Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

  She had somehow tonight convinced the other girls to sing the Lasirèn song for the wonn. It was her birthday, she had told them. She was seven, she had told them. The oldest girl let her pick the song. They’d groaned when she said it, but they knew it was coming and they were prepared, and as the adults gathered around to mourn Msye Caleb, she and her friends sang that song until they were hoarse, circling until they were dizzy. And though she wanted to stop after a while, she did not want them to stop and not begin again with the same song, so she tried to hang on. It was the best seventh-birthday gift they could give her.

  When Madame Gaëlle arrived, Claire somehow knew that she’d interrupt their game. And sure enough, as soon as they saw Madame Gaëlle, the other girls stopped circling and took the opportunity to escape from Claire and her song.

  She could tell by the look on Madame Gaëlle’s face that she had something in mind. Madame Gaëlle wanted something from her. And the only thing she had that Madame Gaëlle might want was her. It was also what her father wanted, for Madame Gaëlle to have her. At first, she was frightened by Madame Gaëlle’s approach, at the careful way she moved in her direction. It was unusual too for a lady like Madame Gaëlle to be out in a fancy party gown with her hair rollers and with slippers on her feet. Something about Madame Gaëlle’s mission must be pressing. At first Madame Gaëlle seemed to creep up on her, then she hovered over her, as though she were building up enough courage to ask a simple question that other adults often asked her, “Is your papa here?”

  She had to look up into Madame Gaëlle’s face to answer. She didn’t want to, but she had to because of the sounds of the waves and all the people visiting Madame Josephine, and whenever she was nervous her voice wasn’t so loud anyway, so Madame Gaëlle wouldn’t be able to understand her unless she was looking straight into Madame Gaëlle’s eyes.

  She wished she could explain to Madame Gaëlle before answering that she was not trying to be disrespectful by looking into her eyes. She knew that looking into an adult’s eyes was as disrespectful as whistling in public or making ugly remarks about someone’s mother. So instead of speaking, she nodded her answer.

  Madame Gaëlle walked away, over to a big rock, then motioned for her to come and sit on another rock, next to her. She looked past Madame Gaëlle, wishing that her father could see them from wherever he was. She had not seen him for some time, but seeing her and Madame Gaëlle together would bring him running over for sure.

  Before starting the wonn, she had hidden her sandals near the rock where Madame Gaëlle was now sitting. Maybe this was some sign. Maybe her sandals had chosen Madame Gaëlle. Her father would certainly see it as some kind of sign if she told him that Madame Gaëlle had come to sit where she had hidden her sandals. Maybe she should be saying something now. But she didn’t know what to say and Madame Gaëlle didn’t seem to know what to say either, because Madame Gaëlle didn’t talk for a long time, but Claire could feel that Madame Gaëlle was watching her the way her father watched her. She took her time slipping on her sandals, not knowing how to make Madame Gaëlle’s staring and not-talking stop. Then she heard Madame Gaëlle say, “I knew your mother.”

  Of course Madame Gaëlle had known her mother. Everyone in town, it seemed, had known her mother. Everyone, except her. She knew this the way she knew everything else, by hearing bits of things adults said to one another when they didn’t think she was listening. Besides, her mother and Madame Gaëlle’s daughter were buried together in the same part of the town cemetery where she had gone that very morning.

  But wait. Was Madame Gaëlle going to tell her something about her mother that she’d never heard before, that extra thing she often wished her father would tell her? Had Madame Gaëlle wrapped a piece of her mother, an invisible piece, in an invisible box, that she now wanted to open for her to visit? Were her mother and Madame Gaëlle friends? Is that why Madame Gaëlle had nursed her that one time, making Madame Gaëlle, as her father liked to say, her milk mother? She wanted to hear more. What could she do to hear more? She raised her head and looked directly into Madame Gaëlle’s eyes. It was not disrespectful if it was urgent, if you wanted something and couldn’t ask. It was not disrespect. It was curiosity. It was like Madame Josephine, who, because she could not speak, had to look in the faces of all people, even the white doctors at Sainte Thérèse when they were trying to talk to her about her leg. But white people didn’t care if you looked into their eyes—that’s what the people who’d seen them up close at L’hôpital Sainte Thérèse said. The white people there actually wanted you to look into their eyes. That’s how they claimed to know you were being honest. So she was now looking into Madame Gaëlle’s wild, mournful eyes and she was pretending that Madame Gaëlle was one of those white people who didn’t care if you looked into their eyes, even as a stream of words came pouring out of Madame Gaëlle’s mouth.

  “Your mother had sewn so many things for you,” Madame Gaëlle was saying, but in a jumble, as if to herself. “She had sewn little dresses for you even before she was pregnant with you.” Then Madame Gaëlle said something about God. No, not God, God’s hands. Her mother, Madame Gaëlle said, had stolen her from God’s hands. “And then you were born,” Madame Gaëlle said, her voice clear now. And the revenan talk, Madame Gaëlle was saying she didn’t believe in that. But she believed in birthdays, she said, and she wished Claire bòn fèt.

  Claire wanted Madame Gaëlle to keep talking about her mother. But Madame Gaëlle stopped talking. Instead Madame Gaëlle smiled, showing some perfect-looking and long white teeth. Then, as though this were a revelation even to herself, Madame Gaëlle said, “Your mother was my friend.”

  Since people said that she and her mother looked so much alike, maybe that’s why Madame Gaëlle wanted to be her friend too. And why her father wanted her and Madame Gaëlle to be friends and for Madame Gaëlle to take her.

  Tell me more, she wanted to say. Please tell me much more. Open that invisible box with the invisible mother and let me see what is inside. But Madame Gaëlle did not say more. Her smile faded and her face dimmed as if something puzzling were coming into her mind, and she frowned as though the thing that had entered her mind were something that she was trying to make sense of, that she was trying to understand. And Claire now imagined that there might be a similar look on her own face, because she too was trying to figure out whether Madame Gaëlle was now upset. Or maybe Madame Gaëlle was thinking about her daughter. Madame Gaëlle smiled again, as if something had been decided in her mind, and Claire suspected that perhaps Madame Gaëlle’s smile was meant to keep her from worrying, and maybe her father had been watching them from somewhere, because at that moment he rose out of the shadows and suddenly he was standing over them, and his shadow covered Madame Gaëlle’s body.

  Her father had been drinking a little, most likely with the other fishermen around the bonfire. He didn’t drink often and never drank a lot, but when he drank he was never happy. She knew most adults got happy when they drank kleren. They laughed and danced by themselves and told jokes. But her father became even quieter when he drank. He became sadder too, as sad as when he was standing at her mother’s grave.

  Her father’s feet seemed to be failing him, as if he were tired of standing over her and Madame Gaëlle, and he sat down on the sand between them. Her father and Madame Gaëlle each seemed to be waiting for the other to talk first, so Claire went back to tugging at her sandal straps and picking tiny grains of sand out from beneath her toenails. While her father had his face turned toward the lighthouse and the hills, Madame Gaëlle said, “Tonight, I take her.”

  Could it be as simple as that? One day she was her father’s daughter and the next she was Madame Gaëlle’s? And could this really mean that her father was going away for good and that she would never see him again? Would he even come back, like her relatives from the hills, to bring her yams and breadfruit at Christmas?

  Her father seemed surprised to hear that Madame Gaëlle was looking to take her that
very night. Maybe that’s how it was when you got something you’d always wanted but thought you would never get. Maybe her father would be just as shocked when he went somewhere else to live, only to find that chèche lavi, the life he had spent so much time looking for, was no life at all without her.

  She tried her best to fight back her tears, kept her hands to her sides as long as she could so her father and Madame Gaëlle would not see her wiping those tears, but the tears came anyway.

  “Why now?” her father asked. But why not now, if he was planning to give her away anyway?

  “Now or never,” Madame Gaëlle said. And Claire wondered what this meant. Was this the last time the three of them would be together?

  Claire looked past Madame Gaëlle and her father, over at the crowd of people still gathered around Madame Josephine. Most of them had known Msye Caleb, just as most of them had known her mother.

  She wondered whether her mother would have been able to do what her father was doing, if she would have had the courage to give her away like this, to someone else. She knew of both fathers and mothers, fishing families, who had given their children, both girls and boys, away. They had taken their children to distant relatives in the capital to work as restavèks, child maids or houseboys. Others had taken their children to the white people at Sainte Thérèse and the white people had put the children in orphanages. Some of those children were taken to the capital and other places and were never seen or heard from again. They became other people’s children in other lands that they’d never even known existed.

  At least she would be staying here, and if her father didn’t leave, if he gave up on chèche lavi elsewhere and stayed in Ville Rose, she could visit with him now and then. He would have more time for visits too, because if she was living with Madame Gaëlle, he wouldn’t have to work as hard. He wouldn’t have to worry about her as much.

  “Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin.” Her father was trying to get her attention. But he didn’t even need to call out her name. She was already listening for any word, every word from him. But she did not want to look at him. She did not want to see him sad. She did not want to make him sadder. She thought she heard tears in his voice when he asked Madame Gaëlle, “You will not change her name?”

  This is why he had said her full and entire name. He wanted to remind Madame Gaëlle of it. Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin. This would always be her name.

  And what else, Claire wondered, would he ask Madame Gaëlle to change or not to change about her? She might never sleep in the same place as her father again. Would they even visit the cemetery on her birthday?

  Her father was now saying something about a letter he’d given to Madame Gaëlle. Maybe the letter would explain more than he had been able to. Maybe it would make her understand everything. But no words could ever do that. She knew that because even if, like Msye Caleb, she could write the most wonderful letters, she could never write a letter that could explain how she was feeling at that moment.

  It was then that she raised her hand. She thought she would pretend she was in school pointing her index finger up to the sky to get their attention. That way, she wouldn’t have to look at either of them.

  They would also realize that she was always going to be a good girl, that she wasn’t going to fight them or disobey, that she would always do what they said. But even if she was going to live with Madame Gaëlle, she wanted her things. She wanted her school notebooks and her uniforms, and even if Madame Gaëlle had fancy beds in her house, she wanted at least the quilt that draped her cot, the quilt her father said had belonged to her mother. So she kept her head down and her hand raised and she told them that she wanted her things, “Bagay yo.”

  Rather than speaking, her father looked in the direction of the shack and pointed to it with an index finger, showing that he agreed she should go get her things.

  She wanted to walk the long way, through the crowd, for this was surely her last walk to the shack when it was still hers, but she sensed that both her father and Madame Gaëlle were in a hurry, that they wanted to get the entire thing done with, so she walked quickly, and soon she was opening the unlocked door and peeking inside the shack. But it was pitch-black inside, as dark as when she would wake up in the middle of the night needing the latrine and was too scared to get up even to use the chamber pot. But it wasn’t her fear of the dark that prevented her from going all the way in. That darkness was already familiar to her. She knew her way through it.

  What kept her from going in was feeling like she had been kicked out, like her home was no longer hers. So she looked back to where her father and Madame Gaëlle were sitting and she noticed they were no longer following her with their eyes. Instead they were each looking at different parts of the beach, trying not to look at each other, so she took advantage of that moment when she knew she was on each of their minds, but in different ways, and she pulled the shack door closed and ran.

  She ran through the alley that snaked between the shacks, up to the coco de mer palms at the entrance of a path that led to the lighthouse. Her sandals became entangled in some ylang-ylang creepers that bordered the trail where sandstones turned to hill gravel, then mountain rock. She was relieved when, at last, the trail curved and made an incline up toward Anthère Hill.

  Most of the houses on Anthère Hill had high concrete walls topped with bottle shards, conch shells, and bougainvillea vines. The bougainvilleas, she knew, grew so easily, so fast, that they crossed individual walls, creating unintended canopies. The canopied and uncanopied trails zigzagged up toward the lighthouse and Mòn Initil.

  The higher she climbed, the breezier it got and the brighter the stars became. The moon seemed larger, more silver than white. The air was much cooler and the sound of the waves faded, though it did not fall away completely. The only voices she now heard were coming from the lighthouse and from the paths between the houses. Muffled conversations were punctuated by giggles from people who sounded as though they were tickling one another.

  She heard a dog bark. That bark was echoed by another, then another, until a chorus of barks from large-sounding dogs had been started. Dogs barking—especially big, fat-sounding dogs—always meant you were not welcomed. She heard yardmen’s voices hushing the dogs, talking to them as though they were people, telling them to calm down. To be sure she wouldn’t be seen, she headed toward the dark, empty houses at the edge of the hill, the newer and larger houses that were occupied only a couple of weeks a year.

  She stopped to catch her breath, leaning against the last wall before the hill abruptly ended at a cliff. The wall felt cool against her arm and smooth too, as though it were on the inside of a house. From up there, the view was clear as always, and she could now see part of the beach. She couldn’t see her shack or the palms behind it but, even with her eyes closed, she would have been able to point in its direction, along with the bungalow where Msye Sylvain lived with his wife and twelve children and grandchildren. When he wasn’t out at sea, Msye Sylvain sold pen tete, breast-shaped bread, which he and his brood baked in a clay oven that was even now flaming.

  She couldn’t see her father or Madame Gaëlle just then, but she knew where Msye Xavier, the boat builder and metal forger, was, because from the hill the sparks coming from Msye Xavier’s tools looked like tiny fireworks. She saw Madame Wilda, who weaved her nets in a low chair behind her house by candlelight. She also saw Msye Caleb’s place, because the girl who stayed with Madame Josephine was cooking something, and the girl was illuminated by the cooking fire and the lamp hanging from a post in the outdoor kitchen. Claire saw the white-clad, ghostlike silhouettes of Madame Josephine and her friends from church. These familiar people and the fires that made them visible to her, these points of light, now seemed like beacons calling her home.

  But no, she was not thinking of going back.

  Suddenly there were more lights. More people were coming forward with lamps. Then one person (her father? was that his voice?) called out her name. Then many other
s called her name too.

  There were so many people calling her name that their voices made their way all the way up the hill to her.

  She could hear the men on the gallery of the lighthouse calling out her name too.

  She almost answered.

  Could this be a song? she wondered. Could her name being called out by dozens of people be a song?

  Could it be a new song for her next game of wonn?

  For a circle of one.

  Yo t ap chèche li …