I remember again what Manman always told me and Nadine about men. We’d laughed! We were so naive. Manman had sheltered us. She’d taken the blows of the world for us. Poor Safira, who had had no one to keep her safe.
“Did she get better, chouchou?” I ask. “Did your manman get better?”
Safira looks up at me and smiles. It’s the first real smile I’ve seen on her face, as though all her other smiles were false. A wide smile, with her one crooked tooth, a smile that transforms her face and makes her glow. “I saved her,” she says softly. My head feels heavy, and I turn my face to the wall and fall asleep to the scratch, scratch of Safira scrubbing.
It’s dark when I wake again. The light is on, and a moth skitters against the bulb, making weird shadows on the tarpaulin roof. I think of the demons who stalk the night. Outside, I hear hushed voices—Tonton Élie and gossipy neighbors—fragments of sentences, bits of words floating like ash and dust in the wind.
“It’s not normal . . . ,” says Jilène, our neighbor who does pedicures under the tree.
“I don’t know what to do,” replies Tonton Élie.
“Seek a remèd for her anger . . . ,” declares someone else, whose voice I don’t even recognize, someone nosy.
“She’s sleeping now.” That is Safira’s voice, firm and practical. “She can stay tonight.”
It is sweet and easy to lie there. A strong wind is blowing; somewhere, a loose tarp flaps, like some great bird taking flight. Somewhere, an evangelical pastor bellows into a megaphone, and his congregation thrills, Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!
I think: I’ll never get up again.
THE AIR IS SWEET WITH THE SMELL OF CINNAMON and star anise as Nadine deals the cards onto the table. We hunch in plastic chairs, socks on our feet and sweaters over our pajamas, as we shiver gratefully near Manman’s hot charcoal stove; it’s an uncommonly cold winter morning. Manman stirs plantain porridge, pours in a can of Carnation milk, and I can hear Nadine’s stomach growling in anticipation.
We play Casino as we wait. We’ve been playing with this old, ragged set of cards for so long that it’s easy to cheat—you can always tell who has the seven of diamonds or the ten of spades because of how the corners are folded—but it’s not fun if you know what’s in the other person’s hand, so we pretend we don’t know at all. It is dark and cozy in the downstairs kitchen because there’s no electricity this morning, and I feel warm, sweet, and peaceful, as if I’ve just drunk a cup of thick hot chocolate. I am relieved, and I can’t remember why I should feel relieved—only that there was once a sense of danger but that it doesn’t exist anymore.
“Krik?” says Manman.
“Krak!” Nadine and I call back in unison.
“What’s a tiny little thing that can make the pride of the president?” asks Manman.
“A needle!” I shout.
“A needle to make his suit!” shouts Nadine.
I throw down a queen and use it to pick up a nine and a three and put them in my pile. I am winning. My pile of cards is growing.
I never win at Casino. Nadine reaches out suddenly and grabs my hand.
I feel frightened. Why are you holding my hand? I want to ask.
I’m falling.
I’m falling. Then it is dark and unfamiliar. I’m lying on a strange canvas cot with something lumpy under my head. For a moment I want to scream. I don’t know where I am. Then I see Safira, sleeping on the ground, snoring softly, the sharp angles of her elbows and knees atop a tangle of sheets. That was a dream. This is what’s real now. I feel sadness and betrayal in my chest, as if something beloved and comfortable has been ripped out of my hands. I close my eyes and try to go back to dream-Manman and dream-Nadine, but I can’t. I try to force time to go backward. Don’t go, don’t go, please don’t go. I grind my teeth into the hard, lumpy pillow, and I don’t cry. I keep smelling cinnamon and star anise as I stare into the corners where the tarp is nailed down, where darkness distorts the shapes of things, and I wait until morning.
Sunlight seeps through the thin plastic walls. A rooster crows, and a machann promenades boiled eggs and ripe bananas: “Ze bouyi fig mi! Ze bouyi fig mi!” I sit on the cot; my body feels old, as if all my bones are rubbing against one another.
As Safira makes coffee, she begins to tell me her story.
“I won’t tell you his name,” says Safira softly as she runs sweet coffee slowly through the strainer over and over, until it’s black. “He was a leader in the Cité, down on Route Neuf, and I knew if I got in good with him, everything would be okay. He’d fix everything for me. Manman wasn’t getting better, and the neighbors started telling me it wasn’t a natural disease. They started telling me it was a sent disease, a curse. And the nurse—the nurse was so mean! She said it was my fault that Manman needed to eat good food with lots of energy and iron. And I didn’t have cash. I didn’t have anything to sell.”
“But you managed. You got by.”
“He said he loved me. And I thought he did. I thought it would be okay if he really loved me.” She pauses. “You know, I was a virgin before that,” she says with a smile.
“You saved your manman.”
“Yes. And she was so angry when I got pregnant. I never told her why I did what I did. She would have been ashamed.”
“Are you ashamed?”
“I’m not ashamed. I’m not ashamed.” Safira runs her hands over her hair, then ties it up in a pale orange kerchief.
“That’s good.”
“But I don’t know what to do. You fix one problem, and another one comes up. Both my feet are in a single shoe. What will I do with this baby?”
She stares at me, as though she expects me to really answer her.
“I don’t know,” I say at last.
She looks like a child now, wide-eyed and young, soft and believing. Everything she has done, she has done to protect the ones she loves. Jealousy creeps in and gnaws at me. Because, amid all her suffering, there are still people in the world whom Safira loves. Her heart isn’t hard and angry. She’s not like me.
JUNE 2011
TONTON ÉLIE SAYS HE’S BRINGING ME TO the manbo—the vodou priestess—for a cure because I’ve become so angry. He’s been saying it ever since I attacked the American photojournalist last month. He says I’m lucky I didn’t get arrested. It is embarrassing, but I can’t hide that I still feel that the guy deserved it.
My sandaled foot sinks into black ooze as Tonton Élie and I push and elbow our way toward the taptap. Around us, every day is a market day, and a painted placard in front of the big stadium advertises an upcoming match between Valentina and the Tigresses.
“I wonder what it would be like to be a girl soccer player,” I say. I’m trying to be friendly, not angry or sad, even if I feel angry and sad.
“They’re all lesbians,” murmurs my uncle, the vertical lines between his eyebrows severe. Then he pauses. “You want a Tampico?”
That’s not like him, to waste fifteen gourdes like that. He must be feeling bad for me.
“The pink Tampico,” I say, and he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles for the young man selling cold drinks out of a cardboard box balanced on his head. Then we get onto the crowded taptap to Martissant.
The road to the south, the one that takes you through the sprawl of the Martissant shantytown and beyond, all the way out of Port-au-Prince, is always dusty (except when it rains, and then it’s muddy) and always full of traffic. We’re squeezed into the taptap, seven people on each side, and I’m at the front, my feet resting on the spare tire. A younger and an older woman stand hunched under the low ceiling. They are carrying chickens.
“I lived in Martissant when I first came to Port-au-Prince,” Élie says suddenly, over the churning of the engine and the throbbing bass of the speakers.
“I didn’t know that.”
“My brother Benisoit knew someone. So that’s where I went.” Tonton Élie pauses for a moment and then starts laughing. “There
were so many cars. When I got off the boat and made it downtown, that’s all I could see—so many cars, half of them going one way and half of them going the other. I said, ‘Woy!’ I didn’t know what to do.”
I try to imagine Tonton Élie as a young, naive man arriving in Port-au-Prince from the provinces. I can’t imagine him wide-eyed.
Élie’s smile disappears, like a startled cat into the shadows, as quickly as it came. “We were looking for a better life,” he says quietly. “Look at what we’ve got.”
The manbo, Manman Niniz, lives in a pink two-room cement house down by the sea at the outer edges of Martissant. It’s also where she works her cures and does her ceremonies. A small stripy gray cat is curled on the porch. It mews at us boredly with a candy-pink tongue. We sit in white plastic chairs and sweat.
“What is the problem?” asks Manman Niniz. She is a short, expansive woman with soft-looking dark skin. She leans on her wooden table, which is covered with peeling images of the saints and the lwa, the vodou spirits. Off to the side stand a bottle of Florida Water perfume and another of Bakara rum and a few half-burned candles. A machete leans against the wall, its point in the dust.
Tonton Élie rests his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands. “This is my niece. She has too much kolè. She is full of anger.”
I am a burden to him. He never wanted me. I had two mothers in my life, and both of them died. There is no one to love me.
Manman Niniz takes my hand and looks into my eyes. When she leans close, I smell cigarettes and see a few coarse white hairs at her temples and a few black hairs on her chin. “My child,” she asks, “why are you so angry?”
I am surprised to hear my own voice saying things I have never said aloud. “Because the world is bad. Because people are suffering—because good people are suffering. Because of the earthquake. Because the earthquake killed my manman. Because Nadine . . . my sister left and forgot about me.” And there are things I am still afraid to say—that I thought Jimmy was my friend, but he thought I’d have sex with him for money, and I nearly did . . . that everyone always says, Bondye bon! God is good! But sometimes I wonder if He really is . . .
The anger boils inside of me. The earthquake broke open all the sadness in my heart, and I could only patch it up again with hardness. I took my fear and my sadness and turned them into hate, because it made me feel strong instead of weak. I never want to stop feeling angry; I can’t afford to feel anything other than angry.
I say quietly, “I wonder if God has forgotten us.”
Manman Niniz knocks twice on the table, then closes her eyes. Beads of sweat glisten on her forehead and her upper lip. Low-pitched sounds, halfway between a hum and a groan, escape her mouth, and she lets go of my hand. She drops her head, shakes it back and forth a few times, and then sits in silence.
I’ve been to lots of ceremonies before, but I’ve only been to one healing—when we were little and Nadine had typhoid fever, and Manman took us to an oungan who told her to do an offering for the Marasa spirits, who protect children. But all I remember from that is that Manman cooked a lot of food, and then a bunch of kids came to eat, and then we wiped our fingers on the oungan’s clothes. I’ve never seen anybody be cured of rage before.
When Manman Niniz opens her eyes, she looks like another person—she has been mounted by the spirit Gede, who stands at the crossroads between this world and the afterlife. She widens her eyes, so I can see all the white, and she peers at me with seemingly mocking fascination. She rises, lifting her skirt around her thighs as if she’s trying to seduce a man, and ties a shimmery purple kerchief around her fleshy waist. She sways to the table and picks up a bottle of kleren with scotch bonnet peppers in it and pours a little onto the dirt floor, in the doorway, then takes a swig. She daubs her face with talcum powder. Then she sticks out her right hand, then her left hand, to me for a brisk double handshake.
“Well, my child!” Manman Niniz intones in Gede’s nasal voice. They say Gede talks that way because he is dead and his nose is stuffed with cotton. He is the master of the cemetery, master of the underworld. “Don’t you think I’m bweautiful?”
“Wi,” I tell the lwa. “You are very beautiful.”
“You twell me you are too angry.”
“That is what everyone says.”
Manman Niniz/Gede calls out, “Marie-Georges! Come here!” A few moments later, a small woman all in white steps in from the lakou. She is an ounsi, one of Manman Niniz’s followers. “You, go with her,” commands Manman Niniz/Gede, gesturing to me. “Your uncle will stway here to discuss the pwayment with me.”
Marie-Georges takes my hand (hers is as hard and callused as leather) and leads me out of the dark wooden house and into the sunlight. We walk through a few neighbors’ yards, past a charcoal-colored bristly piglet eating sweet-potato peels out of a plastic bag, to the swampy marshland that separates the city from the sea.
“How are you today?” I ask, because I don’t know what else to talk about.
“Very well, thank God,” replies Marie-Georges, smiling. She is old enough to be my grandmother, but she has beautiful straight white teeth.
“My name is Magdalie.”
“Take off your shoes, and roll up your pants,” says Marie-Georges, removing her own sandals.
I take off my flip-flops and roll up my jeans to just below the knee, as high as they will go. Then I follow Marie-Georges into the water. It is filled with rusting tin cans, discarded shoes, and other floating debris; soft fans of green and brown algae sweep back and forth in the gentle current. The rocks beneath my bare feet feel slimy and slippery. The mud squishes, cool between my toes. The water soaks the bottoms of my rolled-up jeans, and I know it’s filthy, and thoughts of cholera flit across my mind, but I don’t say anything—I don’t want Marie-Georges to think I lack courage.
We reach an outlying bank—soft, sandy earth where low, scrubby plants grow. Marie-Georges leads me to one of the bushes. “Pull up some of this,” she instructs me. “Wake it up.” I do so, and we walk a bit farther, and Marie-Georges gestures to another plant. “Now pull up some of this. Wake this one up.” I do so, we move on, and she gestures to a third plant. “Now, tell this one why you need it, and then pull.”
“I am too angry,” I say quietly, kneeling down and holding the tough, ropy shrub in my hands. “Since Nadine left, I am angry all the time.” And I pull.
Marie-Georges and I walk back to Manman Niniz’s house under a wide blue sky. A distant white helicopter stirs the air, its propellers in the shape of a blinking black cross. UN is written on its white belly.
Back in the house, the spirit Gede takes the plants from my hands and twists them. “Now we will braid them togwether.” I braid one end while Gede braids the other. Gede looks me up and down, as though the spirit suddenly recognizes me, and touches my leg softly. “Oh, I swee, Dantò walks with you.”
My eyes fall to the table where Ezili Dantò’s image sits among some of the other lwa. She is a dark-skinned woman holding a child—like a brown Mary, with three cuts on her cheek. A jewel-studded crown blossoms from her head like a flower, and she has a narrow nose and a small delicate mouth. Her deep, serious eyes peer out from a blue, red, and gold cloak. She holds the child like a devoted mother. She is beautiful and scarred, like my Manman, who served her.
Marie-Georges comes in from outside with a heavy rock from the water and places it in my hands. The rock is slippery, gritty, and dark, like a bruised organ. Gede places the braided bundle on the floor, next to the burning candle and the 250 gourdes Tonton Élie has paid. I don’t have time to wonder where he got it. “Now, pitit mwen, hit the plants—turn thwe rock and hit them three twimes and twell them your problems.”
I concentrate on the braided bundle of stems and thorns, trying to send everything I feel into them. I turn the rock in my hands. “I can’t stop being angry.” I slam it down the first time.
Again I turn the rock in my hands. “I hate everybody. I hate eve
rything. Nadine said she’d send for me, but she never calls. She never calls at all.” I slam it down a second time.
I turn the rock. “Please. I don’t want to be in the world sometimes. But I can’t be like this anymore. Help me.” I slam the rock down and leave it there.
“Now you must get these things,” Gede says. “An image of Dantò, a bottle of rum, a bottle of Florida Water, a red kwerchief, and a machete. Put the machete and the kwerchief under your bed, and leave them there. Come bwack in three days.”
I DON’T DREAM THE FIRST NIGHT AFTER MY visit to Manman Niniz; I sleep a restful sleep that I cannot remember. The next day I go downtown to the Grand-Rue. I go over to Safira’s tent and ask her to come with me, but I don’t tell her what I’m going to buy. “Some things I have to get in Lavil,” I tell her vaguely. I don’t like going downtown alone now.
“Lavil? I could pick up some lalo leaves,” Safira says brightly. “I’ve been craving it. Lalo with rice and salt beef! I don’t want the baby to get a birthmark if I don’t get what I crave.”
So we take a taptap downtown. Playing hopscotch around the mud, garbage, and puddles in the street, as Nadou and I used to do a long time ago, we duck past the machanns selling hair extensions and boxes of relaxer, past the plastic bucket of turtles (pets or food), past the savory-smelling flat baskets of dried djondjon mushrooms. There are baskets piled high with sweet spices and fresh bergamot, medicinal leaves and edible leaves, white American rice and expensive yellow Haitian rice that no one can afford. There is a rainbow of beans and peas, both dry and fresh. Papayas, mangoes, passionfruit.
“You know, Magda, it’s not true, what they say.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s not a food shortage in Haiti. There’s a money shortage.” Safira laughs.
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