Breath, Eyes, Memory Part 5

"Never the Americans in Haiti again," shouted one man. "Remember what they did in the twenties. They treated our people like animals. They abused the konbit system and they made us work like slaves."

"Roads, we need roads," said another man. "At least they gave us roads. My mother was killed in a ferry accident. If we had roads, we would not need to put crowded boats into the sea, just to go from one small village to another. A lot of you, when you go home, you have to walk from the village to your house, because there are no roads for cars."

"What about the boat people?" added a man from a table near the door. "Because of them, people can't respect us in this country. They lump us all with them."

"All the brains leave the country," Marc said, adding his voice to the melee.

"You are insulting the people back home by saying there's no brains there," replied a woman from a table near the back. "There are brains who stay."

"But they are crooks," Marc said, adding some spice to the argument.

"My sister is a nurse there with the Red Cross," said the woman, standing up. "You call that a crook? What have you done for your people?"

For some of us, arguing is a sport. In the marketplace in Haiti, whenever people were arguing, others would gather around them to watch and laugh at the colorful language. People rarely hit each other. They didn't need to. They could wound just as brutally by cursing your mother, calling you a s.e.xual misfit, or accusing you of being from the hills. If you couldn't match them with even stronger accusations, then you would concede the argument by keeping your mouth shut.

Marc decided to stay out of the discussion. The woman continued attacking him, shouting that she was tired of cowardly men speaking against women who were proving themselves, women as brave as stars out at dawn.

My mother smiled at the woman's colorful words. It was her turn to stand up and defend her man, but she said nothing. Marc kept looking at her, as if waiting for my mother to argue on his behalf, but my mother picked up the menu, and ran her fingers down the list of dishes.

My mother introduced me to the waiter when he came by to take her order. He looked at us for a long time. First me, then my mother. I wanted to tell him to stop it. There was no resemblance between us. I knew it.

It was an eternity before we were served. Marc complained about his boudin when it came.

"I can still taste the animal," he said "What do you expect?" my mother asked. "It is a pig's blood after all."

"It's not well done," he said, while raising the fork to his mouth. "It is an art to make boudin. There is a balance. At best it is a very tight kind of sausage and you would never dream of where it comes from."

"Who taught you to eat this way?" my mother asked.

"Food is a luxury," hesaid, "but we can not allow ourselves to become gluttons or get fat. Do you hear that, Sophie?"

I shook my head yes, as though I was really very interested. I ate like I had been on a hunger strike, filling myself with the coconut milk they served us in real green coconuts.

When they looked up from their plates, my mother and Marc eyed each other like there were things they couldn't say because of my presence. I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn't even see them. My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from the past.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Marc asked me. He spoke to me in a tone of voice that was used with very young children or very old animals.

"I want to do dactylo," I said, "be a secretary."

He didn't seem impressed.

"There are a lot of opportunities in this country," he said. "You should reconsider, unless of course this is the pa.s.sion of your life."

"She is too young now to know," my mother said. "You are going to be a doctor," she told me.

"She still has some time to think," Marc said. "Do you have a boyfriend, Sophie?"

"She is not going to be running wild like those American girls," my mother said. "She will have a boyfriend when she is eighteen."

"And what if she falls in love sooner?" Marc pushed.

"She will put it off until she is eighteen."

We washed down our meal with watermelon juice. Tante Atie always said that eating beets and watermelon would put more red in my blood and give me more strength for hard times.

Chapter 8.

School would not start for another two months. My mother took me to work with her every day. The agency she worked for did not like it, but she had no choice but to take me with her. After all, she could not very well leave me home alone.

On her day job at the nursing home, she cleaned up after bedridden old people. Some of the people were my grandmother's age, but could neither eat nor clean themselves alone. My mother removed their bed pads and washed their underarms and legs, then fed them at lunchtime.

I spent the days in the lounge watching a soap opera while an old black lady taught me how to knit a scarf.

The night job was much better. The old lady was asleep when my mother got there and took over the s.h.i.+ft from someone else. My mother would go into the living room and open a cot for me to sleep on. Most nights, she slept on the floor in the old lady's room in case something happened in the middle of the night.

One night near the end of the summer, I asked her to stay with me for a little while. I was tired of being alone and I was missing home.

"If the lady screams, we will hear it," I said.

"She can't scream," my mother said. "She had a stroke and she can't speak."

She made some tea and stayed with me for a while, anyway.

"I don't sleep very much at night," she said. "Otherwise this would be very hard work to do."

I felt so sorry for her. She looked very sad. Her face was cloudy with fatigue even though she kept reapplying the cream she had bought to lighten her skin.

She laid out a comforter on the floor and stretched her body across it.

"I want you to know that this will change soon when I find a job that pays both for our expenses and for my mother's and Atie's."

"I wish I could help you do one of your jobs," I said.

"But I want you to go to school. I want you to get a doctorate, or even higher than that."

"I am sorry you work so hard," I said. "I never realized you did so much."

"That's how it is. Life is no vacation. If you get your education, there are things you won't have to do."

She turned over on her back and stared direcdy into my face, something she did not do very often.

It had been a month since I had seen Marc. I wondered if he had gone away, but I didn't want to ask her in case he had and in case it was because of me.

"Am I the mother you imagined?" she asked, with her eyes half-closed.

As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. She never had to work for anything because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her. Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn.

"Was I the mother you imagined? You don't have to answer me," she said. "After you've seen me, I know the answer."

"For now I couldn't ask for better," I said.

"What do you think of Marc?" she asked, quickly changing the subject.

"I think he is smart."

"He helped me a lot in getting you here," she said, "even though he did not like the way I went about it. In Haiti, it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man."

She began the story of how she met him. She talked without stopping, as though she were talking on one of our ca.s.settes.

She got her green card through an amnesty program. When she was going through her amnesty proceedings, she had to get a lawyer. She found him listed in a Haitian newspaper and called his office. She was extremely worried that she would not be eligible for the program. It took him a long time to convince her that this was not the case and, over that period of time, they became friends. He started taking her to restaurants, always Haitian restaurants, sometimes ones as far away as Philadelphia. They even went to Canada once to eat at a Haitian, restaurant in Montreal. Marc was old-fas.h.i.+oned about a lot of things and had some of the old ways. He had never married and didn't have any children back home-that he knew of-and she admired that. She was going to stay with him as long as he didn't make any demands that she couldn't fulfill.

"Are you going to marry?" I asked.

"Jesus Marie Joseph, I don't know," she said. "He is the first man I have been with in a long time."

She asked if there was a boy in Haiti that I had liked.

I said no and she smiled.

"You need to concentrate when school starts, you have to give that all your attention. You're a good girl, aren't you?"

By that she meant if I had ever been touched, if I had ever held hands, or kissed a boy.

"Yes," I said. "I have been good."

"You understand my right to ask as your mother, don't you?"

I nodded.

"When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie hated it. She used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure."

She rubbed her palm against her eyelids, as if to keep the sleep away.

"My mother stopped testing me early" she said. "Do you know why?"

I said no.

"Did Atie tell you how you were born?"

From the sadness in her voice, I knew that her story was sadder than the chunk of the sky and flower petals story that Tante Atie liked to tell.

"The details are too much," she said. "But it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you."

I did not press to find out more. Part of me did not understand. Most of me did not want to.

"I thought Atie would have told you. I did not know this man. I never saw his face. He had it covered when he did this to me. But now when I look at your face I think it is true what they say. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father."

She did not sound hurt or angry, just like someone who was stating a fact. Like naming a color or calling a name. Something that already existed and could not be changed. It took me twelve years to piece together my mother's entire story. By then, it was already too late.

Two.

Chapter 9.

I was eighteen and going to start college in the fall. My mother continued working her two jobs, but she put in even longer hours. And we moved to a one-family house in a tree-lined neighborhood near where Marc lived. was eighteen and going to start college in the fall. My mother continued working her two jobs, but she put in even longer hours. And we moved to a one-family house in a tree-lined neighborhood near where Marc lived.

In the new place, my mother had a patch of land in the back where she started growing hibiscus. Daffodils would need more care and she had grown tired of them.

We decorated our new living room in red, everything from the carpet to the plastic roses on the coffee table. I had my very own large bedroom with a new squeaky bed. My mother's room was even bigger, with a closet that you could have entertained some friends in. In some places in Haiti, her closet would have been a room on its own, and the clothes would not have bothered the fortunate child who would sleep in it.

Before the move, I had been going to a Haitian Adventist school that went from elementary right to high school. They had guaranteed my mother that they would get me into college and they had lived up to their pledge. Now my first cla.s.ses at college were a few months away and my mother couldn't have been happier. Her sacrifices had paid off.

I never said this to my mother, but I hated the Maranatha Bilingual Inst.i.tution. It was as if I had never left Haiti. All the lessons were in French, except for English composition and literature cla.s.ses. Outside the school, we were "the Frenchies," cringing in our mock-Catholic-school uniforms as the students from the public school across the street called us "boat people" and "stinking Haitians."

When my mother was home, she made me read out loud from the English Composition textbooks. The first English words I read sounded like rocks falling in a stream. Then very slowly things began to take on some meaning. There were words that I heard often. Words that jump out of New York Creole conversations, like the last kernel in a cooling popcorn machine. Words, among others, like TV, TV, building, feeling, which Marc and my mother used even when they were in the middle of a heated political discussion in Creole. Mwin gin yon feeling. I have a feeling Haiti will get back on its feet one day, but I'll be dead before it happens. My mother, always the pessimist. building, feeling, which Marc and my mother used even when they were in the middle of a heated political discussion in Creole. Mwin gin yon feeling. I have a feeling Haiti will get back on its feet one day, but I'll be dead before it happens. My mother, always the pessimist.

There were other words that helped too, words that looked almost the same in French, but were p.r.o.nounced differently in English: nationality, alien, race, enemy, date, present. These and other words gave me a context for the rest that I did not understand.

Eventually, I began to hear myself that I read better. I answered swiftly when my mother asked me a question in English. Not that I ever had a chance to show it off at school, but I became an English speaker.

"There is great responsibility that comes with knowledge," my mother would say. My great responsibility was to study hard. I spent six years doing nothing but that. School, home, and prayer.

Tante Atie once said that love is like rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

I was eighteen and I fell in love. His name was Joseph and he was old. He was old like G.o.d is old to me, ever present and full of wisdom.

He looked somewhat like Monsieur Augustin. He was the color of ground coffee, with a cropped beard and a voice like mola.s.ses that turned to music when he held a saxophone to his lips.

He broke the monotony of my shuffle between home and school when he moved into the empty house next door to ours.

My mother never trusted him. In the back of my mind echoed her constant warning, "You keep away from those American boys." The ones whose eyes followed me on the street. The ones who were supposedly drooling over me afterwards, even though they called me a nasty West Indian to my face. "You keep away from them especially. They are upset because they cannot have you."

Aside from Marc, we knew no other men. Men were as mysterious to me as white people, who in Haiti we had only known as missionaries. I tried to imagine my mother's reaction to Joseph. I could already hear her: "Not if he were the last unmarried man on earth."