“Rayi chen, di l dan li blan,” said Tonton Élie. “You hate the dog, but you have to admit that it has beautiful white teeth. You may hate her, Magda, but you can’t make yourself blind to what is good.”
“I’m going home,” I told him. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. And I didn’t want to see the shovel hit the bones. I didn’t want to be reminded.
It was Tonton Élie and two neighbors who’d found her, two days after the quake. There wasn’t a mark on her, they’d said. Not even the polish on her toenails was cracked. They had wrapped her in a sheet and buried her shallowly in the unmarked ground.
Still, we are lucky because we found her, because we knew where she was buried, even if we had done it fast and with no funeral. I saw in the newspaper that in the treeless mountains beyond the city, there are mass graves of the unknown, unclaimed dead, tens of thousands of jumbled, nameless people, marked with plywood crosses rotting in the rain. In collapsed buildings throughout the city, there are people still buried.
As for Mme Faustin, she escaped without a scratch. She was born lucky. She came to see us only once after the quake. She spent the whole time crying, and I thought she was showing off. She never came back to see us or to help us again. So I know, I know I am right to hate her.
SEPTEMBER 2011
THE FERRY TO JÉRÉMIE ROCKS IN THE darkness, still tethered to the wharf, as the rain falls and the bay surges. I sit on the floor, my head resting on my knees, my eyes closed, feeling the cold rainwater seeping into my jeans. I check to make sure my cell phone is safe and dry in its plastic bag. I’m miserable, frightened, and already seasick, and we haven’t even left Port-au-Prince. I sing to myself some song I heard on the evangelical station so I will feel less alone: Advesè m kanpe, yo kanpe pou m pa pase . . . My adversaries stand before me, they stand and impede me . . .
When the storm clears and the stars come out, the boat at last begins to move. We will travel all through the night and reach Jérémie after daybreak. As we pull away from the wharf, I start to cry. My chest is tight. I miss Manman even more right now. It has been almost two years since we lost her, but in this moment the wound feels fresh and raw.
Élie brought Manman on the boat last week, in a plain wooden coffin. He is out in Jérémie already, making the preparations. We will bury her in the land she grew up in, and for nine days we will perform her denyè priyè, her last prayers.
I barely know St. Juste, the tiny village in the mountains near Jérémie, the place where I was born. I left when I was just a baby. I haven’t been there in years, not since I was a little tiny child, and never without Manman. I’ve got a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles there, but I don’t know them very well—they are distant childhood memories and half imagination. I’m going to stay with Matant Marie-Lourdes and Tonton Benisoit, and I’m worried I won’t recognize them when I see them. I wish Nadine was here. I wish Safira was here. I just need someone in the darkness with me. I take out my phone from its plastic bag, and I send a text message. IM SAD NADOU. I WISH ID NEVER GOTTEN ON THIS BOAT. I feel a little better just for having sent it, even if Nadine doesn’t write back.
Everyone is talking, jokes and chatter, politics and gossip. Some women are singing and praying. To my left, a young man takes occasional sips out of a Roi des Coqs rum bottle he’s carrying in his pocket.
On the floor next to me, an older man with a kind, lined face and several missing teeth pats his leg and says, “Go ahead and lie down, cheri.” He must see how tired I am. His voice reminds me of Manman’s accent, and I lay my head down and, breathing in the dusty scent of the man’s work trousers mixing with the ocean breeze, feel myself being rocked to sleep. Suddenly I feel very, very tired, as though all the exhaustion of the last year and a half has descended on me all at once, making me sink like a stone into sleep.
ST. JUSTE IS ON THE TIP OF HAITI’S SOUTHERN peninsula, as far from Port-au-Prince as you can get. After the overnight boat trip to Jérémie, you get off at the wharf, where people are selling sweet cinnamony coconut konparèts and cold sodas. Then you take a moto-taxi for an hour and a half, over rocky mountain roads, to Abricots. It is a clean little town where the sea crashes against the sandy beach, which is strewn with discarded conch shells. Then you walk up another mountain for two hours to get to St. Juste.
They send my cousin Jonas and another teenage boy to fetch me in Abricots and help me carry my bag up the mountain. I don’t recognize either of them, and if Jonas remembers me, it was as I was when I was three. But when they see me getting off the moto in the town square, Jonas immediately calls, “Magdalie?” Maybe they know me because I look like someone from Port-au-Prince, or maybe because I look confused, or maybe because I look like Manman.
“Bonswa, kouzin.” Jonas grins. “We’re so happy you’re here.”
“Mèsi, kouzen.” I feel shy.
“I’m Mackenson,” says the other boy, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek. He is tall and wiry yet muscular, with clear, soft-looking skin. I can tell he’s been swimming from the salt crystalized in his hair.
“Magdalie,” I reply.
“Let me carry your bag,” Mackenson says, and he tries to take it from my shoulder.
“I can do it,” I declare proudly. “I’m not a child. I’m as strong as any boy.”
Jonas laughs. “It’s not because you’re a child or a girl, no? You’re not used to it here. You’re not used to these mountains.”
“I walk all over Port-au-Prince. The sun here is no hotter than the sun in the city.”
But the mountain is steep and full of rocks and thorns. Sweat drips, stinging, into my eyes. My calves burn and ache. I fall behind but am too hardheaded to say anything until I lose my balance and put my hand down on a thorn.
“Can it be my turn now?” asks Mackenson, and he hoists the bag lightly on top of his head.
We climb the mountain as though we are ascending through a painting. The red cracked earth beneath our feet, the wide blue sky brushed with white clouds stretching out over the dark sea, the coconut palms as dense as a carpet in the valley below. How could I have been in Port-au-Prince just yesterday? Now I am at the last limit of the earth.
“Magdalie’s got a thorn in her hand!” announces Jonas as, at last, we trudge up to the house.
“Oh no!” frets the woman who must be Matant Marie-Lourdes, jumping up from where she sits, peeling breadfruit. She wipes her hands on her skirt, her wide warm face pinched in concern. “Oh, mezanmi, the poor little thing hasn’t even gotten to the house, and already she’s hurt!” She turns to Jonas ferociously. “What were you thinking?”
“I’m fine. It’s nothing!” I insist.
She clucks. “Let me find a needle to dig it out.”
People keep apologizing to me, at first. “You know, we don’t have much here,” they say shyly. They think that coming from Port-au-Prince, I’m used to luxury— even though they should know better. “We’re poor, chouchou,” Matant Marie-Lourdes tells me anxiously, her hair wrapped up in an old T-shirt on top of her head. “We live in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a very big house. Our floor is dirt. I hope you don’t get diarrhea. I hope the water doesn’t make pimples pop up all over your skin.”
“Matant mwen, what kind of girl do you think you’re talking to? I sleep in a tent,” I reply, and I start laughing, and she does, too. Because what is she apologizing for? She might say it’s the middle of nowhere, but to me, St. Juste looks like paradise. There are trees, trees, trees as far as I can see, and a shimmering ocean brighter blue than a Samaritan’s Purse tarp.
Tonton Élie looks like a different person here, freer and looser, as if someone has squeezed all the tension out of him. The big ropy veins in his forehead don’t pop out anymore, and he smiles and laughs more. He doesn’t look as thin. “Here, I am myself,” he tells me. “I can fish. I can swim in the ocean. If I am hungry, I can just go hit an avocado out of a tree or climb and get a coconut. The only thing we don’t have here is
money.”
Tonton Élie holds his little Yolène in his lap, giving her huge open-mouthed grins.
“Gaaah!” she squeals, and she emits a clear stream of drool. He holds her to his chest as if she is the only treasure he will ever need. I look into her shining black eyes, the little innocent, and I wonder what life will bring her, what God has set aside for her.
Everyone on the mountain knows who I am, but I don’t know who they are. Whenever I walk by a house, the people in the lakou call, Oh, Magda-lie! Come, let me look at you. All grown up! How are you? Koman kò a ye?
“Magdalie! Oh, how you look like your mother!” coos an old woman I don’t recognize, taking off her straw hat and standing on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. She starts to cry, tears falling from her white lashes.
“Please, please, Auntie,” I say. “You don’t need to cry, please.”
Maybe my being here is finally making everything real for them. I’m a living connection to Port-au-Prince and the devastation they have heard about but haven’t seen. And I remind them of Manman; my presence makes her loss real. I am here because she isn’t. I am here in place of the person they knew and loved.
After a while the days begin to blend together, and without realizing it, I start to feel as though this is my new life. St. Juste is a different world, so quiet and sweet. Sometimes the earthquake seems like a nightmare from which I’ve awoken, and Port-au-Prince feels like someone else’s life. For brief flashes I wonder, Was there really ever an earthquake? Was there really ever a Port-au-Prince? And then I run my fingers over the fading scars on my knees and remember, and I try to picture Manman’s face.
I spend afternoons dozing on a straw mat outside the house, helping my little cousin Béatrice make dolls out of banana stalks, braiding hair, and having my hair braided. We play oslè, hopscotch, with a smooth set of goat bones, and even though Béa’s hands are tiny, she is so much better at tossing them and picking them up. I bathe with my girl cousins in the shallows of the warm sea, and then we jump into the cool river, scrubbing each other’s backs with a lacy old pair of panties that makes our skin smooth.
Slurping okra sauce and tonmtonm with salted fish in it, eating until sleep clouds my eyes, I remember, but can no longer feel, my old gnawing desperation and sadness. My cousin Joanne laughs, her amber eyes crinkling, as I pick up a gob of tonmtonm with all five fingers. “Just use these two, ti kokòt, my sweetheart cousin!” she says, pinching together her index finger and thumb. And the whole family says that even baby Béa, who is only four, can swallow bigger pieces of tonmtonm than I can.
I sleep in a bed with Joanne and Guylène, and sometimes Béa gets in, too. The bed is made of slats of wood covered with lumpy old clothes and rags with a sheet over them. The slats of wood are balanced on old empty USAID vegetable-oil cans, and sometimes in the middle of the night they slide off, and the whole bed collapses on one side. But I can’t complain, even if my back aches, even if we keep falling down, because everyone else in the family is sleeping on the floor on sisal mats. Everybody is so kind to me, but I wish they would stop treating me like a guest.
“I’m going to get water,” announces Joanne one afternoon.
“Let me go with you,” I implore as she starts off barefoot toward the river with two five-gallon empty buckets.
She looks doubtful. “I don’t know, Magda . . . Do you think you can do it?”
“It’s not that far! And I carry water all the time in Port-au-Prince.”
“But you know there are mountains here . . .”
“Stop treating me like a child!” But that’s ridiculous— children carry water here all the time. “Stop treating me like I’m not family!”
Joanne relents, handing me one of the buckets. As we walk to the river, the sticky mud clings to the soles of my flip-flops. Joanne picks a mango off a tree and starts to peel it with her teeth as she walks.
“Do you have a boyfriend in Port-au-Prince?” she asks.
“No . . . not yet.”
“There’s no one you like?”
“No. I’m not interested in that.”
“Oh! Magda . . . Everyone is interested in that!”
“They’re all the same. They’ll tell you nice things, they’ll call you ti chouchou, they’ll say, Je t’aime, but none of it’s true. They’re all only after one thing.”
“And what’s that?” asks Joanne, teasing.
“Pussy.”
She pauses for a moment. “Well, they do like that,” she says. “But there are good guys and bad guys. Maybe you’ll find a little boyfriend out here!” She giggles, sucking the fibrous mango pit and casting it into the trees.
When at last we climb the hill down to the river, we go to a spring hollowed into the rocks, where Joanne uses her bucket to take out all the old water filled with silt and leaves. The water slowly fills up again, while a rock-colored crab scurries from crevice to crevice.
“There used to be a water pump up the mountain,” Joanne explains. “But it stopped working years ago, and no one ever fixed it. The organizations don’t know about it. The state doesn’t do anything.” She shrugs. “So we keep going up and down the mountain every day.”
“You don’t get tired?”
“I’m used to it.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I had one. He went to Port-au-Prince. Looking for a better life.”
Joanne fills our buckets, and we start up the mountain. It’s too steep to balance the water on our heads, but Joanne nimbly ascends, the muscles straining in her slim arms and legs. I am not so nimble. The path is slippery with mud, and I start sliding backward. “I don’t think I can do this!”
“Take off your sandals! Go barefoot!” Joanne shouts. “If you try to go up in your sandals, you’ll fall.”
I put down the bucket, trying not to slosh it all over, and slip off my sandals.
“But make sure you don’t get stuck with a thorn,” Joanne adds, considering. “They’re hidden in the mud sometimes.”
I try again, curling my toes into the mud, trying to grip, but I keep stumbling, and I’m afraid I’m wasting the water we’ve walked so far for. “I can’t, Jo!” I squeal.
“It’s okay. You’re not used to it,” Joanne replies, giggling as she descends, as graceful as a little bird, and picks up my bucket, too. Once we hike to the top, I’ll take my bucket back and carry it on my head the rest of the way home, but I cannot do what Joanne does as she goes up the mountain, her back straight, a heavy bucket in each hand, and doesn’t spill a drop. She has been doing this her whole life, walking miles and miles barefoot. This is a beautiful little world, but it is very, very hard.
ST. JUSTE IS SPREAD OUT, DEYÈ MÒN GEN mòn—beyond the mountains there are more mountains, and more mountains beyond those, with more people living on them, just out of sight.
I halt in my tracks on the narrow path between Tonton Seneren’s house and Matant Jezila’s lakou. There are two obstacles before me: a hulking, tawny bull with a slobbering mouth and, leading a goat on a rope, the tall, smiling boy Mackenson who helped carry my bag up the mountain. The air is warm and filled with the sweet perfume of the guava trees.
“Good afternoon, Magdalie.”
“Hi, Mackenson.”
He picks a small handful of ripe yellow guavas from the tree and takes a bite. The guava flesh is soft and pink, and Mackenson’s mouth has an interesting shape, and his teeth are very white.
He offers me a guava. I don’t move.
“Don’t you want it?”
“I . . . I can’t . . .”
“You can’t have guavas?”
“No—I’m afraid . . .”
I must look ridiculous to him: a city girl in jeans and a rhinestone-studded tank top, standing paralyzed, her eyes wide.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, tying his goat to a branch.
I nod in the direction of the bull grazing nearby. It flicks away flies with its tail. It looks drowsy, bu
t you never know. “Bèf la,” I whisper, afraid that the animal might turn and come if it hears its name.
Mackenson bursts out laughing. “You can’t be serious.”
“Bulls can kill people!”
“That old cow isn’t going to do anything to you. Come on.”
He reaches for my hand, still laughing. He has a high, boyish laugh, a little goofy and much higher than his speaking voice. I pause for a moment before taking his hand. His palm is rough and callused; mine is soft and pink except for the spot worn hard from washing clothes. He guides me down the path as I try to stay as far away as possible from the bored or scary cow, my eyes trained on it in case of any sudden moves.
“How old are you?” asks Mackenson.
“Seventeen,” I reply. “Quel âge as-tu?” I don’t know why I switch from Creole to French. Maybe I’m a little embarrassed and want to show Mackenson that I’m better than him in some way, even if I am afraid of cows. And snakes. And biting ants. And shimmery blue mabouya lizards that can jump on you.
“Same as you.” Mackenson has two uneven dimples and big laughing eyes. He stands barefoot on the path. “Do you know how to eat kenèp?” he asks.
“Of course! Do you think we don’t have kenèp in Port-au-Prince?”
“I was just making sure. In any case, you’ve never had kenèp as juicy and sweet as the ones we’ve got in St. Juste.”
“Mmm,” I reply.
“Just be careful they don’t stain your clothes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I could take you to the best kenèp tree right now, if you want.”
“I can’t—my matant sent me to Matant Jezila’s to get a remedy for my sezisman.”
I watch Mackenson’s teasing expression soften, his eyebrows draw together. Matant Jezila is my great-aunt, a tiny old woman who knows all the leaves and herbs to boil to make remedies. I suddenly regret saying anything about shock, reminding Mackenson why I’ve come to the provinces at all. I see it in his face—all he can think of now is the earthquake and Manman’s death, and now he’s imagining what I’ve seen and felt and endured. I feel ridiculous, as though I’m asking for pity.
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