extent of drowning out other languages such as Haitian Kreyol. I am often appalled at the ethnocentric perspective of some English-speaking Rastafarians who go to great lengths to discredit and discourage other languages, especially Haitian Kreyol. A transnational Haitian, I was born in the United States and spent my formative years (age one through eleven) in Haiti; I speak English well enough so that it is relatively easier for me to adapt to Irits. At the same time, I have to recognize that Irits is one way that most non-Kreyol-speaking Rastas identify themselves as other-than-Haitian.
In spite of these struggles in and outside of the trod, my faith as a Nyabinghi Rastafarian could never cancel out my identity as a Haitian. I love Haitian music: mizik rasin, konpa; Haitian food: diri hole and barman peze. Now, as a vegan who does not eat meat, I cook brown rice with peas and I eat tofu and seitan instead of griyo and boulet. In fact, my version of Ital, or Rastafarian cooking, is Haitian food with vegan substitutes. By adopting an Ital or vegan lifestyle, I am fighting the diseases that have plagued many people in my life, including family members, friends, and acquaintances, who have suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart failure. Without forcing my lifestyle on anyone, I do think that a Rastafarian vegan diet might help many Haitians in the United States who are living under stressful conditions in crowded urban centers in New York, Boston, and Miami or are adjusting from a familiar tropical climate to a cold foreign one.
One of the most treasured manifestations of my life as a Razette and as a Haitian is expressing my love of colors, especially in fabrics, in dresses and skirts, as in the regal dress and headwear that African women wear. I love to wrap my dreadlocks in a beautiful festive Afrocentric fabric, praying for strength as I do from my African and Haitian ancestors.
During Nyabinghis, when Rastafarians gather to chant praises or Isis to the Empress and Emperor of Ethiopia, men are asked to uncover their dreadlocks while women are asked to cover theirs. When I was a "bald head" or had not yet become a Nyabinghi Razette, I thought that black people, including Haitians, who read the Bible were being brainwashed into accepting white domination. However, as a Razette, I became aware of the fact that many of the people described in the Bible, including the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, and Jesus, are black Africans. Since contemporary scientific evidence shows that civilization began on the African continent, it follows then that Eve's and Adam's descendants would be black.
Rastafarl, provides me with a space to explore such ideas. Being a Razette gives me the spiritual freedom to create and re-create myself as a woman of physical and spiritual strength and power. My identity as a transnational Nyabinghi Razette, Haitian, working-class, dark-skinned black woman, doctoral candidate, mother, and wife is best captured by the creative and artistic framework of the collage that joins me not only to the immediate Haitian dyaspora in the United States, but to the larger African community all over the world.
My life as a Nyabinghi Razette encourages me to seek the truth about the condition of all black Africans on earth. Both as a Razette and a Haitian, my goal has always been to be free and to be myself. Both as a Razette and a Haitian, I want to live with the truth that black people have been the makers and builders of strong and beautiful civilizations. And they will continue to be.
I was twelve years old when I was tricked into exile. One weekday morning, as I was preparing to catch the school bus, my mother confronted me with her latest finding in what was then my burgeoning delinquency problem. Because I had neglected to cover the pot of rice from last night's dinner, the cockroaches had easily invaded and spoiled our leftovers. We quarreled: She blamed; I denied. And suddenly, forgetting to whom I was speaking, I made the horrible mistake of responding to one of her comments with the expletive "So?" In retrospect, I must have said the word with too strong a hint of exasperation, with too much of the sense that I had grown quickly inconvenienced by her diatribe. Not only had I said "So?" I had dramatized it by rolling my big insolent eyes. She had never liked that word so; she thought it was too curt, too arrogant, and too defiant. The word had no Haitian equivalent to which she could relate, against which she could measure its power. Especially now that it was being used in the context of an argument, she felt safe in assuming the worst of a word whose meaning she did not completely understand. "Pa di'm so," she said as she turned to stare at me in utter disbelief and disgust. "Don't tell me so," she repeated. "Do I look like one of your cronies that you can speak to me in such a disrespectful way?" My mother and I had been having many arguments like this one lately, but this dispute finally brought our conflict to a crisis.
She had had enough of my attitude. She deemed me too Americanized- too saucy-to handle. Her Haitian upbringing (the ruler by which she measured good and evil) could no longer tolerate such unfilial behavior, so she threatened to punish me by sending me back to New York to live with my father. She warned that as soon as I returned home from school, I would find my bags packed and ready for me to be sent away. The sauciness lingered: "Good!" I retorted. "I don't like Florida anyway!" Not taking her threat seriously, I sauntered off to school with an air of cool defiance. But because of the argument, I knew I had missed my bus and so looked more the fool than the victor I wanted to be; to save some face, I walked out of the house singing, "I love New York, I love New York" to the tune of a commercial jingle that she and I both knew. Clearly, my eyes were not the only things on a roll!
When I returned home, sure enough, my mother handed me my luggage and then, along with my uncle, drove me to the airport. Walking through the airport, I summoned the same cool saunter of nonchalance that allowed me to keep my dignity only a few hours before. But underneath that so cool exterior lay a completely incredulous and regretful prodigal daughter. How could I be so foolish? How can she be so serious? She's blown this thing out of proportion. Does she really mean to send me away? Am I really all that bad? Why must I always be so rebellious? Why does the sign over my flight gate read: DEPARTURE TO PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI?
In the fifteen minutes before I was to board the plane, my mother, with a smug smile of victory, explained that I was actually going to be living with her sister in Haiti. Her announcement was the "Ta da!" of a magician whose craft was more entertaining to himself than to his audience. So, while she was being thrilled by her own perspicacity, I couldn't see the humor nor appreciate the genius behind the trick of changing flight destinations. Although her decision was obviously final, I was too shocked to accept the reality that she had proudly unveiled before me. I was in a state of denial. I found her reasons neither sufficient nor strong enough to justify my punishment: "It's for your own good; You're too much, too incorrigible." And the inevitable, "Children in Haiti don't disrespect their elders. You'll learn from them," she predicted, "to comport yourself as a child." Those oft-referred-to "children in Haiti" had some nerve, to keep reminding my mother of how horrible a child I was. How tired I was of hearing my mother sing the praises of these Haitian angels! But soon, whether I liked it or not, I was also going to be-if even just superficially-a child of Haiti.
When it dawned on me that I had been so cleverly deceived, that I was indeed going to Haiti, a place I imagined had no bathrooms, no refrigerators, and no English, I started to cry and then to scream out of sheer terror. Through my tear-glazed eyes, I spied a flight attendant who had a look of grave concern and pity; so, choosing fight over flight (pun intended), I grabbed the opportunity to try to save myself from banishment.
"Don't cry," she said. "What's wrong?"
Pointing to my uncle as if he were the guilty one in a criminal line-up, I sobbed: "He's not my father! He's (gasp for air and then a phlegmful sniff-sniff) not my father!" I wanted to convey the impression that I was being abducted by a complete stranger. My pointing, trembling, finger and my crying eyes combined to form a plea for help, to make me a paragon of victimization. Save me! I exuded.
You can imagine the commotion that my outburst caused. The flight attendant was as horrified as I had predicted. I knew that I could appeal to the sensibilities of an America that, at the time, wanted the children on its milk cartons found and their kidnappers prosecuted. Certainly, she was not going to stand idly by while, right before her very eyes, I became an "unsolved mystery."
To this day, I am still surprised at the desperate measures to which I lowered myself to save myself from Haiti. But this tactic only helped to stall the expulsion process. The exile must go on! My mother quickly explained the situation and after everyone was mollified, the attendant escorted me to my seat. I had been defeated.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have understood both the comedy and the import behind the situation in which I found myself, for on the plane I was surrounded by symbols that marked my situation as a potentially profound, enlightening, and extraordinary one. To my right, on the seat beside me, sat a middle-aged Haitian woman who was deeply embittered about the ruckus that I had caused. She was "familiar with my kind," and with a sort of "fire and brimstone" speech that she seemed to have saved for this moment, she accused me of being an ingrate, a child too ripe for my age, a Haitian American gone too American. Indeed, she knew me too well! As if she had been planted on the plane by my mother, she continued to torment me about the many ways in which my punishment was justified. That my plane instead of heading north was flying south seemed ironically appropriate-Haiti was to be my Hades. I knew her "kind" too, and her finding pleasure in my plight made me decide that I didn't like her too much.
To my left sat a Haitian man in his early thirties, who confessed- with a hint of pride-that he himself had been in my present predicament when he was just a young boy going through his adolescent, vagabon stage. "When I got to Haiti, I sold all of my clothes and returned to the States. Don't worry, you can do the same thing," he advised. So while Mrs. Fire and Brimstone castigated, I wondered if my mother had packed my favorite green-and-black dress. I could get a lot of money for that one, I assured myself. How symbolic was my seating arrangement-between the good on the right and the not so good on the left. This exile was a parable in the making!
When I arrived in Port-Au-Prince, I was immediately met by my uncle Yvero. "Sandee!" he called out as he rushed over to help me with my bags. "Your mother told me all about your coming." He smiled as he said this, and even though I felt miserable, I couldn't help but smile back at his genuine happiness to see me. Did he know why I had been sent? Would I be able to continue relying on his reassuring smile or would he turn against me-the ingrate, juvenile delinquent-when he discovered my reason for being here? His smile comforted me but it also renewed my sense of shame. I knew that I didn't deserve to be smiled at. I sought no comfort because I was too tired and defeated. 1 sought no comfort because I refused to believe that there was any to be found in Haiti. If I were never going to see America again, at least I could wallow in the familiar territory of self-pity. But, this was only temporary, because I had resigned myself to exile; that is, I had surrendered. I had no other choice. It was clear to me that if I wanted to survive in Haiti, I could choose to be neither arrogant nor disobedient. That I needed to acculturate myself for survival purposes necessitated that I substitute humility for impudence, respect for disrespect and acceptance for denial. I was now in a situation and a place where I could not allow my Americanness to override whatever Haitianness I possessed. I needed to tap into all the Haitian resources that I owned because I was going to be here for an undefined amount of time. My title of "American" meant nothing good in this country. My uncle knew why I was here: I was here because there was a correlation between there being something wrong with America and there being something wrong with me.
Uncle Yvero rushed me out of the airport and quickly hailed a tap-tap. He had a commanding and respectable presence. He was younger than my mother and looked it, with his thick head of black hair and well-kempt mustache that complemented it. He carried himself, and my bags, with masculine ease. I felt safe in his company. If I wasn't careful, his strength would ruin me. After all, I wasn't here to depend on someone else's Haitianness; I was here to find my own.
He offered me a Chiclet. "Ki jan ou ye?" he asked.
"M pa pi mal"-I'm fine-I answered. After an hour or so, we transferred to another tap-tap headed to our destination-Arcahaie. When we finally arrived, it was already night. I knew we were in the country somewhere because it was pitch black everywhere I looked.
"Sandee?"
"Wi," I replied. "I'm right over here."
It was my aunt, Mante Venide. I couldn't actually see her, but I immediately recognized her voice from the cassette recordings that she occasionally sent to my mother. Her greeting was always the same-your name in the form of a question. She had supper waiting for me, she explained. "I know you must be hungry. Here. Eat, child." I did. I ate and then soon after that went to sleep.
Early the very next morning, by the crow of the rooster in residence, my aunt woke me up to introduce me to the family: my cousins Alex and Tififi, my uncle Yvero, my aunt Madam Ka (Kalix) and my uncle Ka and a whole slew of other relatives. "We are your family," she concluded her introduction. "This is your home." And with that, she took my hand and told me that we were going to the market to get some things that she needed. And so began my exile.
My aunt, her brother, and her two children shared two huts in a big yard that also housed some of my other relatives. I was assigned a bed in the room where my cousins slept. Since I was so familiar with tiled floors, angular walls and ceilings, and indoor plumbing, the room seemed unfinished, makeshift. It was cozy and afforded much comfort in its rustic way. Simplicity and frugality defined life in the Haitian countryside. The cobbled floors of the room were layered with very fine dust. Every day my cousins and I took turns sweeping the floor, although I never understood the utility behind such an everlasting chore. No matter how much my cousins, my aunt, or I swept, the floor always remained slightly dusty.
During my stay, my aunt Venide made me help her cook, buy groceries, wash and iron clothes, feed the chickens and the pig, clean the yard, run errands for and keep company with my elderly aunt. Whatever she did, I emulated to the best of my abilities. Whatever I was told to do, I did. I never disliked doing these chores. I approached them as if they were small adventures. I wanted to prove that I was not as American as I had been accused and convicted of being. I felt a sense of kinship when I sat on a small wooden chair beside my aunt and, imitating her, wrapped my thighs around the little ceramic basin in which she washed clothes. She scrubbed the clothes with masterful skill while I, her apprentice, scrubbed like a madwoman for want of that skill. Under her expert hands, the clothes squeaked relentlessly as if to complain about the pain they suffered from being scrubbed too vigorously. Mante Venide's pursed lips and deeply furrowed brow told me that she was oblivious to their cries. I liked that our laundry detergent was simply a big block of soap. Everything I used, from the outhouse that threatened to swallow me whole to the bed I slept on, was as unpretentious as my cousins, my family, and our living arrangements. After we were done with the wash, I felt a sense of genuine achievement when I saw our whites gleaming on the rocks we had laid them on to dry. I felt important when I carried water from the well without spilling it.
Like all prisoners, at some point I was even allowed recreation. I got to play games and run reasonably wild with my cousins. We played with marbles; we sang songs; we gossiped about a neighborhood hussy whom I never met; we competed to see who could tell the funniest joke to the pig; we played hide-and-seek, and when we were really bored we teased the dangerous "Ti Malis" out of its underground home with cupfuls of water. "L ap mode 'ou-it's going to bite you!" Alex would scream every time the insect showed its annoyed head.
But as acclimated as I may have seemed on the surface, I was still unabashedly American in essentials.
On Sunday morning we went to church. Since I was already familiar with this ritual from my mass-attending Sundays in America, I ironed my favorite green-and-black dress to wear for the occasion. When I went to search my suitcases for a pair of nylon stockings so that I could put the finishing touches to my ensemble, I was annoyed to discover that my mother had not packed a pair for me. I informed my aunt that I could not attend mass without pantyhose. She laughed. It was too hot to wear stockings. I felt wronged and misunderstood. What did practicality or comfort have to do with style? I found her a bit too Haitian, too country, too old-fashioned. My sense of style was being undermined by someone who actually let the weather get in the way of appearance. I was also angry that it was actually hot outside. I knew better than to confront my aunt with my opinions. Because I was still a child, freedom of speech, especially that of dissent, wasn't my right. Unnerved, but still adorned in green-and-black polyester finery, I walked to church alongside my aunt and my cousins. By the time we reached the church, I realized that my dress-unlike anyone else's-bore a sheen that was too immodest, too gaudy for church. I was being loud without having said a word. I stood out when I should have blended in. Bowing my head in prayer, I was glad to discover that my patent leather shoes had turned from conspicuously shiny to humbly dusty. Haiti's dirt redeemed me, but only to embarrass me later that afternoon.
After we had returned home from church and had eaten lunch, my cousins and I went to play hide and seek in the yard. Tififi and I went to hide while Alex counted un deux trois… Still unfamiliar with the area, I found it hard to find a place to hide. Alex was already at quinze and I was still looking for a hiding place. I began to panic. Spotting a kenep tree, I dashed for cover behind it. As I ran toward the tree, I slipped and fell in a small pool of mud. The first word out of my mouth was "Shit!" Alex and Tififi came running. They laughed and pointed in my direction while Alex kept giggling and repeating the word shit over and over again.
I was angry and refused to get up. I was embarrassed for myself and for Alex who, I assumed, would be punished for his imitation of the corrupt, and now contagious, American exile. I lay brooding in the mud. I didn't try to get up. I wanted my aunt to locate the cause of my profane reaction outside of myself. Was it my fault that this part of the yard was so muddy? Maybe if I were more familiar with the yard, I would not have reacted as I did. I relied on my foreignness as an excuse.
Even during the night, surrounded and disguised by utter darkness as I was, I was every bit a foreigner. To my unsympathetic cousins, I had no qualms about revealing my fears of the zombie population that I was certain inhabited Haiti's nights. When my cousins ventured into the yard away from the house to play and tell stories, I pleaded for them to stay on the porch with me. Haiti's nights had a quality that loomed too huge and formidable in relation to my physical size, my naivete and my city-girl upbringing. The porch was solid and dependable. The nights, on the other hand, were a bit too dark, a bit too quiet… a bit too vast and intangible. Haiti's nights made you think that you could have nightmares with your eyes wide open, so that you'd want to close your eyes just to situate yourself in your own darkness-too afraid to blend in and get lost in a darkness that wasn't your own… a nightmare that wasn't your own. Here in Haiti, I easily (if even unfairly) equated good and evil with things diurnal and nocturnal. Whenever the sun set, I felt taunted by a darkness that knew me as a foreigner… a Haitian darkness that sensed my fears and had no pity for the American me.
For two weeks, my life as a stranger in a strange land continued in this manner. I didn't feel at home. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to return to my mother.
The Monday following the second week of my stay in Haiti, my uncle Yvero claimed to have received a letter from my mother. "If you think that you have truly reformed, your mother says that she would like you to return home. So do you think that you've reformed?" my uncle asked.
Of course I have, I thought to myself, especially if it means that I can go back home. But for the sake of seeming sincere and apologetic, I hesitated in my response. I wanted my uncle to understand that I was using this moment of silence to reflect on my wrongdoings. Finally after a few minutes I bowed my head in contrition and said, " Wi, I have reformed." And after a long speech from my uncle and my aunt about how lucky I was to have a mother who cared about me and how deeply foolish I was not to cherish and appreciate that fact, I was told to go and say good-bye to the rest of my extended family. I was going to be leaving for Florida the next day. My stint as an exile was over.
Although I am the only girl that I know of who has had such an experience to recount, I am certainly not the only Haitian American who has an exiled-to-Haiti-for-reform story, for I know several Haitian-American boys who (like me) have been sent to Haiti to change their potentially self-destructive behaviors. Like my mother, the mothers of these young men relied on the tried-and-true effect of stubborn love, pride, and hope to discipline their children. Because we seemed caught in a frenzy to fit in, our mothers attempted to rescue us, if not by superseding, then by tempering the present with the past, the modern with tradition, America with Haiti. With each child that a Haitian mother has to raise in America, she has to deal with the triple-consciousness of its Haitian, American, and Black identities. In junior high school, I was known to my black peers as the just-got-off-the-banana-boat refugee or the Vodou queen. I fit into neither of their notions of what it means to be Black or American. Out of ignorance of my own culture, I let those insults sting. Out of ignorance of what it truly means to be Haitian, I let those insults define me. Not now. Not ever. Years later, while on a study-abroad trip to China, although I knew no Swahili nor had ever been to Africa, I was referred to as "the African." While visiting one of the autonomous regions in Northern China, I met a little girl who, pointing in my direction, greeted me as "Kunta Kinte"-the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots. The television movie series had just been shown there. My black face summoned the association with the only other black face this little girl had ever seen. I wasn't an individual, nor did the fact that I am female, and Kinte male, matter. I was just Black. In China when I insisted I was American the Chinese raised skeptical eyebrows.
I questioned my identity then, but wouldn't now because of what I've learned about myself. When you come to know and embrace yourself-whether you have two, three, or four identities to reconcile- you understand that you have everything to gain from those experiences that challenge your justifications for being who you say and think you are. In fact, the lessons learned from these experiences help you achieve the power to shape rather than be shaped by your own future experiences.
As extravagant a form of punishment as my exile seems, I've decided that it was most necessary and most justifiable and certainly most Haitian. By being consistently rude to my mother, I demonstrated my ignorance of the value of respecting my parents and, in extension, my elders. I dared to challenge a philosophy of living that is steeped in common sense and tradition. I dared to think that I was immune from Haitian lore and Haitian justice by virtue of being born in the U.S.A. At twelve years old, I became a walking manifestation of an imperialism that my mother would not endure; with every backtalk, head-wag, eye-roll and "So?", I denied, attacked, and decried everything my mother understood to be Haitian. I was a Haitian American trying to suffocate (whether consciously or not) the Haitian part of my identity. My mother would not tolerate this murder of both her culture and my identity.
My mother was always one step ahead of me and my siblings because she parented vigilantly and ceaselessly (and still continues to do so). I am grateful that she was slicker when I was just slick. For each failed attempt at deceiving her or preempting her authority, I grew to realize and finally accept the intrinsic contrast between my role as the bumbling child and her role as the experienced parent. I am grateful that she knew the limits of her own tolerance. How else can a mother diagnose and then treat an intolerable child if she has not first defined, for herself and eventually her children, what is tolerable? I am grateful that she intervened on my behalf every time I showed signs of becoming less than the decent human being that she wanted me and my siblings to be. My mother has given me a story that I love to tell; it is a "Go to your room" story, Haitian-style.
Haitians have a term "san manman" that literally means motherless. But "san manman" does not necessarily mean that one doesn't have a mother, but that one behaves as though one didn't have a mother, as if one were raised without guidance, morals, without the principles that perpetuate culture and a strong community.
And it was because of my mother's fear that I was losing or taking for granted these same ancient properties that she sent me to Haiti so that I could reacquaint myself with them. She wanted me to witness, firsthand, those ancient properties of unconditional self-respect and respect for others shown by the paradigmatic "children of Haiti," through the struggles that my aunt endured raising two children in the poor countryside, through the dignity and respect with which they lived their lives despite the odds, through the interactions between mother and child, the elders and the young, the womenfolk and the menfolk.
I've said that my mother has given me a wonderful story, but I must also acknowledge what I understand to have come before that story, what always was, before the story ever began-the moral. My mother started with a moral and had me trace a path to it with my own story. She has given me a lesson of life that I practice every day. I respect my elders and all others not out of terror of further banishment, but out of an understanding of myself in relation to America, Haiti, and the larger world. It would be foolish to think that I had actually reformed after that one exile to Haiti. Of course, I hadn't. It takes more than a "go to your room," even if that room is actually another country, to discipline a child. My understanding came like most do-through a gradual process of trial and error. But I know that I am most fortunate that my mother refused to remain complaisant about her child's moral development.
In a world where insults still exist and still can sting, there must be culture. In a world where only one may parent where two, three, four, and seven used to, there must be history. In a world where fitting in may mean selling out, there must be keepers of the past, reminders of the ancient ways. James Baldwin, who understood the value of the past in sustaining a stable and dignified present, alluded in his Notes of a Native Son to his envy of some Haitians' ability to trace their history back to regal roots. There are rewards of dignity, pride, and honor that proceed from being placeable and traceable.
My siblings and I didn't have our own rooms growing up. We were poor enough so that a curtained partition in the living room served as our makeshift wall. So, one can understand on that superficial level why my mother couldn't just send me to my room. Economics didn't allow it. But neither did the enormity of my crime- dishonoring my mother-allow it. Instead my mother sent me to her room, her mother's room, her grandmother's room, her great-grandmother's room. How could I act as I did knowing from what traditions, what roots, what culture I had sprung? How could I desecrate when I had no right to? And upon my return to the States- whether it was days later or years later-I had to ask myself these questions: And if I still want to fit in, how has the need to do so transformed? How has my newly acquired self-understanding and self-respect altered the way that I choose to fit in? Once I acknowledged that by dishonoring my mother I dishonored myself and my culture, I accepted and understood the reasoning that went behind such an extravagant punishment. If at twelve years old I could not comprehend the gravity of my crime against my mother, I could at least extrapolate, from the gravity of my punishment, that I had finally done the abominable. I needed that-to know that I could actually be held accountable, to know that I was wrong. I needed to know that my insult to her merited retribution and maybe even wrath. But above all, I needed to know that at least this much was true-that I was not "san manman," either literally or figuratively.