Haiti Noir

by Edwidge Danticat

  “Don’t worry, Ghislaine, Lakou 22 came with Maloulou,” Destin and Madame Destin, the very first residents to build shacks at the entrance of the yard, told my mother one morning soon after we moved there. Darkness did not worry my mother, but Maloulou would. My mother had braved the dark streets for as long as I could remember before retreating to her own cinder block–mounted bed, hidden behind the paisleyprint curtain to protect me from the parade of visitors whose fees paid for our shack, my school, our food and clothing. In some ways, I was my mother’s daughter; I was never afraid of the dark.

  Like the Destins, other residents with nothing to do often gathered, coffee cups in hands, under bright early suns to swap Maloulou stories, as if competing for the most exciting rendition. There were those who laughed in disbelief, others appeared pensive when reports were shared about the mysterious thing that had always lived in their midst but had never been seen. Young ones like me attending to morning chores before hastily preparing for a discounted ride to school with Josaphat, the camionette driver who lived in Lakou 22, used to listen furtively, ears tuned to what was being said, eyes wide with amazement. Where the name Maloulou came from, no one really knew. One version of the story was that Maloulou came from the sea to the island with the name Nkiruka, but it was changed to Maloulou because it rolled easier on the tongue.

  Nevertheless, the nomadic and infamous visitor who was said to roam our compound in the ink-blue night enthralled all. One man in particular, it was said, Roland Désir, might have come nose-to-nose with Maloulou.

  Roland Désir turned mad one morning, the story went, and folks repeated verbatim the words of the person who saw it happen, his wife Marguerite, who stood in the middle of the yard sobbing, saying that maybe if she hadn’t confronted Roland about the children’s school fees lost in a cockfight the previous night, he might not have lost his head. Years later, Roland was still roaming the streets and corridors, speaking to himself, living under trees, sleeping under the stars, begging for food, throwing rocks at the sea or at the gagè where he used to wage cheer on cockfights.

  Lakou 22 people still sought Roland to give him scraps of food. After all, it was on account of this yard that his life changed. Folks remembered how he was a proud nèg nan nò, who had moved here from up north a long time ago with his young family. He provided for all his eight children, transforming abandoned oil drums into coal stoves to sell. Sadly, what he made was insufficient to sustain his avaricious cockfighting addiction; but all agreed that he was a fine member of Lakou 22.

  What made matters worse for the Désir clan were the series of unfortunate events that hit the family right on the heels of Roland taking to the streets. Folks were in agreement that it was easy to imagine Kenesou, Roland’s youngest child, not living long. Less than a year had passed between him and Jean, the sibling before him, and Madame Roland’s body had not fully been restored to carry a healthy baby to term. And sure enough, Kenesou was very sickly: fever, bronchitis, diarrhea, you name the parasitic disease and he had it. Many thought the Désirs lucky to have had him alive for so long, but some still believed Maloulou might have been the culprit.

  Now, the death of Hermione Désir, the eldest, came as a complete surprise. She was pretty like a rainbow, they say when telling her story. By all accounts, Hermione was angeliclooking. To have seen her walking down the road and not taken special notice would be cause for concern with any man: young or old. Men begged to nestle in her hips. Wives tried to shield their mates. Prostitutes wished she’d move away. Little boys could be heard praying for the gods to send them wives like her when they grow up. Young girls were said to imitate her walks and get their hair done like hers.

  The whole neighborhood trembled, they say, the afternoon Hermione Désir started convulsing. Burning cotton under her nose, rubbing alkali on her face and chest, were not enough to bring her back. She did not even wait to have the tea that had been put on the fire for her. All of Lakou 22 mourned her, even crazy Roland Désir, the father she had supposedly lost to Maloulou. He was heard the night of her burial pacing about and lamenting, “This child was too young and pretty to die,” as if her death made him momentarily sane.

  Mothers and wives who inherited these stories would evoke the fate of Roland to caution their men of the perils of walking dark corridors after midnight. In my head, though, I had preferred imagining Maloulou like the character Django, from the first spaghetti western film I ever saw. I envisioned Maloulou pulling a machetes-filled coffin in the dead of our nights, looking to rescue me, her own Maria, from renegades like Uncle Solon, who had mutated into a Tonton Macoute.

  Mother never told me the familial relations we had with Solon. I suspected we had none. Personally, I had no recollection of his presence prior to the age of twelve or thirteen. We never went to his house; he came to us. My calling him Uncle Solon was just one of those impositions made on Haitian children, an effort at politeness by assigning a familial title to an adult stranger. Along with having to call people who curdled my blood aunties and uncles, I hated my mother for forcing me to kiss people I did not care for, but that was not the only reason I wished Uncle Solon dead. He was mother’s steadiest customer. And I could tell that he was one of the best payers since we seemed to eat a bit better after his passages. He was also short, bow-legged, had a receding hairline, and eyes set too far apart, and an unfriendly face that his small, stubby legs and arms did not help. But this had nothing to do with my disliking him. One night, during an early-evening visit as my mother prepared him some plantain porridge, he came over to the table where I was slumped on my school books, put one hand on my mouth and the other under my dress, and did not stop until he heard my mother returning to the room. That’s how and why my deep hatred for Uncle Solon started; and my passion for Maloulou began. Mother has had to snatch me from endless daydreams where Maloulou slays Uncle Solon and all the members of his nefarious, dungaree-clad gang.

  My hatred for Uncle Solon grew deeper when he volunteered to bring me home from school to save mother the camionette fare, just so he could continue searching and playing with my bouboun under the nun’s school uniform during the car rides. That nourished my plan to catch Maloulou and make an offering of Uncle Solon. Yes, I pondered the fact that I too might not survive the encounter. But not surviving was the least of the deterrents, for I was already dying in small bits. All my desires and needs to unearth the Maloulou enigma and find an ally in stopping Uncle Solon took on realness when, for the first time, at the point when night and day mixed and lying wide awake in bed wishing to hear mother turn the key, and thinking of all the bad things Uncle Solon did, I instead heard with my own ears the clinking and clapping. I listened, still as a corpse, to steps moving through the passageway toward the sea, and waited silently until the same footsteps and dangling chains ambled back.

  There were a few people who told of having heard Maloulou in the night. I told no one, though I felt a tremendous pleasure for finally belonging to a special cadre of people. After a while, I did grow tired of staying up nights waiting to hear Maloulou go by. But if I wanted to come upon the one who wandered in the hours of darkness, tell on Uncle Solon and have an ally in making him disappear from our lives, I needed to know the exact times when the stroll happened, study the pace, prepare some trappings and paraphernalia, and brace for what may come.

  Had mother suspected my crazed plan, she would have made me gulp down daily concoctions of hellebore until I was completely purged of my foolish idea. Curing my folly would become her personal crusade. But I kept my idea and plan in my head, sharing them with not even the wind.

  In conversations with myself, however, I pulled all sorts of reasons to give me the heart to go forward. The Bible tells how little David took on the giant Goliath, I recalled. I had two giants in my life and one was going to help me slay the other. Rather than continue to endure the visits and car rides with Uncle Solon or painfully imagine the size of mother’s sorrow when he kissed and hit her like what I saw him do
one night behind the green paisley curtain, I was determined to risk everything. I was prepared to know Maloulou just as Roland Désir had, if only in the private confines of my head.

  Amassing the items that I needed for my expedition to Maloulou was exhaustive and costly. It ate away at the tiny bit of money I was saving to buy Mother a set of gold eggplantshaped earrings like the ones she often borrowed from her friend Fifi. I knew Mother would never muster the courage to buy them herself, feeling that she’d be wasting hard-earned money intended for rent, food, and school fees on something unneeded for our survival. I was saving those pinched coins extracted here and there to one day appear as her own magi, bearing gold earrings she would love. To protect my meager funds, I did try to get her to pay for the rope for my plan, but it didn’t work. Her response to my request: “You’re too old to be jumping rope! Are you getting the rope to hang the both of us?” I had no comeback. Whatever I could say would be too lame against the disarming image of our lifeless bodies hanging from some tree in the yard or from our ceiling. And a long sisal rope I absolutely needed for my mission: so I dipped in my gold earrings fund.

  Collecting salt and black pepper was the easiest. Many of us in the yard put out our salt to dry if it’s not raining. And whenever I came upon a calabash of salt in the sun, I would help myself. Plus, I volunteered often to be sent to market so I could purchase more salt and pepper for my mission. In less than a month, I hid away enough salt to spoil the taste of our water hole, and enough pepper to scatter about and get all of Lakou 22 fighting. Little by little, I pounded and mixed the two spices together to create a peppery powder that I’d be throwing in Maloulou’s face to cause momentary blindness as I roped her arms and legs and dragged her back to our shack.

  The night of my operation, I carefully arranged rags on my bed so it looked like I was tucked inside. I prayed that it would not be one of these nights when my mother would fish for me in the dark, as if fearing that I would be sucked through a hole in the ceiling. If I did not carefully plan every move, I could lose money and my quest for Maloulou would fall to the wayside. And both Mother and I would be dying sooner than our Creator intended. I chose a Friday night because that’s usually when mother stayed out dancing and drinking with her clients into the wee hours of the morning. Other days in the week, some clients made quick and short stops for a taste of her on their way home, and she’d be around, going in and out through the night. But the weekends belonged to her clients. I too had taken the habit of staying out later those nights to play with the boys and let them kiss me in the dark, disobeying Mother’s directions to go home once the Pierrette twins, who were known good girls, went in to sleep.

  I wore Mother’s faded black dress that she had worn to almost every burial procession, including that of her own mother and countless members of Lakou 22. The dress blended well with the dark. Standing in a corner of the gallery of the tworoom shack recently vacated by a couple named Janine and Jean, the rope and an alfò bag containing my salt-and-pepper mixture strung across my shoulder, I was waiting in a darkness that was as thick and heavy as molasses. I replayed in my head the clink, clap, clink, clap of the night promeneur, and knew that I would recognize those steps in a crowd of thousands. How much time went by, I couldn’t tell. Though I knew I had only blinked my heavy lids when suddenly Lakou 22 became a cane field, right under my eyes. The leaves of the cane felt like a thousand crazy red ants attacking my exposed arms, legs, and face, drawing me into a strange state of alertness.

  Believing that I could be in a cane plantation wasn’t hard. Léogâne, one of the remaining towns of the Haitian sugarcane empire created by France, was no more than seven or eight kilometers from Lakou 22. I could have sleepwalked to Léogâne. But what followed disturbed the expected order of things. Before I was discovered that morning at the edge of the sea by Madame André, hearing her piercing yell of “Anmwe, vin pote l sekou,” Please help her, I thought myself dead and on the journey to Ginen, through this long underwater passage that Aunt Francine said all Haitians go to when they die. And the idea of dying soothed me. I would never have to speak overtly and with fear of these remembrances, never have to tell another soul of my encounters with Maloulou or be called the girl in Lakou 22 who went mad and spoke nonsense. And Uncle Solon would never touch me again.

  When Madame André and Djo picked up my shivering, wet, and seaweed-entangled body from the shore, sensation in my limbs returned before my voice. But it took more than four months, plus the violent death of Uncle Solon after leaving our shack and the side of my convalescent bed one night, to confirm for Mother that I was not crazy. That got her to begin untying my arms and legs from the bed, no longer fearing that I would take off running. I was even allowed to read my old school books after I recited the daily Bible verses with her. Recording my experiences in some unused pages of some old notebook came to me only after Mother had me repeating this verse with the Bible open on my head. But the servant who did things that deserved a beating without knowing it will receive a light beating. Much will be required from everyone to whom much has been given.

  These words started a memory flood and I could clearly see the cane field and the old woman who had appeared from nowhere in front of me; the steps and clinking of the chain made her unmistakable. There stood Maloulou, tall as a coconut tree, eyes bright like the stars above, with a metal collar connected to a chain that ran all the way to one of her feet. Without giving me time to catch my breath, take in the realization that I was nose-to-nose with her, or dig into the blindness-inducing mixture to execute the plan that I had rehearsed hundreds of times in my head, she grabbed my left arm and asked, looking down at me, in a voice as big as she was, “Why did you follow me?”

  I remember stammering the words, “I need … help …” while remaining mesmerized by finally being in the presence of the one who has inhabited Lakou 22 before it was Lakou 22; the one whom the people have named, accepted as just another neighbor, feared, and blamed for undoing their lives and taking away their children.

  “Children should not be out at this time of night. And those who don’t listen pay for their stubbornness,” she said in a hoarse, ancient voice that sounded like the scolding of a hundred worried grandmothers.

  Since I had gotten a bit light-headed from the heavy and pungent smell of asafetida that enveloped the air around her, I mumbled some inaudible words.

  “You can follow me, but you can’t speak,” she said, peering down at me, her head wrapped in a tiyon, then beginning to move away.

  “Uncle Solon,” I remember stuttering, determined to tell Maloulou why I had followed her. “You have to liberate Mother and me from Uncle Solon.” Stunned and still immobilized by fear, I managed to add in a feeble voice, “Telling Mother how he touches my bouboun when her eyes are turned away would have caused so much … more pain …”

  Maloulou stopped and turned again to look at me, her face softly lit by the half-moon overhead, revealing tender and clear eyes that seemed to see right into the profoundest corner of my soul, and let out a big sigh.

  From one of the many pockets in her long dress, she drew something out and sprinkled it atop my head and on my face, saying, “He will never touch you again.”

  I continued crying as Maloulou patted my head with her heavy tree branch–like hands to calm me down. Her powdery potions on my face and her words must have had an impact. I could hear, but was no longer able to respond to her as she lunged into a story about a horse and life.

  “Just remember, my child, you die a slave if you let this horse guide you. You must command the horse, through the mountains of life and the valleys of death. Just be sure to always do things that will put you on the good side of life,” she said. “Sa n fè se li n wè, we always reap what we sow, my child. I cannot leave you here now, can I?” She seemed to be concerned by my presence. Tightening her calloused left hand on my arm, she ploughed through the cane; the machete in her right hand pushing the blistery leaves away. At the end of the fie
ld, there was a small assembly waiting; even the mastiffs and bloodhounds were there, tranquil. Standing a short distance from the crowd, she asked twice, “Sa ki la?” What’s there? And an echo of voices responded, “Bwa n ap kloure.” We are nailing wood.

  “Good. I am the woman of the mountain with no name who Makandal sent,” Maloulou said, still holding on to me. The name Makandal reverberated in a dizzying swirl in my head. Ma-kan-dal, I replayed, visualizing the bench way in back of the class where I sat, and Mr. Laborde’s mouth as he gave a history lesson one afternoon long ago.

  “François Makandal: man, myth, but surely rebellious slave, who was burned at the stake, just like Jeanne D’Arc,” he had said in quick French to show the ease with which he spoke the language. “Makandal’s followers helped in killing some six thousand slave-owners in his six years of rebellion,” he added in his showy style. “Makandal freed himself and rose to the heavens, perhaps still roaming the Haitian skies and forests,” he laughed, “having baffled them and even us. However, myth is sacred, impermeable even. But remember, a myth is just a myth, a figment of our imagination. See you all tomorrow,” he ended, dismissing the class.

  In my mind that night, while repeating the short description of Makandal over and over in the same way that I repeated the Bible verse, trying to make it all stick in my head, I had imagined the tall, dark, and muscular Makandal in his ascension, the same way I effortlessly believed that Christ, Elijah, and the Virgin Mary went up to the skies, in flesh and blood.

  That’s when I finally understood Maloulou’s question, and the answer that came back was some sort of password. It became clear that she had journeyed with me into a world and time long forgotten, misunderstood, and lost within the flimsy confines of yellowed history books.