“Don’t he have a German shepherd?” I asked, causing more laughter.
Dandelions littered the drop to the gully. The wishful serpent closes its eyes, makes a wish, then blows the dandelion to bits—a white explosion into stardust carrying Dambala’s breath to Bondyè. Lève-toi, the cicadas reminded us as we lugged our buckets of rocks off the tracks headed home. Headed for some sneaky shit. Dis-moi.
We hid behind a truck across the street from Joe Boy’s house and waited. Soon Joe Boy emerged and we let him have it. White rocks pummeled him and a few windows. He ran back into his house with a few new shiners.
“Sonny! Bring your ass over here!” Father yelled from the back of his truck.
He saw the whole thing and considered it cowardly. Now he’d have to buy new windows for Joe Boy’s house. The windows were already Swiss cheese with a few BB gun holes and two clean .22-caliber wounds, which is why Joe Boy’s father didn’t raise too much hell after Father hobbled over there to make arrangements and apologies. And of course, all of this was coming out of my meager savings and allowance. Yet that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that Father thought I was a coward.
That night while trying to sleep, I heard the mouse. Then there was a crack like someone had stepped on a pecan with church shoes. Something was in my room. I smelled it. Him. I cautiously opened my eyes, and there he stood, holding the dead mouse by the tail. Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, FMC.
“What you doin’ in here?” I asked.
“I came to see you,” he said.
“What I do?”
He laughed.
“Get on away from here,” I said, then hid under the covers. When I mustered enough courage, I looked again and he was gone.
He found me.
• • •
The next day I took a personal field trip on the Metro bus and rode all over Houston. I was looking for him, although I had the impression that he was not far away and was watching me the entire time. I could smell it. Burning wood.
Around 3:00 P.M. I got off the bus at Ricky and MLK, where a crowd of kids, old and young, had gathered. They were waiting for me. Waiting with Joe Boy.
The first punch landed on my mouth, splitting my bottom lip against my bottom teeth. That shit hurt. Warm blood seeped from my lip, confusing my ego with the notion that it was only hot spit. The customary oohs and aahs and rants only resembled the train on Mykawa, a low, sonorous constant tucked away on the back burner until it’s merely a hum, almost muted. I couldn’t hear anything, didn’t want to hear anything. My heart was beating so fast that I thought I heard it; senses confusing feeling with hearing. My hands felt heavy, weighted by fear and inexperience, but I kept them up, if not to guard then at least to look like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t.
Scott Joplin’s ragtime sang. The ice cream truck. Fuck! I wanted a Bomb Pop. Damn this fight, I thought, but the crowd had encircled us and there was no getting out.2
Joe Boy stood back, one foot planted before his body with all of his weight leaning back on the other foot. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t talking shit. He was serious. Some guys would bounce around aping Sugar Ray Leonard with exaggerated punches and self-broadcast in-fight commentary, but not Joe Boy. He came to fight.
I threw a slow left cross, and he countered with a punch in the stomach. I buckled, but he didn’t throw me to the ground or wrestle like some guys. No. Joe Boy was only interested in pure pugilistic combat, so naturally, I kicked him against the side of his knee. It didn’t do much, but he unloaded on me and the whole thing happened too gotdamn fast for me to keep up.
Several punches later, I was sprawled on the concrete covering my face as he continued whipping my ass. Then he got up. I peered between my fingers and noticed Sonnier in the crowd, yelling—
“Lève! Lève-toi!”
STAND UP!
I had heard Father say it before when I would fall. Lève-toi. Stand up, Sonnier was screaming. Nobody noticed him. Joe Boy had taken a few steps back, then I noticed that his fists were covered in blood. My blood.
Fistfights are essentially about openings and opportunity coupled with skill and belief. Joe Boy was a static target who led with his right and planted his right foot forward for balance. God, if I was a lefty. Technically, there was an opening, but he’d literally beat me to the ground, and now he was giving me an opportunity to get up and try again. A second chance at bat. He knew I was inexperienced and really didn’t have comparable skills, which was why he had to jump back and give me another shot. His pride was on the line too.
The hood, as are many hoods around the world, is always a predatory environment. We, little black boys, learn this early in life. The strong defeat the weak. Advantage is never given. Cowardice is a death knell. These are the rules.
The only thing left was whether I believed I could beat him. And I didn’t believe. I wasn’t a fool. But I had managed to make a showing. Don’t cry.
“Lève-toi, Couzain!” Sonnier yelled again.
Stand. Stand up. Stand up for yourself.
So I stood.
The prospect of throwing flurries at Joe Boy seemed as rational as committing to hard jabs dead center against the trunk of an oak tree. But in order to fight with fists, one must commit to the pain of the oak. The pain is part of the process. When you’re removed from the fear of pain, then you can hold your own. You may not win the fight, but you won’t look like a bitch.
It certainly would’ve been nice if Sonnier would’ve tied Joe Boy’s shoes together, invisibly of course, but that only happened in cartoons. In fact, by the time I got to my feet, Sonnier was gone. By now, a few older guys had parked their Monte Carlos, Cutlasses, and Regals around the circle and watched from their hoods. Fuck. Graduation in the hood.
I can’t tell you I kicked Joe Boy’s ass and he cried “uncle,” but I can say that he got a bloody nose. After ten minutes, he stopped and stuck out his bloody hand.
Armistice.
The crowd roared above the shrill chorus of approving cicadas. White boy got wit’ him. Ti’ John put hands on him. That nigga crazy like his daddy. Don’t fuck wit’ ’dem Creole niggas when they get mad. Ti’ John got nuts. Ti’ John handled his business. Ti’ John got heart. I bet Joe Boy ain’t gonna fuck wit’ him no mo’. And they were right. Joe Boy and I never fought again.
I walked back home triumphant with Booger and Raymond Earl by my side giving me the play-by-play. Apparently, I’d connected a few lucky shots. I guess I made my own luck.
“Mr. Frenchy, you shoulda seen it. Ti’ John gave Joe Boy a bloody nose,” Booger reported to Father as we jumped the fence into my backyard.
Father didn’t even say a word, focusing his lasso on the white plastic bucket twenty feet away from him.
His cast was off.
Father didn’t give a shit about my fight after he heard the details. He just shrugged with a haughty “That’s what you supposed to do.” He lit a Benson & Hedges; then I noticed a gold crucifix ring on his pinkie. Yeah, that one.
Later that night as Mother nursed my bruises with ice packs and comforting words, we watched Mike’s daddy give a speech on the news about crime prevention in the city of Houston, even though at St. Andrew’s, the mystery of urine puddles, stolen Hot Wheels, and missing bag lunches would remain unsolved.
With the mouse dead and Ms. Johnson in Harris County Jail for possession, I climbed onto my roof and listened to the train on Mykawa Road. I thought about the water moccasin beseeching the white dandelions. What did the snake request? Was it granted?
The cicadas sang in spurts. The train’s distant roar softened. Under the stars of a hot, humid Houston night and while lying on warm roofing tile, I pulled out my member with scabbed, swollen knuckles and masturbated for the first time.
I didn’t consider whether anybody on my street was watching from their window. I mean, I was on the roof full monty. Then I looked on the corner and I saw him again, smoking something, shadowy, still . . . nosy. What the fuck did
he want? I thought.
* * *
1. Marijuana cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid laced with PCP.
2. Dice Rule 5: When gambling in an enclosed area, always know where the exits are located.
eighteen
le pélican
Louisiana, July 1870
In the mornings after the cock crowed and dawn dampened leaves and fruit, the old women would return from the lagoon with jars of that sweet water on their heads, singing quietly as the village awakened. Singing that song. The field hands would move toward the cane fields, dazed but constant, heading toward their obligation to the land. I watched from a cracked window.
Those were different days back then. Flesh could be measured by grain or gold and adjudicated by effort and intentions. We dealt in absolutes. Memories of slavery still lingered, buttressed by a desperate hope to understand what freedom meant. The land and our labor would determine our future, most believed. And the lwa would judge our actions and shape our faith.
We felt the rain, tasted its vitality, witnessed crops grow from sprout to stalk with the generous sun enriching their hopeful leaves. We prayed for the land, asking for its nourishment to feed our bodies so that we could live and honor the lwa and our ancestors. God was not far away, not in the sky or the clouds but right there on land—the dark dirt dampened by our patriots’ blood. You could hear it. Taste it. See it. Smell it. God. Everywhere. On wet dirt where cane and fruit sprung forth proudly in this new republic. This is my earliest memory of Haiti.
Je m’appelle Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, FMC.
Aboard the Schooner Jeannette, Due Northwest at Approximately Ten Knots in the Gulf of Mexico
My uncle Emmanuel Guillory leaned against the railing of the deck smoking a cheroot and gazing at the Alabama coastline as the schooner navigated past Dauphin Island. A hundred years earlier, his grandparents were run off the small island by British forces, forcing his grandfather Gregoire to petition for a land grant in the Spanish-held Opelousas Post of the Louisiana Territory. His grandparents’ storied love affair was the talk of the legal community and French aristocracy. Gregoire, the French landowner, fell in love with his slave Marguerite, birthing a new family in the Louisiana Territory—the Guillorys, FPC.
In 1859, Nonc Emmanuel took us to Haiti with the promise of sanctuary and prosperity. What we found was dismal infighting among Saint-Domingue’s quarrelsome affranchi. P. E. Desdunes had promised a land of freedom and liberty in the Jacobin tradition, but Nonc Emmanuel didn’t give a damn about idealism or politics, only soil. He was a farmer.
The Civil War had forced many of us, les gens du couleur libres, to pick sides. Some, like my cousin Auguste Donato, had joined the Confederacy as a way to preserve their property rights. Others, like my other cousin Martin Guillory, had joined the Union resistance, forming a special unit of guerrilla Jayhawkers, the Free Scouts of Bois Mallet. Most knew what both Cousin Auguste and Cousin Martin were doing—stealing. Under the auspices of their respective allegiances, they raided farms and towns throughout southwestern Louisiana, stealing white cotton from white farms. Most of our people stashed their cotton crops deep in the woods of Bois Mallet under Leon Fontenot’s supervision. Now the war was over and Nonc Emmanuel was bringing us back to La Louisiane. Land speculation was high, and the war had left most in St. Landry Parish impoverished. We weren’t sure what we were returning to.
Yet it wasn’t the economic turmoil of St. Landry Parish that worried him. It was me—the little boy who had been born in Saint-Marc and was now returning to Louisiana with him.
My mama, Mathildé Sonnier, journeyed with the Guillorys to Haiti. She was related to Nonc Emmanuel’s grandmother Marguerite, and he didn’t believe St. Landry Parish would be safe for her if war broke out between the states—she was four months pregnant. Upon my birth, the villagers of Saint-Marc embraced me as their own and began secretly instructing me in the ways of the Dahomey. While Nonc Emmanuel and my cousins exchanged farming techniques with the locals, I was learning how to draw vévés and call spirits under the guidance of the great houngan1 Etienne Delbeau. Very soon the great houngans and mambos of the region heard of me—the boy who could divine with knucklebones fashioned from goat ankles. My predictions were gospel, but I couldn’t predict that Mama would leave me. She died of yellow fever on my tenth birthday.
And now, two months later, many on the Jeannette were whispering of throwing me overboard, not wanting to arrive in the newly reunified United States of America with a voodoo child, but they were thwarted. With scabbard in hand, Nonc Emmanuel threatened the wary, highbrow New Orleanian Creoles who conspired to kill me while reciting verses from Les Cenelles.2 They backed off, leaving the rustic patriarch and his rural brood to their pastoral ruminations on farm life.
For his part, Ozémé Boudreaux, my biological father, stood resolute with Nonc Emmanuel, although most had grown tired of his antics, primarily petty theft and adultery. Ozémé was not an honorable man, so Nonc Emmanuel took it upon himself to provide me with an upstanding role model. Mama’s husband, Jacques Sonnier, had been killed in the war, but it was no secret that Ozémé was my father.
And now, hours away from reaching the Port of New Orleans, the passengers had grown hostile toward me. Edmund, Emmanuel’s teenage son and my best friend, had taken ill. So I took the opportunity to cure him with methods I had learned in Haiti, which caused an uproar with the New Orleanian Creoles. But Nonc Emmanuel didn’t have time to worry about them, marshaling his wishes toward his boy’s speedy recovery before making port and hoping that his land grant in western St. Landry Parish was still intact.
His cheroot died out from damp air. He lit it again and thanked the British for running his forefathers out of the mosquito-ridden Dauphin Island to St. Landry Parish, where a French-speaking, God-fearing free man of color could own land and make something out of himself. Land was the measure, Nonc Emmanuel used to say, not fancy titles or European educations. Land would determine the fate of his family. And for him, family included me—the young copper-colored boy who practiced cleromancy with knucklebones and spoke the Dahomey and Kongo tongues to the stars.
A large brown pelican circled the mast above, lured by the foreign smell of Nonc Emmanuel’s burning cheroot. Distanced from the caucusing highbrow Creoles of New Orleans, he didn’t notice that chatter had abruptly ceased as I led a weak Edmund to the deck. Emmanuel looked at his boy and smiled inwardly as Edmund took feeble steps toward the railing.
“Qui c’est ça?”3 Edmund murmured, pointing to the shore.
“Ça c’est l’Amerique,”4 I answered.
Nonc Emmanuel turned and embraced his son, his burning cheroot dropping on the deck.
“Ça c’est nos pays, mon garçon. Nos pays,”5 said Emmanuel with joyous wet eyes.
I reached down, picked up the cheroot, and put it in my mouth. I didn’t cough but blew a steady stream of grayish white smoke even though this was the first time my young lungs welcomed tobacco. I immediately took a liking to it.
They stared at me, pointed, speculated. “Bastard,” they said aloud. “Witch,” they said under their breath. Both were true. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. They hated me because I was one of them. They hated me because I was born in Haiti like many of their own parents. But they were right about one thing. I was different. I am different.
It was a familiar tongue that brought us together—La Louisiane and Haiti. Distant cousins banded together by vague revolutionary republicanism masked in new freedom. Africa came along too as the Guinea people made Saint-Domingue their home. Nowhere was this new feeling of discovery and absolute faith more prevalent than Haiti.
The day I was born in Saint-Marc, Etienne knew. He found me. He showed me. He showed me God.
Docks of the Mississippi River, New Orleans, July 1870
God’s tears are brown. These tears swell the banks of the Mississippi, carrying higher power to its marshes, tributaries, and bayous—saturating the ric
h Gulf Coast soil with divine gumption that’s readily available to the faithful and the willing. La Louisiane. Its land is predisposed to the making of miracles, the forgiveness of sins, and the realization of dreams because . . . La Louisiane is a land for believers.
We arrived in New Orleans on a hot night. The docks were busy with cargo and carpetbaggers. Vieux Carré was exceptionally congested for the late hour, with all manner of people crowding the city, but very few awaited our arrival. Nonc Mannie had secured lodging in case the steamer was late. As we approached the docks we looked at each other proudly with weary eyes. We were fatigued, some felt foolish, some felt clever. But we had dodged the War Between the States. P. E. Desdunes, the Haitian consul in New Orleans, had left an attaché to inform him of our arrival. But he never showed.
Before dawn the next morning, we boarded an old Confederate steamer and pushed into the Mississippi headed to Bayou Plaquemine. Early morning fog masked the route with only the sounds of the river to support the notion that life still existed west of Orleans Parish. At Bayou Plaquemine we shifted direction and headed toward Grand Lake, then Grand Bayou. Moss-draped oaks guarded the banks of the still bayou. All on the steamer were silent as we navigated further into the quiet abyss. My father didn’t say anything to me since the standoff in the Gulf; rather, he conferenced with Nonc Emmanuel and occasionally looked at me. They were making plans.
By daybreak we reached the Atchafalaya River, where I was introduced to a new type of people called “Acadians.” They were French-speaking fishermen and trappers—gruff, hardworking, and suspicious. Nonc Emmanuel told all of us to stay close and not to say anything as our cargo was transferred to a flatboat. Midday we continued along the Atchafalaya headed toward Bayou Courtableau. The heavy foliage along the banks hid the utter destruction of farmlands that we had heard about once we reached New Orleans. It was very clear that the War Between the States had ruined Louisiana, and the general feeling was that everybody would have to start over, including these new dark eyes that were everywhere, watching, hoping, praying—they were the “freedmen.”
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