He was never aware of the actual moment he fell asleep. Nodding off was natural whenever he sat for any length of time, so his daydreams, memories, and REM sleep ran into each other like an endless city block with no corners or crossings. His last thought before his closed eyes fluttered was of Dieuseul and whether they were related or just two men who had taken to each other more quickly than his other long- or short-term tenants.
Lucien had felt immediately comfortable enough to lease Dieuseul the morning shift driving his taxi without asking around about the newcomer to KAM and without requiring a deposit. The latter upset Marie-Ange, who’d already budgeted the funds, mentally applying one-third of the $1,000 to a new outfit. Years later, when Dieuseul’s marriage to a black American woman deteriorated as rapidly as Marie-Ange’s health, Lucien offered him his daughters’ old bedroom upstairs. Marie-Ange was too exhausted to argue or even to question the decision. At least she knew and liked Dieuseul, who’d painted a portrait of their daughters from an old picture she cherished. He’d painted them as affectionately as he treated her, even though she was no longer beautiful or elegant.
Lucien had also appreciated conversations with his tenant and the man’s attentiveness toward his wife, which would have made another man jealous or at least suspicious. But Dieuseul took the burden of caring for Marie-Ange off Lucien’s shoulders. Dieuseul turned out to be the best company for Marie-Ange, who required extra help getting in and out of bed and climbing down the stairs to cook, something she insisted Lucien let her continue to do. Dieuseul had gladly held her under the elbow and obliged her all night long while Lucien sleepily drove the taxi during the night shift.
Lucien had not planned to still be driving a taxi at that stage. He’d planned to honor Marie-Ange’s wishes not to take in tenants in the upstairs bedrooms or the basement. But the reality of their immigrant lives had fallen short of their dreams for their home, family, and community. In the beginning, they’d tried harder than anyone around them. New revenue streams materialized as quickly as Haitians stepped off planes and tipped out of boats onto America’s hard ground. The food Marie-Ange prepared at KAM was only a welcome. Some thought it was a lure because of the perfume of her rice and beans, the crispiness of her fried green plantains, and the tenderness of her perfectly seasoned griot coaxed patrons who soon discovered the other offerings at KAM. Those who came for the promise of the best Haitian food in Queens, or a friendly moneymaking game of poker, dominos, or bezique, always needed and left with more than they’d come for. They were hungry for good food and company and downright desperate for immigrant services.
As Lucien slept, the memory of KAM rose like dough. His heart didn’t swell; it stretched like a balloon being filled with air. He remembered how he had worked with Marie-Ange to increase their growing understanding of U.S. laws and institutions. He was the one who’d insisted they monetize their expertise and help KAM’s patrons for a fee or for favors. While visitors ate and played cards, Lucien and Marie-Ange translated immigration documents, explained what FICA was on tax-eroded minimum-wage paychecks, arranged hookups for papers that an illegal immigrant could use for work, set up dates between green card holders and desperate san-soulyé undocumented seekers in need of spouses for plausible marriages that immigration officers would not question or deny.
Marie-Ange’s English had grown so quickly and so eloquent that she had been paid to attend court hearings, citizenship interviews, and doctors’ appointments. Lucien’s domain had been all things vehicular—how to get a driver’s license, where to get documents notarized, how to register a car, how to get insurance, where to get repairs made for cheap so the vehicle could pass inspection and be deemed suitable to insure and register. He connected buyers to sellers, held vehicles and money in his own form of escrow—the backyard for the cars and his locked briefcase for the cash. He ran raffles on Sundays for items he’d bought on credit or Marie-Ange’s Avon products that weren’t selling fast enough.
Lucien buried his head into the pillow of memories, dreaming of the good old days when he and his gorgeous wife worked to expand their bona fide cottage industry. They’d grown KAM into a marginally profitable business that didn’t really earn them profits as much as it kept them flush with the cash of others as they brokered transactions. For a time, they’d thought they might be able to quit their jobs, but the medical benefits and the twenty-dollars-an-hour wage Lucien earned were indispensable. Marie-Ange had not wanted to leave her jobs on Wall Street, first as a cashier at a Duane Reade drugstore, then as a secretary in one of the law firms off Chambers Street. She’d landed the latter while translating and then filling out immigration documents at the Immigration and Naturalization Service office for a struggling Haitian grandmother. A lawyer in a priority lane had overheard her Frenchified English and the accuracy of her translation. Impressed with her legal advice, he’d offered her a job on the spot. That same afternoon, Marie-Ange had picked up two new suits from a Jewish-owned boutique on Delancey Street that she’d had on layaway for several months.
The following Monday morning she’d arrived at the law office better dressed than the long-tenured white paralegals with straight ponytails and impeccable bouffants. Although she never wore makeup, her flawless brown skin the color of coconut shells and her naturally plum-tinted lips made the few black cleaning ladies and bathroom attendants request the shade of powder and lipstick she used. To make her self-imposed Avon sales quota, she would pretend that her bottom eyelids were not naturally black, that her lips were not genetically tinted the same color as her gums. She would eventually double her target quota, selling products to women who wanted to look like her. But as the white secretaries struggled to keep up with her work quality and obscenely unaffordable wardrobe and the black cleaning staff tried to get their skin as smooth as hers, the envy of the two groups on both sides of the racial divide boiled over. Their unspoken competition against her would eventually explode after years of insufferable coveting of her exceptional typing skills, multilingual fluency, mastery of immigration law, and sexy diplomacy that allowed her to correct the partner who’d hired her straight from the INS line. They waited five long years to strip the pride that shone through her pricey wardrobe, natural beauty, and curvaceous figure.
Dubbing her the black Betty Boop, the women had been disgusted by the lust her thick thighs and legs elicited from the men in the office—white lawyers and black janitors alike. In their minds and closely guarded gossip, they hatched fantastic plots to put gum in her abundant hair that she tamed to look professional. They wished she’d leave some of it out of her loose bun, so they could put envelope glue in it, so she’d have to cut it, at least, in half. They imagined getting her Chaka Khan weave-like waves caught in a filing cabinet that they would lock, leaving only the option of a complete chop to set her free. The only comfort they had was that she had been going prematurely gray since age three. Most of the gray hairs were at the nape of her neck. She wore her hair back in a low ponytail most of the time to hide those. But an elegant shimmery line streaked down the left side of her head from where her temple vein throbbed, ending just above her left ear.
Lucien reached into his dream and grabbed at the hair he’d always loved. He could not let go of Marie-Ange’s beauty, the very thing that had gotten her fired. And those people hadn’t even seen the fullness of her looks. No one at work had ever seen her with her hair out. They would have murdered her outright to see her fresh from the salon. Only when she got a wash and set at the pricey Harlem beauty parlor did she indulge in a coif of soft loose curls. Only then could others see the length of her hair that hit below her shoulder blades, the hair that had made her marginally acceptable to Lucien’s family. She was far too dark for the loosely inbred terceron clan. But her long hair, even before she had ever straightened or relaxed it, allowed her to pass for good enough. That and her spit shine polish—her private school education, impeccable dress, and high-class upbringing, enjoy
ed until her father was disappeared. Years later, while working in an alien country and office, she suffered another devastating disappearance. A pricey pair of shoes had gone missing and gotten her fired from her fancy office job.
Marie-Ange had pissed off too many people at the law firm. She’d physically rebuffed her bosses’ passes one time too many. She’d ignored the Cameroonian janitor who called her “ma soeur,” hoping for the acknowledgment that would lead to coffee in the cafeteria, over which he would slip her his phone number and get hers, then maybe a date and so on. Not a single woman at the office had been able to tolerate the perfection she’d honed while serving fifteen years as the daughter of the first Duvalier’s closest adviser. Her expensive wardrobe was a product of the same training, except less for being a good daughter and more for being a proxy trophy—a gentle, compliant, doting daughter-wife to her adoring father-husband.
Lucien had warned her to watch out when she’d started earning a few cents more than some of the white secretaries. He’d even told her to stop buying and wearing designer clothes that they could not afford. He wasn’t surprised that she ignored him. She felt entitled to the pair of Chanel shoes, even if she used two weeks’ pay plus funds borrowed from the escrow monies in his locked briefcase and the money for that month’s phone and electricity bills. Madison Avenue shops did not offer layaway plans. They accepted cash, check, and American Express. She paid by check from the separate bank account she’d kept secret from Lucien. She had finally purchased the high-heeled, pebbled leather slip-on pumps she’d seen the most senior paralegal wearing months before.
That paralegal, a sneaker commuter, kept several pairs of shoes, still in their shoeboxes, under her desk. Unlike that paralegal, Marie-Ange would wear her new high-heeled shoes like a supermodel. She’d strut to and from work and all around the office all day in her highest heels. When she got bored with a particular pair of shoes, she’d switch to an equally expensive pair. The day she switched her shoes turned out to be her last at the office.
Marie-Ange never did learn exactly how the plot had been contrived or who’d hatched it. But the sneaker commuter’s pumps had gone missing, possibly picked up and discarded in the janitor’s bin by a partner who’d been working late and, seeing the shoes under a desk, assumed they belonged to the black girl who refused to bed a man of his stature and decided on petty payback. The Cameroonian janitor didn’t want to throw the clearly new pair of shoes away, but he had grown tired of waiting for a wink from Marie-Ange. The next morning, she came in wearing her Chanels while the other paralegal was losing her mind looking for her own pair. She immediately pointed the finger at Marie-Ange, who knew that there would be no vindicating Cinderella moment of trying on a shoe to see whether it fit the true owner. Upon seeing the accusing eyes of the entire office, she left in a panic before she could be unjustly fired for theft.
That afternoon Marie-Ange boarded the A train with a slight bend in her neck. Sitting across from her were two women—one Haitian (she always recognized her people) and a black American who tried not to let her leather coat touch her neighbor. She stared at the Haitian woman, wondering if she would have to return to the life of a nanny-housekeeper after years of proud office work. She recognized the American woman’s attempt to distance herself from her neighbor. It was the same way Marie-Ange had lived in Haiti, next to but apart from, different but akin to those believed to be less than. She could see that both women were staring at her feet, trying to figure out who and what she was and where she belonged. She had developed a close kinship with immigrants like herself, although they’d come from very different economic classes. However, until that day, she’d never felt an alliance with American blacks. She’d been stripped of her privilege, wrongly accused of theft, and ejected from the class she believed she’d entered. She thought of the reciprocal prejudice between immigrant and America-born blacks, each group misunderstanding the other, envy and resentment on both sides, separated by how their Americanness had been obtained. Haitian immigrants adopted the biases and stereotypes held by whites against black Americans. Black Americans looked down on the lowly, ass-backward, more “African” immigrants who struggled for better lives in a foreign home, resenting them for attempting to rob them of their birthright. America’s native sons clutched their tenuous citizenship with the power of a vise grip, as if immigrants could somehow purse-snatch their hard-won privilege.
Disdainfully and unsympathetically, they stood back and looked down as their Caribbean and African just-come cousins struggled for sponsorship by often reluctant or exploitative family members. A sibling or a parent might feel some allegiance, obligation, absolute pity, genuine affection, or needy attachment, or be simply worn down by on-their-knees pleas. The desperate seekers might seduce, trick, or pay someone to marry them. But the most they could become were naturalized citizens of the United States. They could be converted but never native. Never mind that black Americans had long been regarded as second-class citizens. At least they were citizens by birth, not by some mechanical conversion, some legally bastardized baptism, some restoration of something broken or abnormal. The foreigners were the abhorrent ones, rejected before they were born by virtue of where they would be delivered. They would go from aliens, legal or illegal, and, at best, become “unnatural” American citizens. They might pass for black American if they kept their mouths shut and adopted the proper garb. But their contorted pronunciation of English words, accents as thick and bumpy as oatmeal; their layers of sweaters, two or three hats, as many strangling scarves, and ill-fitting winter coats would unmask them. Even their America-born children gave them away: little natives with kinky, basic-plaited hair, never braided then beaded; shiny shoes or leather sandals, never sneakers; knee-length skirts or high-water slacks, never jeans; thermos lunches of warm rice and beans, never sandwiches; proper English, never slang.
Marie-Ange looked at the two women and smiled in an attempt to make amends with and between both. She wanted to tell them that things would be okay and tried to believe the same herself as she rode home embarrassed and jobless. She waved as she stepped off the train. Neither woman waved back.
Lucien had understood why, even unemployed, Marie-Ange had resisted renting out their basement like their neighbors did. It wasn’t only because she was a proud and deferential devotee who didn’t want to displace Ezili’s shrine. She had been saving that space for her most special women—their daughters. She’d planned for them to live there as college commuter students and then, one by one, they would move out to get married. She’d hoped that one of them would come back to raise her own family in the house when she and Lucien grew old and went back to Haiti or died. Marie-Ange had died. And, sure enough, Lucien had had his girls living in the basement. But none of it was as they had planned.
For the moment, he persisted in his waking dream in the back seat of Leona’s car. Like hot breath blown close into his ear, he could feel Marie-Ange’s wishes, her angst, and the humiliation she’d endured at the hands of others, including his own. Now he’d lost the house she’d debased herself for by cleaning white people’s houses, wiping their children’s noses, changing their elders’ diapers, standing in their factories until her feet callused so badly she could peel thick layers off her heels with a knife, and serving these people as they made purchases from an overpriced drugstore, and finally been prejudicially indicted for stealing a pair of shoes that barely rivaled the hand-stitched Parisian pairs she’d worn since starting school at the age of three. She had been the general’s daughter, dressed in French finery since birth. She had built KAM as the manman in Kay Manman. There was no other, no better, mother or wife to him.
Lucien startled himself awake, imagining Marie-Ange calling him, but it was Leona’s voice letting him know they were approaching her house. He sat up to listen to whatever it was Leona needed him to know. Except for Marie-Ange, he had always been more enamored of his own thoughts than those of others, espec
ially women. He was amused by the simplemindedness of the stronger sex, how easily he could manipulate them. Even Marie-Ange. While she lay dying, still showing her jealousy over their basement tenant Asante, he had already picked out a new wife—Leona, her caregiver—with the help of their daughters. He had had a mistress in the basement, a soon-to-be girlfriend running his home, and a dying wife in a bed upstairs. His grief and manhood had been the only things keeping the four-way arrangement from exploding.
He suddenly missed Asante but quieted the feeling, because the thought of his basement bouzin was a distraction from what he really needed to ponder. He sat up and stared straight ahead. The back of Leona’s head kept him grounded in the present moment, so he could think clearly about how he would get into his house.
Leona would be of no use. She would, in fact, block his passage. She was a good nurse, had proven herself a proper jailer for Marie-Ange and him. He could blame no one but himself for his relationship with Leona. He’d picked her from the three finalists his daughters had offered as a nurse for Marie-Ange. After she passed, he’d kept Leona as his companion. She’d even attended Marie-Ange’s funeral and visited her grave with him in the months and years after. Fortunately for Lucien, Leona, a long-widowed underachieving would-be physician who’d settled for becoming a trained RN, had been by his side during both of his strokes. But living with her until he sorted things out with his dying house would mean spending time away from his real life, his girls.
Lucien flicked his fingers to count in silence, Zero, One, Two, Three.
He climbed out of the car and all but crawled into Leona’s house. He started coughing but hoped that she couldn’t hear him. Homesick. Sick of home. This home. Her home. Sick for home. His home.
“Go straight to the bedroom!” Leona shouted.
He did not protest.
My Mother's House Page 6