Hold Tight, Don't Let Go

by Laura Rose Wagner

  “Did you know we have a swimming pool here in Saint Juste? Have your cousins told you about that already?” One corner of Mackenson’s mouth turns up in a half smile.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true!”

  “You’re such a comedian.”

  “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “And you all go to the river and carry buckets of water to fill it? How can you have a swimming pool, but you have no running water and no electricity . . . ?”

  “And no school and no clinic and no money!” He laughs his boyish laugh. “We have a swimming pool made out of rocks, where the sea washes in.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “That sounds nice.”

  “More than nice, Magdalie. It’s paradise.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’ll take you there if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you should go now. Madanm Jezila is waiting for you. Demen, si dye vle, Magdalie. Tomorrow, God willing.” Mackenson stoops to untie his goat and continues up the path. His footsteps stop briefly; he has turned around to watch me pick my way carefully down the unfamiliar rocky path. I pause to place each of my sandaled feet gingerly, trying not to slip. I can feel his eyes upon me, and I pray to myself, Dear Lord, don’t let me slip and fall now, or this boy is going to laugh at me forever.

  THE CEREMONIES FOR MANMAN CAN’T BE done the way we do them for people who die in ordinary ways. The rituals aren’t made for people who die the same day as hundreds of thousands of other people and are tossed into unmarked, strange earth. Reburying Manman more than a year after she died is like holding a funeral, a wake, and final prayers all at once.

  When people die, their souls go anba dlo, under the water, where they remain for a year and a day or longer. The dead don’t like to be underwater, where it’s cold and wet. The souls of the dead stay underwater until their loved ones set them free. The denyè priyè lasts for nine days, and at the end of that, we will retrieve Manman’s soul from underwater; we will set Manman’s spirit free.

  The first day the oungan comes to Tonton Benisoit and Matant Marie-Lourdes’s house, and the ceremony begins. Matant Marie-Lourdes has made sweet, dark coffee and hands out chewy diamonds of bread. Her hair is tied up in a shiny white kerchief, and she pours a little coffee out onto the earth in front of the house for the ones we cannot see: the departed, our ancestors, and our spirits and ghosts. For a while, everyone chats, dunking their bread in their coffee and asking, “How are your children?” “How is so-and-so? I heard he had cholera. He’s better now?” “Did you hear that Madame so-and-so had twins?”

  I’m cradling little Yolène. A rivulet of milk-laced drool flows out the corner of her mouth. Her toenails are tiny and pink; so tiny, I can hardly believe they’re real.

  “Are you going to steal that baby?” asks Michlove, Tonton Élie’s girlfriend and Yolène’s manman.

  “I’m not ready to have a baby,” I reply. Of course, neither is Michlove. She looks older than she is, but she has no maturity.

  The oungan, who is young and handsome, draws on the ground in white chalk the shape of a crossroads. It is Legba’s vèvè—the symbol for the spirit Papa Legba, who will allow us to communicate with the spirits and the ancestors. The drumming begins, the drummer’s callused hands sure and strong.

  Papa Legba, ouvri baryè a pou lwa yo!

  Papa Legba, open the gates for the spirits!

  The drumbeat resonates deep within me; my veins and tendons vibrate like guitar strings being plucked. As mourners enter the house, it grows hot and crowded. There are not enough chairs for everyone, so people stand and spill back into the lakou. They mostly all wear white or black.

  The oungan traces Ezili Dantò’s vèvè on the ground in white powder—a curlicued heart, pierced with a knife. He chants, his voice firm yet plaintive, and people join in. We dance, the women lifting their long skirts, sashaying in time with the drumbeat. I am warm, at once light-headed and grounded. My skin feels electric. The dancing lasts all morning. The drummers beat the goatskin drums until their palms are red and stinging with heat. In the afternoon, the men smack down dominoes and play Casino on old card tables. We sip kleren (sprinkling a little on the floor for the spirits) and sweet Couronne soda. After the sun sets, everyone tells stories and jokes. Manman would have liked to be here—she would have liked to sit with the people she grew up with, telling dirty jokes about the president and a donkey. I pour some of my soda onto the ground, and I stare at the dark spot in the dirt, and I remember how much Manman loved sweet things.

  IN BETWEEN THE CEREMONIES AND THE obligations, we have lots of time to do ordinary things, too. Today I head down the ridge with my cousin Joanne to bathe in the river. Mackenson must have seen me in the distance, because he’s already perched in a mango tree by the time we are about to pass his house.

  “Magda-lie!” he calls as we walk by. His bare toes grip the sticky trunk securely, and he beams down at us from among the broad green leaves.

  “Hey, Mackenson.”

  “Do you like mangoes?”

  We enter the lakou, calling bonswa to Mackenson’s grandma, who is peeling lam veritab with her grandson on her hip. “Bonswa, doudou!” she calls back as she tosses another wedge of peeled breadfruit into the pot.

  “Here you go,” says Mackenson, tossing several mangoes down to us and speaking in a gallant voice. “You will see they are very sweet.”

  Joanne and I squeeze the mangoes to soften them and release the juice, then bite them and suck, the sweet golden juice dripping down our chins. Mackenson looks pleased and proud, peering down at us from his perch, swinging his legs, but he does not descend.

  “Why don’t you come down and talk with us?” asks Joanne.

  “Just a second,” replies Mackenson, glancing around.

  A wicked glimmer of realization crosses Joanne’s face. “Are you stuck?” She elbows me. “He’s stuck up there!”

  “I am not! I’ve been climbing these trees my whole life.” His feet dangle from the branch. “I’m just watching. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not very high up,” Joanne observes. “Just jump!”

  Mackenson peers down cautiously, then quickly covers his hesitation with a smirk of manly confidence. “I’ll jump down when I feel like it.”

  Joanne starts to giggle, and then I do, too. “Manmi, come help your grandson out of the tree,” my cousin calls out.

  Mackenson’s grandmother looks up from her breadfruit and sighs, puts down the baby, then rises, briskly wipes her hands on her skirt, and goes to get the gòl they use to knock fruit out of the trees.

  “Gran! What are you doing?” Mackenson yelps.

  She starts poking him with the gòl as though he were a stubborn mango. Now Joanne and I laugh full on, even though I feel a little bad for Mackenson, too. He looks mortified, as though he’s worrying that people can hear us laughing the next mountain over.

  When the gòl doesn’t work, Mackenson’s grandmother rises up on tiptoe to reach him. She seizes his bottom and pushes. “Let go, Mackenson! Lage kò w!”

  He grips a mango branch in panic. “Woy!” he yells as he slides off the branch, still hanging on to the tree with his arms. His grandmother grabs him around his waist and pulls. “Let go!”

  I laugh so much that tears run down my face, and I gasp for breath.

  Mackenson lets go and topples out of the tree and almost onto his grandmother.

  “Moron,” she mutters as she whacks his butt lightly.

  Joanne, clasping her mango, juice growing sticky on her chin, says, “Woouch! Oh, thank you for that, Macken. Thank you for that. Oh, my stomach hurts from laughing.”

  “It looked higher from up there,” Mackenson says defiantly.

  I’m laughing so hard, I still can’t speak. Mackenson looks as though he wishes he could disappear.

  GROWING UP IN PORT-AU-PRINCE, YOU hear two things that don’t make a lot of sense when you put them together.
The first thing you always hear is that life is so much better in the countryside: you eat better, you feel better, you breathe better, you don’t have to worry about thieves or political insecurity, you don’t even need money because the food grows on trees. The second thing you always hear is that if you want a better life, you have to be in Port-au-Prince: if you want to be a success, if you want to provide for yourself and your family, if you want to be a modern person with education and dignity, you have to go to the capital.

  Tonton Élie is peering into a piece of mirror leaning at an angle against the whitewashed wall, carefully shaving his face with a sharpened razor. Michlove went to Abricots this morning to sell molasses at the market, carrying an umbrella to shield baby Yolène from the sun. I figure this is a good time to talk, since he’s alone for once.

  “Tonton, I was thinking . . .” I’m trying to keep my tone as light as possible. “Maybe I could stay here in Saint Juste longer.”

  The razor scratches against his face. He doesn’t look at me. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m responsible for you now, and I say no.”

  “Stop talking to me like I’m a child!”

  Tonton Élie puts down his razor and turns around. “Then stop sounding like a child. You come here, you spend a few days here, and you only see the good things. You think you’re in paradise, don’t you?”

  I don’t say anything to that.

  “But it’s because you don’t know any better,” he continues. “You don’t see how hard life can be here, the day the crops fail, the day someone gets sick.”

  “Life is hard in Port-au-Prince,” I counter. “You’re always saying it yourself, how much you miss Jérémie and how much better life is here. How dirty Port-au-Prince is. You’re a hypocrite! You always say those things.”

  Tonton Élie slaps his hands together, back-to-palm, in exasperation. “Of course I say those things, Magdalie. This is my home. Shouldn’t I be nostalgic for it?”

  “If this is our home, then why can’t we stay here?”

  “Do you want to walk three hours up and down these mountains in the sun just to go to and from school every day?”

  “In Port-au-Prince, I don’t go to school at all.”

  “Damn it, Magdalie! Why does every conversation with you turn into an argument? You used to say you wanted to do something with your life, to be a great doctor or a great writer. You have to be in Port-au-Prince if you want to have dreams like that.”

  I feel as though I am about to cry and I don’t want to cry. “You keep saying that. Everybody keeps saying that, but look at what Port-au-Prince has done to us.”

  Tonton Élie leans back against the wall and puts the tips of his fingers together like a professor. “Think of it this way, Magdalie. How do we eat in Port-au-Prince? I make a little money, doing this-and-that, and with the money, we buy a little food. Sometimes we get meat and sometimes we have to boil white flour into porridge, but we eat something, most days.”

  “Most days,” I mutter.

  “And if we really have nothing, I can go downtown and try to sell a radio. Or I can borrow money from somebody. Or I can try to get a little food on credit. You see? There’s always a way to get by in Port-au-Prince. Because there’s money there, even if we can’t see it.”

  “But here you don’t need money at all!” I exclaim. “And everybody eats. You go into anybody’s lakou and they say, ‘Oh, Magda, stay and eat a little tonmtonm. Here, have some fish!’ You can walk around all day eating mangoes and guavas for free!”

  “Everybody here eats this week, Magdalie. But what happens when a hurricane comes through and knocks all the breadfruit out of the tree before they’re ripe? Then everybody starves, because there’s nothing to fall back on. There’s no big boss you can borrow from. There’s nothing to sell because no one has money. There’s nothing to buy on credit because no one has anything to sell.

  “It’s a different misery, Magda. Port-au-Prince misery and Saint Juste misery, they’re different miseries. But no misery is sweet, my dear. No misery is sweet.”

  Every night of a funeral period is a party. You aren’t supposed to come to a wake and leave hungry—or sober. And you don’t need a lot of money because everyone contributes something, even if they don’t have a coin to their names. Tonight Tonton Benisoit kills a goat. Matant Marie-Lourdes cooks up the blood with oil, green onion, and hot pepper and then fries the meat, makes a sauce of the tripe and chewy stomach and skin, and makes a soup from the head. Other people bring yams to boil, plantains to fry, and breadfruit for tonmtonm. The fishermen contribute some of their catch, so we have fresh and salted fish and sweet conch. Mme Ernst brings kremas, which is so sweet and creamy with condensed milk and coconut you don’t realize you’re getting drunk, and several old men bring plastic gallons of homemade kleren. It’s enough to eat all week.

  Burials are for weeping, but wakes are for laughing. The same old men tell folktales, riddles, and jokes late into the night, taking swigs of strong kleren.

  Sometimes we can barely hear the stories because there is so much noise from the people playing dominoes, slapping them down, mixing them around on the rough wooden table, yelling and laughing. Mackenson is there. He is losing so badly that he’s got clothespins all the way up his forearm, as punishment for his lack of skill. It looks painful. I walk over to him.

  “You’re pretty good at this, huh, Macken?” I tease.

  The other players snort and laugh. “Macken’s on another planet tonight.”

  He scowls. “Not true.”

  His older brother, Lixson, grins. “What’s got you so distracted, little brother of mine?”

  “I’m not distracted!”

  Mackenson is so irritable that I wonder if he’s still angry about the mango tree. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why are you in a bad mood?”

  He jumps a little when I speak. “No, no,” he says. “Don’t say that. I’m not in a bad mood, Magdalie.”

  Lixson takes a sip of kleren and hands me the bottle. It burns in a nice way as it hits my lips, flows down my throat, and settles like a low, warm fire in my stomach. “Don’t pay any attention to him, Magdalie.” Lixson punches Mackenson playfully on the shoulder, but Mackenson doesn’t smile.

  I walk over to Joanne.

  “Why are you blushing?” she demands. “Your face is all purple and glowing.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Go look at yourself in the mirror in the house.”

  “Well, you’re embarrassing me!”

  Joanne gazes at me appraisingly. “Do you like Mackenson?”

  “Ha! What? Of course not!” I laugh too loudly, which makes everything a thousand times worse.

  “Ohhhh, Magdalie likes Mackenson!” Joanne says loudly and claps her hands in excitement.

  “It’s not true!”

  “Why are you so embarrassed? It’s normal. It’s natural. What, are you an Adventist or something?”

  “No, it’s just . . .” And I don’t know how to answer. The truth is that I’ve been living quietly in my own head for so long now that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to care that somebody is paying attention.

  “He’s a good kid,” says Joanne. “He won’t do anything to you.”

  “It’s not that. That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “You think too much, Magdalie. You care about him, that’s all!”

  But that’s it; that’s just what frightens me. Once you start caring about people, it matters if they disappear and don’t come back.

  And when Mackenson appears in our lakou the next day with four speckled eggs from his papa’s chickens and says simply, without any teasing, “I brought these for you, Magdalie,” there’s even more to fear, because I know, for sure, that he cares about me, too.

  I HARDLY BOTHER TO CARRY MY CELL PHONE here. Most of St. Juste doesn’t have reception, and there’s almost nowhere to charge a phone unless you walk an hour to Abricots. But today I’v
e got my phone in my pocket, and I’ve got a bar of battery life left. When it vibrates against my hip, I’m momentarily confused, then pick it up, thinking it might be Safira calling.

  “Alo!”

  Static crackles over the line. At last I make out a voice. “Magda? Magdalie?”

  “Nadou!”

  “How are you, ti kokòt?”

  “Mwen la, mwen la . . . Hanging in there.” How can our conversation be so casual?

  “You know what happened to me yesterday? I was at the grocery store when I felt the earth shaking. You know how it is? And I dropped what I was holding and I just ran out the door into the street. I don’t even remember running—next thing I knew I was out in the parking lot, and I was shaking and I looked like a crazy person. And this guy from the store came out and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You just broke a dozen eggs all over the floor!’ and I said, ‘Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you feel it, mister?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘The earthquake? Didn’t you feel the earthquake!’ And he said there wasn’t anything, and he made me pay for the eggs.”

  “Oh. . . And it really wasn’t anything?”

  “No, Magda . . . They don’t even have fault lines in Miami. I was embarrassed. And it made me think of you. It made me miss you, because if you run like that in Haiti, everybody understands. But if you run like that in Miami, everyone says you’re crazy.” Nadine laughs. “Where are you, boubou?” Nadine asks. In the background, I hear noise like a television set.

  “I’m just on my way to see Madanm Yves’s second son. He has malaria, and Matant Marie-Lourdes is sending a remèd for him,” I reply before I realize Nadine has no idea who Mme Yves is. “I’m in the provinces, ti cheri. Everybody asks about you.”