It was a rocky ride to the airport. The old hunchback lowered her body onto a sack of charcoal to sleep, as though it were a feather mattress. My mother kept her eyes on the barren hills speeding outside the window. I wished there were other people with us, chatty Madan Saras, vendors, to add some teeth sucking and laughter to our journey.
My mother reached over and grabbed the cloth bells on Brigitte's booties, sadly ignoring the skeletal mares and even bonier women tugging their beasts to open markets along the route.
In the city, we were slowed down by the heavier traffic. My mother looked closely at the neon signs on the large pharmacies and American-style supermarkets. The vans hurried up and down the avenues and made sudden stops in the middle of the boulevards. My mother gasped each time we went by a large department store, shouting the names of places she had visited in years past.
The old hunchback got off at the iron market in Port-au-Prince. A few men with carts rushed to help her unload her charcoal bags from the roof.
She waved good-bye to us as the van pulled away.
"Find peace," she said, chewing the end of an unlit pipe.
"Find peace, you too." answered my mother.
Brigitte grabbed my blouse when she woke up. While I changed her diaper, my mother held my back and her head as though she was afraid that we would both crash if she let go. Brigitte slept peacefully through the rest of the trip.
"She's a good child," my mother said. "C'est comme une poupée. It's as if she's not here at all."
The airport lobby was crowded with peddlers, beggars, and travelers. We tried to keep up with the driver as he dashed towards a short line with our suitcases. My mother had no trouble at the reservation desk. Our American passports worked in our favor. She bribed the ticket seller twenty dollars to change us into seats next to one another.
I looked up at the murals on the high airport ceiling once more. The paintings of Haitian men and women selling beans, pulling carts, and looking very happy at their toil.
My mother's face looked purple on the flight. She left to go the bathroom several times. When she came back, she said nothing, just stared at the clouds out the window. The flight attendant gave her a pill, which seemed to calm her stomach.
"Is it the cancer again?" I asked.
"It's my discomfort with being in Haiti," she said. "I want to go back there only to be buried."
She picked at the white chicken they served us for lunch, while I gave Brigitte a bottle.
"You don't seem to eat much," she said.
"After I got married, I found out that I had something called bulimia," I said.
"What is that?"
"It's when you don't eat at all and then eat a whole lot- bingeing."
"How does that happen?" she said. "You are so tiny, so very petite. Why would you do that? I have never heard of a Haitian woman getting anything like that. Food, it was so rare when we were growing up. We could not waste it."
"You are blaming me for it," I said. "That is part of the problem."
"You have become very American," she said. "I am not blaming you. It is advice. I want to give you some advice. Eat. Food is good for you. It is a luxury. When I just came to this country I gained sixty pounds my first year. I couldn't believe all the different kinds of apples and ice cream. All the things that only the rich eat in Haiti, everyone could eat them here, dirt cheap."
"When I saw you for the first time, you were very thin."
"I had just gotten my breasts removed for the cancer. But before that, before the cancer. In the beginning, food was a struggle. To have so much to eat and not to eat it all. It took me a while to get used to the idea that the food was going to be there to stay. When I first came, I used to eat the way we ate at home. I ate for tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, in case I had nothing to eat for the next couple of days. I ate reserves. I would wake up and find the food still there and I would still eat ahead anyway."
"So it is not so abnormal that I have it," I said.
"You are different, but that's okay. I am different too. I want things to be good with us now."
My daughter was asleep by the time we landed in New York. My mother got our suitcases while I waited in the lobby.
"Will you spend the night at home before you go back to Providence?" she asked, struggling with our bags.
I told her I would.
"Don't you have someone you can call to pick us up?" I asked.
"The only person you have to count on is yourself," she said.
We took a cab back to Nostrand Avenue. I looked around the living room while she listened to the messages on her answering machine. There was still red everywhere, even the new sofa and love seat were a dark red velvet.
Most of her messages were from Marc. His voice sounded softer than I remembered it.
"T'es retourné?" Are you back?
"Call me as soon as you get back."
"Je t'aime."
He even sounded excited on the "I love you." She moved closer to the machine, blocking my view of it, as though he was there in the flesh and she was standing with him and they were naked together.
I walked up the red carpeted stairs to my old room. Aside from the bed, the room was completely bare. She had removed all the jazz legend posters that Joseph had given me. On the far end of the wall was the sketch of her and me at Coney Island. The sketch emphasized the merry-go-round but shrunk us in comparison, except for our hands, which seemed like the largest parts of our bodies.
My old bed no longer creaked when I sat on it. My mother had fixed the noisy springs that had made it so much fun, so musical.
Her messages still echoed from downstairs. A final declaration of love from Marc and then one of her friends, asking where she was.
I opened my old closet. It too was empty. I went to the guest room, where she had a desk and a cot to do her reading and sewing. She had said that she would make it more homelike if ever my grandmother or Tante Atie decided to come for a visit.
The bed in her reading and sewing room squealed when I sat on it. My daughter liked the sound and laughed as we bounced up and down on it.
"Some things never change," my mother said, watching us from the doorway.
"I think we'll sleep here," I said.
"And your room?"
"The mattress there is too stiff."
"You can have my room," she said.
"Don't worry. It is only for one night."
"What about the baby?"
"She'll be okay with me."
"You're wondering what I've done with your things, aren't you?" she asked.
"I don't need those things anymore."
I am sorry.
"Please don't be so sorry. I can always get others."
"I was passionately mad," she said.
"And you burnt them?"
"In a very frustrated moment, yes. I was having an anxiety attack and I took it out on those clothes."
"Better on the clothes than on yourself," I said.
"In spite of what I have done to you, you've really become an understanding woman," she said. "What do you want for dinner? We'll have no more of that bulimia. I'll cure it with some good food."
"It's not that simple."
"Then what are you supposed to do?"
"For now, I eat only when I'm hungry."
"Are you hungry now?" she asked.
"Not now."
"You didn't eat on the flight."
"Okay," I gave in. "I'll eat whatever you make."
"I need to go out after dinner," she said. "It's very important, otherwise I wouldn't lose this time with my daughter and granddaughter."
"We'll be fine."
I gave Brigitte a bath in the tub while my mother cooked spaghetti for dinner. The cooking smells of the house had changed.
We ate at the kitchen table, watching through the low windows as a little girl skipped rope under a hanging light in a neighbor's yard.
Brigitte tried to dig her pacifier into my plate. I cut off a strand of spaghetti and put it in her mouth.
"After you left home," she said, "the only thing I ate was spaghetti. I would boil it and eat it quickly before I completely lost my appetite. Everything Haitian reminded me of you."
"It didn't have to be that way."
"I didn't realize you would call my bluff. I thought you would come back to me, humiliated."
She got up and cleared the table, leaving my full plate of spaghetti in front of me.
"I have to go now," she said.
"Are you still seeing Marc?" I asked.
"I want him to have dinner with you and your husband soon."
"So you're still seeing him."
"Very much seeing him."
"Are you going to marry him?"
"I have not even told Monman and Atie about him. At this point in my life, wouldn't it be senseless for me to marry?"
She grabbed her purse and started for the door.
"The sooner I go out, the sooner I can come back. I won't be long. If my phone rings, you can pick it up."
I dialed my home number from the living room phone. The answering machine picked up after the third ring. I heard my own voice, joyfully announcing that "You've reached the Woods residence. For Joseph, Sophie, or Brigitte, please leave a message."
I hung up quickly, not sure what to say to myself. I called again a few minutes later and left a message.
"Joseph, I'm back from Haiti. I'm in Brooklyn at my mother's. Please call me."
I left her number.
He called back a few minutes later.
"What's up?" he asked, as though we were just having a casual conversation.
"I'm okay and you?"
"Fine, except my wife left me."
"I am back. I'm at my mother's," I said.
"Is Brigitte okay?" he asked. "Can I speak to her?"
Brigitte grabbed the phone with both hands when I put it against her face.
"Is she okay?" he asked.
"She's fine."
"And you?"
"Good."
"Sophie, what were you thinking?"
"I'm sorry."
"Is this how we're going to handle all our problems? I was afraid something awful had happened to you. I call at all hours and you're never there. When I rush back to Providence all I get is a note. 'Sorry I needed to go somewhere and empty out my head.'"
"I wasn't away very long."
"What if your mother hadn't gone back for you? Wouldn't you have stayed longer?"
"I am back now, aren't I?"
"And what if you feel like leaving again?" he asked.
"Can we please talk about that later?"
"Are you coming home?"
Yes.
"To stay?"
"What do you think?"
"I don't really know," he said. "What is it? What did I do, Sophie?"
"You know my problems."
"The therapy, that's helping you."
"I don't think it is."
"You'll have to start over, but you're okay."
"I don't feel okay."
"You're a beautiful woman. It's natural. You're desirable. Nothing is wrong with that."
"But we can't even be together."
"That's all right. I told you after the baby was born. As long as it takes, I will wait."
"But, what if I never get over it? What if I never get fixed?"
"You're not a machine. You can't go to a shop and get fixed. It will happen slowly. I've always told you this, haven't I? I will be there for you."
"Why didn't you answer the phone the first time?" I asked.
"I was practicing," he said. "Should I drive down and get you?"
"I told my mother I'd spend the night here with her. I'll rent a car and drive home tomorrow."
"All this traveling, isn't it rough on Brigitte?"
"She's got Caco blood. She's a strong one; she'll be fine."
"I want you to have the pediatrician check her out the minute you get home."
"I will."
"How's your mother?"
"She wants us all to have dinner with her male friend soon."
"You mean her boyfriend?"
"I suppose."
"I wouldn't have guessed that you went to Haiti. I wouldn't have known at all if it weren't for her. I was going to fly down to get you, but she wanted to find you herself."
"She didn't find me. I wasn't lost."
"You know what I mean."
"I know. My mother can be very overwhelming sometimes."
"She wanted to see you very badly. Did you work things out?"
"We talked," I said.
"Is she home? I'd like to thank her."
"You can thank her when you see her."
"And when will I see you?" he asked.
"Tomorrow."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"There will be no pressure or anything," he said. "I promise you."
He wanted to hear Brigitte one more time. I tickled her feet and she laughed on cue.
"Does she speak Creole?" he asked.
"She didn't speak very much."
"She might have said Daddy and I missed it."
"She didn't."
"Is she walking on her own?"
"We've only been away a few days."
"It seems like ages. Does she still reach for people's food?"
"She does that."
"Can I come for you? I'll drive down there right now."
"It's better for me if I find my own way back. I am the one who left. I should come back myself."
I laid out a comforter in the guest room. I put the baby down on the guest bed, surrounded by four large pillows.
My mother walked in to check on us when she came home.
"Is everything all right?" she asked.
"Fine," I said. "How was your visit?"
"I went to see Marc." Her voice cracked. "I had something to tell him."
"Was it good? Was it bad?"
"Depends on how you look at it. Did you call your husband?"
"Yes."
"He will be happy to see you." She cradled the door as though she wasn't sure what to say next. "The baby, she's okay?"
"Fine," I said.
"Well, good night."
Breakfast was plentiful: all the things that made me feel most guilty when I ate them-bacon and eggs and extremely sweet café au lait.
"I thought you would be hungry" she said, "on the road to recovery. How can you resist all this food?"
"It's not as simple as that."
I had a piece of toast while my mother gave my daughter her formula. She looked like she hadn't slept much. The eggplant shade came back to her skin, as it always did before she applied her skin bleaching creams.
"You didn't look very happy when you came home last night," I said.
"Someone like me, you see me happy, you know I'm
pretending," she said.
"Is something wrong?"
"Brace yourself. I know you are not going to believe what I have to tell you. Sophie, your mother is pregnant."
"Pregnant?" I stuttered.
"Marc and I, we have-"
"You sleep together?"
She nodded, looking ashamed.
"How far along are you?" I asked.
"A month or so."
"Are you going to marry him?"
"Jesus Marie Joseph. Am I going to do what?"
"Doesn't he want to marry you?"
"Of course he wants to marry me, but look at me. I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts. I don't know when this cancer will come back. I am not an ideal mother."
Brigitte wrapped her arms around my mother's neck as my mother burped her.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"That's what I don't know."
"What does Marc want?"
"It's my decision. Supremely, it's mine. I am very scared. I don't know. The nightmares, they're coming back."
"In Dame Marie, it didn't seem like you slept at all."
"Whenever I'm there, I feel like I sleep with ghosts. The first night I was there, I woke up pounding at my stomach."
"What are you going to do about the baby?"
"I don't know."
"You can marry Marc and have the baby."
"And repeat my great miracle of being a super mother with you? Some things one should not repeat."
"Think of it as a second chance."
"I've had the second chance of my life by being spared death from this cancer. I can't ask too much."
"Do you love Marc?"
"I think I love him. Since you left, he stays with me at night and wakes me up when I have the nightmares."
"You still won't go for help?"
"I know I should get help, but I am afraid. I am afraid it will become even more real if I see a psychiatrist and he starts telling me to face it. God help me, what if they want to hypnotize me and take me back to that day? I'll kill myself. Marc, he saves my life every night, but I am afraid he gave me this baby that's going to take that life away."
"You can't say that."
"The nightmares. I thought they would fade with age, but no, it's like getting raped every night. I can't keep this baby."
"It must have been much harder then but you kept me."
"When I was pregnant with you, Manman made me drink all kinds of herbs, vervain, quinine, and verbena, baby poisons. I tried beating my stomach with wooden spoons. I tried to destroy you, but you wouldn't go away."
She reached over and handed Brigitte back to me.
"When I was carrying you, you were brave," she said. "You wanted to live. You wanted to taste salt, as my mother would say. You were going to kill me before I killed you."
– "What are you going to do about this one?"
"She's a fighter too. She's already fighting me."
"Do you know that it's a girl?"
"I don't know. I never want to know. I think it's a girl because you ended up being a girl. I can't go through night after night of the next nine months living these nightmares that same way again."
"Are you going to take it out?"
She crossed herself.
"Jesus Marie Joseph. Every time I even think of that, the nightmares get worse. It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech. Last night after I talked to Marc about letting it go, I felt the skin getting tight on my belly and for a whole minute I couldn't breathe. I had to lie down and say I had changed my mind before I could breathe normally."
"Have you seen a doctor?"
"I know, these things, they sound crazy to me too, but maybe that's what it wants, to drive me crazy."
"You should talk to someone. Someone other than Marc, someone outside the whole situation."
"I am trying to keep one step ahead of a mental hospital. They would probably put me away thinking that I might hurt both myself and this child."
"When you and Marc are together, do you have the nightmares then?"
"I pretend; it is like eating grapefruit. I was tired of being alone. If that's what I had to do to have someone wake me up at night, I would do it. But never in my life did I think I could get pregnant."
"You didn't use birth control?"
She laughed through her tears.
"I would have never imagined we could be having this conversation. Maybe if I spend more time with you, I will want this baby. I would want this child if the nightmares weren't so bad. I can't take them. One morning, I will wake up dead."
"Don't say that."
"You will leave today," she said.
"I can stay longer if you need me."
"Your husband, I know he will be anxious to see you."
"I can ask him to drive down and he will stay with us for a couple of days."
"Non non. I'll deal with this. Marc will come and stay here with me."
"Why don't you just marry him?"
"Because you don't marry someone to escape something that's inside your head. One night, I woke up and found myself choking Marc. This is before I knew I was pregnant. One day he'll get tired of it and leave me."
"What about the baby?"
"You've asked the same question a million ways; you have a camaraderie with this child. I'll have it. That's what you want to hear."
"At least this child will know its father."
"I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next."
She lent me her new car for the trip to Providence, a guarantee that I would come back to visit her. She tugged at Brigitte's hat and kissed her forehead as I strapped Brigitte into the back seat.
"You forgive me, don't you?" she asked.
I leaned over and kissed her stomach.
"It will be a beautiful baby," I said.
"Don't call it a baby."
I kept seeing her face as I drove into the New England landscape. I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.
After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother's anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had "caught" from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn't both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl.
I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot, perhaps a bit more than other children. The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.
I pulled into the driveway of our house shortly after noon. Joseph nearly fell down the steps as he rushed towards the car. I screeched to a halt, a few inches shy of crashing into him.
He tapped on the back window, trying to get Brigitte's attention. She looked a bit disoriented when he raised her out of the seat.
"And the child's mother, does she get a hug?"
He pressed his lips down on mine.
"Bienvenue," he said, "Welcome back."
He ran up the steps with Brigitte, leaving me to carry my own bag.
The sun shining through the window colored our wooden floors the hue of Haitian dirt. Joseph threw Brigitte up in the air, both of them laughing as he caught her.
"Tell Daddy all about Haiti," he said.
Brigitte pursed her wet lips as though she wanted to.
"Are you glad to see Daddy?" He propped her up on the sofa.
"Are you glad to see her mommy?" I asked, sitting next to him.
"It's nice to see you, but I want to kill you."
His free hand traveled up and down my blouse.
"Did you miss me?" I asked.
"Sometimes."
The bedroom was messy. There were sheets piled on top of one another and pillows thrown randomly about. I held the sheets up to my face and sniffed them for another woman's scent. The mattress smelled like his socks.
"You see I need you to put some order in my life," he said.
"You need a maid," I said.
He twirled the duck mobile on the baby's crib, which we kept next to our bed.
"How was your trip?" he asked.
"My grandmother was preparing her funeral," I said. "It's a thing at home. Death is journey. My grandmother thinks she's at the end of hers."
"You called it home?" he said. "Haiti."
"What else would I call it?
"You have never called it that since we've been together. Home has always been your mother's house, that you could never go back to."
I searched through the pile of dishes in the kitchen sink, trying to find a clean glass for a drink of water. In the nursery were the large drums he sometimes used in performance.
"I was calling the ancestral spirits, asking them to make you come back to me," he said.
"Your prayers were answered."
I went to the living room and crashed on the sofa. It suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by my own life, my own four walls, my own husband and child. Here I was Sophie-mâitresse de la maison. Not a guest or visiting daughter, but the mother and sometimes, more painfully, the wife.
"We'll deal with this, won't we?" asked Joseph, pushing his tongue in my left ear. "I need to know that we can get through all this."
In the living room was a fuzzy picture of a very fat me lying naked with a newborn on my stomach. Joseph had been too excited to focus when we brought the baby home that first night. All I kept thinking was, Thank God it was a Caesarean section. The tearing from a natural birth would have totally destroyed me.
I reached over and tapped Brigitte's nose.
"I need to know. Did you leave on impulse or had you been planning to go for a long time?" he asked.
"We weren't connecting physically."
"Did you find an aphrodisiac?"
"I don't need an aphrodisiac. I need a little more understanding."
"I do understand. You are usually reluctant to start, but after a while you give in. You seem to enjoy it."
I called Brigitte's pediatrician to make an appointment. I gave Brigitte her bath, and laid her down while Joseph tapped a few keys on his saxophone.
I called my mother, but she did not pick up the phone. Her answering machine did not pick up either. I changed into a sweatsuit to go to bed. Joseph came to bed in a thick terry-cloth robe.
"If our skins touch," he said, "I won't be able to resist you."
We held each other while trying to make out the plot of an old black-and-white movie. It was about lovers, a young girl and her painting instructor.
At midnight, I called my mother.
She sounded anxious when she answered.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Marc is here with me," she said.
She told me she loved me and hung up the phone.
Joseph rocked me in his arms while we listened to the cooing sounds Brigitte made in her sleep.
"My mother is pregnant," I said.
"You will finally have a sibling, a kindred spirit."
It felt better when I thought of it that way.
"Brigitte will be older than her aunt," he said. "Isn't that nice?"
Our pediatrician, Karen, was happy to see Brigitte.
She was an middle-aged Indian woman who had sewn me up in the emergency room at the Providence hospital and had subsequendy seen me through my pregnancy.
"Looks like you've lost weight," she said.
I held Brigitte's feet while she examined her.
I nearly dropped to my knees with gratitude when she told me that Brigitte was okay.
"We'll follow the regular schedule for checkups," she said, filling out her chart.
"Only a mountain can crush a Haitian woman," I said.
"In that case, your daughter has proven herself a real Haitian woman," Karen said.
"Tell me how it was," she asked as I dressed Brigitte after the physical. "You were going to the provinces, weren't you? There are warnings against all kinds of things in places like that."
"It is somewhat dry where I went. There are not a lot of swamps for malaria or any of those things you warned me about. I was careful about the baby's water. We always boiled it for a long time."
"She looks good so far, but keep an eye on her and call me if anything unusual happens. If you go to Haiti again anytime soon, leave your angel behind. I am not sure there's enough Haitian in her to survive another mountain."
I called Joseph from the hospital to tell him that everything was all right. When Brigitte and I came home, there was a large dinner waiting for us. Fried chicken, glazed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Everything came frozen out of a box, but still managed to retain some flavor.
We decided to start giving Brigitte a few more adventurous solids. I pureed some sweet potatoes and boiled some carrots and fed her small spoonfuls. I ate everything on my plate, forcing myself to resist the urge to purge my body.
After dinner, I called my mother.
"When are you going to come and have dinner with Marc and me?"
"We'll come as soon as we can," I said.
"How's the baby?"
"Good," I said, "How's yours?"
"Don't call it that," she said. "I haven't decided if I will follow through. It's fighting me though. More and more of a fighter every day."
"Is Marc there?"
"Yes, but he can sleep and I can't. I am watching television. I don't know. It's really hard. You know what happens now. I look at every man and I see him."
"Marc?"
"Non non," she whispered. "Him. Le rioleur, the rapist. I see him everywhere."
"Have you told Marc?"
"He thinks my body is in shock from getting pregnant after all the cancer treatment."
"You should tell someone."
"You cannot report a ghost to the police."
Joseph's hands were creeping up my arm and going through the top of my nightgown.
"I tried to get rid of it," she said, "Today. But they wanted me to think about it for twenty-four hours. When I thought of taking it out, it got more horrifying. That's when I began seeing him. Over and over. That man who raped me."
"We'll come and visit you this weekend," I said.
"I want Joseph to meet Marc."
I felt his other hand creeping up my thighs, his hair smelling like aftershave as his face approached mine.
"Manman, I have to go," I said. "We'll visit with you on the weekend. Maybe Saturday."
"Saturday will be a wonderful day then," she said.
He reached over and pulled my body towards his. I closed my eyes and thought of the Marassa, the doubling. I was lying there on that bed and my clothes were being peeled off my body, but really I was somewhere else. Finally, as an adult, I had a chance to console my mother again. I was lying in bed with my mother. I was holding her and fighting off that man, keeping those images out of her head. I was telling her that it was all right. That it was not a demon in her stomach, that it was a child, like I was once a child in her body. I was telling her that I would never let anyone put her away in a mental hospital, that I would take care of her. I would visit her every night in my doubling and, from my place as a shadow on the wall, I would look after her and wake her up as soon as the nightmares started, just like I did when I was home.
I kept thinking of my mother, who now wanted to be my friend. Finally I had her approval. I was okay. I was safe. We were both safe. The past was gone. Even though she had forced it on me, of her sudden will, we were now even more than friends. We were twins, in spirit. Marassas.
"Can we visit my mother this weekend?" I asked Joseph.
"Whatever you want." He was panting.
"You were very good," he said.
"I kept my eyes closed so the tears wouldn't slip out."
I waited for him to fall asleep, then went to the kitchen. I ate every scrap of the dinner leftovers, then went to the bathroom, locked the door, and purged all the food out of my body.
There were three of us in my sexual phobia group. We gave it that name because that's what Rena-the therapist who introduced us-liked to call it.
Buki, an Ethiopian college student, had her clitoris cut and her labia sewn up when she was a girl. Davina, a middle-aged Chicana, had been raped by her grandfather for ten years.
We met at Davina's house. She was the only one of us with a place to herself. Buki lived in a college dorm and, of course, I lived with Joseph.
Davina had a whole room in her house set aside for our meetings. When we came in, we changed into long white dresses that Buki had sewn for us. We wrapped our hair in white scarves that I had bought. As we changed in the front room, I showed them the statue of Erzulie that my grandmother had given me. Davina told me to take it into the room myself, as I pondered what it meant in terms of my family.
The air in our room smelled like candles and incense. We sat on green heart-shaped pillows that Davina had made. The color green stood for life and growth.
We bowed our heads and recited a serenity prayer.
God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."
I laid the Erzulie next to our other keepsakes, the pine cones and seashells we collected on our solitary journeys.
"I am a beautiful woman with a strong body." Davina led the affirmations.
"We are beautiful women with strong bodies." We echoed her uncertain voice.
"Because of my distress, I am able to understand when others are in deep pain."
"Because of our distress, we are able to understand when others are in deep pain."
I heard my voice rise above the others.
"Since I have survived this, I can survive anything."
Buki read us a letter she was going to send to the dead grandmother who had cut off all her sexual organs and sewn her up, in a female rite of passage.
There were tears rolling down her face as she read the letter.
"Dear Taiwo. You sliced open my soul and then you told me I can't show it to anyone else. You took a great deal away from me. Because of you, I now carry with me an untouchable wound."
Sobbing, she handed me the piece of paper. I continued reading the letter for her.
"Because of you, I feel like a helpless cripple. I sometimes want to kill myself. All because of what you did to me, a child who could not say no, a child who could not defend herself. It would be easy to hate you, but I can't because you are part of me. You are me."
We each wrote the name of our abusers in a piece of paper, raised it over a candle, and watched as the flames consumed it. Buki blew up a green balloon. We went to Davina's backyard and watched as she released it in the dark. It was hard to see where the balloon went, but at least it had floated out of our hands.
I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free. I didn't feel guilty about burning my mother's name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too.
It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames.
When I came home from the meeting, I found Joseph sitting in the living room with Brigitte on his lap.
"Listen to this." He grabbed her and jumped up. "Say it again, pumpkin."
"Say what again?" I asked.
"She said Dada."
At his prodding, Brigitte said something that sounded like Dada.
"Say it again." We were both cheering.
Her eyes lit up as she watched us.
"Sweetie, say it again, please," I said, secretly rooting for "Mama."
She clapped her hands, keeping up with our excitement.
"Oh please, honey, say it again. Dada. Dada."
"Mama. Mama. Manman."
She said Dada and laughed.
Joseph jumped up in the air and simulated a high five.
"She's saving Mama for when she can really talk," I said. "Dada is such a random sound."
"You're green with envy and you know it."
I went to the kitchen to make myself some tea.
"How was the meeting?" he asked.
"Good."
"Your mother called. She says she urgently needs to talk to you."
The baby was saying Dada over and over, trying to capture all his attention.
"Your therapist called too," he said. "She wanted to know if you'd be coming for your visit tomorrow. I said yes."
I let him play with the baby while I went in to call my mother.
"Marc is downstairs making me some eggs," she said.
"Are you all right?" I asked. "Joseph said it was urgent."
"It was an urgent feeling. I just wanted to hear your voice."
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"You think it's unhealthy, don't you? My sudden dependence on you."
"As long as you're all right."
"How is my granddaughter?"
"Fine. How about you? How is your situation?"
"I can't sleep. Are you coming this weekend?"
"On Saturday," I said.
"I am really happy we have this time again."
"Me too."
"I got a telegram from Manman today. She said everything is ready now for her funeral. She's glad about that."
"Did you tell her that you're pregnant?"
"I'll tell her when I'm further along. I don't want her to worry about me going crazy again."
"You sure you're feeling all right?"
"Better. Maybe this child, she's getting used to me. Man-man tells me she's worried Atie will die from chagrin. Louise left a big hole in her. It's sad."
"She loved her."
"Atie will live. She always has."
I heard Marc's voice offering her some scrambled eggs.
"I'll wait for you on Saturday," she said.
"Bye, Mama."
"Bye, my star."
I sat up and wrote Tante Atie a letter. Now that she was reading, I wanted to send her something that only her eyes could see, something that she didn't have to have other people listen to. I imagined her standing there next to me, as we reminisced about the konbit potlucks, the lotteries we almost never won, and our dead relatives who we had such a kinship to, as though they were our restless spirits, shadows wandering in the darkness as our bodies slipped into bed.
My therapist was a gorgeous black woman who was an initiated Santeria priestess. She had done two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, which showed in the brightly colored prints, noisy bangles, and open sandals she wore.
Her clinic was in a penthouse overlooking the Seekonk River. "You pulled a sudden disappearing act last week," she said as I looked over the collection of Brazilian paintings and ceremonial African masks on her walls.
She put out a cigarette while looking through my file. "Let's go for a stroll so you can tell me all about it."
We usually had our sessions in the woods by the river.
"So what is happening in your life?" she asked, waving a stick towards a stray dog behind us.
I told her about my sudden trip to Haiti, the trip that had caused me to miss my appointment the week before. I told her about my mother coming for me and my finding out that my grandmother, and her mother before her, had all been tested.
"I thought we were going to do some more work before you could actually try confrontational therapy," she said.
"I wasn't thinking about it as confrontational therapy. I just felt like going. And since Joseph was away I took advantage and went."
"I know a woman who went back to Brazil and took a jar full of dust from her mother's grave so she would always have her mother line with her. Did you have a chance to reclaim your mother line?"
"My mother line was always with me," I said. "No matter what happens. Blood made us one."
"You're telling me you never hated your mother."
"I felt a lot of pain."
"Did you hate her?" she asked.
"Maybe hate is not the right word."
"We all hate people at one time or another. If we can hate ourselves, why can't we hate other people?"
"I can't say I hated her."
"You don't want to say it. Why not?" she asked.
"Because it wouldn't be right, and maybe because it wouldn't be true."
"Maybe? You hesitate-"
"She wants to be good to me now," I said, "and I want to accept it."
"That's good."
"I want to forget the hidden things, the conflicts you always want me to deal with. I want to look at her as someone I am meeting again for the first time. An acquaintance who I am hoping will become a friend. I grew up believing that people could be in two places at once. Meeting for the first time again is not such a hard concept."
We watched a crew team paddling across the river.
"Did you ask your grandmother why they test their daughters?" she asked.
"To preserve their honor."
"Did you express your anger?"
"I tried, but it was very hard to be angry at my grandmother. After all she was only doing something that made her feel like a good mother. My mother too."
"And how was it, seeing your mother?"
"She is pregnant now."
"So she is in a relationship."
"It's the same man she was involved with when I was there."
"Are they married?"
No.
"They sleep together?"
"Obviously."
"Did she sleep with him when you were home?" she asked.
"She would never have a man in the house when I was home. It would be a bad example."
"How does it make you feel knowing that she slept with someone? Don't you feel betrayed that after all these years, she does the very thing that she didn't want you to do?"
"I can't feel mad anymore."
A jogging couple bumped my shoulders as they raced by.
"Why aren't you mad anymore?" she asked.
"I feel sorry for her."
"Why?"
"The baby, it's roused up a lot of old emotions in my mother."
"What kinds of emotions?"
"Maybe emotions is not the word. It's brought back images of the rape."
"Like you did."
"Yes," I said. "Like I did."
"What about your father? Have you given him more thought?"
"I would rather not call him my father."
"We will have to address him soon. When we do address him, I'll have to ask you to confront your feelings about him in some way, give him a face."
"It's hard enough to deal with, without giving him a face."
"Your mother never gave him a face. That's why he's a shadow. That's why he can control her. I'm not surprised she's having nightmares. This pregnancy is bringing feelings to the surface that she had never completely dealt with.
You will never be able to connect with your husband until you say good-bye to your father."
"I am seeing my mother this weekend," I said.
"You are establishing relations again."
"Joseph and I are going to visit her so we can get to know her friend."
"You mean her lover, the father of her child."
"Yes."
"Is it hard for you to imagine your mother sexually?"
"I've never really tried."
"Do it now."
"Do what?"
"Imagine her in the sexual act," she said.
I tried to imagine my mother, wincing and clenching her teeth as the large shadow of a man mounted her. She didn't like it. She even looked like she was crying, even though her lips were saying things that made him think otherwise.
"Do you imagine that it's the same for her as it is for you?"
"I imagine that she tries to be brave."
"Like you."
"Maybe."
"Do you think you'll ever stop thinking of what you and Joseph do as being brave?"
"I am his wife. There are certain things I need to do to keep him."
"The fear of abandonment. You always have that in the back of your mind, don't you?"
"I feel like my daughter is the only person in the world who won't leave me."
"Do you understand now why your mother was so adamantly against your being with a man, a much older man at that? It is only natural, dear heart. She also felt that you were the only person who would never leave her."
We stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Two swans were floating along trying to catch up with one another. The crew team was rowing towards the edge of the river.
"During your visit, did you go to the spot where your mother was raped?" Rena asked. "In the thick of the cane field. Did you go to the spot?"
"No, not really."
"What does that mean?"
"I ran past it."
"You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you'll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts."
My mother met us on the stoop outside the house. She was wearing a large tent dress with long puffy sleeves. She looked calmer, rested. Her skin was evened out with a powdered mahogany glow.
Joseph had driven in our station wagon, while I brought Brigitte in my mother's car.
"Ca va byen?" My mother kissed Joseph four times on the cheek. "I brought your wife and daughter back in one piece."
She took the baby from my arms and shoved Marc forward to introduce himself.
Marc was a bit fatter than I remembered. He was squeezed into a small gray jacket and a large pair of pants held up by suspenders.
Marc recited his full name as he shook Joseph's hand.
"Marc has a lot of the old ways," my mother said to Joseph.
The kitchen smelled like fried fish, boiled cabbage, and mayonnaise.
"What have you been up to?" my mother said, curling Brigitte up in her arms. Brigitte reached up to grab my mother's very short hair.
"She said Dada," Joseph announced proudly.
"Even when she grows up and gets a doctorate," Marc said, "it will not count as much."
Marc wrapped an apron around his waist and turned over the fish in the skillet.
My mother took Joseph on a tour of the house, the tour he had never gotten. He followed her obediently, beaming.
She moved us into the backyard where she had placed her picnic table near her hibiscus patch. She stood over Joseph's shoulder, to show him how to sprinkle chopped pickled peppers on his plantains.
"What kind of music do you do?" Marc asked Joseph as we sat down to eat.
"I try to do all kinds of music," Joseph said. "I think music should speak not only to the ear, but mostly to the soul."
"That's a very vague answer," my mother said.
"I think they want to know if you get paid," I said.
"We're not being as graceless as that," Marc said. "I was thinking more in terms of merengue, calypso, soka, samba?"
"Is there money in it?" asked my mother.
"I do okay," Joseph said. "I play with friends when they need someone, but trust me, I have a little nest egg saved up."
My mother winked for only my eyes to see. She had prepared for this, was set to make Joseph love her. "I have something to tell you," she said to me. "I have made a decision."
Turning back to Joseph, my mother asked, "Is that how you bought your place in Providence?"
"Sure is," Joseph said.
"I really was asking more about your opinion of music," Marc insisted.
"We hear you," said my mother.
"He has much of the old ways," she whispered again in my ear.
Marc pretended not to hear.
"Where are your roots?" my mother asked Joseph as she fed plantain chunks to the baby.
"I was born in the South," he said. "Louisiana."
"They speak some kind of Creole there," she said.
"I know it," he said. "Sometimes I try to talk the little I know with my wife, your daughter."
"I feel like I could have been Southern," my mother said.
"We're all African," said Marc.
"Non non, me in particular," said my mother. "I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?" she said turning to Marc.
Marc shrugged.
"I try to get him to church," my mother said, "just to listen to them, but he won't go. You tell him, Joseph. Tell this old Haitian, with his old ways, about a Negro spiritual."
"They're like prayers," Joseph said, "hymns that the slaves used to sing. Some were happy, some sad, but most had to do with freedom, going to another world. Sometimes that other world meant home, Africa. Other times, it meant Heaven, like it says in the Bible. More often it meant freedom."
Joseph began to hum a spiritual.
Oh Mary, don't you weep!
"That's a Negro spiritual," said my mother.
"It sounds like vaudou song," said Marc. "He just described a vaudou song. Erzulie, don't you weep," he sang playfully.
"I told you I could have been Southern." My mother laughed.
"Do you have a favorite Negro spiritual?" Joseph asked my mother.
"I sure do."
"Give us a rendition," urged Marc.
"You'll regret asking," said my mother.
"All of you will help me if I stumble." She rocked Brigitte's body to the solemn lift of her voice.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
A long ways from home.
We all clapped when she was done. Brigitte, too.
"I want that sung at my funeral," my mother said. "My mother's got me thinking this way; you've got to plan for everything."
The day ended too soon for my mother. We never got a moment alone for her to tell me what she had decided. That night as we said good-bye, she wrapped her arms around my body and would not let go.
"She will come back," Marc said, separating us.
"Us Caco women," she said, "when we're happy, we're very happy, but when we're sad, the sadness is deep."
On the ride back to Providence, Joseph kept singing my mother's spiritual, adding some bebop to the melody, as though to reverse the sad tone.
"Your mother's good folk," he said. "I always understood why she didn't like me. She didn't want to give up a gem like you."
My mother had left two messages on our machine by the time we got home.
"We had a nice day, pa vrè?" she said when I called back. "Did Joseph enjoy himself? The two of you, you go very well together. Marc thought he was old for you, but he liked meeting him anyway."
She stopped to catch her breath.
"Are you really okay?" I asked.
"It was wonderful to see you."
"The nightmares, have they stopped?"
"I didn't tell you what I had decided. I am going to get it out of me."
"When did you decide?"
"Last night when I heard it speak to me."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. I am sure, it spoke to me. It has a man's voice, so now I know it's not a girl. I am going to get it out of me. I am going to get it out of me, as the stars are my witness."
"Don't do anything rash."
"Everywhere I go, I hear it. I hear him saying things to me. You tintin, malpròp. He calls me a filthy whore. I never want to see this child's face. Your child looks like Manman. This child, I will never look into its face."
"But it's Marc's child."
"What if there is something left in me and when the child comes out it has that other face?"
"You mean what if it looks like me?"
"No, that is not what I mean."
"Marc has no children; he must want some."
"If he wants some badly enough, he can have some."
I heard Marc asking who she was talking to.
"I'll call you tomorrow," she said before hanging up. "Pray to the Virgin Mother for me."
I had a late afternoon session on the bare floor of Rena's office. Through her smoked French doors, the river looked a breathless blue.
"How was the visit with your mother?" she asked.
"I am very worried about her state of mind," I said. "It was like two people. Someone who was trying to hold things together and someone who was falling apart."
"You feel she was only pretending to be happy."
"Deep inside, yes."
"Why?"
"That's always how she's survived. She feels that she has to stay one step ahead of a mental institution so she has to hold it together at least on the surface."
"What has she decided to do with the baby?"
"She is probably taking it out as we speak."
"What do you mean she's taking it out?"
"Losing it. Dropping it. I can't say it."
"An abortion?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"She says she hears the baby saying things to her. He says hurtful things, this baby."
"Your mother hears a voice?"
"Yes."
"Has she always heard voices?"
"When I lived with her, it was just the nightmares, her reliving the experience over and over again."
"And now she hears these voices?"
"Yes."
"If she's afraid of therapy, perhaps your mother should have an exorcism."
"An exorcism?"
"I am not joking. She should have a release ritual. The kind of things you do with the sexual phobia group. You can help."
"She is afraid to deal with anything that would make this more real."
"It has to become frighteningly real before it can fade."
"It's always been real to her," I said. "Twenty-five years of being raped every night. Could you live with that? This child, it makes the feelings stronger. It takes her back to a time when she was carrying me. Even the time when she was living with me. That's why she is trying to get the child out of her body."
"I think she needs an exorcism. Has she told her lover that she wants to abort?"
"I wish you wouldn't call him that."
"Why not?"
"It sounds-" I hesitated.
"Sexual?"
"Yes."
"Too sexual to be linked with your mother? I think you have a Madonna image of your mother. Part of you feels that this child is a testimonial of her true sexuality. It's a child she conceived willingly. Maybe even she is not able to face that."
"I just want her to be okay," I said.
"Does her lover know that she doesn't want the baby?"
"The way my mother acts, he probably think it's the best thing that's ever happened to her. I don't think she's ever really explained to him about how I was born."
"Do you think he would want her to have the baby?"
"Not if he knew what it was doing to her. I don't think so."
"And you think she's aborting right now?"
"Before I came here, I called her and she wasn't there. I called her at work and she wasn't there."
"So she's going to do this on her own. Without her lover."
"I think she'll lose her mind if she doesn't."
"I really think you should convince her to seek help."
"I can't convince her," I said. "She's always thought that she was crazy already, that she had just fooled everybody."
"It's very dangerous for her to go on like she is."
"I know."
I drove past Davina's house. She was at work, but I had my own key to our room. I went in and sat in the dark and drank some verbena tea by candlelight. The flame's shadows swayed across Erzulie's face in a way that made it seem as though she was crying.
On the way out, I saw Buki's balloon. It was in a tree, trapped between two high branches. It had deflated into a little ball the size of a green apple.
We thought it had floated into the clouds, even hoped that it had traveled to Africa, but there it was slowly dying in a tree right above my head.
Joseph was on the couch, rocking the baby, when I came home. She was sleeping in his arms, with her index and middle fingers in her mouth. Joseph took her to our room and put her down without saying a word. He came back and pulled me down on the sofa. He picked up the answering machine and played me a message from Marc.
"Sophie, je t'en prie, call me. It's about your mother."
Marc's voice was quivering, yet cold. It seemed as though he was purposely forcing himself to be casual.
I grabbed Joseph's collar, almost choking him.
"Let's not jump to any wild conclusions," he said.
"I am wondering why she is not calling me herself," I said.
"Maybe she's had a complication with the pregnancy."
"She was going to have an abortion today."
"Keep calm and dial."
The phone rang endlessly. Finally her answering machine picked up. "S'il vous plait, laissez-moi un message. Please leave me a message." Impeccable French and English, both painfully mastered, so that her voice would never betray the fact that she grew up without a father, that her mother was merely a peasant, that she was from the hills.
We sat by the phone all night, alternating between dialing and waiting.
Finally at six in the morning, Marc called.
His voice was laden with pain.
"Sophie. Je t'en prie. I am sorry."
He was sobbing.
'What is it?" I asked.
'Calme-toi. Listen to me."
'Listen to what?"
'I am sorry," he said.
'Put my mother on the phone. What did you do?"
'It's not me."
'Please, Marc. Put my mother on the phone. Where is she? Is she in the hospital?"
He was sobbing. Joseph pressed his face against mine. He was trying to listen.
"Is my mother in the hospital?"
"Non. She is rather in the morgue."
I admired the elegance in the way he said it. Now he would have to say it to my grandmother, who had lost her daughter, and to my Tante Atie, who had lost her only sister.
"Am I hearing you right?" I asked.
"She is gone."
Joseph pressed harder against me.
"What happened?" I was shouting at Marc.
"I woke up in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I wake up and she's not there, so I was not worried. Two hours passed and I woke up again, I went to the bathroom and she was lying there."
"Lying there? Lying where? Talk faster, will you?"
"In blood. She was lying there in blood."
"Did she slip and fall?"
"It was very hard to see."
"What was very hard to see?"
"She had a mountain of sheets on the floor. She had prepared this."
"What?"
"She stabbed her stomach with an old rusty knife. I counted, and they counted again in the hospital. Seventeen times."
"Are you sure?"
"It was seventeen times."
"How could you sleep?" I shouted.
"She was still breathing when I found her," he said. "She even said something in the ambulance. She died there in the ambulance."
"What did she say in the ambulance?"
"Mwin pa kapab enkò. She could not carry the baby. She said that to the ambulance people."
"How could you sleep?" I was screaming at him.
"I did the best I could," he said. "I tried to save her. Don't you know how I wanted this child?"
"Why did you give her a child? Didn't you know about the nightmares?" I asked.
"You knew better about the nightmares," he said, "but where were you?"
I crashed into Joseph's arms when I hung up the phone.
It was as if the world started whirling after that, as though I had no control over anything. Everything raced by like a speeding train and I, breathlessly, sprang after it, trying to keep up.
I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and threw a few things inside.
"I am going with you," Joseph said.
"What about Brigitte? Who will look after her? I can't take her into this."
"Let's sit down and think of some way."
I didn't have time to sit and think.
"You stay. I go. It's that simple."
He didn't insist anymore. He helped me pack my bag. We woke up the baby and he drove me to the bus station.
We held each other until the bus was about to pull out.
I gave Brigitte a kiss on the forehead.
"Mommy will bring you a treat from the market."
She began to cry as I boarded the bus. Joseph took her away quickly, not looking back.
Marc was waiting in the house in Brooklyn when I got there. Somehow I expected there to be detectives, and flashing cameras, but this was New York after all. People killed themselves every day. Besides, he was a lawyer. He knew people in power. He simply had to tell them that my mother was crazy.
There was a trail of dried blood, down from the stairs to the living room and out to the street where they must have loaded her into the ambulance. The bathroom floor was spotless, however, except for the pile of bloody sheets stuffed in trash bags in the corner.
"Sophie, will you sit down?" Marc said, following me as I raced in and out of every room in the house. "I need to tell you how things will proceed."
I rushed into my mother's room. It was spotless and her bed was properly made. In her closet, everything was in some shade of red, her favorite color since she'd left Haiti.
"I was cleared beyond any doubt in your mother's accident. I have used what influence I have to make this very expeditious for all of us. I have contacted a funeral home. They will get her from the morgue and they will ship her to a funeral home in Dame Marie."
If I died mute, I would never speak to him again. I would never open my mouth and address a word to him.
"We can see her in the funeral home," he said. "They will ship her tomorrow night. That's the earliest possible. They have a service. They notify the family. I have already had your family notified."
How dare he? How could he? To send news that could kill my grandmother, by telegram.
"You can sleep at my house until the flight tomorrow night."
I had no intention of going to his house. I was going to spend the night right there, in my mother's house.
He did not leave me. He stayed in the living room and ate Chinese food while I crouched in the fetal position in the large bed in my mother's room.
Joseph let me listen to Brigitte's giggles when I called home. I heard a voice say Mama, but I knew it was his. She was still saying Dada, even though I knew he had tried to coach her.
"One day we'll all take a trip together," he said.
"This trip I must make alone."
"We are waiting for you," he said, "we love you very much. Don't stay there too long."
I lay in my mother's bed all night fighting evil thoughts: It is your fault that she killed herself in the first place. Your face took her back again. You should have stayed with her. If you were here, she would not have gotten pregnant.
When I woke up the next day, Marc was asleep on the sofa.
"Would you pick something for your mother to be buried in?" he asked.
He spoke to me the way older men addressed orphan children, with pity in his voice. If we had been in Haiti, he might have given me a penny to ease my pain.
I picked out the most crimson of all my mother's clothes, a bright red, two-piece suit that she was too afraid to wear to the Pentecostal services.
It was too loud a color for a burial. I knew it. She would look like a Jezebel, hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them. She was the only woman with that power. It was too bright a red for burial. If we had an open coffin at the funeral home, people would talk. It was too loud a color for burial, but I chose it. There would be no ostentation, no viewing, neither pomp nor circumstance. It would be simple like she had wanted, a simple prayer at the grave site and some words of remembrance.
"Saint Peter won't allow your mother into Heaven in that," he said.
"She is going to Guinea," I said, "or she is going to be a star. She's going to be a butterfly or a lark in a tree. She's going to be free."
He looked at me as though he thought me as insane as my mother.
At my mother's dressing, in the Nostrand Avenue funeral home, her face was a permanent blue. Her eyelids were stretched over her eyes as though they had been sewn shut.
I called Joseph one last time before we got on the plane. He put the baby on the phone to wish me Bon Voyage. This time she said Manman. When I said good-bye, she began to cry.
"She feels your absence," Joseph said.
"Does she sleep?" I asked.
"Less now," he said.
My mother was the heavy luggage that went under the plane. I did not sit next to Marc on the plane. There were enough seats so that I did not have to. There were not many people going to Haiti, only those who were in the same circumstances as we were, going to weddings or funerals.
At the airport in Port-au-Prince, he spun his head around to look at everything. It had been years since he had left. He was observing, watching for changes: In the way the customs people said Merci and au revoir when you bribed them not to search your bags. The way the beggars clanked the pennies in their tin cans. The way the van drivers nearly killed one another on the airport sidewalk to reach you. The way young girls dashed forward and offered their bodies.
He had been told by the funeral home that my mother's body would follow us to the Cathedral Chapel in Dame Marie. A funeral home driver would pick her up. As soon as she got there, we could claim her and bury her, that same day, if that's what we wanted. The chauffeur arrived promptly and gave us a ride, in the hearse, to Dame Marie.
I felt my body stiffen as we walked through the maché in Dame Marie. Marc had his eyes wide open, watching. He looked frightened of the Macoutes, one of whom was sitting in Louise's stand selling her last colas.
People greeted me with waves and smiles on the way to my grandmother's house. It was as though I had lived there all my life.
Marc was straining to take in the sights. We walked silently. Louise's shack looked hollow and empty when we went by. In the cane fields, the men were singing about a mermaid who married a fisherman and became human.
My grandmother was sitting on the porch with her eyes on the road. I wondered how long she had been sitting there. For hours, through the night, since she had heard? We ran to each other. I told her everything. What I knew from him, where I blamed myself, and where he had blamed me.
She knew, she said, she knew even before she was told. When you let your salt lay in the sun, you are always looking out for rain. She even knew that my mother was pregnant. Remember, all of us have the gift of the unseen. Tante Atie was sitting on the steps with a black scarf around her head. She was clinging to the porch rail, now with two souls to grieve for.
Marc introduced himself to my grandmother, reciting his whole name.
"Dreams move the wind," said my grandmother. "I knew, but she never spoke of you."
We decided to have the funeral the next morning, just among ourselves. That night we made a large pot of tea, which we shared with only Eliab and the other wandering boys. We did not call it a wake, but we played cards and drank ginger tea, and strung my wedding ring along a thread while singing a festive wake song: Ring sways to Mother. Ring stays with Mother. Pass it. Pass it along. Pass me. Pass me along.
Listening to the song, I realized that it was neither my mother nor my Tante Atie who had given all the mother-and-daughter motifs to all the stories they told and all the songs they sang. It was something that was essentially Haitian. Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land.
Marc slept in Tante Atie's room while Tante Atie slept in my grandmother's bed with her. They allowed me the courtesy of having my mother's bed all to myself.
The next day, we went together to claim my mother's body. My grandmother was wearing a crisp new black dress. She would surely wear black to her grave now. Tante Atie was wearing a purple frock. I wore a plain white dress, with a purple ribbon for my daughter. We sat on the plush velvet in the funeral chapel, waiting for them to bring her out. Tante Atie was numb and silent. My grandmother was watching for the black priest, the one they call Lavalas, to come through the door. The priest was the last missing pebble in the stream. Then we could take my mother to the hills.
Marc got up and walked around, impatiently waiting for them to wheel out her coffin. The velvet curtains parted and a tall mulatto man theatrically pushed the coffin forward.
Marc raised the olive green steel lid and felt the gold satin lining. My mother was lying there with a very calm look on her face. I reached over to brush off some of the melting rouge, leaving just enough to accentuate her dress.
She didn't feel as cold as I expected. She looked as though she was dressed for a fancy affair and we were all keeping her from going on her way. Marc was weeping into his handkerchief. He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small Bible. He reached in and folded her hands over it. My grandmother dropped in a few threadless needles and Tante Atie, one copper penny.
My grandmother did not look directly at my mother's face, but at the red gloves on her hands and the matching shoes on her feet. My grandmother looked as though she was going to fall down, in shock.
We pulled her away and led her back to her seat. The priest came in and sprinkled holy water on my mother's forehead. He was short and thin, a tiny man with bulging eyes. He leaned forward and kissed my grandmother's hands. He crossed himself and held my grandmother's shoulder. Tante Atie fell on the ground; her body convulsing.
Marc grabbed her and held her up. Her body slowly stilled but the tears never stopped flowing down her face.
"Let us take her home," said my grandmother.
They took her coffin up the hill in a cart. My grandmother walked in front with the driver and Tante Atie and I walked behind with the priest. As we went through the market, a crowd of curious observers gathered behind us.
We soon collected a small procession, people who recognized my grandmother and wanted to share her grief. The vendors ran and dropped their baskets at friends' houses, washed their feet and put on their clean clothes to follow my mother. School children trailed us in a long line. And in the cane fields, the men went home for their shirts and then joined in.
The ground was ready for my mother. Somehow the hole seemed endless, like a bottomless pit. The priest started off with a funeral song and the whole crowd sang the refrain.
Good-bye, brother. Good-bye, sister.
Pray to God for us.
On earth we see you nevermore
In heaven we unite.
People with gourd rattles and talking drums joined in. Others chimed in with cow horns and conch shells. My grandmother looked down at the grave, her eyes avoiding the coffin. Some of the old vendors held Tante Atie, keeping her body still.
My grandmother threw the first handful of dirt on the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Then Tante Atie, and then me. I threw another handful for my daughter who was not there, but was part of this circle of women from whose gravestones our names had been chosen.
From the top of the hill, I saw our house, between the hills and the cane field.
I couldn't bear to see them shoveling dirt over my mother. I turned around and ran down the hill, ahead of the others. I felt my dress tearing as I ran faster and faster down the hill.
There were only a few men working in the cane fields. I ran through the field, attacking the cane. I took off my shoes and began to beat a cane stalk. I pounded it until it began to lean over. I pushed over the cane stalk. It snapped back, striking my shoulder. I pulled at it, yanking it from the ground. My palm was bleeding.
The cane cutters stared at me as though I was possessed. The funeral crowd was now standing between the stalks, watching me beat and pound the cane. My grandmother held back the priest as he tried to come for me.
From where she was standing, my grandmother shouted like the women from the market place, "Ou libéré?" Are you free?
Tante Atie echoed her cry, her voice quivering with her sobs.
"Ou libéré!"
There is always a place where women live near trees that, blowing in the wind, sound like music. These women tell stories to their children both to frighten and delight them. These women, they are fluttering lanterns on the hills, the fireflies in the night, the faces that loom over you and recreate the same unspeakable acts that they themselves lived through. There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms. Where women like cardinal birds return to look at their own faces in stagnant bodies of water.
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me.
From the thick of the cane fields, I tried my best to tell her, but the words would not roll off my tongue. My grandmother walked over and put her hand on my shoulder.
"Listen. Listen before it passes. Paròl gin pié zèl. The words can give wings to your feet. There is so much to say, but time has failed you," she said. "There is a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?"
My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.
"Now," she said, "you will know how to answer."