"I had a burst of creativity when I was in Paris," she said. "Here, it's yours."
Princesse peered at this re-creation, not immediately recognizing herself, but then seeing in the face, the eyes, the breasts, a very true replication of her body.
Princesse stared at the painting for a long time and then she picked it up, cradling it as though it were a child. It was the first time that Catherine had given her one of her paintings. Princesse felt like she had helped to give birth to something that would have never existed otherwise.
"My friend, the artist whose boots I used to wear," Catherine said, "I wanted to go to Paris if only to see his grave. I missed the funeral, but I wanted to see where his bones were resting."
Catherine gave Princesse two T-shirts, one from the Pompidou Center, and another from a museum in Paris where she hoped one day her work would hang.
"I wish I could have let you know I was going," Catherine said. "But I wasn't sure myself that I would go until I got on the plane.
Princesse sat on the veranda next to Catherine, holding her little painting. She was slowly becoming familiar with what she saw there. It was her all right, recreated.
It struck Princesse that this is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her. The sky in all its glory had been there for eons even before she came into the world, and there it would stay with its crashing stars and moody clouds. The sand and its caresses, the conch and its melody would be there forever as well. All that would change would be the faces of the people who would see and touch those things, faces like hers, which was already not as it had been a few years before and which would mature and change in the years to come.
That afternoon, as Princesse walked up the road near the cockfights, clutching an image of herself frozen in a time that would never repeat, a man walked out of the yard, carrying a fiery red rooster with a black sock draped over its face. The rooster was still and lifeless beneath the sock even as the man took sips of white rum and blew it in a cloud at the rooster's shrouded head. A few drops of blood fell to the earth in a circle and vanished in the dirt.
Along the fence, the old drunk was moaning a melody that Princesse had never heard him sing before, a sad longing tune that reminded her of the wail of the conch shell.
"I am a lucky man, twice a day I see you," he said.
"Twice a day," she replied.
The old man dug his heel into the dust as his wife approached him, trying to take him home.
Princesse watched the couple from a safe distance, cradling her portrait in her arms. When she was far enough away not to be noticed, she sat on a patch of grass under a tree and began to draw their two faces in the dust. First she drew a silhouette of the old man and then his wife with her basket on her head, perched over him like a ballerina, unaware of her load.
When she was done, Princesse got up and walked away, leaving the blank faces in the dirt for the next curious voyeur to add a stroke to.
In the yard nearby another cockfight had begun.
"Get him, kill him!" the men cheered. "Take his head off. Right now!"
new york
day women
Today, walking down the street, I see my mother. She is strolling with a happy gait, her body thrust toward the DON'T WALK sign and the yellow taxicabs that make forty-five-degree turns on the corner of Madison and Fifty-seventh Street.
I have never seen her in this kind of neighborhood, peering into Chanel and Tiffany's and gawking at the jewels glowing in the Bulgari windows. My mother never shops outside of Brooklyn. She has never seen the advertising office where I work. She is afraid to take the subway, where you may meet those young black militant street preachers who curse black women for straightening their hair.
Yet, here she is, my mother, who I left at home that morning in her bathrobe, with pieces of newspapers twisted like rollers in her hair. My mother, who accuses me of random offenses as I dash out of the house.
Would you get up and give an old lady like me your sub-way seat? In this state of mind, I bet you don't even give up your seat to a pregnant lady.
My mother, who is often right about that. Sometimes I get up and give my seat. Other times, I don t. It all depends on how pregnant the woman is and whether or not she is with her boyfriend or husband and whether or not he is sitting down.
As my mother stands in front of Carnegie Hall, one taxi driver yells to another, "What do you think this is, a dance floor?"
My mother waits patiently for this dispute to be settled before crossing the street.
In Haiti when you get hit by a car, the owner of the car gets out and kicks you for getting blood on his bumper.
My mother who laughs when she says this and shows a large gap in her mouth where she lost three more molars to the dentist last week. My mother, who at fifty-nine, says dentures are okay.
You can take them out when they bother you. I'll like them. I'll like them fine.
Will it feel empty when Papa kisses you?
Oh no, he doesn't kiss me that way anymore.
My mother, who watches the lottery drawing every night on channel 11 without ever having played the numbers.
A third of that money is all I would need. We would pay the mortgage, and your father could stop driving that taxicab all over Brooklyn.
I follow my mother, mesmerized by the many possibilities of her journey. Even in a flowered dress, she is lost in a sea of pinstripes and gray suits, high heels and elegant short skirts, Reebok sneakers, dashing from building to building.
My mother, who won't go out to dinner with anyone.
If they want to eat with me, let them come to my house, even if I boil water and give it to them.
My mother, who talks to herself when she peels the skin off poultry.
Fat, you know, and cholesterol. Fat and cholesterol killed your aunt Hermine.
My mother, who makes jam with dried grapefruit peel and then puts in cinnamon bark that I always think is cockroaches in the jam. My mother, whom I have always bought household appliances for, on her birth-day. A nice rice cooker, a blender.
I trail the red orchids in her dress and the heavy faux leather bag on her shoulders. Realizing the ferocious pace of my pursuit, I stop against a wall to rest. My mother keeps on walking as though she owns the side-walk under her feet.
As she heads toward the Plaza Hotel, a bicycle messenger swings so close to her that I want to dash forward and rescue her, but she stands dead in her tracks and lets him ride around her and then goes on.
My mother stops at a corner hot-dog stand and asks for something. The vendor hands her a can of soda that she slips into her bag. She stops by another vendor selling sundresses for seven dollars each. I can tell that she is looking at an African print dress, contemplating my size. I think to myself, Please Ma, don't buy it. It would be just another thing that I would bury in the garage or give to Goodwill.
Why should we give to Goodwill when there are so many people back home who need clothes? We save our clothes for the relatives in Haiti.
Twenty years we have been saving all kinds of things for the relatives in Haiti. I need the place in the garage for an exercise bike.
You are pretty enough to be a stewardess. Only dogs like bones.
This mother of mine, she stops at another hot-dog vendor's and buys a frankfurter that she eats on the street. I never knew that she ate frankfurters. With her blood pressure, she shouldn't eat anything with sodium. She has to be careful with her heart, this day woman.
I cannot just swallow salt. Salt is heavier than a hundred bags of shame.
She is slowing her pace, and now I am too close. If she turns around, she might see me. I let her walk into the park before I start to follow again.
My mother walks toward the sandbox in the middle of the park. There a woman is waiting with a child. The woman is wearing a leotard with biker's sho
rts and has small weights in her hands. The woman kisses the child good-bye and surrenders him to my mother; then she bolts off, running on the cemented stretches in the park.
The child given to my mother has frizzy blond hair. His hand slips into hers easily, like he's known her for a long time. When he raises his face to look at my moth-er, it is as though he is looking at the sky.
My mother gives this child the soda that she bought from the vendor on the street corner. The child's face lights up as she puts in a straw in the can for him. This seems to be a conspiracy just between the two of them.
My mother and the child sit and watch the other children play in the sandbox. The child pulls out a comic book from a knapsack with Big Bird on the back. My mother peers into his comic book. My mother, who taught herself to read as a little girl in Haiti from the books that her brothers brought home from school.
My mother, who has now lost six of her seven sisters in Ville Rose and has never had the strength to return for their funerals.
Many graves to kiss when I go back. Many graves to kiss.
She throws away the empty soda can when the child is done with it. I wait and watch from a corner until the woman in the leotard and biker's shorts returns, sweaty and breathless, an hour later. My mother gives the woman back her child and strolls farther into the park.
I turn around and start to walk out of the park before my mother can see me. My lunch hour is long since gone. I have to hurry back to work. I walk through a cluster of joggers, then race to a Sweden Tours bus. I stand behind the bus and take a peek at my mother in the park. She is standing in a circle, chatting with a group of women who are taking other people's children on an afternoon outing. They look like a Third World Parent-Teacher Association meeting.
I quickly jump into a cab heading back to the office. Would Ma have said hello had she been the one to see me first?
As the cab races away from the park, it occurs to me that perhaps one day I would chase an old woman down a street by mistake and that old woman would be somebody else's mother, who I would have mistaken for mine.
Day women come out when nobody expects them.
Tonight on the subway, I will get up and give my seat to a pregnant woman or a lady about Ma's age.
My mother, who stuffs thimbles in her mouth and then blows up her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie while sewing yet another Raggedy Ann doll that she names Suzette after me.
I will have all these little Suzettes in case you never have any babies, which looks more and more like it is going to happen.
My mother who had me when she was thirty-three— I'dge du Christ—at the age that Christ died on the cross.
That's a blessing, believe you me, even if American doc-tors say by that time you can make retarded babies.
My mother, who sews lace collars on my company soft-ball T-shirts when she does my laundry.
Why, you can't you look like a lady playing softball?
My mother, who never went to any of my Parent-Teacher Association meetings when I was in school.
You're so good anyway. What are they going to tell me? I don't want to make you ashamed of this day woman. Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.
caroline's
wedding
It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate. As I stood on the courthouse steps, I wanted to run back to my mother's house waving the paper like the head of an enemy rightfully conquered in battle.
I stopped at the McDonald's in Fulton Mall to call ahead and share the news.
There was a soap opera playing in the background when she picked up the phone.
"I am a citizen, Ma," I said.
I heard her clapping with both her hands, the way she had applauded our good deeds when Caroline and I were little girls.
"The paper they gave me, it looks nice," I said. "It's wide like a diploma and has a gold seal with an official-looking signature at the bottom. Maybe I will frame it."
"The passport, weren't you going to bring it to the. post office to get a passport right away?" she asked in Creole.
"But I want you to see it, Ma."
"Go ahead and get the passport. I can see it when you get it back," she said. 'A passport is truly what's American. May it serve you well."
At the post office on Flatbush Avenue, I had to temporarily trade in my naturalization certificate for a pass-port application. Without the certificate, I suddenly felt like unclaimed property. When my mother was three months pregnant with my younger sister, Caroline, she was arrested in a sweatshop raid and spent three days in an immigration jail. In my family, we have always been very anxious about our papers.
I raced down the block from where the number eight bus dropped me off, around the corner from our house. The fall was slowly settling into the trees on our block, some of them had already turned slightly brown.
I could barely contain my excitement as I walked up the steps to the house, sprinting across the living room to the kitchen.
Ma was leaning over the stove, the pots clanking as she hummed a song to herself.
"My passport should come in a month or so," I said, unfolding a photocopy of the application for her to see.
She looked at it as though it contained boundless possibilities.
"We can celebrate with some strong bone soup," she said. "I am making some right now."
In the pot on the stove were scraps of cow bones stewing in hot bubbling broth.
Ma believed that her bone soup could cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped that it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiancé. Since Caroline had announced that she was engaged, we'd had bone soup with our supper every single night.
"Have you had some soup?" I asked, teasing Caroline when she came out of the bedroom.
"This soup is really getting on my nerves," Caroline whispered in my ear as she walked by the stove to get some water from the kitchen faucet.
Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling as I squeezed it hello. After my mother was arrested in the sweatshop immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused Caroline's condition. Caroline was lucky to have come out missing only one forearm. She might not have been born at all.
"Soup is ready," Ma announced.
"If she keeps making this soup," Caroline whispered, "I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there's no magic in it."
It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us, knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.
"Ma, if we keep on with this soup," Caroline said, "we'll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these cows."
Caroline brushed aside a strand of her hair, chemically straightened and streaked bright copper from a peroxide experiment.
"You think you are so American," Ma said to Caro-line. "You don't know what's good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy."
"There's another American citizen in the family now." I took advantage of the moment to tell Caroline.
"Congratulations," she said. "I don't love you any less."
Caroline had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.
Later that night, Ma called me into her bedroom after she thought Caroline had gone to sleep. The room was still decorated just the way it had been when Papa was still alive. There was a large bed, almost four feet tall, facing an old reddish brown dresser where we could see our reflections in a mirror as we talked.
Ma's bedroom closet was spilling over with old suit-cases, some of which she had brought with her when she left Haiti almost twenty-five years before. They were so crowded into the small space that the closet door would never stay fully closed.
"She drank all her soup," Ma said as she undressed for bed. "She talks bad about the soup but she drinks
it."
"Caroline is not a child, Ma."
"She doesn't have to drink it."
"She wants to make you happy in any small way she can."
"If she wanted to make me happy, you know what she would do."
"She has the right to choose who she wants to marry. That's none of our business."
"I am afraid she will never find a nice man to marry her," Ma said. "I am afraid you won't either."
"Caroline is already marrying a nice man," I said.
"She will never find someone Haitian," she said.
"It's not the end of creation that she's not marrying someone Haitian."
"No one in our family has ever married outside," she said. "There has to be a cause for everything."
"What's the cause of you having said what you just said? You know about Eric. You can't try to pretend that he's not there."
"She is my last child. There is still a piece of her in-side me."
"Why don't you give her a spanking?" I joked.
"My mother used to spank me when I was older than you," she said. "Do you know how your father came to have me as his wife? His father wrote a letter to my father and came to my house on a Sunday afternoon and brought the letter in a pink and green handkerchief. Pink because it is the color of romance and green for hope that it might work. Your grandfather on your papa's side had the handkerchief sewn especially in these two colors to wrap my proposal letter in. He brought this letter to my house and handed it to my father. My father didn't even read the letter himself. He called in a neighbor and asked the neighbor to read it out loud.
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