I was going home reconciled. I felt American. I felt I had taken part in an American tradition. I felt our numbers couldn't be ignored and I felt that a lot of discussion that day all over the country would have to include black males and it would have to include a different way of looking at us. I didn't go home "angry" at anyone. In fact I felt better about America as a whole. I sensed from all the eyes around me that something very deep had been resolved for a lot of brothers. There hadn't been any violence to disrupt the March. And we were alive. There was no bomb under D.C.
I saw a brother the next day walking with his son on Franklin. I had never seen him walking with his son before. He had been on the bus. I made my way to the deli where I usually eat lunch and got into a conversation with a family from Tennessee. It was probably that drawl of theirs that provoked me into conversation with them. I had been talking about the March to someone else and the older southern woman looked at me and said with an intriguing twang that she had been "praying for us." I believed her. I believed what her eyes were saying to me, and I thanked her for her prayers because her prayers had fused with the spirit I was carrying from the March. I believed her because I imagined that everyone had been watching and praying for us. The slaves had been watching. The Quakers had been watching, and so had John Brown, Nat Turner, and George Jackson. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe were watching. So was Crispus Attucks. Servicemen like him were watching from their posts. And heroes were watching from their graves. The white man with the distress signal was watching somewhere. I believed her drawl. I believed her eyes. And for that moment, it felt impossible to be invisible.
IN SEARCH OF A NAME
Miriam Neptune
1980
My first nightmare was provoked by a doll. She sat on my toybox, regal in her peasant dress and scarf. I dreamt that she cackled, and attacked my Spiderman comic book, then went after me. My mother saved me. She took the doll away and sent it back to my father.
I imagined my father as a bogeyman, like the macoutes my mother described to me from her childhood—they would take you away in the night. My father would arrive unannounced, with the court order, to take me for the weekend, even if I kicked and screamed, even if my mother cried.
1986
In the fourth grade, we presented our family stories to the class. I announced that my parents were from Haiti. I repeated what my mother had taught me in singsong tones, "Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It is next to Puerto Rico and Cuba." My classmates laughed. They had already decided that I was an alien. The only Haiti they could imagine was an island where "everybody hates each other."
1986 was the year my father left. I remember he drove by our house in Los Angeles on his way to New York with his new family. He sent for me during Easter. I remember not caring. Maybe a father was like a first cousin—someone you played with once a year.
On one trip my father and I explored the city together, recording everything we saw. There is still a magic that takes over when I remember holding his camera for the first time. As we stood on the edge of Central Park, I narrated, "Here we are in New York City, across from the Natural History Museum, and Central Park. Let's see how many interesting things there are. There are dogs, there are bus-waiters, and fathers." As I zoomed in on his face, he cautioned, "I think you are little bit too close."
1986 was also a big year for Haiti. Mommy and I watched as Baby Doc and his wife fled with the national treasury in a silver Mercedes. Baby Doc really was a big baby—a boy, whose father made him president at nineteen, who ran away when his toy soldiers began to burn.
I finally thought to ask my mother how long it had been since she was home. "Twenty years," she replied. I could not imagine time that long.
1989
When I turned thirteen, I was finally allowed to watch The Serpent and the Rainbow, the horror movie everyone had seen but me. I remember feeling captivated by Marielle, the young Haitian doctor who guides an American on his journey to find the "zombie drug." I was taken in by her elegance, her ability to move so fluidly between this world and the beyond. She was a dancer, the embodiment of Erzulie Freda. This was the type of Haitian woman I wanted to be.
My dream ended when I viewed her making "love" to the American, scratching at him gently like a lioness eating her pray. I understand now that Marielle is just another black exotic, and the story is not about her. I searched for other images. What I found was the Haiti of an American imagination, an island of a million horrors. Haitians were zombies, mobsters, and angry witches. The movies I found failed to depict the true horror: that we were a prideful people being eaten by the shadow of colonialism, unable to speak for ourselves.
1991
At fifteen, I started to care more about Haitian politics. I read everything I could about Aristide. He was like my Nelson Mandela. I saw him as the only hope for democracy in Haiti. I watched as he rose from champion of the poor to president of the nation, then was plucked from his pedestal and muzzled like a rabid dog. I learned not to put all of my eggs in one basket.
On my fifteenth birthday, my father reappeared. He brought me more rice and beans and cake than I could eat. He told me the story of how he met my mother at a wedding in Brooklyn—she was wearing an orange dress.
We took a picture together, and for the first time I realized our smiles were the same. My mother accused me of betrayal. "Your father's family are Duvalierists," she said, warning me that he could not be trusted.
1994
In the middle of the coup, my mother taught me to speak out about the way we were treated. She put me on stage one night a meeting of peace activists, and told me to describe what I knew about the raping and killing of dissenters in Haiti. My voice cracked and my knees shook as I felt her pass on the burden to me, to represent us.
I thought of taking my mother's name, Bateau. Boat. I imagine the boat, floating on the seas with no place to land. How could I take that name when even she chooses not to associate with the father who gave it to her?
1995
Twenty years have passed, and now it is my turn to go home. As I board the plane to Port-au-Prince, I am suddenly conscious of my bent shoulders and drab clothing. The woman ahead of me in a bright blue dress holds her head high, despite the weight of the sacks she grips in each hand. If someone at this moment were to ask me who I am, I would not know how to respond.
When we arrive, a small band plays ballads on the runway. The man checking my passport stares at me then decides to speak English instead of Kreyol. I am an election observer, an American who brings some semblance of justice by recording the voting process. We hover over college students as they count ballots at midnight in Les Cayes. We count them again, and write down our results. The answer is easy: Rene Preval has won. Twenty percent of voters have voiced their opinion. The other eighty percent watch silently as "democracy" changes hands.
The morning after the elections in Les Cayes, a man approaches me to ask my name. I tell him, "Miriam Neptune." He says I am his second cousin, the daughter of his first cousin. The Neptunes live here, he tells me. I smile at the coincidence, but cry inside because the name is only a name, not a family.
1998
Does name determine lineage? The only lineage I embrace is the one that raised me: my mother, her mother, and the mothers who created her. What is nation? What is my nation? Nation is in part, the imagination. Nation exists only where we create boundaries. My nation lives in the waters between spiritual and physical homes.
REPORTING SILENCE
Leslie Casimir
I make a living by telling other people's stories. These people are all strangers to me, a newspaper reporter, yet I am often able to convince them to pour out some of their most intimate thoughts, dreams, and miseries—details that are usually shared between close relatives, passed on from grandmother to granddaughter, mother to daughter, father to son. I can look grieving women in their watery eyes and ask them to describe their mur
dered sons or husbands— their ambitions, their scent. And amazingly enough, they will comply. I am moved to tell their stories for I am not certain of my own.
Details about my family have avoided me all of my life. In my twenty-nine years, I have been trained not to expect to learn much about the women and men who came before me. They are dead, my only surviving grandmother often insists. What would be the point in raising the dead? Leve mo. This is an expression I have heard over and over again. An expression I have grown to accept. A phrase that angers me. Frustration from not knowing much about my family, frustration that is now making me numb. For I have learned those words have helped shield my grandmother from pain and regret, as if their spirits would come back to haunt her and me.
From losing her home to a cyclone to struggling to put food on the table, her life's wounds still are fresh. And this American-born girl, this ti ameriken, who in recent years has professed a committed interest in Haiti, has no right—I suppose—to expect my grandmother to accommodate my curiosity as to her life before coming to America, the promised land, where money could supposedly be found on the streets and in public fountains, ready for the taking. When she got off that plane from Port-au-Prince nearly thirty years ago, she left behind a part of herself. And I cannot blame her for discarding a painful past. But it is not only her life she is guarding, it is mine as well, one that is filled with gaps and vague accounts of things, information scooped up along the years through passing mentions and aunts' conversations at the kitchen table. I can't get my grandmother to even mention my late grandfather's name above a whisper. Jotting down his name on pieces of paper helps me to envision this faceless man. I keep his name written in all my journals— otherwise I would forget.
During my college years in Florida, I would beg my grandmother to speak onto the blank cassette tapes that I sent her. But they would go unrecorded, collecting dust on top of the refrigerator. Our phone conversations would be full of awkward pauses when I would ask questions about her life, about how she had raised my own mother in a southern town in Haiti that is surrounded by breadfruit trees, about raising eight children for a man who lived in another house with his wife and children in that very same neighborhood. How my mother barely knew that man. She only would see and smell the cologne-scented man in the white linen suit, who would come by for late evening supper.
"I'll explain everything to you some day," my grandmother insists, changing the subject as she sits in her well-worn leather easy chair, for hours. That day has never come. Her silence infected my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles. They all share something that is unspeakable: our family's history. Sad stories are not good to be passed down from generation to generation, my mother reasons, siding with her mother who didn't tell her much either.
The only time I could get people in my family to speak freely about their past was when a relative would come back from Haiti, bearing gifts. I don't remember when I came to realize how important it was to receive these items: food, liquor, embroidered cotton bed sheets, even a pair of plastic slippers. But I now know those things helped them to remember where they came from, to relive their cherished memories. For it was through those items that I was able to catch glimpses of a sweet and bitter Haiti, of my grandmother and parents. The bites of molasses candy packed with cashews, the sips of egg yolk liquor, the spices, loosened their tongues and they would speak about hunting for pheasants, horseback riding, and summers spent on family farms. My parents would tell us fragmented stories from their childhoods. Pasts that were broken in tiny pieces just like the jars that carried the pickled peppers and fine-shredded cabbage soaked in white distilled vinegar, the fiery odor clinging to the gift-bearers' shirts. Of my father's father abandoning his five children to start another family in neighboring Santo Domingo or Havana, Cuba. No one is really certain where he ended up. Only thing that is for sure is that he came back to Haiti, dying of cancer, so that his children, the ones who made it to America, could bury him. It was as if the odors wafting from the soaked, rickety suitcase brought to our home stirred memories in my parents' minds that were otherwise kept buried deep. In their new lives, in their home on a street called Phillips on the South Side of Chicago, these items served as a truth potion that helped soothe their ripped hearts, as they were transplanted to new jobs where they swept up powdered gum at a Wrigley factory and lifted sharp, cold iron parts at a steel mill.
"You realize how much you miss everything," one family member explained. "How life hasn't been what you expected it to be."
Now that I live on my own, catching my family reflecting on their lives is rare. Instead, when we get together now, we sit at tables, talking about who got married, when will I get married, and who is sick. Superficial topics I can easily discuss with the strangers I now interview. Aside from blood, my family is not connected by much else. Not like a Korean friend of mine, who at a young age was given a book about his lineage that spans thirty-three generations. That's a lot of history, permanence, and family pride. I, on the other hand, cannot even break the silence past my own mother's generation. However, I have jotted down notes, and bits and pieces of stories. And I fill blank cassettes daily on my job, fill them with stories. None of them my own.
VINI NOU BEL
Annie Gregoire
A few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I was born in a Brooklyn hospital during a hot summer. Early in my life, my father introduced me to the civil-rights leader, for a picture of Dr. King hung on the living room wall of my parents' one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Although my father never spoke to me about why he displayed a picture of the slain activist next to that of John F. Kennedy in our home, I later came to understand the significance of their portraits.
In elementary school, I started to understand that the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. symbolized the struggle for racial equality. During Black History Month, my classmates and I sang "We shall overcome" as loudly as we could and recited poems resonating, "I have a dream ..." Still, honoring Black History Month had a somber tone, not as exciting to me as the other cultural events celebrated at my bilingual public school. With great anticipation, I looked forward to celebrating Haitian Flag Day at school.
On Haitian Flag Day I always felt special marching in the auditorium wearing my Haitian folkloric attire, a red bandanna covering my head and a blue dress tucked in at the waist with a red scarf, while chanting the national anthem of Haiti. That was the only time I truly believed I was no different from my peers, as we all marched in unison, showing off the same colors of blue and red. My Haitian-born parents were there singing along with me while we paraded down the aisle. Celebrating Haitian history and culture at this elementary school seemed to foster a great sense of ethnic pride among many students in the French and Spanish bilingual programs, including the few students who were neither of Haitian nor Hispanic descent.
Other times, however, some of my schoolmates, notably the boys, reminded me that I was different. Instead of addressing me as "Annie" they preferred to call me "Blackie." Their teasing began to sound natural, since the term "Blackie" was often used by black people to describe their darker peers. Although I learned to tolerate the taunting, I was somewhat confused about how dark a person needed to be in order to be called "Blackie" since many of the individuals who belittled me were just a shade or two lighter.
As my preteen years approached, I wanted to interact more with young people of different cultural backgrounds. I grew tired of studying French and celebrating Haitian Flag Day. One day I convinced my parents to enroll me in a Catholic grammar school attended by some of the children living on my block. I was hoping to start anew. To my dismay, attention to my dark hue followed me to Catholic school. On the first day of class at my new school, I was greeted with loud laughter by a group of boys sitting in the back of the classroom. Thereafter, one of the boys from that group, who was of Jamaican descent, also chose not to address me as "Annie." This time my new name was "Crispy." He s
topped calling me "Crispy" the day I exploded in Language Arts class and cried out loud before all my classmates. From then on, he referred to me by my proper name. The insults by some of the other students did not end though. Occasionally, I was "the Creature from the Black La- goon" or the child whose mamma left her "in the toaster too long." One time a female classmate snidely remarked, "It's getting darker in here," as I entered the classroom and when I was leaving she said, "It's getting lighter in here." A girl with fair complexion asked me one day, "Do you ever wish you were light-skinned?"
At this grammar school, I did have the opportunity to make more friends of different cultural backgrounds: African-American, Trinidadian, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and others. But there was also a large student population of Haitian descent. Being of Haitian descent at my school brought little pride and prestige, however. The 1980s rolled in with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, linking the disease to Haitians. Meanwhile, numerous Haitians were fleeing their homeland in shabby boats to reach American shores. Unfortunately, the Haitian-American students were not exempt from being stigmatized even in a school in which they dominated. Some students pretended they couldn't speak a word of Haitian Kreyol while others tried to distance themselves from their Haitian-born parents, identifying themselves as Americans.
From grammar school, I moved on to a high school with a mixed student population of African, European, Hispanic, and Asian origins. Although the different ethnic groups were tolerant of one another, they hardly intermingled. Occasionally I heard "ethnic jokes" told by students of various groups, but I was only truly affected by the derogatory remarks about dark-skinned blacks or people of Haitian descent. In high school, I purposely stayed away from the lunchroom and tried to avoid the comments by taking unpopular and extra classes and working in the school office.
Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Page 14