It was something that Ma might have said.
The photographer met us at the wedding grove at the Botanic Garden. Eric and Caroline posed stiffly for their photos, surrounded by well-cropped foliage.
"These are the kinds of pictures that they will later lay over the image of a champagne glass or something," Ma said. "They do so many tricks with photography now, for posterity."
We went back to the house to get Caroline's luggage.
"We cannot take you to the airport," Ma said.
"It's all right, Mother," Eric said. "We will take a cab. We will be fine."
I didn't know how long I held Caroline in my arms on the sidewalk in front of our house. Her synthetic arm felt weighty on my shoulder, her hair stuck to the tears on my face.
"I'll visit you and Ma when I come back," she said. "Just don't go running off with any Brazilian soccer players."
Caroline and I were both sobbing by the time she walked over to say good-bye to Ma. She kissed Ma on the cheek and then quickly hopped in the taxi without looking back. Ma ran her hand over the window, her finger sliding along the car door as it pulled away.
"I like how you stood up and spoke for your sister," she said.
"The toast?"
"It was good."
"I feel like I had some help," I said.
That night, Ma got a delivery of roses so red that they didn't look real.
"Too expensive," she said when the delivery man handed them to her.
The guy waited for her to sign a piece of paper and then a bit longer for a tip.
Ma took a dollar out of her bra and handed it to him.
She kept sniffing the roses as she walked back to the kitchen.
"Who are they from?" I asked.
"Caroline," she said. "Sweet, sweet Caroline."
Distance had already made my sister Saint Sweet Caroline.
"Are you convinced of Caroline's happiness now?" I asked.
"You ask such difficult questions."
That night she went to bed with the Polaroid wed-ding photos and the roses by her bed. Later, I saw her walking past my room cradling the vase. She woke up several times to sniff the roses and change the water.
That night, I also dreamt that I was with my father by a stream of rose-colored blood. We made a fire and grilled a breadfruit for dinner while waiting for the stream to turn white. My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of the fire. Suddenly the moon slipped through a cloud and dived into the bloody stream, filling it with a sheet of stars.
I turned to him and said, "Look, Papy. There are so many stars."
And my father in his throaty voice said, "If you close your eyes really tight, wherever you are, you will see these stars."
I said, "Let's go for a swim."
He said, "No, we have a long way to travel and the trip will be harder if we get wet."
Then I said, "Papa, do you see all the blood? It's very beautiful."
His face began to glow as though it had become like one of the stars.
Then he asked me, "If we were painters, which landscapes would we paint?"
I said, "I don't understand."
He said, "We are playing a game, you must answer me.
I said, "I don't know the answers."
"When you become mothers, how will you name your sons?"
"We'll name them all after you," I said.
"You have forgotten how to play this game," he said.
"What kind of lullabies do we sing to our children at night? Where do you bury your dead?"
His face was fading into a dreamy glow.
"What kind of legends will your daughters be told? What kinds of charms will you give them to ward off evil?"
I woke up startled, for the first time afraid of the father that I saw in my dreams.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of warm milk.
Ma was sitting at the kitchen table, rolling an egg between her palms. I slipped into the chair across from her. She pressed harder on both ends of the egg.
"What are you doing up so late?" she asked.
"I can't sleep," I said.
"I think people should take shifts. Some of us would carry on at night and some during the day. The night would be like the day exactly. All stores would be open and people would go to the office, but only the night people. You see, then there would be no sleeplessness."
I warmed some cold milk in a pan on the stove. Ma was still pressing hard, trying to crush the egg from top and bottom. I offered her some warm milk but she refused.
"What did you think of the wedding today?" I asked.
"When your father left me and you behind in Haiti to move to this country and marry that woman to get our papers," she said, "I prepared a charm for him. I wrote his name on a piece of paper and put the paper in a cal-abash. I filled the calabash with honey and next to it lit a candle. At midnight every night, I laid the calabash next to me in the bed where your father used to sleep and shouted at it to love me. I don't know how or what I was looking for, but somehow in the words he was sending me, I knew he had stopped thinking of me the same way."
"You can t believe that, Ma," I said.
"I know what I know," she said. "I am an adult woman. I am not telling you this story for pity."
The kitchen radio was playing an old classic on one of the Haitian stations.
Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you.
I had to leave you before I could understand you.
"Would you like to see my proposal letter?" Ma asked.
She slid an old jewelry box across the table towards me. I opened it and pulled out the envelope with the letter in it.
The envelope was so yellowed and frail that at first I was afraid to touch it.
"Go ahead," she said, "it will not turn to dust in your hands."
The letter was cracked along the lines where it had been folded all of these years.
My son, Carl Romélus Azile, would be honored to make your daughter, Hermine Francoise Genie, his wife.
"It was so sweet then," Ma said, "so sweet. Promise me that when I die you will destroy all of this."
"I can't promise you that," I said. "I will want to hold on to things when you die. I will want to hold on to you."
"I do not want my grandchildren to feel sorry for me," she said. "The past, it fades a person. And yes. Today, it was a nice wedding."
My passport came in the mail the next day, addressed to Gracina Azile, my real and permanent name.
I filled out all the necessary sections, my name and address, and'listed my mother to be contacted in case I was in an accident. For the first time in my life, ,1 felt truly secure living in America. It was like being in a war zone and finally receiving a weapon of my own, like standing on the firing line and finally getting a bullet-proof vest.
We had all paid dearly for this piece of paper, this final assurance that I belonged in the club. It had cost my parent's marriage, my mother's spirit, my sister's arm.
I felt like an indentured servant who had finally been allowed to join the family.
The next morning, I went to the cemetery in Rosedale, Queens, where my father had been buried. His was one of many gray tombstones in a line of foreign unpronounceable names. I brought my passport for him to see, laying it on the grass among the wild daisies surrounding the grave.
"Caroline had her wedding," I said. "We felt like you were there."
My father had wanted to be buried in Haiti, but at the time of his death there was no way that we could have afforded it.
The day before Papa's funeral, Caroline and I had told Ma that we wanted to be among Papa's pallbearers.
Ma had thought that it was a bad idea. Who had ever heard of young women being pallbearers? Papa's funeral was no time for us to express our selfish childishness, our American rebelliousness.
When we were children, whenever we rejected symbols of Haitian culture, Ma used to excuse us with great embarrassment and
say, "You know, they are American."
Why didn't we like the thick fatty pig skin that she would deep-fry so long that it tasted like rubber? We were Americans and we had no taste buds. A double tragedy.
Why didn't we like the thick yellow pumpkin soup that she spent all New Year's Eve making so that we would have it on New Year's Day to celebrate Haitian Independence Day? Again, because we were American and the Fourth of July was our independence holiday.
"In Haiti, you own your children and they find it natural," she would say. "They know their duties to the family and they act accordingly. In America, no one owns anything, and certainly not another person."
"Caroline called," Ma said. She was standing over the stove making some bone soup when I got home from the cemetery. "I told her that we would still keep her bed here for her, if she ever wants to use it. She will come and visit us soon. I knew she would miss us."
"Can I drop one bone in your soup?" I asked Ma.
"It is your soup too," she said.
She let me drop one bone into the boiling water. The water splashed my hand, leaving a red mark.
"Ma, if we were painters which landscapes would we paint?" I asked her.
"I see. You want to play the game of questions?"
"When I become a mother, how will I name my daughter?"
"If you want to play then I should ask the first question," she said.
"What kinds of lullabies will I sing at night? What kinds of legends will my daughter be told? What kinds of charms will I give her to ward off evil?"
"I have come a few years further than you," she insist-ed. "I have tasted a lot more salt. I am to ask the first question, if we are to play the game."
"Go ahead," I said giving in.
She thought about it for a long time while stirring the bones in our soup.
"Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it?" she asked finally
Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.
epilogue:
women
like us
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother had two rules for living. Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook and housekeeper who ever lived.
Your mother s second rule went along with the first. Never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn't say you enjoy it, or your husband won't respect you.
And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook.
Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more.
"What will she do? What will be her passion?" your aunts would ask when they came over to cook on great holidays, which called for cannon salutes back home but meant nothing at all here.
"Her passion is being quiet," your mother would say. "But then she's not being quiet. You hear this scraping from her. Krik? Krak! Pencil, paper. It sounds like some-one crying."
Someone was crying. You and the writing demons in your head. You have nobody, nothing but this piece of paper, they told you. Only a notebook made out of dis-carded fish wrappers, pantyhose cardboard. They were the best confidantes for a lonely little girl.
When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.
You have always had your ten fingers. They curse you each time you force them around the contours of a pen. No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. You remember her silence when you laid your first notebook in front of her. Her disappointment when you told her that words would be your life's work, like the kitchen had always been hers. She was angry at you for not understanding. And with what do you repay me? With scribbles on paper that are not worth the scratch of a pig's snout. The sacrifices had been too great.
Writers don't leave any mark in the world. Not the world where we are from. In our world, writers are tortured and killed if they are men. Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women. In our world, if you write, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. They end up in a prison dungeon where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they're forced to eat their own waste.
The family needs a nurse, not a prisoner. We need to forge ahead with our heads raised, not buried in scraps of throw-away paper. We do not want to bend over a dusty grave, wearing black hats, grieving for you. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine women who went before you and worked their fingers to coconut rind so you can stand here before me holding that torn old notebook that you cradle against your breast like your prettiest Sunday braids. I would rather you had spit in my face.
You remember dunking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call them. Ghosts like burnished branches on a flame tree. These women, they asked for your voice so that they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak in a tongue that is hard to understand. Even if it's patois, dialect, Creole.
The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil for we are always with you.
When you were a little girl, you used to dream that you were lying among the dead and all the spirits were begging you to scream. And even now, you are still afraid to dream because you know that you will never be able to do what they say, as they say it, the old spirits that live in your blood.
Most of the women in your life had their heads down. They would wake up one morning to find their panties gone. It is not shame, however, that kept their heads down. They were singing, searching for meaning in the dust. And sometimes, they were talking to faces across the ages, faces like yours and mine.
You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head. You often thought that with-out the trees, the sky would fall on your head. You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice. There have been days when the sky was as close as your hair to falling on your head.
This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life. Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a mil-lion pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh. Some- times, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried "Krik?" and we have answered "Krak!" and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us.
You remember thinking while braidi
ng your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother, who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother, she introduced you to the first echoes of the tongue that you now speak when at the end of the day she would braid your hair while you sat between her legs, scrubbing the kitchen pots. While your fingers worked away at the last shadows of her day's work, she would make your braids Sunday-pretty, even during the week.
When she was done she would ask you to name each braid after those nine hundred and ninety-nine women who were boiling in your blood, and since you had writ-ten them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this was your testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my aunts Josephine and Marie-Rose who both passed away this year. Your love and guidance will always be with us. Many thanks to my mother and father for continued support. Thanks to the folks at the Brown University Creative Writing program, especially Karen Davies, Gale Nelson, Meredith Steinbach, Robert Coover, Paula Vogel, Thadious Davis, Aishah Rahman, and Rosemarie Waldrop, who were the first to see these stories. Thank you, Ann Birstein and Elizabeth Dalton. I owe so much to Melanie Fleishman for all your very hard work, to the wonderful gang at Clinica who became like family to me, to Jonathan and Ed for giving me a chance to learn so much about myself. To my aunt Grace and my cousin Magalie Adonis, my cousins, Betty, and Mendy, Esther for the braids, and to Nadine Gilles, sister of the yam. And to Paule Marshall, the greatest kitchen poet of all.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
1. Children of the Sea
2. Nineteen Thirty-Seven
3. A Wall of Fire Rising
Krik? Krak! Page 13
