Create Dangerously

by Edwidge Danticat

  After a brief rest, I reclaim my mountain legs and continue on. Along the way, Nick and I retell each other fragmented stories about my great-grandparents—his great-great-grandparents—the furthest that memory and history go back in our family, vague tales that we’ve gathered from older family members. Like Tante Ilyana, both my great-grandparents lived in Beauséjour their entire lives, never venturing farther than Dabonne, the first big market town off the mountain. When they married, together they owned twenty or so acres of land and thirty pigs. Of the twelve children to whom my great-grandmother gave birth, only four made it to adulthood. My great-grandparents spent their whole lives without electricity, telephones, medical doctors, or morgues. When their children died at varying ages in childhood, they buried them the same day or the next, for lack of said morgue.

  As we cross an arch of rock that forms a slanted bridge on the side of the mountain, Nick and I lament the fact that there is not more to say of our progenitors’ lives beyond these indefinite segments, which could be true of almost anyone else who had lived here in these mountains.

  As children, Nick and I had both come here, along with my brother Bob, to spend a week with Tante Ilyana, who is the last close family member still living in Beauséjour. Everyone else, including my grandparents, had migrated, some to the Haitian capital and others to other parts of the world. I don’t remember the childhood climb up the mountain being so grueling. I remember skipping over what seemed like molehills then, compared to this endless series of cliffs and crags. I remember collecting dandelions as we passed the gardens of people who had known our fathers and grandfathers when they were our age, people who called us by the names of our aunts and uncles, people of whom there is no longer any trace. I remember plucking handfuls of vetiver and citronella, crushing them in my hand to inhale their fragrance. I don’t remember the domes of bare rock. I don’t remember my Aunt Ilyana’s house looking so isolated from up high. I don’t remember the pain in my calves, the agony of every step.

  When I say this to Nick, he replies, “Perhaps it’s because you were lighter, because you were a little girl.”

  We meet up with Uncle Joseph on the descent toward Tante Ilyana’s house as he stops for a rest of his own. He offers the borrowed mule to Nick, who barely escapes a kick in the groin as he tries to mount the animal.

  “This is why I have never been on one of those,” I say.

  “You’ve just never been tired enough,” replies Uncle Joseph, who, at seventy-six years old, has been coming to Beauséjour from the capital a couple of times a year to visit Tante Ilyana and see after a small school that he has started here.

  Uncle Joseph points out the one-room schoolhouse down below. It looks tiny and lopsided, no different from the small cemetery behind it, the cluster of marble-looking tombs where my great-grandparents are buried.

  We reach Tante Ilyana’s house by midafternoon. It is a modest two-room home made of limestone walls and a tin roof. The house stands between a stream and a banana grove and has not changed very much since Nick, Bob, and I came here as children, except that the tin roof has been replaced a couple of times due to rust and hurricanes. Tante Ilyana lives alone now, but her ex-husband has his own place nearby and he visits often, as does her adult son, my cousin Renel, who is a dentist in Port-au-Prince. Unlike my father, his brothers and sisters, and Renel, who followed one another to the city, Tante Ilyana remained behind with her daughter, Jeanne, until, the year before our visit, Jeanne died at the age of thirty-eight, of some unnamed deadly infectious disease passed on to her by a philandering former husband. After Jeanne’s death, Tante Ilyana had entombed her oldest child and only daughter in a beautiful turquoise three-tiered mausoleum next to the house. In Jeanne’s mausoleum a place is reserved for Tante Ilyana, so mother and daughter can be together again in death as they had always been in life.

  Tante Ilyana is not home when we arrive. Her grandsons, Jeanne’s two teenage boys, who are visiting from the capital for the summer, give us some water and a large sisal mat to collapse on as we wait for her to return. We immediately crash on the front porch, in a cool spot close to the wooden railing at the other end of which the boys are pouring dried corn kernels into a grinder, turning them into bright yellow cornmeal. The boys are surrounded by twelve of Tante Ilyana’s prized hens and roosters, which squawk loudly as handfuls of corn occasionally rain down on their heads.

  Tante Ilyana arrives an hour or so later. She looks much younger than her seventy-five years. Her skin is an even mahogany hue and her body looks taut and lean, almost muscular. She is wearing a dark green dress and a black head wrap. She kisses Uncle Joseph and Cousin Nick hello, but, having not seen me in more than twenty-two years, does not recognize me. She lists the names of a few of my girl cousins, trying to guess who I am. Finally Uncle Joseph says, “It’s Mira’s daughter, Edwidge.”

  “Ah, Edwidge,” Tante Ilyana takes my face in her firm, large hands. “Mira’s daughter.”

  Tante Ilyana and Uncle Joseph exchange family news while Nick and I join in the corn grinding. Occasionally Tante Ilyana shouts questions to me about my parents and three brothers in New York. Has my father lost his hair? Has my mother lost weight, gained weight since my uncle showed her the last family photographs? Were any of my brothers married?

  I show her a few pictures I brought for her, of my father and his receding hairline, of my plump mother, and of my three brothers, two of whom became fathers that year. With all the family news out of the way, there is nothing left to do but eat.

  It is corn harvest season in the valley surrounding Tante Ilyana’s house. So over the next three days, we eat lots of corn. We grill ears of corn over charcoal and firewood sticks in the thatched cooking shack by the stream. We boil them smothered with banana leaves in an aluminum pot that seems to have no bottom. We eat the sweet baby ones raw, right off the cob. From an earlier harvest, we have cornmeal paste, mayi moulen, for breakfast and a sweet corn flour puree, labouyi, for supper.

  Things get going quickly that afternoon, as Uncle Joseph and Nick, who are staying nearby at the house of the school’s headmistress, spend their time visiting with parents and meeting teachers, and I attach myself to Tante Ilyana.

  That night over a bowl of labouyi, Uncle Joseph tries to convince Tante Ilyana to move to Port-au-Prince to be closer, in her old age, to him and his family.

  “You’re an old woman,” he says. “Not that I’m wishing it, but if something happens to you, you won’t be able to see a proper doctor. People die from simple illnesses here. When Jeanne died, we were barely able to arrive in time for the funeral. If you die, not that I’m wishing it, it takes so long to get here that we may not be able to see you one last time. There is no chance that your brothers in New York, Edwidge, and the others will have time to come and say good-bye. You know yourself that a corpse can last only a day or two here.”

  Uncle Joseph’s monologue is interrupted by two shots of gunfire from somewhere in the distance. Tante Ilyana explains that it is the village chief, the chèf seksyon, the only legal authority in the surrounding area, signaling that he is back home from a day trip, in case anyone needs to come see him.

  “Do you think life is easier for an old woman in the city?” Tante Ilyana continues. “Here I can watch over the land and over Jeanne’s grave and even if you don’t see me soon after I die, we’ll see one another after.”

  Unlike Uncle Joseph, Tante Ilyana is not particularly religious. Every once in a while she had a pè savann, a lay mountain priest, come over to the cemetery to say a mass over her grandparents’ graves, but only because she thought they had worked hard their whole lives and would expect it as a sign of respect. No masses were said, however, for Jeanne, who was Baptist, like my uncle.

  Glancing over at Jeanne’s mausoleum gleaming in the moonlight, I ask Tante Ilyana why she hadn’t buried Jeanne in the cemetery near her grandparents, my great-grandparents, who, like her and Jeanne, had chosen to remain in Beauséjour.

 
; “That cemetery belongs to a lot of people,” she says. “This place is just mine and hers. When I am gone, people are going to take over the family land that is left. They already want to take it from me because I’m the only one in the family here, but this place I built for Jeanne and me is big and heavy, so maybe they will leave us alone.”

  The people Tante Ilyana is talking about are her few neighbors, friends and foes, who, she believes, figure that because she has so many family members in the city and abroad she doesn’t need the land to live.

  Changing the subject, Tante Ilyana turns to me and says, “I forgot to ask you. How is Mira’s other daughter, the one who once came here as a girl? I hear that she is a jounalis. What was her name again, Edwidge?”

  I hear a hint of pride in her voice, pride that this person, who she has momentarily forgotten is myself, has spent some time with her. A jounalis, or journalist, is the most common kind of writer in Haiti. A mix of usefulness—you are offering a service to others by providing information—and notoriety makes it an occasionally respectable profession, especially to someone like Tante Ilyana, who, because she was older and was needed for house and field chores, was never sent to school by her parents, and as a result does not know how to read or write. Though I am not a journalist, I know that this is her way of calling me a writer. I am overjoyed, thrilled. The separate pieces of my life have come together in that moment. I am the niece and the jounalis, a family writer in the eyes of my aging aunt, who has never read a word or a sentence, who has never met and will never meet another writer.

  My uncle, however, raises his eyebrows in concern, as though Tante Ilyana’s journalist question is proof of her increasing senility. Nick hides a smile under a cupped hand and looks at me to see how I will clarify this.

  I simply and proudly say, “Tante Ilyana, I am Edwidge. I am the same one who was here.”

  She seems unconvinced, so I search my memory for concrete evidence of that past visit with her. Tante Ilyana and her husband were still together then, though sleeping in twin beds on opposite sides of their room, where my brother Bob, Nick, Jeanne, and I all slept on Jeanne’s large sisal mat on the floor. Jeanne had been a shy but hardworking young woman. She and Tante Ilyana had spent almost every moment of their summer days together. They woke up at dawn and fetched water from the stream, made coffee for the household and everyone else who came by, sprinkled the yard with water, and swept it with sisal brooms that made a swooshing music, like a fan concert. I wandered around the yard all day, played hide and seek, lago, and hopscotch with the area girls while Nick, my brother Bob, and Tante Ilyana’s husband went to work in the fields. Twice a day Tante Ilyana, Jeanne, and I would bathe in the lower end of a crystal clear stream, which was stinging cold in the morning and lukewarm in late afternoon. I was not allowed to do any work other than shell peas and sort corn kernels from the newly harvested corn because I was a city girl and the other types of work were considered too strenuous for me.

  Later that night, after assigning me the twin bed where her husband used to sleep, Tante Ilyana goes out to the mausoleum to say goodnight to her daughter. “We have visitors,” she tells Jeanne, part of her face shielded from the moonlight. “Mira’s daughter, Edwidge, the journalist, she has come to see us again.”

  The next morning, I help Tante Ilyana make coffee in the cooking shed by the stream. I hold the swollen pouch, hanging from a rounded piece of coat hanger, while she pours scalding water over the coffee grounds. Uncle Joseph, Nick, and I map out the day over coffee and cassava bread with Tante Ilyana and her grandsons. There are more meetings for Nick and Uncle Joseph with a builder they had hired to add another room to the schoolhouse Uncle Joseph had paid to have built there. There are several teachers to interview for the new classes, and further curriculum planning sessions with the headmistress, a woman in her thirties who is raising three toddlers alone, since her husband left for the Dominican Republic five years ago and never returned.

  The school is Uncle Joseph’s latest passion, the last thing he wants to accomplish, he says, before he dies. He has zealously collected money from family members and friends to build it so that some of the children of Beauséjour, both boys and girls, can learn to read and write.

  We make our way en masse to the schoolhouse, a large open room with a dirt floor and tin roof. Tante Ilyana watches closely, narrowing her eyes, as Uncle Joseph gives special instructions to the headmistress and the builder. The headmistress puts in a plea for a blackboard for each of the new room’s four walls to enable children on different levels to work independently. The schoolmistress also asks the builder to assure her of a roof that won’t leak. She doesn’t want to have to stop classes and send the children home whenever it rains. Tante Ilyana, who had been cooking the occasional midday meal for the children since the school first opened, volunteers herself again.

  “I’ll continue to do it,” she says almost to herself.

  I reach over and rub her shoulders, thinking, perhaps over-thinking, that this is her way of making sure that other children are able to get the education that she had not.

  After the schoolhouse, we walk over to the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. The tombs are made of cracked marble among knee-high weeds. Some of the names and dates, carved deeply on some tombstones and more superficially on others, have faded. There is no birth date for my great-grandmother Mirazine, from whom my father gets his name, Miracin, and his nickname, Mira. It is possible that her birth was never recorded at all in any public register. My great-grandmother died in 1919, during the 1915–1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti. My great-grandfather, Osnac, died after his wife did, my Tante Ilyana tells us, but the year of his death has long faded from his tombstone and her memory.

  I announce that when I die, I too want to be buried in Beauséjour.

  “Where would you find someone to carry you this far?” asks Tante Ilyana. “First from New York to Port-au-Prince, and then this two-day trudge up the mountains. It would be a lot of carrying.”

  I assure her that there would be less carrying if I were cremated and my ashes scattered from the peak of one of the mountains.

  “There is already enough dust in Haiti,” she says very matter-of-factly. “You should be buried where you die.”

  Where I die will probably not be here in this place, I think, unless the descent from the mountain proves as fatal as I had believed the climb might be.

  “Enough now,” says Tante Ilyana. “This is too much talk about dying.”

  I return a few more times to my great-grandparents’ graves, often by myself. The year before, my first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, had been chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s famous book club, generously exposing the book to thousands more readers than I had ever dreamed or imagined. The novel attempts to tell the story of three generations of Haitian women. Ifé Caco, the grandmother, loses her husband to a chain gain. Martine Caco, the older daughter, as a teenager is raped by a brutal Tonton Macoute whose face she never sees. Atie Caco, Martine’s sister, harbors a secret unrequited love for another woman. Sophie Caco, the granddaughter, the narrator of the book, is the child who is born as a result of her mother’s rape. All of these women share a trauma: all had mothers who regularly inserted the tips of their fingers into their daughters’ vaginas to check that they were still virgins.

  The virginity testing element of the book led to a backlash in some Haitian American circles. “You are a liar,” a woman wrote to me right before I left on the trip. “You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits.”

  “Why was she taught to read and write?” I overheard a man saying at a Haitian American fund-raising gala in New York, where I was getting an award for writing this book. “That is not us. The things she writes, they are not us.”

  Maligned as we were in the media at the time, as disasterprone refugees and boat people and AIDS carriers, many of us had become overly sensitive and were eager to censor anyone who did not project a “positive image” of Haiti
and Haitians.

  The letter writer was right, though. I was lying in that first book and all the other pieces of fiction I have written since. But isn’t that what the word fiction or novel on the book jacket had implied? Isn’t even the most elementary piece of fiction about a singularly exceptional fictional person, so that even if that fictional person is presented as an everyman or everywoman, he or she is bound to be the most exceptional everyman or everywoman fictional person of the lot? And how can one individual—be it me or anyone else—know how nine to ten million other individuals should or would behave? Furthermore, though I was not saying that “testing” happened in every Haitian household, to every Haitian girl, I knew many women and girls who had been “tested” in that way.

  “You are a parasite and you exploit your culture for money and what passes for fame,” is the second most common type of criticism I get from inside the community.

  Anguished by my own sense of guilt, I often reply feebly that in writing what I do, I exploit no one more than myself. Besides, what is the alternative for me or anyone else who might not dare to offend? Self-censorship? Silence?

  During one of my visits to my great-grandparents’ grave, I had with me a book of essays titled Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels, which features several writers discussing their published novels. So, while I was sitting at the gravesite, I wrote the following letter to my first novel’s main character, Sophie. And since the immigrant artist must sometimes apologize for airing, or appearing to air, dirty laundry, my note to Sophie was later published as an afterword in all subsequent editions of the book, becoming an addendum to the text.

  Dear Sophie,

  I am writing you this note while sitting on the edge of my great-grandmother’s grave, an elevated tombstone in the high mountains of Léogâne, overlooking a majestic lime-colored mountain range. Suspended as I am here, far from terra firma and close to the clouds, I feel that this is the only place in the world where I truly belong. This is the place that I most wished as a home for you too, the place I had in mind when I had Tante Atie stand with you in the middle of a cemetery plot and pronounce, “Walk straight, you are in the presence of family.”