by Hilton Als
We didn’t know that then. On August 2nd we would return from a morning run, singing of soldiers on the hill and C-130s rolling down the strip, to learn that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and we stood in silence on the drill pad as our leaders announced that it looked as if we were going to war. The United Nations passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi troops. They did not need to tell us what would happen if Iraq did not withdraw.
In the next few days the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were mobilized. The aircraft carriers Eisenhower and Independence slipped through the Suez Canal. The first F-15s arrived from Langley, and each morning, before we ran singing of soldiers dying in foreign countries, we came down to see the news from the Gulf written on a chalkboard, the mobilization of forces, the resolutions and sanctions passed by the UN.
Then we ran, farther and faster than we had before. I want to say our voices were louder. Many of us would go home after training and never see the Gulf, never stand on a hill or jump from the sky, but we went through our last days singing, adhering to the old rhythms, the old songs. We ran in the mornings and evenings. We marched to class with our young voices echoing off the walls of the barracks all around us. And when we returned to our temporary homes in the barracks late at night, we lay dreaming not of home but of war, what form our futures might follow.
Our last night in Basic Training our parents had flown in or driven through the night to see us. They were waiting on the drill pad as we came back from wherever we had been, and the drill sergeants marched us in place for what seemed forever, our voices louder and louder and louder, echoing off the buildings all around as bombs exploded in the far distance. The drill sergeants wanted our parents to see us and hear us, to feel our voices ringing out into the summer night, and caught up in the cadence, the sheer joy of singing, whether about dirty commies or women lying dead in hospital beds, whether about soldiers dying in the early morning rain or soldiers falling from the sky, we didn’t know that we were only marching in place.
Which is to say we never knew where we were going, and would only realize later that we never went anywhere. We woke every morning to reveille and dressed with the dark outside the windows, then ran down to the drill pad and all over the base, past the old WWII cannons and the fighter jets, past the tanks and helicopters and bronze statues of men long dead, past the base commander’s house, everything dark, lit only in pools of yellow light that threw our shadows out large beside us. We might have been circling forever, as if we had always been here and always would be. We might have been lost in the darkness. We might have been on any base, wearing any uniform in the world, blindly following the men chosen to lead us, who could have taken us anywhere.
Edwidge Danticat
All the Home You’ve Got
from Freeman’s
Faith
My uncle, the Baptist minister, whom I lived with in Haiti from the time that I was four years old to the time I was twelve, often used the expression enfants de la promesse, children of promise, to refer to children like me. The phrase was not meant to refer to our overall potential, but to the fact that we were born to Christian parents. Being a child of promise, in my particular case, also had to do with being born as a result of many promises.
It took five years from the time my parents were married for them to have me. And between their wedding night and the day I was born, there were a lot of prayers and tears. My father once told me that he’d wondered whether he would have to wait to be a hundred years old to become a father, like Abraham. So there were many promises made before I showed up. My mother had promised that she would consecrate her firstborn to Christ, that she would make sure the child walked no other path, that her first daughter or son would be a servant of the Lord. And my father promised God that he would stop smoking, that he would never so much as look at any other woman but my mother. He promised that he would never leave his children if he could help it. But there were many things that were beyond his and my mother’s control.
A few years after my birth, my parents left Haiti to seek a better home and future elsewhere, to escape a brutal dictatorship, to find work, to make money. And for all that to happen they had to leave me and my younger brother behind. So I was a child of promise, born out of pure faith, but a child, and later an adult, whose faith in any kind of home, would, just like my heart, completely break.
Witness
When I was ten years old, an older boy moved into my aunt and uncle’s house and every night for a few weeks, he would walk into the room where I and several girls slept and he would slip his hands under our nightgowns and touch our private parts. Our bunk beds were lined up near the linen-filled armoire from which he needed to get a set of sheets at night, and before he’d pick up the sheets he would touch us. Sometimes it was one or two of us. Sometimes it was all four of us, all of us too terrified to discuss what was going on even among ourselves, all of us too afraid that he might kill us if we screamed or told anyone else.
In that moment I would pretend that my body was no longer my own and that I had merged with the bedsheet. During the day, I would find certain objects to keep me from thinking about the night: self-made amulets in the form of beautiful black and brown women on toothpaste boxes. I would cut out these faces and their gleaming white teeth and I would think how lucky these women were because, since they neither had homes nor beds, no one could touch them in terrible ways. These ungrounded women could also shield me, I thought, by drawing me into whatever imaginary world they lived in, where people laughed all the time and had no vulnerable flesh.
I was afraid to write openly about these nights while my parents were still alive. I was afraid that it might upset them. My parents had left Haiti in the middle of a thirty-year dictatorship during which most people were being terrorized. A woman or girl being raped, or even killed, was not all that unusual. A girl could be walking down the street, she could even be on her way to school alone, and if one of the dictatorship’s henchmen decided he liked her, he could take her away. My aunt and uncle managed to protect me from the street threat. Yet they were not aware that the terror had walked inside their home.
As an adult at family gatherings, at mine or other people’s homes, I would sit quietly and listen to story after story of female relatives who had been asked to go to private houses, prisons, police stations, wearing their prettiest dresses to “convince” the colonel, general, foot soldier, or militia man who’d arrested their father, brother, uncle, cousin, not to kill their men. Sometimes the price of a loved one’s release was a young female relative’s virginity. But no one spoke about any of this until our female heroines had died.
Many of the women in my family covered up being abused with piousness. They wore white clothes and wrapped their hair with white scarves. They wore no jewelry or makeup. They prayed a lot. They tried to make themselves as white as the snow we had not yet seen, as white as light itself. They tried to become invisible.
The less of you that was seen the better, my aunt Denise liked to say. But it was no guarantee of protection, even in the dark, even inside your own home.
“I can’t always be where you are, but the more time you spend in church, the more eyes you have on you,” my father would say when I joined him and my mother in New York at age twelve.
Having eyes on you made it harder for people to hurt you because there were not only human eyes on you. God and his angels were also watching over you.
Prayer
When I first wrote about this—as fiction—when I was twenty-three years old, this is some of what I wrote:
When I was a little girl, I had a small notebook made of a few folded sheets, held together by bamboo syrup. There, I sketched a series of stick figures, which were so closely drawn that they almost bumped each other off the page. My effigies were of a child who woke up in tears every morning to find her panties gone. There were never any bubbles over her scalp. No expressions nor conversations. There
was just a burning ache between her thighs and a head that bent down to look and then somehow was never raised again . . .
I was forced to press my pillow farther against the wall when Aunt Denise’s godson Joel moved in. He was a tall, thin fifteen-year-old who looked like a man on account of a shaggy beard. He had just come from the hills of Léogâne and his whole body smelled like the wet clay that was still clinging to the straps of his brown sandals.
After he spent the first night in the far corner of the room, way over on the boys’ side, I woke up and found my panties gone.
I couldn’t string together the words to tell. (“Lost Shadows and Stick Figures,” The Caribbean Writer, volume 6, 1992)
I asked that this be published as fiction, but I am not sure it was. I find it interesting that in my fictional version, I put him in the same room with me and the other girls, “way over on the boys’ side.” I also gave myself a notebook to write and draw images in. Reading this now, I wonder whether worse things happened to me than my protective childhood mind has allowed me to remember. But what I most want to hold on to now is the fact that words and images had become an alternate home, my safest place. My imagination had rescued me. My prayers had saved me too—I consider writing a kind of prayer—even though they had not been answered in the way I’d yearned for or expected.
A few years ago, I ran into Joel at my aunt and uncle’s house in Haiti after my aunt had died. I stood away from him, and though I had both dreaded and rehearsed this encounter over and over in my mind for years, I did not publicly blurt out what he had done to me. I did not cry or run away either. I did not even cringe. I answered his hello and looked into his eyes, and though I saw no visible sign of remorse or soul-searching there, it was the first time in my life that I stopped praying for his death. He was now a shadow to me. I had escaped his grasp, and strangely enough, my imperfect faith in God, which had led me to supplement my prayers with my own protective visions of those bodiless women, had been a big part of my being able to stand in the same room as Joel and mourn the same loved one.
I am still waiting to experience both perfect forgiveness and perfect faith, though. I am not yet able to love my enemies the same way I love my friends. I am unable to pray for those who persecute me beyond praying for them to stop persecuting me. But I am still praying that this particular persecution will not follow me all the days of my life.
Grace
I have always had low religious self-esteem. Whenever I am in a church, be it my home church or a church I am visiting, there is always a moment when I expect someone to walk over and escort me out, saying, “This is not your place. You don’t belong here. We are kicking you out.”
The feeling that God let me down by allowing Joel to touch me sometimes makes my faith plummet in a way that is as clear to me as a special-effects meteorite in a movie. But it is much harder for me to express how my survival of this ordeal is what keeps making my faith rebound—not just my being alive, but being able to love my husband, and my two daughters, being able to write my stories, and also to contribute some things, both tangible and intangible, to the world we all live in.
Many of the people I grew up with, some of whom are now pastors and choir directors and other functionaries in different types of churches, are very happy to see me in church. But others, armed with public revelations that writers directly or indirectly make in their work, are hell-bent on seeing me draw a line in the sand and make a clear declaration of “pure and absolute faith,” as one friend put it.
For a long time, a childhood friend would email me accounts of dreams that she’d had about me and my family. Her most consistent dream about me involved my having sold my soul to the devil, unwillingly, in my sleep. She could tell by the things I had been writing, she said, and by the fact that I refused to write Christian stories.
“You might have strayed too far from home,” she once wrote me, “a little or a lot from the path your uncle and parents taught you. Jesus does not do in-between or lukewarm. You’re either inside his kingdom or out in the cold.”
I felt condemned by this person because she had very accurately described my often wavering faith, which could be lukewarm or sometimes cold. At times it was because of gatekeepers like her, whose level of certainty I could never match. But most of the time it was because my imagination would not allow me to constrain myself to one set of beliefs, one set of people, and one set of “certainties.” As a writer, I told myself, I had to live in other spaces, in other bodies, in other homes, in other minds, in order to convincingly create my characters, which, if I am lucky, represent a whole range of beliefs, lifestyles, moralities, and hopes and dreams.
“This kind of thinking is a certain road to hell,” another enfant de la promesse, who actually fulfilled her religious promise and was attending a theological seminary, told me.
None of this shocks or offends me; I grew up with a minister after all. Hell was not just other people, but even deviant thoughts, which is a minefield for fiction. I understand drawing lines and unambiguity. I understand not compromising. I understand you’re either with us or against us. But that is just not me. Besides, I’m not always sure who “us” is. Is it the gatekeepers to our celestial home? Is it God? Might “us” not also be a group of wounded people whose faith often wavers but who are still seeking a home in God?
Whenever my faith wavers, I try to stick to the basics. I am not expecting any cookies for it, but I still believe in prayer and I still believe in God. I understand, as my minister uncle used to say, that the Bible has many contradictions. I am still struggling with the way these contradictions are often used by human beings to hurt, and even assault, others. Yet I want to respect other people’s religions. I want—need—to seek inspiration in the stories of strong people from a whole range of faiths and religious paths.
In the strict religious environment in which I grew up, that makes me a heretic, and a messy one at that. A heretic who refuses to wander off too far, to not believe at all, yet still continues to walk around with a messy and incomplete faith that sometimes feels like living in a half-finished house.
One thing trauma and the resulting restlessness keeps reminding me is that we are all born vulnerable. Unlike an actual house we are not made of wood, stone, concrete, mortar, or cement. We are easily broken, and we might end up spending the rest of our lives trying to find some way to fix that brokenness. One can still learn, though, from other wounded people—real or fictional—whose faith seems complete, “finished,” people whose faith is—or feels—actually like home. One of those folks for me is the lay preacher Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
I sometimes find myself prayerfully muttering a few lines from one of her outdoor sermons.
“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.”
Reading this, I always imagine her meaning that sometimes our bodies are all the home we’ve got.
Then I whisper, Amen, Sister, Amen.
Steven Harvey
The Other Steve Harvey
from Michigan Quarterly Review
It does only happen on the telephone.
A woman—it is always a woman—and I may be talking about insurance or a credit card or my medications, while I’m standing in the kitchen twirling the telephone cord and the subject of my name comes up. The voice at the other end of the line that had started off businesslike, polite, and unaccented, suddenly breaks into a nervous laugh, sheds its formality, and is full of attitude.
It turns black.
“Are you really Steve Harvey?”
It happens to those of us with the name of someone who is famous, in my case a black television star known for his charisma, chutzpah, and thick moustache. “I’m here with Steve Harvey,” Ellen DeGeneres once joked, “and Steve Harvey’s moustache.” He is an entertainer who presents himself as saucy, sexy, and full of good cheer.
“I just love tha
t man, hmm mm,” the voice on the phone once added. “He’s somethin’.”
It is the voice of a black woman letting down her defenses. A woman among friends, and I hear in it an opening, a thinning of the distance between us, even, perhaps, a call to kinship from a confidante, and I usually try to join in with a self-deprecating joke. “No, he’s the rich one,” I say. Or I might be a little evasive. “Me, Steve Harvey? Only on the telephone.” Usually I just tell them what they know already: “No, I’m the other Steve Harvey.”
What I don’t say is what I am thinking.
The Other Steve Harvey
I remind people that I had the name first. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, seven years before the TV star, and my parents chose the name because they liked the sound of it. No one else before me in my family was named Steve as far as I know. My mother called me Stevie.
As for the name Harvey, my dad’s father was a cattle rancher in Dodge City and the last name has a question mark beside it, since that side of the family, unlike my mother’s side with a lineage that runs back to a witch in Salem, is not well known. There may be a reason for this blank spot in the record since my dad liked to joke that the Harveys were probably cattle rustlers and thieves.
