Hold Tight, Don't Let Go

by Laura Rose Wagner

  While Safira heads to the vegetable machann and haggles over her lalo, I make my way to where they sell things for ceremonies. There are multicolored powders and colognes for sale and little cloth dolls in tiny chairs for making someone fall in love with you.

  “Oh! Mezanmi!” Safira comes over to me, holding a black plastic bag of lalo leaves. “I didn’t realize we were buying things for devil worship today.” But there’s a teasing tone to what she says.

  “What religion are you?” I ask.

  “Catholic?” she replies vaguely, in the way that really means “a little of this, a little of that.”

  While Safira hovers nearby, cautiously running her thin fingers over a sequined bottle with the skull image of Bawòn Samdi, I negotiate the price of a machete, red kerchief, and image. The vendor is an older woman without a lot of teeth and with a pipe in her mouth, both of which make it hard to understand her. I like her because she seems strong. The red kerchief is satiny. The queenly image of Dantò is the same one I saw at Manman Niniz’s house.

  Soon we’re squeezed back into the taptap, facing each other and hardly moving in the traffic up Route Delmas, when Safira suddenly inhales sharply. “Oh!”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, terrified that the bumpy road has made her go into labor.

  “Look!” She points out the wooden slats, out onto the street. I turn around. Everyone in our taptap turns around.

  They are breaking down a camp. I can’t see who “they” are—if they are police or agents from the mayor’s office or agents from an aid organization. They are men, I can see, muscled, their skin wet with sweat, in matching white T-shirts.

  “Oh, no . . . ,” says Safira softly. “Oh . . .”

  The men have sticks and hammers. One of them shouts, “Break ’em down! Break ’em down!” The tents and little shacks crumple easily into the dust. The people stand there, holding whatever they can, as the sun beats down. An old man with a cane. A young man in long jean shorts with a radio in his hand. A little boy wearing a backpack, holding a pack of crackers. A young woman, her hair wrapped in a lace scarf, leaning against a woman who might be her mother. A little boy clings to an older girl’s skirt with both hands.

  “He’s looking at me,” says Safira.

  “What can we do?” I ask.

  “We can’t do anything.”

  Safira and I are silent, tired, and lost in thought the rest of the way up Route Delmas. Her pregnant belly looks all the more swollen upon her skinny knees as she sits on the hard wooden taptap bench. I lean my forehead against a rusted beam. For some reason, I think: I want to live forever.

  As we walk back down to the tents—slowly, for Safira’s sake—she asks suddenly, “Do you think there are lwa who can protect my baby?”

  “I think so. If you serve them. You should go talk to a manbo or an oungan.”

  “I know,” Safira says quietly. “I just don’t have very much money or very much to give. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.” She pauses. “You know, I’d give my own life to make sure that my baby had a good life. If someone could guarantee me that . . .” She looks so sad for a moment. “Where will those people go?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll go somewhere.”

  “I’ll bring you some lalo and rice tomorrow, once I’ve cleaned and cooked it,” Safira says. “I’m not sure if I’ll find any salt beef.”

  We reach the camp. Some little boys are playing soccer, and a breeze caresses my hair like cool fingers. Safira says, “It’s beautiful,” and she is right: our camp is beautiful, framed against the dusk, in the darkening pink of the hazy sky.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER I PUT THE MACHETE with the red kerchief around it under the bed and the image of Dantò under my pillow, I have a dream that begins like a familiar nightmare, until it changes.

  I am trapped in a shaking house. The floor lurches like a boat on a stormy sea. I know if I do not get the door open soon and flee, the roof will collapse onto me. I fumble with the lock, unable to get it open. I am not able to scream or move or say a word.

  I feel something around my ankles and look down. It is a pool of blood, washing up against me, hot, rising, and frothing. I look up and see Dantò. It is not the Dantò of the image, with her fine cloak and jewel-encrusted crown. But I know instantly that it is Dantò before me. She looks like a peasant woman in a dark blue denim dress. She has a beautiful, wide face and black skin, and her head is wrapped in a red kerchief. Deep, horizontal wrinkles are carved into her forehead, just as they are carved into the foreheads of all the market women who carry heavy baskets on their heads all day. Her eyes burn with fury, devotion, and heartbreak. No sound escapes her lips. She opens her mouth, and blood pours out. Blood pours from the three cuts on her cheek, but she never falls. I know that Dantò is holding the shaking house up with her strength.

  I look down and see my own blood running down, but it doesn’t make me feel afraid. The hot, rusty scent of it rises to my nostrils. I just think: I endure, I endure. I look mutely at the lwa, and the lwa stares mutely back, her eyes aflame with all the anger and love the world can contain.

  “Manman,” I say with sudden recognition.

  With a single push, the door flies open, and I escape into the world.

  When I return to Manman Niniz’s house in Martissant at sunrise three days later, I come alone; Tonton Élie is out looking for work, like he does most days.

  “Pitit mwen,” says Manman Niniz as I enter. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad,” I respond, leaning down to kiss the manbo on the cheek. She still smells like cigarettes and burned kleren. I open my mouth to tell her about my dream, but then I don’t—I won’t tell anyone about it, not even Manman Niniz. It’s a secret between me and Ezili Dantò. If I speak about it, I might spoil what Dantò has done for me.

  Manman Niniz knocks twice, then places the bottle of rum I’ve brought on the altar and lights a candle. She has boiled the now-dry braided leaves together into a dark tea, and pours in some Florida Water perfume. She has me strip down to my panties and instructs me to stand in a metal basin, and she begins to pour the liquid over me as her followers look on. It feels cool over the tiny heat pimples that itch and prickle on my back, and it smells like the forest and the sea, like flowers and spicy orange—like the Haiti of imagination, the Haiti Manman told stories about, that existed before the cities and the dust.

  The three ounsis dressed in white sing songs I do not know, songs of love and pain, songs that our ancestors sang, songs that survived slavery and the passage across the sea, songs that outlived death.

  Words dance and fill my mind as I close my eyes and accept the coolness of the liquid running over me, running down me like blood. The world deserves our anger. We should be angry at the injustice and the loss.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke-ke!” cries Manman Niniz, eyes blazing, as wordless Ezili Dantò takes control of her body. Dantò lights a Comme-Il-Faut cigarette and holds it in her lips as she continues her work. The ounsis’ song rises, they cry Ezili, o! in the rum-colored candlelight, as the cigarette smoke swirls and dances up to the ceiling.

  I let my head fall against my chest as the liquid cascades down my neck. We should be angry for everyone who never had a chance, for everyone who searched for life and only found suffering or death.

  Ezili takes the bundle of leaves in her hand and rubs my body down with fierce tenderness. I envision all of my sins, all of my anger, all of the poison within me being scraped off and washed away.

  We should be angry for everyone who was born strong and able to love, and who then became hardened and shut off and allowed the love in her heart to be leeched out and slowly replaced by anger.

  And I begin to cry—not the tears of anger I have shed in frustration and shock since January 12, not the tears of bitterness that I have shed since Nadine left—but tears of grief. My grief pierces me like daggers. My memories pierce me. The tea hangs like dewdrops from the tips of my hair. I want to b
e an angry, avenging woman. I want to vomit blood.

  We can be our own protectors. We must love ourselves as our own mothers would love us. Our mothers want us to be at peace. The world deserves our anger, but we owe it to ourselves not to hold the anger in our hearts.

  Is there hope? I ask.

  There is always hope, answers a voice, which may have been my own but may not have been. There is never certainty, but there is always hope.

  I stoop down, put my arms around my knees, bury my head in my arms, and rock myself back and forth like a child in her mother’s embrace.

  JULY 2011

  SAFIRA WENT BACK TO HER MANMAN IN Cité Soleil. It was a few days before I noticed. I’d been experimenting, trying to make coconut tablèt candy, and I wanted to bring her some. It was ugly, ugly tablèt; when the sugar hardened, it stuck to the plate with whole pieces of cinnamon still lodged in it. But it didn’t taste too bad. I went to her tent, but I didn’t find Safira. The plywood door was padlocked.

  “She’s gone,” said a young man in the neighboring tent, peering at me as he scrubbed his sneakers with detergent.

  “Where?”

  “To Cabaret. She should be back tomorrow morning.”

  “What? No, not the aunt. I’m looking for Safira.”

  “Oh, she’s gone, too. She left.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I can’t let myself feel sad. People disappear so suddenly. I was just getting used to her. I take out my phone and call her. It rings and rings, and I’m about to hang up when I hear a distant “Alo?”

  “Alo? Safira?”

  “Magda!” It sounds as if she’s shouting from far away.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going!”

  “Bon. Chouchou. I was afraid to tell you. I wasn’t even sure, you know, until it happened. My manman didn’t want me in the camp anymore. She heard they are tearing down the camps.”

  “So you’re back in Cité Soleil?”

  “You know, things aren’t so bad in the Cité now. It’s not so dangerous, like it was. And none of us can stay in the camps forever.”

  “You never said good-bye!”

  “I hate saying good-bye!” Safira cried.

  “You’d rather I get sezisman, that I die of shock when I find you gone?”

  “I’m sorry, cheri m nan! Really!”

  “Okay,” I say. “When will I see you again?”

  “Don’t worry, cheri! You can come see me whenever you want!” she insists, and then my minutes run out, and the call drops.

  She’s right. We cannot stay in the camp. None of us can. The little bonds and communities we made will have to come apart. Safira, I wonder, what will you do now? What if she never comes back? What if I never see her again? Her image suddenly conquers my mind. Her narrow chest, her jutting limbs, her stupid, trusting smile. Her sacrifice laps at my heart, menacing the dam against my emotions, threatening to overflow. Safira, who saved her mother, who saved her family. I’ve never known such jealousy. I imagine her and her act, and for the first time since before the earthquake, I pull out my journal and write.

  Safira, full of love, wordlessly pressed her arm over her eyes, the crook of her elbow sticky over the bridge of her nose. She did not cry out. She breathed through her mouth, submitted her body, and let go of her mind. Her body remained, but she was not there. She kept a part of herself sacred and whole. Her soul, like a frightened bird released from a pair of cupped hands, flew away. It was not there. It was not in that room, on those sun-dried sheets smelling of bleach, in that room that smelled of sweat and sex. It could not hear grunts or whimpers. It could not feel pain. It slipped through a crack in the front door, out into the bright sunlight. It ascended, higher and higher. It flew over Cité Soleil, beyond the abandoned sugar factory, buffeted by the wind, until the shanties and cinder-block houses and garbage-filled swampland were just a distant, jagged pattern like broken pieces of glass. It flew over Port-au-Prince once, circled, and then soared out over the bay and up into heaven.

  I could not hold on to Nadine. I cannot hold on to Safira. All I can do is hold everyone in my heart, the only place I know where I can keep them safe.

  AUGUST 2011

  MICHLOVE HAD HER BABY BACK IN THE provinces, Tonton Élie told me today. They didn’t even have time to get her all the way down the mountain to the clinic in Abricots. She ended up pushing out that baby right on the banks of a stream. It’s a little girl, and they’ve named her Kethly Yolène. The “Yolène” part is in memory of Manman.

  “Whatever her name is, I’m going to call her Ti Ravin—Little Stream,” I tell Tonton Élie. “I heard of someone who gave birth in the taptap on the way to the hospital, and they called the baby Little Truck. Mezanmi, Michlove gave birth at the stream.” I can just see it. Michlove’s a fat, strong, juicy girl; she’d have no problem giving birth. I suspect that Yolène a.k.a. Ti Ravin simply fell out of her.

  “Very funny, Magdalie.” Tonton Élie doesn’t look up as he screws together an old TV set. “You know, life is going to change for you soon.”

  “Of course it will, uncle-of-mine.” What a stupid thing to say. My life has never stopped changing lately. That’s all life is made of: change. Nothing stays.

  “We’re going to have to move out of the camp soon.”

  “I know.”

  Tonton Élie puts down his screwdriver and looks me in the eye. “I have to go to Jérémie in a few days. I think you should come, too.”

  “Me, Tonton? I don’t even remember the provinces. What would I do there?”

  Tonton Élie leans back on his heels. His rubber sandals are worn through at the soles. “There are a lot of people back there who would like to see you. It would be good for you to leave Port-au-Prince for a while.”

  “Yeah, but, Tonton, someone has to stay here and take care of the house—what if it rains? Who’s going to catch the water?”

  “Listen, Magdalie.” He clears his throat. “I shouldn’t leave a sixteen-year-old girl alone for that long. All the brothers and sisters have been putting some money aside for Yolette’s final prayer and wake.”

  “Ah. I understand.” I can tell that Tonton Élie feels nervous telling me this, because his forehead looks as creased and complicated as the circuit boards he is always fixing.

  Manman always used to talk about how someday she’d go back to Jérémie. At least for a visit, and maybe forever, to build a house and start a garden. When she’d made enough money, when she finally had the means—she’d go home. It was one of her many dreams that would never come true.

  “You should come,” says Tonton Élie, gazing at me seriously. “I think you should come. Just for two weeks or so. You can stay with Tonton Benisoit and Tati Marie-Lourdes.”

  I don’t say anything. It feels wrong that this is the reason we’re going back to Jérémie. Manman is supposed to be here and alive, and Nadou is supposed to be here with me, and this should be a happy trip. I shouldn’t be burying Manman. I pick at a scab on my knee and don’t pay attention to Tonton Élie at all, as though I’ve found a hiding place out in the open.

  “Magdalie,” he says. “Magdalie.”

  “Wi, tonton.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Ça va, tonton.”

  “It might be hard, you know. People will cry and fall down. But you are strong.”

  Am I? I wonder. But I don’t say anything. I would rather hide.

  “I wouldn’t tell Nadine the same thing,” Tonton Élie continues. “But you’ve always been stronger than she is.”

  Could that be true? I’m as flexible as a reed, who can bear any weight and never break? I’m strong enough to withstand the ceremonies, the crying, the remembering, but Nadine isn’t? I’ve always been the louder one. Maybe she ties up all her feelings and swallows them.

  TONTON ÉLIE DUG MANMAN’S BONES UP from the shallow place they buried her after the quake, near Mme Faustin’s ho
use, where Manman died. I hadn’t gone there before because I didn’t want to remember or relive the earthquake or run into Mme Faustin.

  I’d imagined a dry and dusty mound, but the ground over where Manman was buried was covered in flowers, growing and blooming. There was hibiscus everywhere, and orange-red blossoms; the ground felt moist, and the air smelled like frangipani.

  “It’s a miracle!” I told Tonton Élie.

  He looked at me with his mouth twisted, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should speak. “No, Magdalie, not a miracle.”

  “Of course it’s a miracle. All these flowers . . .”

  “Mme Faustin stops by to tend them.”

  I stared at him. “That’s not true.”

  It’s not true because I hate her. I never want to see her again. It’s not true because I refuse to believe it, because I know what I know: that she is nasty and disgusting and cruel. It’s not true because it was her house that Manman died in.

  “You think things are simple!” Tonton Élie exclaimed.

  “How can I possibly think anything is simple?” I snapped back.

  He shook his head and said, “Sometimes things are more complicated than they seem.”

  I looked at him hatefully. There was nothing to lose. I’m too old for him to beat me.

  “Think about it, Magdalie. Use your brain. Who took care of Madame Faustin when she was sick? Who bathed her? Who fed her?”

  “Manman.”

  “Who cooked for her, every single day? And brought food to her on a tray when she couldn’t get out of bed?”

  “Manman.”

  “Who slept on the floor of Madame Faustin’s room, listening to her cry when some boyfriend had left her or one of her children was in trouble in New York?”

  I sighed. “Manman.”

  “Who was there, in Madame Faustin’s house, every single day for almost twenty years?”

  “My manman.”

  But that doesn’t change anything for me, even if Mme Faustin loved Manman in her way. What kind of love is that, where you pay someone 1,500 gourdes a month to break her back and call it charity? Manman may have been Mme Faustin’s best friend in the world, but Mme Faustin was never Manman’s best friend. I’ll never, ever believe it.