Everything Inside
Page 18
There were cell-phone videos of him falling, taken from different angles. Some people had filmed him from the ground. Others had recorded him from their terraces and balconies. He looked, in the quickly assembled collage of these recordings, not like a person but like a large object plummeting. He was moving too fast to be identifiable as a human being when the footage wasn’t in slow motion.
The lightness returned. That airless sensation of his body evaporating. Darline and Paris were fading, too. They were becoming distant longings, silhouettes, shadows fading on the ground.
There are loves that outlive lovers. Some version of these words had been his prayer as he fell. Darline would now have two of those. He would also have two: Darline and Paris. He would keep trying to look for them. He would continue to hum along with Darline’s song, and keep whispering in Paris’s ear. He would also try to guide Darline back to the beach, to look for others like him.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Kathy Neustadt, Nancy Neustadt Barcelo, Susan Neustadt Schwartz, the University of Oklahoma, Daniel Simon, and World Literature Today for the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and to the Ford Foundation for the 2018 Art of Change Fellowship. Both honors have not only placed me in extraordinary company but have led to some wonderful creations and exquisite collaborations. Thank you, Elizabeth Alexander and Achy Obejas, for modeling writerly advocacy so beautifully. I am extremely grateful to Nicole Aragi, Charles Rowell, and Deborah Treisman, who are often the first readers of my short stories. Thank you, Robin Desser, for traveling this road with me for so long. And thanks to my family—Bob, Kelly, Karl, Fedo, Mira, Leila, Madame Boyer, and the whole Danticat and Boyer gang—for everything I can and cannot name.
“Being born is the first exile…” is from Cindy Jiménez-Vera’s poem “COULD YOU TALK TO US ABOUT YOUR COUNTRY’S HISTORICAL MEMORY?,” which can be found in I’ll Trade You This Island: Selected Poems, translated by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil (Ediciones Aguadulce, Biblioteca Desembocadura, 2018). “We love because it’s the only true adventure…” is from Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Love: Is a Human Condition,” which can be found in The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, January 2007). The lyrics to “Shall We Gather at the River?” are from the hymn “At the River,” written by Robert Lowry in 1864. Nina Simone’s “Take Me to the Water” is referring to a version of this song recorded live at Morehouse College in Atlanta in June 1969. Charles Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song” is from his album The Clown, recorded in 1957. “Latibonit O” is a well-known Haitian folk song that invokes the Artibonite region—Latibonit—in the north of Haiti. The way the lyrics are translated is based on whether one believes that the “Sole” being referred to in the song is the sun (normally spelled “solèy”) or a person named Sole. If one believes that it is the sun, as my character does, the first verse referred to in the story “Without Inspection” can be translated thus:
O Artibonite, they sent me word
that the sun is sick.
When I arrive, I find the sun in bed.
When I arrive, I find the sun is dead.
Regretfully, I must bury the sun.
It pains me so to bury the sun.
Credits
These stories first appeared, in different forms, in the following publications: “Dosas” as “Elsie” (Winter 2006) and “In the Old Days” (Spring 2012) in Callaloo; “The Gift” as “Bastille Day” (June 2011) in The Caribbean Writer; “Hot-Air Balloons” (Spring 2011) in Granta magazine; “The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special” (October 2013) in Ms. magazine; “Sunrise, Sunset” (July 2017) and “Without Inspection” (May 2018) in The New Yorker; and an excerpt from “Seven Stories” as “Quality Control” (Fall 2014) in The Washington Post Magazine.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
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