A flattened and drying daffodil was dangling off the little card that I had made my aunt Atie for Mother's Day. I pressed my palm over the flower and squashed it against the plain beige cardboard. When I turned the corner near the house, I saw her sitting in an old rocker in the yard, staring at a group of children crushing dried yellow leaves into the ground. The leaves had been left in the sun to dry. They would be burned that night at the konbit potluck dinner.
I put the card back in my pocket before I got to the yard. When Tante Atie saw me, she raised the piece of white cloth she was embroidering and waved it at me. When I stood in front of her, she opened her arms just wide enough for my body to fit into them.
"How was school?" she asked, with a big smile.
She bent down and kissed my forehead, then pulled me down onto her lap.
"School was all right," I said. "I like everything but those reading classes they let parents come to in the afternoon. Everybody's parents come except you. I never have anyone to read with, so Monsieur Augustin always pairs me off with an old lady who wants to learn her letters, but does not have children at the school."
"I do not want a pack of children teaching me how to read," she said. "The young should learn from the old. Not the other way. Besides, I have to rest my back when you have your class. I have work."
A blush of embarrassment rose to her brown cheeks.
"At one time, I would have given anything to be in school. But not at my age. My time is gone. Cooking and cleaning, looking after others, that's my school now. That schoolhouse is your school. Cutting cane was the only thing for a young one to do when I was your age. That is why I never want to hear you complain about your school." She adjusted a pink head rag wrapped tighdy around her head and dashed off a quick smile revealing two missing side teeth. "As long as you do not have to work in the fields, it does not matter that I will never learn to read that ragged old Bible under my pillow."
Whenever she was sad, Tante Atie would talk about the sugar cane fields, where she and my mother practically lived when they were children. They saw people die there from sunstroke every day. Tante Atie said that, one day while they were all working together, her father-my grandfather- stopped to wipe his forehead, leaned forward, and died. My grandmother took the body in her arms and tried to scream the life back into it. They all kept screaming and hollering, as my grandmother's tears bathed the corpse's face. Nothing would bring my grandfather back.
The bòlèt man was coming up the road. He was tall and yellow like an amber roach. The children across the road lined up by the fence to watch him, clutching one another as he whistled and strolled past them.
This albino, whose name was Chabin, was the biggest lottery agent in the village. He was thought to have certain gifts that had nothing to do with the lottery, but which Tante Atie believed put the spirits on his side. For example, if anyone was chasing him, he could turn into a snake with one flip of his tongue. Sometimes, he could see the future by looking into your eyes, unless you closed your soul to him by thinking of a religious song and prayer while in his presence.
I could tell that Tante Atie was thinking of one of her favorite verses as he approached. Death is the shepherd of man and in the final dawn, good will be the master of evil.
"Honneur, mes belles, Atie, Sophie."
Chabin winked at us from the front gate. He had no eyelashes-or seemed to have none. His eyebrows were tawny and fine like corn silk, but he had a thick head of dirty red hair.
"How are you today?" he asked.
"Today, we are fine," Tante Atie said. "We do not know about tomorrow."
"Ki niméro today?" he asked. "What numbers you playing?"
"Today, we play my sister Martine's age," Tante Atie said. "Sophie's mother's age. Thirty-one. Perhaps it will bring me luck."
"Thirty-one will cost you fifty cents," he said.
Tante Atie reached into her bra and pulled out one gourde.
"We will play the number twice," she said.
Even though Tante Atie played faithfully, she had never won at the bòlèt. Not even a small amount, not even once.
She said the lottery was like love. Providence was not with her, but she was patient.
The albino wrote us a receipt with the numbers and the amount Tante Atie had given him.
The children cringed behind the gate as he went on his way. Tante Atie raised her receipt towards the sun to see it better.
"There, he wrote your name," I said pointing to the letters, "and there, he wrote the number thirty-one."
She ran her fingers over the numbers as though they were quilted on the paper.
"Would it not be wonderful to read?" I said for what must have been the hundredth time.
"I tell you, my time is passed. School is not for people my age."
The children across the street were piling up the leaves in Madame Augustin's yard. The bigger ones waited on line as the smaller ones dropped onto the pile, bouncing to their feet, shrieking and laughing. They called one another's names: Foi, Hope, Faith, Esperance, Beloved, God-Given, My Joy, First Born, Last Born, Asefi, Enough-Girls, Enough-Boys, Deliverance, Small Misery, Big Misery, No Misery. Names as bright and colorful as the giant poincianas in Madame Augustin's garden.
They grabbed one another and fell to the ground, rejoicing as though they had flown past the towering flame trees that shielded the yard from the hot Haitian sun.
"You think these children would be kind to their mothers and clean up those leaves," Tante Atie said. "Instead, they are making a bigger mess."
"They should know better," I said, secretly wishing that I too could swim in their sea of dry leaves.
Tante Atie threw her arms around me and squeezed me so hard that the lemon-scented perfume, which she dabbed across her chest each morning, began to tickle my nose.
"Sunday is Mother's Day, non?" she said, loudly sucking her teeth. "The young ones, they should show their mothers they want to help them. What you see in your children today, it tells you about what they will do for you when you are close to the grave."
I appreciated Tante Atie, but maybe I did not show it enough. Maybe she wanted to be a real mother, have a real daughter to wear matching clothes with, hold hands and learn to read with.
"Mother's Day will make you sad, won't it, Tante Atie?"
"Why do you say that?" she asked.
"You look like someone who is going to be sad."
"You were always wise beyond your years, just like your mother."
She gently held my waist as I climbed down from her lap. Then she cupped her face in both palms, her elbows digging |into the pleats of her pink skirt.
I was going to sneak the card under her pillow Saturday night so that she would find it as she was making the bed on Sunday morning. But the way her face drooped into her palms made me want to give it to her right then.
I dug into my pocket, and handed it to her. Inside was a poem that I had written for her.
She took the card from my hand. The flower nearly fell off. She pressed the tape against the short stem, forced the baby daffodil back in its place, and handed the card back to me. She did not even look inside.
"Not this year," she said.
"Why not this year?"
"Sophie, it is not mine. It is your mother's. We must send it to your mother."
I only knew my mother from the picture on the night table by Tante Atie's pillow. She waved from inside the frame with a wide grin on her face and a large flower in her hair. She witnessed everything that went on in the bougainvillea, each step, each stumble, each hug and kiss. She saw us when we got up, when we went to sleep, when we laughed, when we got upset at each other. Her expression never changed. Her grin never went away.
I sometimes saw my mother in my dreams. She would chase me through a field of wildflowers as tall as the sky. When she caught me, she would try to squeeze me into the small frame so I could be in the picture with her. I would scream and scream until my voice gave out, then Tante Atie would come and save me from her grasp.
I slipped the card back in my pocket and got up to go inside. Tante Atie lowered her head and covered her face with her hands. Her fingers muffled her voice as she spoke.
"When I am done feeling bad, I will come in and we will find you a very nice envelope for your card. Maybe it will get to your mother after the fact, but she will welcome it because it will come directly from you."
"It is your card," I insisted.
"It is for a mother, your mother." She motioned me away with a wave of her hand. "When it is Aunt's Day, you can make me one."
"Will you let me read it to you?"
"It is not for me to hear, my angel. It is for your mother."
I put the card back in my pocket, plucked out the flower, and dropped it under my shoes.
Across the road, the children were yelling each other's names, inviting passing friends to join them. They sat in a circle and shot the crackling leaves high above their heads. The leaves landed on their faces and clung to their hair. It was almost as though they were caught in a rain of daffodils.
I continued to watch the children as Tante Atie prepared what she was bringing to the potluck. She put the last touches on a large tray of sweet potato pudding that filled the whole house with its molasses scent.
As soon as the sun set, lamps were lit all over our quarter. The smaller children sat playing marbles near whatever light they could find. The older boys huddled in small groups near the school yard fence as they chatted over their books. The girls formed circles around their grandmothers' feet, learning to sew.
Tante Atie had promised that in another year or so she would teach me how to sew.
"You should not stare," she said as we passed a nearsighted old woman whispering mystical secrets of needle and thread to a little girl. The girl was squinting as her eyes dashed back and forth to keep up with the movements of her grandmother's old fingers.
"Can I start sewing soon?" I asked Tante Atie.
"Soon as I have a little time," she said.
She put her hand on my shoulder and bent down to kiss my cheek.
"Is something troubling you?" I asked.
"Don't let my troubles upset you," she said.
"When I made the card, I thought it would make you happy. I did not mean to make you sad."
"You have never done anything to make me sad," she said. "That is why this whole thing is going to be so hard."
A cool evening breeze circled the dust around our feet.
"You should put on your blouse with the long sleeves," she said. "So you don't catch cold."
I wanted to ask her what was going to be so hard, but she pressed her finger over my lips and pointed towards the house.
She said "Go" and so I went.
One by one the men began to file out of their houses. Some carried plantains, others large Negro yams, which made your body itch if you touched them raw. There were no men in Tante Atie's and my house so we carried the food ourselves to the yard where the children had been playing.
The women entered the yard with tins of steaming ginger tea and baskets of cassava bread. Tante Atie and I sat near the gate, she behind the women and me behind the girls.
Monsieur Augustin stacked some twigs with a rusty pitchfork and dropped his ripe plantains and husked corn on the pile. He lit a long match and dropped it on the top of the heap. The flame spread from twig to twig, until they all blended into a large smoky fire.
Monsieur Augustin's wife began to pass around large cups of ginger tea. The men broke down into small groups and strolled down the garden path, smoking their pipes. Old tantes-aunties-and grandmothers swayed cooing babies on their laps. The teenage boys and girls drifted to dark corners, hidden by the shadows of rustling banana leaves.
Tante Atie said that the way these potlucks started was really a long time ago in the hills. Back then, a whole village would get together and clear a field for planting. The group would take turns clearing each person's land, until all the land in the village was cleared and planted. The women would cook large amounts of food while the men worked. Then at sunset, when the work was done, everyone would gather together and enjoy a feast of eating, dancing, and laughter.
Here in Croix-des-Rosets, most of the people were city workers who labored in baseball or clothing factories and lived in small cramped houses to support their families back in the provinces. Tante Atie said that we were lucky to live in a house as big as ours, with a living room to receive our guests, plus a room for the two of us to sleep in. Tante Atie said that only people living on New York money or people with professions, like Monsieur Augustin, could afford to live in a house where they did not have to share a yard with a pack of other people. The others had to live in huts, shacks, or one-room houses that, sometimes, they had to build themselves.
In spite of where they might live, this potluck was open to everybody who wanted to come. There was no field to plant, but the workers used their friendships in the factories or their grouping in the common yards as a reason to get together, eat, and celebrate life.
Tante Atie kept looking at Madame Augustin as she passed the tea to each person in the women's circle around us.
"How is Martine?" Madame Augustin handed Tante Atie a cup of steaming tea. Tante Atie's hand jerked and the tea sprinkled the back of Madame Augustin's hand.
"I saw the facteur bring you something big yesterday." Madame Augustin blew into her tea as she spoke. "Did your sister send you a gift?"
Tante Atie tried to ignore the question.
"Was it a gift?" insisted Madame Augustin. "It is not the child's birthday again, is it? She was just twelve, no less than two months ago."
I wondered why Tante Atie had not showed me the big package. Usually, my mother would send us two cassettes with our regular money allowance. One cassette would be for me and Tante Atie, the other for my grandmother. Usually, Tante Atie and I would listen to our cassette together. Maybe she was saving it for later.
I tried to listen without looking directly at the women's faces. That would have been disrespectful, as bad as speaking without being spoken to.
"How is Martine doing over there?" asked Stephane, the albino's wife. She was a sequins piece worker, who made herself hats from leftover factory sequins. That night she was wearing a gold bonnet that make her look like a star had landed on her head.
"My sister is fine, thank you," Tante Atie finally answered.
Madame Augustin took a sip of her tea and looked over at me. She gave me a reprimanding look that said: Why aren't you playing with the other children? I quickly lowered my eyes, pretending to be studying some random pebbles on the ground.
"I would wager that it is very nice over there in New York," Madame Augustin said.
"I suppose it could be," said Tante Atie.
"Why have you never gone?" asked Madame Augustin.
"Perhaps it is not yet the time," said Tante Atie.
"Perhaps it is," corrected Madame Augustin.
She leaned over Tante Atie's shoulder and whispered in a not so low voice, "When are you going to tell us, Atie, when the car comes to take you to the airplane?"
"Is Martine sending for you?" asked the albino's wife.
Suddenly, all the women began to buzz with questions.
"When are you leaving?"
"Can it really be as sudden as that?"
"Will you marry there?"
"Will you remember us?"
"I am not going anywhere," Tante Atie interrupted.
"I have it on good information that it was a plane ticket that you received the other day," said Madame Augustin. "If you are not going, then who was the plane ticket for?"
All their eyes fell on me at the same time.
"Is the mother sending for the child?" asked the albino's wife.
"I saw the delivery," said Madame Augustin.
"Then she is sending for the child," they concluded.
Suddenly a large hand was patting my shoulder.
"This is very good news," said the accompanying voice. "It is the best thing that is ever going to happen to you."
I could not eat the bowl of food that Tante Atie laid in front of me. I only kept wishing that everyone would disappear so I could go back home.
The night very slowly slipped into the early hours of the – morning. Soon everyone began to drift towards their homes. On Saturdays there was the house to clean and water to fetch from long distances and the clothes to wash and iron for the Mother's Day Mass.
After everyone was gone, Monsieur Augustin walked Tante Atie and me home. When we got to our door he moved closer to Tante Atie as though he wanted to whisper something in her ear. She looked up at him and smiled, then quickly covered her lips with her fingers, as though she suddenly remembered her missing teeth and did not want him to see them.
He turned around to look across the street. His wife was carrying some of the pots back inside the house. He squeezed Tante Atie's hand and pressed his cheek against hers.
"It is good news, Atie," he said. "Neither you nor Sophie should be sad. A child belongs with her mother, and a mother with her child."
His wife was now sitting on the steps in front of their bougainvillea, waiting for him.
"I did not think you would tell your wife before I had a chance to tell the child," said Tante Atie to Monsieur Augustin.
"You must be brave," he said. "It is some very wonderful news for this child."
The night had grown a bit cool, but we both stood and watched as Monsieur Augustin crossed the street, took the pails from his wife's hand and bent down to kiss her forehead. He put his arms around her and closed the front door behind them.
"When you tell someone something and you call it a secret, they should know not to tell others," Tante Atie mumbled to herself.
She kept her eyes on the Augustin's house. The main light in their bedroom was lit. Their bodies were silhouetted on the ruffled curtains blowing in the night breeze. Monsieur Augustin sat in a rocking chair by the window. His wife sat on his lap as she unlaced her long braid of black hair. Monsieur Augustin brushed the hair draped like a silk blanket down Madame Augustin s back. When he was done, Monsieur Augustin got up to undress. Then slowly, Madame Augustin took off her day clothes and slipped into a long-sleeved night gown. Their laughter rose in the night as they began a tickling fight. The light flickered off and they tumbled into bed.
Tante Atie kept looking at the window even after all signs of the Augustins had faded into the night.
A tear rolled down her cheek as she unbolted the door to go inside. I immediately started walking towards our bedroom. She raced after me and tried to catch up. When she did, she pressed her hand down on my shoulder and tried to turn my body around, to face her.
"Do you know why I always wished I could read?"
Her teary eyes gazed directly into mine.
"I don't know why." I tried to answer as politely as I could.
"It was always my dream to read," she said, "so I could read that old Bible under my pillow and find the answers to everything right there between those pages. What do you think that old Bible would have us do right now, about this moment?"
"I don't know," I said.
"How can you not know?" she asked. "You try to tell me there is all wisdom in reading but at a time like this you disappoint me."
"You lied!" I shouted.
She grabbed both my ears and twisted them until they burned.
I stomped my feet and walked away. As I rushed to bed, I began to take off my clothes so quickly that I almost tore them off my body.
The smell of lemon perfume stung my nose as I pulled the sheet over my head.
"I did not lie," she said, "I kept a secret, which is different. I wanted to tell you. I needed time to reconcile myself, to accept it. It was very sudden, just a cassette from Martine saying, 'I want my daughter,' and then as fast as you can put two fingers together to snap, she sends me a plane ticket with a date on it. I am not even certain that she is doing this properly. All she tells me is that she arranged it with a woman who works on the airplane."
"Was I ever going to know?" I asked.
"I was going to put you to sleep, put you in a suitcase, and send you to her. One day you would wake up there and you would feel like your whole life here with me was a dream." She tried to force a laugh, but it didn't make it past her throat. "I had this plan, you see. I thought it was a good plan. I was going to tell you this, that in one week you would be going to see your mother. As far as you would know, it would just be a visit. I felt it in my heart and took it on Monsieur Augustin's advice that, once you got there, you would love it so much that you would beg your mother to let you stay. You have heard with your own two ears what everyone has said. We have no right to be sad."
I sunk deeper and deeper into the bed and lost my body in the darkness, in the folds of the sheets.
The bed creaked loudly as Tante Atie climbed up on her side.
"Don't you ever tell anyone that I cry when I watch Donald and his wife getting ready for bed," she said, sobbing.
I groped for my clothes in the dark and found the Mother's Day card I had made her. I tucked it under her pillow as I listened to her mumble some final words in her sleep.
The smell of cinnamon rice pudding scented the whole kitchen. Tante Atie was sitting at the table with a bowl in front of her when I came in. I felt closer to tears with each word I even thought of saying, so I said nothing.
I sat at my usual place at the table and watched out of the corner of my eyes as she poured a bowl of rice pudding and slid it towards me.
"Bonjou," she said, waving a spoon in front of my face.
"Your bonjou, your greeting, is your passport."
I kept my head down and took the spoon only when she laid it down in front of me. I did not feel like eating, but if I did not eat, we would have had to sit and stare at one another, and sooner or later, one of us would have had to say something.
I picked up the spoon and began to eat. Tante Atie's lips spread into a little grin as she watched me. Her laughter prefaced the start of what was going to be a funny story.
There were many stories that Tante Atie liked to tell. There were mostly sad stories, but every once in a while, there was a funny one. There was the time when she was a little girl, when my grandmother was a practicing Protestant. Grandmè Ifé tried to show her Christian faith by standing over the edge of a snake pit and ordering the devils back into the ground. Tante Atie was always bent over with laughter as she remembered the look on Grandmè Ifé's face when one of the snakes started to crawl up the side of the pit towards her. My grandmother did not come out for days after that.
Whether something was funny or not depended on the way Tante Atie told it. That morning, she could not bring the laughter out of me like she had in the past. It was even hard for her to force it out of herself.
After I had eaten, I washed the dishes and put them in the basket to dry.
"I want to tell you a few things," Tante Atie said from where she was sitting at the table. "You need to know certain things about your mother."
"Why can't you come to New York too?" I interrupted.
"Because it is not the time yet. After you leave, I am going back home to take care of your grandmother. I am only here in Croix-des-Rosets because of your schooling. Once you leave, I can go back."
"I don't know why you can't go to New York too," I said.
"We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen. Your mother wants to see you now, Sophie. She does not want you to forget who your real mother is. When she left you with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances with you."
Tante Atie opened the front door and let the morning sun inside. She ran her fingers along the grilled iron as she looked up at the clear indigo sky.
She picked up a broom and began to sweep the mosaic floor.
"My angel," she said, "I would like to know that by word or by example I have taught you love. I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. That is why I could never fight her about keeping you here. I do not want you to go and fight with her either. In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children." She stopped to pound the dust out of the living room cushions. "But you were never abandoned. You were with me. Your mother and I, when we were children we had no control over anything. Not even this body." She pounded her fist over her chest and stomach. "When my father died, my mother had to dig a hole and just drop him in it. We are a family with dirt under our fingernails. Do you know what that means?"
She did not wait for me to answer.
"That means we've worked the land. We're not educated. My father would have never dreamt that we would live in the same kind of house that people like Monsieur and Madame Augustin live in. He, a school teacher, and we, daughters of the hills, old peasant stock, pitit soyèt, ragamuffins. If we can live here, if you have this door open to you, it is because of your mother. Promise me that you are not going to fight with your mother when you get there."
"I am not going to fight," I said.
"Good," she said. "It would be a shame if the two of you got into battles because you share a lot more than you know."
She reached over and touched the collar of my lemon-toned house dress.
"Everything you own is yellow," she said, "wildflower yellow, like dandelions, sunflowers."
"And daffodils," I added.
"That is right," she said, "your mother, she loved daffodils." Tante Atie told me that my mother loved daffodils because they grew in a place that they were not supposed to. They were really European flowers, French buds and stems, meant for colder climates. A long time ago, a French woman had brought them to Croix-des-Rosets and planted them there. A strain of daffodils had grown that could withstand the heat, but they were the color of pumpkins and golden summer squash, as though they had acquired a bronze tinge from the skin of the natives who had adopted them.
Tante Atie took the card from under her pillow and put it on the night table, next to the plane ticket. She said that it would be nice for me to give the card to my mother personally, even though the daffodil was gone.
The trip to La Nouvelle Dame Marie took five hours in a rocky van. However, Tante Atie thought that I couldn't leave for New York without my grandmother's blessing. Besides, Grandmè Ifé was getting on in years and this could be my last chance to see her.
The van from Croix-des-Rosets let us off in the marketplace in Dame Marie. The roads to my grandmother's house were too rough for anything but wheelbarrows, mules, or feet.
Tante Atie and I decided to go on foot. We walked by a line of thatched huts where a group of women were pounding millet in a large mortar with a pestle. Others were cooking large cassava cakes in flat pans over charcoal pits.
In the cane fields, the men chopped cane stalks as they sang back and forth to one another. A crammed wheelbarrow rolled towards us. We stepped aside and allowed the boys to pass. They were bare-chested and soaked with sweat, with no protection from the sun except old straw hats.
We passed a farm with a bamboo fence around it. The owner was Man Grace, a tall woman who had hair patches growing out of her chin. Man Grace and her daughter were working in the yard, throwing handfuls of purple corn at a flock of guinea fowls.
My mother had sent money for the reconstruction of her old home. The house stood out from all the others in Dame Marie. It was a flat red brick house with wide windows and a shingled roof. A barbed wire fence bordered my grandmother's pumpkin vines and tuberose stems.
I raced up to the front of the house to stand under the rooster-shaped weather vanes spinning on my grandmother's porch. My grandmother was in the yard, pulling a rope out of her stone well.
"Old woman, I brought your child," Tante Atie said.
The rope slipped out of my grandmother's hands, the bucket crashing with an echoing splash. I leaped into her arms, nearly knocking her down.
"It does my heart a lot of good to see you," she said.
Tante Atie kissed my grandmother on the cheek and then went inside the house.
Grandmè Ifé wrapped her arms around my body. Her head came up to my chin, her mop of shrubby white hair tickling my lips.
"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I am going to cook only the things you like."
…
At night, the huts on the hills looked like a crowd of candles. We ate supper on the back porch. My grandmother cooked rice and Congo beans with sun-dried mushrooms. She was wearing a long black dress, as part of her devil, to mourn my grandfather.
"Tell me, what good things have you been doing?" asked my grandmother.
"She has been getting all the highest marks in school," said Tante Atie. "Her mother will be very proud."
"You must never forget this," said my grandmother. "Your mother is your first friend."
I slept alone in the third room in the house. It had a large four-poster bed and a mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mattress sank as I slipped under the sheets in the bed. It was nice to have a bed of my own every so often.
I lay in bed, waiting for the nightmare where my mother would finally get to take me away.
We left the next day to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Tante Atie had to go back to work. Besides, my grandmother said that it was best that we leave before she got too used to us and suffered a sudden attack of chagrin.
To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
We each gave my grandmother two kisses as she urged us to go before she kept us for good.
"Can one really die of chagrin?" I asked Tante Atie in the van on the way back.
She said it was not a sudden illness, but something that could kill you slowly, taking a small piece of you every day until one day it finally takes all of you away.
"How can we keep it from happening to us?" I asked.
"We don't choose it," she said, "it chooses us. A horse has four legs, but it can fall anyway."
She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.
That whole week, Tante Atie left for work before dawn and came home very late at night. She left me food to eat and asked Monsieur Augustin to stop by in the mornings and evenings to check on me. When she came home, I watched, through the faint ray of light that crept across the sheet, as she tiptoed over to our bed, before going to sleep. That was how I knew for sure that she had not run away and left me.
I went to school every day as usual. After school, I went into our yard and spent the afternoons gathering the twigs and leaves that kept it from being clean.
When I came home from school Friday afternoon, I saw Tante Atie sitting on the steps in front of the bougainvillea. When she saw me, she ran towards me and swept my body in the air.
"You cleaned up real good," she said.
I had done my last cleaning that morning, before leaving for school. The dead leaves were stacked on top of fallen branches, twigs, and dried flowers.
Tante Atie kissed both my cheeks and carried my notebook inside. The living room seemed filled by the suitcase that she had bought me for the trip. While I was working on the yard, I had somehow told myself that I would be around for more potlucks, more trips to my grandmother's, even a sewing lesson. The suitcase made me realize that I would never get to do those things.
"I know I have not been here all week," Tante Atie said. "I wanted to work extra hours to get you some gifts for your trip."
She poured hot milk from a silver kettle that she had always kept on the shelf for display. Stuck to the bottom of the kettle was a small note, Je t'aime de tout mon coeur. The note read, "I love you very much." It was signed by Monsieur Augustin.
I reached over to grab the note dangling from the kettle. Tante Atie snatched it back quickly. She held it upside down and looked at it as though it were a picture, fading before her eyes.
She turned her back quickly and placed the note on the shelf.
We sat across the table from one another and drank without saying anything. I tried to hide my tears behind the tea cup.
"No crying," she said. "We are going to be strong as mountains."
The tears had already fallen and hit my cheeks.
"Mountains," she said, prodding my ribs with her elbow.
She bent and picked up a white box from the heap of things that she had bought. Inside was a saffron dress with a large white collar and baby daffodils embroidered all over it.
"This is for you to wear on your trip," she said.
My mother's face was in my dreams all night long. She was wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair. She opened her arms like two long hooks and kept shouting out my name. Catching me by the hem of my dress, she wrestled me to the floor. I called for Tante Atie as loud as I could. Tante Atie was leaning over us, but she could not see me. I was lost in the yellow of my mother's sheets.
I woke up with Tante Atie leaning over my bed. She was already dressed in one of her pink Sunday dresses, and had perfume and face powder on. I walked by her on my way to the wash basin. She squeezed my hand and whispered, "Remember that we are going to be like mountains and mountains don't cry."
"Unless it rains," I said.
"When it rains, it is the sky that is crying."
When I came from the wash basin, she was waiting for me with a towel. It was one of many white towels that she kept in a box under her bed, for special occasions that never came. I used the towel to dry my body, then slipped into the starched underwear and the dress she handed to me.
The suitcase was in a corner in the kitchen. The table was covered with white lace cloth. Tante Atie's special, unused china plates and glasses were filled with oatmeal and milk.
She led me to the head of the table and sat by my side. A slight morning drizzle hit the iron grills on the door.
"If it rains, will I still have to go?" I asked her.
She ran her finger over a shiny scar on the side of her head.
"Yes, you will have to go," she said. "There is nothing we can do to stop that now. I have already asked someone to come and drive us to the aéroport."
She took a sip from the milk in her glass and forced a large smile.
"You should not be afraid," she said. "Martine was a wonderful sister. She will be a great mother to you. Crabs don't make papayas. She is my sister."
She reached inside her pocket and pulled out the card that I had made her for Mother's Day. It was very wrinkled now and the penciled words were beginning to fade.
"I would not let you read it to me, but I know it says some very nice things," she said, putting the card next to my plate. "It is not so pretty now, but your mother, she will still love it."
Before she could stop me, I began to read her the words.
"You see," Tante Atie shrugged, "it was never for me." She slipped the card in the pocket of my dress. "When you get there, you give that to her."
"She will not be able to see the words," I said.
"She will see them fine and if she cannot see them, you read them to her like you just did for me and from now on, her name is Manman.
Chabin, the lottery agent, peeked his head through the open door, waving his record book at us.
"We do not want to play today," Tante Atie said.
"I am here to pay you," Chabin said. "Don't you follow the results? Your number, it came out. You are a winner."
Tante Atie looked very happy.
"How much did I win?" she asked.
"Ten gourdes," he said.
He counted out the money and handed it to her.
"You see," Tante Atie said, clutching her money. "Your mother, she brings me luck."
The Peugeot taxi came for us while we were still at the table. I left Tante Atie's kitchen, my breakfast uneaten and the dishes undone.
The drizzle had stopped. The neighbors were watching as the driver carried my one suitcase to the car.
The Augustins came over to say good-bye. Madame Augustin slipped a crisp pink handkerchief in my hand as she kissed me four times-twice on each cheek.
"If you study hard, you will have no trouble with your English," Monsieur Augustin said as he firmly shook my hand.
I held Tante Atie's hand as we climbed into the back seat. Our faces were dry, our heads up. We were like sunflowers, staring directly at the sun.
Before pulling away, the driver turned his head and complimented us on our very clean yard.
"My child, she cleans it," Tante Atie said.
The car scattered the neighbors and the factory workers, as they waved a group farewell. Maybe if I had a really good friend my eyes would have clung to hers as we were driven away. A red dust rose between me and the only life that I had ever known. There were no children playing, no leaves flying about. No daffodils.
The sun crawled across our faces as the car sped into Port-au-Prince. I had never been to the city before. Colorful boutiques with neon signs lined the street. Vans covered with pictures of flowers and horses with wings scurried up and down and made sudden stops in the middle of the boulevards.
Tante Atie gasped each time we went by a large department store or a towering hotel. She shouted the names of places that she had visited in years past.
When they were teenagers, she and my mother would save their pennies all year long so they could come to the city on Christmas Eve. They would tell my grandmother that they were traveling with one of the old peddlers, but that was never their plan. They would take a tap tap van in the afternoon so as to arrive in Port-au-Prince just as the sun was setting, and the Christmas lights were beginning to glow. They stood outside the stores in their Sunday dresses to listen to the sounds of the toy police cars and talking dolls chattering over the festive music. They went to Mass at the Gothic cathedral, then spent the rest of the night sitting by the fountains and gazing at the Nativity scenes on the Champs-de-Mars. They bought ice cream cones and fireworks, while young tourists offered them cigarettes for the privilege of taking their pictures. They pretended to be students at one of the gentry's universities and even went so far as describing the plush homes they said they lived in. The white tourists flirted with them and held their hands. They laughed at silly jokes, letting their voices rise and fall like city girls. Later, they made rendezvous for the next night, which of course they never kept. Then before dawn, they took a van back home and slipped into bed before my grandmother woke up.
I looked outside and saw the bare hills that bordered the national highway.
"We are almost there," the driver said as he slowed down, almost to a stop.
We waited for a while for the car to move.
"Is there some trouble?" asked Tante Atie.
"There is always some trouble here," the driver said. "They are changing the name of the airport from Francois Duvalier to Mais Gate, like it was before Francois Duvalier was president."
Tante Atie's body tensed up.
"Did they have to do it today?" Tante Atie asked. "She will be delayed. We cannot miss our appointment."
"I will do what I can," the driver said, "but some things are beyond our control."
I moved closer to the window to get a better look. Clouds of sooty smoke were rising to the sky from a place not too far ahead.
"I think there is a fire," the driver said…
Tante Atie pushed her head forward and tried to see.
"Maybe the world, it is ending," she said.
We began to move slowly in a long line of cars. Dark green army vans passed through narrow spaces between cars. The driver followed the slow-paced line. Soon we were at the airport gate.
We stopped in front of the main entrance. The smoke had been coming from across the street. Army trucks surrounded a car in flames. A group of students were standing on top of a hill, throwing rocks at the burning car. They scurried to avoid the tear gas and the round of bullets that the soldiers shot back at them.
Some of the students fell and rolled down the hill. They screamed at the soldiers that they were once again betraying the people. One girl rushed down the hill and grabbed one of the soldiers by the arm. He raised his pistol and pounded it on top of her head. She fell to the ground, her face covered with her own blood.
Tante Atie grabbed my shoulder and shoved me quickly inside the airport gate.
"Do you see what you are leaving?" she said.
"I know I am leaving you."
The airport lobby was very crowded. We tried to keep up with the driver as he ran past the vendors and travelers, dragging my suitcase behind him.
As we waited on the New York boarding line, Tante Atie and I looked up at the paintings looming over us from the ceiling. There were pictures of men and women pulling carts and selling rice and beans to make some money.
A woman shouted "Madame," drawing us out of the visions above us. She looked breathless, as though she had been searching for us for a long time.
"You are Sophie Caco?" she asked, speaking directly to me.
I nodded.
Tante Atie looked at her lean body and her neat navy uniform and hesitated before shaking her hand.
"I will take good care of her," she said to Tante Atie in Creole. She immediately took my hand. "Her mother is going to meet her in New York. I spoke to her this morning. Everything is arranged. We cannot waste time."
Tante Atie's lips quivered.
"We have to go now," the lady said. "You were very tardy."
"We were not at fault," Tante Atie tried to explain.
"It does not matter now," the lady said. "We must go."
Tante Atie bent down and pressed her cheek against mine.
"Say hello to your manman for me," she said. "You must not concern yourself about me."
The driver tapped Tante Atie's shoulder.
"There could be some more chaos," he said. "I want to go before things become very bad."
"Don't you worry yourself about me," Tante Atie said. "I am not going to be lonely. I will be with your grandmother. Just you always remember how much your Tante Atie loves and cherishes you."
The woman tugged at my hand.
"We really must go," she said.
"She is going," Tante Atie said, releasing my hand.
The woman started walking away. I moved along with her taking big steps to keep up. I kept turning my head and waving at Tante Atie. Her large body stood out in the middle of the airport lobby.
People rubbed against her as they rushed past. She stood in the same spot wiping her tears with a patchwork handkerchief. In her pink dress and brown sandals, with the village dust settled on her toes, it was easy to tell that she did not belong there. She blended in neither with the smiling well-dressed groups on their way to board the planes nor with the jeans-clad tourists whom the panhandlers surrounded at the gate.
She stood by the exit gate and watched as the woman pulled me though a glass door onto the runway leading to the plane.
The plane was nearly full. There were only a few empty seats. I followed the woman down the narrow aisle. She showed me to a seat by a window. I slipped in quickly and looked outside, hoping to see Tante Atie heading safely home.
I only saw a patch of the smoky sky. The woman left. She soon came back with a little boy. He was crying and stomping his feet, struggling to wiggle out of her grasp. She cornered him against the seats and pressed him into the chair. She held him down with both her hands. He stopped fighting, slid upward in the seat, raised his head, and spat in her face.
His shirt was soaked with the saliva that was still dripping from either side of his mouth. He rubbed his already-red eyes with the back of his hand. Leaning forward, he pressed his face against the seat in front of him. It was almost as though he was trying to find a way to muffle his own sobs.
I reached over to stroke his head. He grabbed my hand and dug his teeth into my fingers. I hit his arm and tried to get him to release my fingers. He bit even harder. I smacked his shoulder. He let go of my fingers and began to scream.
The woman rushed over. She pulled him from the seat, raised him up to her chest, and rocked him in her arms. He clung to her body for a moment then pulled away, digging his fingers into her neck. She stumbled backwards and nearly fell. He slipped out of her arms and ran out of her reach. She dashed down the aisle after him.
A tall man blocked the aisle and stood in the little boy's way. He began to cry louder when he noticed that he was cornered. He jumped on a passenger's lap and began to pound his head on a side window. The man grabbed him and wrestled him back to his seat. He strapped him down with his seatbelt, then leaned over and did the same for me.
As soon as his seatbelt was on, the boy sat still. Both the man and the woman stood over him and watched him carefully, as though they were expecting him to reach up and grab one of their eyeballs. He did nothing. He sat back in his seat, bent his head, and wept silently.
, "What is the matter with him?" the man said in French.
"His father died in that fire out front. His father was some kind of old government official, très corrupt," she whispered. "Très guilty of crimes against the people."
"And we are letting him travel?"
"He does not have any more relatives here. His father's sister lives in New York. I called her. She is going to meet him there."
"I can see why he is upset," the man said.
The plane began to roar towards the sky. I looked outside and saw the cars heading away. I could not tell Tante Atie's taxi from the others.
The sound of the engine silenced the boy's sobs. He soon fell asleep, and shortly after, so did I.
Children, we are here." The woman was shaking both of us at the same time.
The plane was empty. We walked down a long passageway, the woman first, with the little boy's hand in hers, and then me. She rushed us by the different lines without stopping. She only waved each time and flashed a large manila envelope.
We soon joined a crowd and watched as suitcases filed past us on a moving mat.
"Do you see your bags?" she asked.
I saw my suitcase and pointed to it. She walked over and picked it up and put it on the floor next to me. We waited for the little boy to point out his, but he did not.
She leafed through his papers and said, "Jean-Claude, do you see your suitcase?"
He buried his face in her skirt and began to cry. She walked over and checked the stubs on the suitcases. He did not have any.
We walked down another corridor. Then a glass gate opened itself and we were out in a lobby filled with people holding balloons and flowers. Some of them burst forward to hug loved ones.
A woman moaned as she walked towards Jean-Claude. She grabbed him and squeezed his little body against hers.
"They've killed my brother," she cried. "Look at him, look at my brother's son."
She carried him away in her arms, his face buried in her chest.
My mother came forward. I knew it was my mother because she came up to me and grabbed me and begin to spin me like a top, so she could look at me.
The woman who had been with me looked on without saying anything.
"Stay here," my mother said to me in Creole.
She walked over to a corner with the woman, whispered a few things to her, and handed her what seemed like money.
"I cannot thank you enough," my mother said.
"There is no need," the woman said. She bowed slightly and walked away.
I raised my hand to wave good-bye. The woman had already turned her back and was heading inside. It was as though I had disappeared. She did not even see me anymore.
As the woman went through the gate, my mother kissed me on the lips.
"I cannot believe that I am looking at you," she said. "You are my little girl. You are here."
She pinched my cheeks and patted my head.
"Say something," she urged. "Say something. Just speak to me. Let me hear your voice."
She pressed my face against hers and held fast.
"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Did you have a nice plane flight?"
I nodded.
"You must be very tired," she said. "Let us go home."
She grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my arm with the other.
Outside it was overcast and cool.
"My goodness." Her scrawny body shivered. "I didn't even bring you something to put over your dress."
She dropped the suitcase on the sidewalk, took off the denim jacket she had on and guided my arms through the sleeves.
A line of cars stopped as we crossed the street to the parking lot. She was wobbling under the weight of my suitcase.
She stopped in front of a pale yellow car with a long crack across the windshield glass. The paint was peeling off the side door that she opened for me. I peered inside and hesitated to climb onto the tattered cushions on the seats.
She dropped the suitcase in the trunk and walked back to me.
"Don't be afraid. Go right in."
She tried to lift my body into the front seat but she stumbled under my weight and quickly put me back down.
I climbed in and tried not to squirm. The sharp edge of a loose spring was sticking into my thigh.
She sat in the driver's seat and turned on the engine. It made a loud grating noise as though it were about to explode.
"We will soon be on our way," she said.
She rubbed her hands together and pressed her head back against the seat. She did not look like the picture Tante Atie had on her night table. Her face was long and hollow. Her hair had a blunt cut and she had long spindly legs. She had dark circles under her eyes and, as she smiled, lines of wrinkles tightened her expression. Her fingers were scarred and sunburned. It was as though she had never stopped working in the cane fields after all.
"It is ready now," she said.
She strapped the seatbelt across her flat chest, pressing herself even further into the torn cushions. She leaned over and attached my seatbelt as the car finally drove off.
Night had just fallen. Lights glowed everywhere. A long string of cars sped along the highway, each like a single diamond on a very long bracelet.
"We will be in the city soon," she said.
I still had not said anything to her.
"How is your Tante Atie?" she asked. "Does she still go to night school?"
"Night school?"
"She told me once in a cassette that she was going to start night school. Did she ever start it?"
"Non."
"The old girl lost her nerve. She lost her fight. You should have seen us when we were young. We always dreamt of becoming important women. We were going to be the first women doctors from my mother's village. We would not stop at being doctors either. We were going to be engineers too. Imagine our surprise when we found out we had limits."
All the street lights were suddenly gone. The streets we drove down now were dim and hazy. The windows were draped with bars; black trash bags blew out into the night air.
There were young men standing on street corners, throwing empty cans at passing cars. My mother swerved the car to avoid a bottle that almost came crashing through the windshield.
"How is Lotus?" she asked. "Donald's wife, Madame Augustin."
"She is fine," I said.
"Atie has sent me cassettes about that. You know Lotus was not meant to marry Donald. Your aunt Atie was supposed to. But the heart is fickle, what can you say? When Lotus came along, he did not want my sister anymore."
There was writing all over the building. As we walked towards it, my mother nearly tripped over a man sleeping under a blanket of newspapers.
"Your schooling is the only thing that will make people respect you," my mother said as she put a key in the front door.
The thick dirty glass was covered with names written in graffiti bubbles.
"You are going to work hard here," she said, "and no one is going to break your heart because you cannot read or write. You have a chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads."
A smell of old musty walls met us at the entrance to her apartment. She closed the door behind her and dragged the suitcase inside.
"You wait for me here," she said, once we got inside. I stood on the other side of a heavy door in the dark hall, waiting for her.
She disappeared behind a bedroom door. I wandered in and slid my fingers across the table and chairs neatly lined up in the kitchen. The tablecloth was shielded with a red plastic cover, the same blush red as the sofa in the living room.
There were books scattered all over the counter. I flipped through the pages quickly. The books had pictures of sick old people in them and women dressed in white helping them.
I was startled to hear my name when she called it.
"Sophie, where are you?"
I ran back to the spot where she had left me. She was standing there with a tall well-dressed doll at her side. The doll was caramel-colored with a fine pointy noise.
"Come," she said. "We will show you to your room."
I followed her through a dark doorway. She turned on the light and laid the doll down on a small day-bed by the window.
I kept my eyes on the blue wallpaper and the water stains that crept from the ceiling down to the floor.
She kept staring at my face for a reaction.
"Don't you like it?" she asked.
"Yes. I like it. Thank you."
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she unbraided the doll's hair, taking out the ribbons and barrettes that matched the yellow dress. She put them on a night table near the bed. There was a picture of her and Tante Atie there. Tante Atie was holding a baby and my mother had her hand around Tante Atie's shoulder.
I moved closer to get a better look at the baby in Tante Atie's arms. I had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother's but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that I noticed that I looked like no one in my family. Not my mother. Not my Tante Atie. I did not look like them when I was a baby and I did not look like them now.
"If you don't like the room," my mother said, "we can always change it."
She glanced at the picture as she picked up a small brush and combed the doll's hair into a ponytail.
"I like the room fine," I stuttered.
She tied a rubber band around the doll's ponytail, then reached under the bed for a small trunk.
She unbuttoned the back of the doll's dress and changed her into a pajama set.
"You won't resent sharing your room, will you?" She stroked the doll's back. "She is like a friend to me. She kept me company while we were apart. It seems crazy, I know. A grown woman like me with a doll. I am giving her to you now. You take good care of her."
She motioned for me to walk over and sit on her lap. I was not sure that her thin legs would hold me without snapping. I walked over and sat on her lap anyway.
"You're not going to be alone," she said. "I'm never going to be farther than a few feet away. Do you understand that?"
She gently helped me down from her lap. Her knees seemed to be weakening under my weight.
"Do you want to eat something? We can sit and talk. Or do you want to go to bed?"
"Bed."
She reached over to unbutton the back of my dress.
"I can do that," I said.
"Do you want me to show you where I sleep, in case you need me during the night?"
We went back to the living room. She unfolded the sofa and turned it into a bed.
"This is where I'll be. You see, I'm not far away at all."
When we went back to the bedroom, I turned my back to her as I undressed. She took the dress from me, opened the closet door, and squeezed it in between some of her own.
The rumpled Mother's Day card was sticking out from my dress pocket.
"What is that?" she asked, pulling it out.
She unfolded the card and began to read it. I lay down on the bed and tried to slip under the yellow sheets. There was not enough room for both me and the doll on the bed. I picked her up and laid her down sideways. She still left little room for me.
My mother looked up from the card, walked over, and took the doll out of the bed. She put her down carefully in a corner.
"Was that for me?" she asked looking down at the card.
"Tante Atie said I should give it to you."
"Did you know how much I loved daffodils when I was a girl?"
"Tante Atie told me."
She ran her fingers along the cardboard, over the empty space where the daffodil had been.
"I haven't gone out and looked for daffodils since I've been here. For all I know, they might not even have them here."
She ran the card along her cheek, then pressed it against her chest.
"Are there still lots of daffodils?"
"Oui," I said. "There are a lot of them."
Her face beamed even more than when she first saw me at the airport. She bent down and kissed my forehead.
"Thank God for that," she said.
I couldn't fall asleep. At home, when I couldn't sleep, Tante Atie would stay up with me. The two of us would sit by the window and Tante Atie would tell me stories about our lives, about the way things had been in the family, even before I was born. One time I asked her how it was that I was born with a mother and no father. She told me the story of a little girl who was born out of the petals of roses, water from the stream, and a chunk of the sky. That little girl, she said was me.
As I lay in the dark, I heard my mother talking on the phone.
"Yes," she said in Creole. "She is very much here. In bone and flesh. I cannot believe it myself."
Later that night, I heard that same voice screaming as though someone was trying to kill her. I rushed over, but my mother was alone thrashing against the sheets. I shook her and finally woke her up. When she saw me, she quickly covered her face with her hands and turned away.
"Ou byen? Are you all right?" I asked her.
She shook her head yes.
"It is the night," she said. "Sometimes, I see horrible visions in my sleep."
"Do you have any tea you can boil?" I asked.
Tante Atie would have known all the right herbs.
"Don't worry, it will pass," she said, avoiding my eyes. "I will be fine. I always am. The nightmares, they come and go"
There were sirens and loud radios blaring outside the building.
I climbed on the bed and tried to soothe her. She grabbed my face and squeezed it between her palms.
"What is it? Are you scared too?" she asked. "Don't worry." She pulled me down into the bed with her. "You can sleep here tonight if you want. It's okay. I'm here."
. She pulled the sheet over both our bodies. Her voice began to fade as she drifted off to sleep.
I leaned back in the bed, listening to her snoring.
Soon, the morning light came creeping through the living room window. I kept staring at the ceiling as I listened to her heart beating along with the ticking clock.
"Sophie," she whispered. Her eyes were still closed. "Sophie, I will never let you go again."
Tears burst out of her eyes when she opened them.
"Sophie, I am glad you are with me. We can get along, you and me. I know we can."
She clung to my hand as she drifted back to sleep.
The sun stung my eyes as it came through the curtains. I slid my hand out of hers to go to the bathroom. The grey linoleum felt surprisingly warm under my feet. I looked at my red eyes in the mirror while splashing cold water over my face. New eyes seemed to be looking back at me. A new face all-together. Someone who had aged in one day, as though she had been through a time machine, rather than an airplane. Welcome to New York, this face seemed to be saying. Accept your new life. I greeted the challenge, like one greets a new day. As my mother's daughter and Tante Atie's child.
The streets along Flatbush Avenue reminded me of home. My mother took me to Haiti Express, so I could see the place where she sent our money orders and cassettes from.
It was a small room packed with Haitians. People stood on line patiently waiting their turn. My mother slipped Tante Atie's cassette into a padded envelope. As we waited on line, an old fan circled a spider's web above our heads.
A chubby lady greeted my mother politely when we got to the window.
"This is Sophie," my mother said through the holes in the thick glass. "She is the one who has given you so much business over the years."
The lady smiled as she took my mother's money and the package. I kept feeling like there was more I wanted to send to Tante Atie. If I had the power then to shrink myself and slip into the envelope, I would have done it.
I watched as the lady stamped our package and dropped it on top of a larger pile. Around us were dozens of other people trying to squeeze all their love into small packets to send back home.
After we left, my mother stopped at a Haitian beauty salon to buy some castor oil for her hair. Then we went to a small boutique and bought some long skirts and blouses for me to wear to school. My mother said it was important that I learn English quickly. Otherwise, the American students would make fun of me or, even worse, beat me. A lot of other mothers from the nursing home where she worked had told her that their children were getting into fights in school because they were accused of having HBO-Haitian Body Odor. Many of the American kids even accused Haitians of having AIDS because they had heard on television that only the "Four Hs" got AIDS-Heroin addicts, Hemophiliacs, Homosexuals, and Haitians.
I wanted to tell my mother that I didn't want to go to school. Frankly, I was afraid. I tried to think of something to keep me from having to go. Sickness or death were probably the only two things that my mother would accept as excuses.
A car nearly knocked me out of my reverie. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street. She stopped in front of a pudgy woman selling rice powder and other cosmetics on the street.
"Sak passé, Jacqueline?" said my mother.
"You know," answered Jacqueline in Creole. "I'm doing what I can."
Jacqueline was wearing large sponge rollers under a hair net on her head. My mother brought some face cream that promised to make her skin lighter.
All along the avenue were people who seemed displaced among the speeding cars and very tall buildings. They walked and talked and argued in Creole and even played dominoes on their stoops. We found Tante Atie's lemon perfume in a botanica shop. On the walls were earthen jars, tin can lamps, and small statues of the beautiful mulâtresse, the goddess and loa Erzulie.
We strolled through long stretches of streets where merengue blared from car windows and children addressed one another in curses.
The outdoor subway tracks seemed to lead to the sky. Pebbles trickled down on us as we crossed under the tracks into another more peaceful neighborhood.
My mother held my hand as we walked through those quiet streets, where the houses had large yards and little children danced around sprinklers on the grass. We stopped in front of a building where the breeze was shaking a sign: MARC CHEVALIER, ESQUIRE.
When my mother rang the bell, a stocky Haitian man came to the door. He was a deep bronze color and very well dressed.
My mother kissed him on the cheek and followed him down a long hallway. On either side of us were bookshelves stacked with large books. My mother let go of my hand as we walked down the corridor. He spoke to her in Creole as he opened the door and let us into his office.
He leaned over and shook my hand.
"Marc Jolibois Francis Legrand Moravien Chevalier."
"Enchanté," I said.
I took a deep breath and looked around. On his desk was a picture of him and my mother, posed against a blue background.
"Are you working late?" my mother asked him.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"We are just walking around," my mother said. "I am showing her what is where."
"Later, we'll go someplace," he said, patting a folder on his desk.
My mother and I took a bus back to our house. We were crowded and pressed against complete strangers. When we got home, we went through my suitcase and picked out a loose-fitting, high-collared dress Tante Atie had bought me for Sunday Masses. She held it out for me to wear to dinner.
"This is what a proper young lady should wear," she said.
That night, Marc drove us to a restaurant called Miracin's in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The restaurant was at the back of an alley, squeezed between a motel and a dry cleaner.
"Miracin's has the best Haitian food in America," Marc told me as we parked under the motel sign.
"Marc is one of those men who will never recover from not eating his monman's cooking," said my mother. "If he could get her out of her grave to make him dinner, he would do it."
"My mother was the best," Marc said as he opened the car door for us.
There was a tiny lace curtain on the inside of the door. A bell rang as we entered. My mother and I squeezed ourselves between the wall and the table, our bodies wiping the greasy wallpaper clean.
Marc waved to a group of men sitting in a corner loudly talking politics. The room was packed with other customers who shouted back and forth adding their views to the discussion.
"Never the Americans in Haiti again," shouted one man. "Remember what they did in the twenties. They treated our people like animals. They abused the konbit system and they made us work like slaves."
"Roads, we need roads," said another man. "At least they gave us roads. My mother was killed in a ferry accident. If we had roads, we would not need to put crowded boats into the sea, just to go from one small village to another. A lot of you, when you go home, you have to walk from the village to your house, because there are no roads for cars."
"What about the boat people?" added a man from a table near the door. "Because of them, people can't respect us in this country. They lump us all with them."
"All the brains leave the country," Marc said, adding his voice to the mêlée.
"You are insulting the people back home by saying there's no brains there," replied a woman from a table near the back. "There are brains who stay."
"But they are crooks," Marc said, adding some spice to the argument.
"My sister is a nurse there with the Red Cross," said the woman, standing up. "You call that a crook? What have you done for your people?"
For some of us, arguing is a sport. In the marketplace in Haiti, whenever people were arguing, others would gather around them to watch and laugh at the colorful language. People rarely hit each other. They didn't need to. They could wound just as brutally by cursing your mother, calling you a sexual misfit, or accusing you of being from the hills. If you couldn't match them with even stronger accusations, then you would concede the argument by keeping your mouth shut.
Marc decided to stay out of the discussion. The woman continued attacking him, shouting that she was tired of cowardly men speaking against women who were proving themselves, women as brave as stars out at dawn.
My mother smiled at the woman's colorful words. It was her turn to stand up and defend her man, but she said nothing. Marc kept looking at her, as if waiting for my mother to argue on his behalf, but my mother picked up the menu, and ran her fingers down the list of dishes.
My mother introduced me to the waiter when he came by to take her order. He looked at us for a long time. First me, then my mother. I wanted to tell him to stop it. There was no resemblance between us. I knew it.
It was an eternity before we were served. Marc complained about his boudin when it came.
"I can still taste the animal," he said
"What do you expect?" my mother asked. "It is a pig's blood after all."
"It's not well done," he said, while raising the fork to his mouth. "It is an art to make boudin. There is a balance. At best it is a very tight kind of sausage and you would never dream of where it comes from."
"Who taught you to eat this way?" my mother asked.
"Food is a luxury," hesaid, "but we can not allow ourselves to become gluttons or get fat. Do you hear that, Sophie?"
I shook my head yes, as though I was really very interested. I ate like I had been on a hunger strike, filling myself with the coconut milk they served us in real green coconuts.
When they looked up from their plates, my mother and Marc eyed each other like there were things they couldn't say because of my presence. I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn't even see them. My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from the past.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Marc asked me. He spoke to me in a tone of voice that was used with very young children or very old animals.
"I want to do dactylo," I said, "be a secretary."
He didn't seem impressed.
"There are a lot of opportunities in this country," he said. "You should reconsider, unless of course this is the passion of your life."
"She is too young now to know," my mother said. "You are going to be a doctor," she told me.
"She still has some time to think," Marc said. "Do you have a boyfriend, Sophie?"
"She is not going to be running wild like those American girls," my mother said. "She will have a boyfriend when she is eighteen."
"And what if she falls in love sooner?" Marc pushed.
"She will put it off until she is eighteen."
We washed down our meal with watermelon juice. Tante Atie always said that eating beets and watermelon would put more red in my blood and give me more strength for hard times.
School would not start for another two months. My mother took me to work with her every day. The agency she worked for did not like it, but she had no choice but to take me with her. After all, she could not very well leave me home alone.
On her day job at the nursing home, she cleaned up after bedridden old people. Some of the people were my grandmother's age, but could neither eat nor clean themselves alone. My mother removed their bed pads and washed their underarms and legs, then fed them at lunchtime.
I spent the days in the lounge watching a soap opera while an old black lady taught me how to knit a scarf.
The night job was much better. The old lady was asleep when my mother got there and took over the shift from someone else. My mother would go into the living room and open a cot for me to sleep on. Most nights, she slept on the floor in the old lady's room in case something happened in the middle of the night.
One night near the end of the summer, I asked her to stay with me for a little while. I was tired of being alone and I was missing home.
"If the lady screams, we will hear it," I said.
"She can't scream," my mother said. "She had a stroke and she can't speak."
She made some tea and stayed with me for a while, anyway.
"I don't sleep very much at night," she said. "Otherwise this would be very hard work to do."
I felt so sorry for her. She looked very sad. Her face was cloudy with fatigue even though she kept reapplying the cream she had bought to lighten her skin.
She laid out a comforter on the floor and stretched her body across it.
"I want you to know that this will change soon when I find a job that pays both for our expenses and for my mother's and Atie's."
"I wish I could help you do one of your jobs," I said.
"But I want you to go to school. I want you to get a doctorate, or even higher than that."
"I am sorry you work so hard," I said. "I never realized you did so much."
"That's how it is. Life is no vacation. If you get your education, there are things you won't have to do."
She turned over on her back and stared direcdy into my face, something she did not do very often.
It had been a month since I had seen Marc. I wondered if he had gone away, but I didn't want to ask her in case he had and in case it was because of me.
"Am I the mother you imagined?" she asked, with her eyes half-closed.
As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. She never had to work for anything because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her. Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn.
"Was I the mother you imagined? You don't have to answer me," she said. "After you've seen me, I know the answer."
"For now I couldn't ask for better," I said.
"What do you think of Marc?" she asked, quickly changing the subject.
"I think he is smart."
"He helped me a lot in getting you here," she said, "even though he did not like the way I went about it. In Haiti, it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man."
She began the story of how she met him. She talked without stopping, as though she were talking on one of our cassettes.
She got her green card through an amnesty program. When she was going through her amnesty proceedings, she had to get a lawyer. She found him listed in a Haitian newspaper and called his office. She was extremely worried that she would not be eligible for the program. It took him a long time to convince her that this was not the case and, over that period of time, they became friends. He started taking her to restaurants, always Haitian restaurants, sometimes ones as far away as Philadelphia. They even went to Canada once to eat at a Haitian, restaurant in Montreal. Marc was old-fashioned about a lot of things and had some of the old ways. He had never married and didn't have any children back home-that he knew of-and she admired that. She was going to stay with him as long as he didn't make any demands that she couldn't fulfill.
"Are you going to marry?" I asked.
"Jesus Marie Joseph, I don't know," she said. "He is the first man I have been with in a long time."
She asked if there was a boy in Haiti that I had liked.
I said no and she smiled.
"You need to concentrate when school starts, you have to give that all your attention. You're a good girl, aren't you?"
By that she meant if I had ever been touched, if I had ever held hands, or kissed a boy.
"Yes," I said. "I have been good."
"You understand my right to ask as your mother, don't you?"
I nodded.
"When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie hated it. She used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure."
She rubbed her palm against her eyelids, as if to keep the sleep away.
"My mother stopped testing me early" she said. "Do you know why?"
I said no.
"Did Atie tell you how you were born?"
From the sadness in her voice, I knew that her story was sadder than the chunk of the sky and flower petals story that Tante Atie liked to tell.
"The details are too much," she said. "But it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you."
I did not press to find out more. Part of me did not understand. Most of me did not want to.
"I thought Atie would have told you. I did not know this man. I never saw his face. He had it covered when he did this to me. But now when I look at your face I think it is true what they say. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father."
She did not sound hurt or angry, just like someone who was stating a fact. Like naming a color or calling a name. Something that already existed and could not be changed. It took me twelve years to piece together my mother's entire story. By then, it was already too late.