Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

  A woman rilled a calabash a few feet from where my sandals muddied the water. Tante Atie chatted with the women as she went by. Some young girls were sitting bare-chested in the water, the sun casting darker shadows into their faces. Their hands squirted blackened suds as they pounded their clothes with water rocks.

  A dusty footpath led us to a tree-lined cemetery at the top of the hill. Tante Atie walked between the wooden crosses, collecting the bamboo skeletons of fallen kites. She stepped around the plots where empty jars, conch shells, and marbles served as grave markers.

  "Walk straight," said Tante Atie, "you are in the presence of family."

  She walked around to each plot, and called out the names of all those who had been buried there. There was my great-grandmother, Beloved Martinelle Brigitte. Her sister, My First Joy Sophilus Gentille. My grandfather's sister, My Hope Atinia Ife, and finally my grandfather, Charlemagne Le Grand Caco.

  Tante Atie named them all on sight.

  "Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire."

  From the cemetery, we took a narrow footpath to the vendor's hut. On either side of us were wild grasses that hissed as though they were full of snakes.

  We walked to a whitewashed shack where a young woman sold rice and black beans from the same sisal mat where she slept with her husband.

  In the yard, the husband sat under the shade of a straw parasol with a pipe in his mouth and a demijohn at his feet. He was pounding small nails into leather straps and thin layers of polished wood to make sandals.

  The hammering echoed in my head until I reached the cane fields. The men were singing about a woman who flew without her skin at night, and when she came back home, she found her skin peppered and could not put it back on. Her husband had done it to teach her a lesson. He ended up killing her.

  . . .

  I was surprised how fast it came back. The memory of how everything came together to make a great meal. The fragrance of the spices guided my fingers the way no instructions or measurements could.

  Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.

  According to Tante Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.

  I rushed back and forth between the iron pots in the yard. The air smelled like spices that I had not cooked with since I'd left my mother's home two years before.

  I usually ate random concoctions: frozen dinners, samples from global cookbooks, food that was easy to put together and brought me no pain. No memories of a past that at times was cherished and at others despised.

  By the time we ate, the air was pregnant with rain. Thunder groaned in the starless sky while the lanterns flickered in the hills.

  "Well done," Tante Atie said after her fourth serving of my rice and beans.

  My grandmother chewed slowly as she gave my daughter her bottle.

  "If the wood is well carved," said my grandmother, "it teaches us about the carpenter. Atie, you taught Sophie well."

  Tante Atie was taken off guard by my grandmother's compliment. She kissed me on the forehead before taking the dishes to the yard to wash. Then, she went into the house, took her notebook, and left for her lesson with Louise.

  My grandmother groaned her disapproval. She pulled out a small pouch and packed pinches of tobacco powder into her nose. She inhaled deeply, stuffing more and more into her nostrils.

  She had a look of deep concern on her face, as her eyes surveyed the evening clouds.

  "Tandé. Do you hear anything?" she asked.

  There was nothing but the usual night sounds: birds finding their ways in the dark, as they shuffled through the leaves.

  Often at night, there were women who travelled long distances, on foot or on mare, to save the car fare to Port-au-Prince.

  I strained my eyes to see beyond the tree shadows on the road.

  "There is a girl going home," my grandmother said. "You cannot see her. She is far away. Quite far. It is not the distance that is important. If I hear a girl from far away, there is an emotion, something that calls to my soul. If your soul is linked with someone, somehow you can always feel when something is happening to them."

  "Is it Tante Atie, the girl on the road?"

  "Non. It is really a girl. A younger woman."

  "Is the girl in danger?"

  "That's why you listen. You should hear young feet crushing wet leaves. Her feet make a swish-swash when they hit the ground and when she hurries, it sounds like a whip chasing a mule."

  I listened closely, but heard no whip.

  "When it is dark, all men are black," she said. "There is no way to know anything unless you apply your ears. When you listen, it's kòm si you had deafness before and you can hear now. Sometimes you can't fall asleep because the sound of someone crying keeps you awake. A whisper sounds like a roar to your ears. Your ears are witness to matters that do not concern you. And what is worse, you cannot forget. Now, listen. Her feet make a swish sound and when she hurries it's like a whip in the wind."

  I tried, but I heard no whip.

  "It's the way old men cry," she said. "Grown brave men have a special way they cry when they are afraid."

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head to concentrate.

  "It is Ti Alice," she said.

  "Who is Ti Alice?"

  "The young child in the bushes, it is Ti Alice. Someone is there with her."

  "Is she in danger?"

  My grandmother tightened her eyelids.

  "I know Ti Alice," she said. "I know her mother."

  "Why is she in the bushes?"

  "She must be fourteen or fifteen years now."

  "Why is she out there?"

  "She is rushing back to her mother. She was with a friend, a boy."

  I thought I heard a few hushed whispers.

  "I think I hear a little," I said, rocking my daughter with excitement.

  "Ti Alice and the boy, they are bidding one another goodbye, for the night."

  My grandmother wrapped her arms around her body, rocking and cradling herself.

  "What is happening now?" I asked.

  "Her mother is waiting for her at the door of their hut. She is pulling her inside to test her."

  The word sent a chill through my body.

  "She is going to test to see if young Alice is still a virgin," my grandmother said. "The mother, she will drag her inside the hut, take her last small finger and put it inside her to see if it goes in. You said the other night that your mother tested you. That is what is now happening to Ti Alice."

  I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers' obsession with keeping us pure and chaste. My mother always listened to the echo of my urine in the toilet, for if it was too loud it meant that I had been deflowered. I learned very early in life that virgins always took small steps when they walked. They never did acrobatic splits, never rode horses or bicycles. They always covered themselves well and, even if their lives depended on it, never parted with their panties.

  The story goes that there was once an extremely rich man who married a poor black girl. He had chosen her out of hundreds of prettier girls because she was untouched. For the wedding night, he bought her the whitest sheets and nightgowns he could possibly find. For himself, he bought a can of thick goat milk in which he planned to sprinkle a drop of her hymen blood to drink.

  Then came their wedding night. The girl did not bleed. The man had his honor and reputation to defend. He could not face the town if h
e did not have a blood-spotted sheet to hang in his courtyard the next morning. He did the best he could to make her bleed, but no matter how hard he tried, the girl did not bleed. So he took a knife and cut her between her legs to get some blood to show. He got enough blood for her wedding gown and sheets, an unusual amount to impress the neighbors. The blood kept flowing like water out of the girl. It flowed so much it wouldn't stop. Finally, drained of all her blood, the girl died.

  Later, during her funeral procession, her blood-soaked sheets were paraded by her husband to show that she had been a virgin on her wedding night. At the grave site, her husband drank his blood-spotted goat milk and cried like a child.

  I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fingernail.

  Like Tante Atie, she had told me stories while she was doing it, weaving elaborate tales to keep my mind off the finger, which I knew one day would slip into me and condemn me. I had learned to double while being tested. I would close my eyes and imagine all the pleasant things that I had known. The lukewarm noon breeze through our bougainvillea. Tante Atie's gentle voice blowing over a field of daffodils.

  There were many Cases in our history where our ancestors had doubled. Following in the vaudou tradition, most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives.

  After my marriage, whenever Joseph and I were together, I doubled.

  "The testing? Why do the mothers do that?" I asked my grandmother.

  "If a child dies, you do not die. But if your child is disgraced, you are disgraced. And people, they think daughters will be raised trash with no man in the house."

  "Did your mother do this to you?"

  "From the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me."

  "When you tested my mother and Tante Atie, couldn't you tell that they hated it?"

  "I had to keep them clean until they had husbands."

  "But they don't have husbands."

  "The burden was not mine alone."

  "I hated the tests," I said. "It is the most horrible thing that ever happened to me. When my husband is with me now, it gives me such nightmares that I have to bite my tongue to do it again."

  "With patience, it goes away."

  "No Grandme Ife, it does not."

  "Ti Alice, she has passed her examination."

  The sky reddened with a sudden flash of lightning. "Now you have a child of your own. You must know that everything a mother does, she does for her child's own good. You cannot always carry the pain. You must liberate yourself."

  We walked to my room and put my daughter down to sleep.

  "I will go soon," I told my grandmother, "back to my husband."

  "It is better," she said. "It is hard for a woman to raise girls alone."

  She walked into her room, took her statue of Erzulie, and pressed it into my hand.

  "My heart, it weeps like a river," she said, "for the pain we have caused you."

  I held the statue against my chest as I cried in the night. I thought I heard my grandmother crying too, but it was the rain slowing down to a mere drizzle, tapping on the roof.

  The next morning, I went jogging, along the road, through the cemetery plot, and into the hills. The sun had already dried some of the puddles from the drizzle the night before.

  Along the way, people stared at me with puzzled expressions on their faces. Is this what happens to our girls when they leave this place? They become such frightened creatures that they run like the wind, from nothing at all.

  Chapter 24

  Three days later, my mother came. When I first caught a glimpse of her, she was sitting on the back of a cart being pulled by two teenage boys.

  Eliab raced to the yard, grabbed my grandmother's hand, and yanked her towards the road.

  My mother was shielding her face from us, hiding behind a red umbrella.

  My grandmother followed Eliab to the edge of the road.

  "That lady," Eliab said, pointing at the umbrella guarding my mother's face. "That lady, she says she belongs to you."

  Tante Atie was in the yard boiling some water for our morning coffee. She got up quickly when my grandmother started screaming my mother's name.

  "Min Martine!"

  "Tololo. Tololo," Eliab chimed in as though it was his long-lost mother who had come back.

  My grandmother grabbed her broom and speared it in the ground to anchor herself.

  My mother folded the red umbrella and laid it on top of a large suitcase on the cart next to her.

  Some of the road vendors gathered around her to say hello.

  My mother kissed them on the cheek and stroked their children's heads. They looked curiously at her cerise jumper, ballooned around her small frame.

  My grandmother was trembling on the spot where she was standing. Tante Atie put her hands on her hips and stared ahead. She did not look the least bit surprised.

  A plantain green scarf floated in the breeze behind my mother. She skipped through the dust and rushed across the yard. Eliab circled around her like a wingless butterfly.

  My mother walked over and kissed my grandmother. Tante Atie moved slowly towards her, not particularly excited. My mother was glowing.

  Tante Atie tapped her lips against my mother's cheeks, then went back to fanning the cooking sticks with my grandmother's hat.

  "Sak pasé, Atie?" asked my mother.

  "You," answered Tante Atie fanning the flames. "You're what's new."

  I clung to the porch railing as my anchor. It had been almost two years since the last time we saw each other. My mother's skin was unusually light, a pale mocha, three or four shades lighter than any of ours.

  Brigitte's body tightened, as though she could sense the tension in mine.

  "I see you still wear the deuil," my mother said to my grandmother.

  "It is all the same," answered my grandmother. "The black is easier; it does not get dirty."

  "Mon Dieu, you do not look bad for an old lady," said my mother. "And you have been talking about arranging your funeral like it was tomorrow."

  "Your skin looks lighter," said my grandmother. "Is it prodwi? You use something?"

  My mother looked embarrassed.

  "It is very cold in America," my mother said. "The cold turns us into ghosts."

  "Papa Shango, the sun here, will change that," my grandmother said.

  "I am not staying long enough for that," my mother said. "When I got your telegram, I decided to come and see Sophie and take care of your affairs at the same time. I plan to stay for only three days. This is not the visit I owe you. This is just circumstance. When I come again, I will stay with you for a very long time."

  I watched her from the railing, waiting for her to look over and address me personally.

  She looked very young and thin, but for the most part healthy. Because of the roomy size of her jumper, I couldn't tell whether or not she was wearing her prosthetic bra.

  "Sophie, walk to your mother," said my grandmother.

  They were all staring at me, even Eliab. My mother put her hands in her pockets. She narrowed her eyes as she tried to see my face through the sun's glare.

  Brigitte began to twist in my arms. She sensed something.

  "Sophie, walk to your mother." My grandmother's voice grew more forceful.

  My mother looked uncomfortable, almost scared.

  I did not move. We stared at each other across the yard, each waiting for the other to yield. As her daughter, I was expected to walk over and greet her first. However, I did not trust my legs. I wasn't sure I could make it down the steps without slipping and h
urting both myself and Brigitte.

  "Walk to your mother." My grandmother was becoming angry.

  "It is okay," my mother said, coming towards me. "I will walk to her."

  She climbed onto the porch and kissed me on the cheek.

  Brigitte reached up to grab a large loop earring on my mother's right lobe.

  "You didn't send word you were coming," I said.

  "Let me see her," she said, extending her hands for Brigitte. Brigitte leaned forward. I let her slip into my mother's grasp.

  "How old is she now?" she asked.

  "Almost six months."

  She made funny faces at Brigitte.

  "I got all the pictures you sent me," she said.

  "Why didn't you answer?"

  "I couldn't find the words," she said. "How are you?"

  "I've been better."

  She went back to the yard to pay the cart boys and took Brigitte with her.

  "You're not staying here, are you?" she asked when she came back to the porch.

  She tickled Brigitte's armpits as she spoke, giggling along with her.

  I reached for my daughter. She pressed Brigitte's body against her chest and would not give her back.

  "Manman asked me to come here and make things better between us. It's not right for a mother and daughter to be enemies. Manman thinks it puts a curse on the family. Besides, your husband came to me and I could not refuse him."

  "You've seen him?"

  "Oh, the flames in your eyes."

  "How is he?"

  "Worried. I told him we would be back in three days."

  "You can't make plans for me."

  ' "I did."

  We were speaking to one another in English without realizing it.

  "Oh that cling-clang talk," interrupted my grandmother. "It sounds like glass breaking."

  Brigitte was pulling at my mother's earrings. My mother took them off and handed them to me.

  "You and I, we started wrong," my mother said. "You are now a woman, with your own house. We are allowed to start again."

  The mid-morning sky looked like an old quilt, with long bands of red and indigo stretching their way past drifting clouds. Like everything else, eventually even the rainbows disappeared.