Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

  "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 pebb
le 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."

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Four

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35