Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

  "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 passion 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 shift 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 cassettes.

  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-fashioned 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.

  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, eve
rything 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 classes 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 Institution. It was as if I had never left Haiti. All the lessons were in French, except for English composition and literature classes. 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, 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 pronounced 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 God 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 molasses 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."

  When she came home during the day and saw him sitting on his porch steps next door, she would nod a quick hello and walk faster. She wrapped her arms tighter around me, as though to rescue me from his stare.

  Somehow, early on, I felt that he might like me. The way his eyes trailed me up the block gave him away. My mother liked to say, "I admire priests because they like women for more than their faces and their buttocks." Joseph's look went beyond the face and the buttocks.

  He looked like the kind of man who could buy a girl a meal without asking for her bra in return.

  Whenever I went by his stoop, I felt like we were conspiring. How could I smile without my mother noticing and how could he respond to her brisk hello and mine too, without letting her see that wink that was for me alone?

  At night, I fantasized that he was sitting somewhere pining away, dreaming about me, thinking of a way to enter my life. Then one day, like rain, he came to my front door.

  I was stretched out on the couch with a chemistry book when I heard the knock. I looked through the security peephole to check. It was him.

  "Can I use your phone?" he asked. "I've had mine disconnected because I'm going out of town soon."

  I opened the door and led him to the phone. Our fingers touched as I handed it to him. He dialed quickly, smiling with his eyes on my face.

  "Did we get it?" he asked into the phone.

  His feet bounced off the ground when he heard the answer. "Yes!" he shouted. "Yes!"

  He handed me back the phone with a wink.

  "Have you ever really wanted something great and gotten it?" he asked.

  My face must have been blank.

  He asked me the question again, then suddenly slapped his forehead.

  "I haven't even introduced myself."

  "My name is Sophie," I said, jumping ahead.

  "I am Joseph," he said. I knew.

  "Was it good news you just got?"

  "What gave me away?"

  He looked at me as though he was waiting for me to say something equally witty. I wasn't as glib, as fast on my feet. I couldn't think of anything.

  "It was good news," he answered. "I just found out that we got a gig in the East Village from now until our tour starts."

  A gig?

  "A job. I am a musician."

  "I know," I said. "Sometimes I hear you playing at night."

  "Does it bother you?"

  "Non, it's very pretty."

  "I detect an accent," he said.

  Oh please, say a small one, I thought. After seven years in this country, I was tired of having people detect my accent. I wanted to sound completely American, especially for him.

  "Where are you from?" he asked.

  "Haiti."

  "Ah," he said, "I have never been there. Do you speak Creole?"

  "Oui, Oui," I ventured, for a laugh.

  "We, we," he said, pointing to me and him. "We have something in common. Mwin aussi. I speak a form of Creole, too. I am from Louisiana. My parents considered themselves what we call Creoles. Is it a small world or what?"

  I shook my head yes. It was a very small world.

  "You live alone?" he asked.

  My mother's constant suspicion prodded me and I quickly said, "No." Just in case he was thinking of coming over tonight to kill me. This was New York, after all. You could not trust anybody.

  "I live with my mother."

  "I have seen her," he said.

  "She works."

  "Nights?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Did you two just move here?"

  "Yes, we did."

  "I thought so," he said. "Whenever I'm in New York, I sublet in the neighborhood and I have never seen you walking around before."

  "We moved about a year ago."

  "That's about the last time I was in Brooklyn."

  "Where are you the rest of the year?"

  "In Providence."

  I was immediately fascinated by the name. Providence. Fate! A town named for the Creator, the Almighty. Who would not want to live there?

  "I am away from my house about six months out of the year," he said. "I travel to different places with my band and then after a while I go back for some peace and quiet."

  "What is it like in Providence?" I asked.

  "It is calm. I can drive to the river and watch the sun set. I think you would like it there. You seem like a deep, thoughtful kind of person."

  I am.

  "I like that in people. I like that very much."

  He glanced down at his feet
as though he couldn't think of anything else to say.

  I wanted to ask him to stay, but my mother would be home soon.

  "I work at home," he finally said, "in case you ever want to drop by."

  I spent the whole week with my ear pressed against the wall, listening to him rehearse. He rehearsed day and night, sometimes twelve to ten hours without stopping. Sometimes at night, the saxophone was like a soothing lullaby.

  One afternoon, he came by with a ham-and-cheese sandwich to thank me for letting him use the phone. He sat across from me in the living room while I ate very slowly.

  "What are you going to study in college?" he asked.

  "I think I am going to be a doctor."

  "You think? Is this something you like?"

  "I suppose so," I said.

  "You have to have a passion for what you do."

  "My mother says it's important for us to have a doctor in the family."

  "What if you don't want to be a doctor?"

  "There's a difference between what a person wants and what's good for them."

  "You sound like you are quoting someone," he said.

  "My mother."

  "What would Sophie like to do?" he asked.

  That was the problem. Sophie really wasn't sure. I had never really dared to dream on my own.

  "You're not sure, are you?"

  He even understood my silences.

  "It is okay not to have your future on a map," he said. "That way you can flow wherever life takes you."

  "That is not Haitian," I said. "That's very American."

  "What is?"

  "Being a wanderer. The very idea."

  "I am not American," he said. "I am African-American."

  "What is the difference?"

  "The African. It means that you and I, we are already part of each other."

  I think I blushed. At least I nearly choked on my sandwich. He walked over and tapped my back.

  "Are you all right?"