Hold Tight, Don't Let Go

by Laura Rose Wagner

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he says. “Where were you, Magda? Where were you?”

  “I’m swimming to escape, brother, I’m swimming to escape.” I laugh and laugh. Our presidents have been telling us this for years: naje pou sòti! They’ve been telling Haitian people to just keep trying, keep struggling, and someday we’ll be free. “If I just swim hard enough, I can get anywhere, monchè!”

  Mackenson doesn’t laugh. He stares at me, his eyes wide and filled with wonder, and looks a little scared.

  THERE ARE NO CEMETERIES HERE. INSTEAD, the dead remain among us. Many houses have tombs in the lakou, amid the banana stalks, the thorns, the guava trees. The tombs are small, for perhaps four people, and made of mud, brightly painted in shades of white, sea-green, bright blue, and pink, all covered in thatched canopies to keep the worst of the rain away. When you walk from Tonton Benisoit’s house to Mme Frantz’s lakou, you pass right by a pink tomb nestled in the trees, not far from where the boys play soccer barefoot in the scrubby grass, where the palm fronds trace shadows on the red earth.

  Manman was buried in the empty space in the tomb beside Matant Jezila’s house, down by the sea. You can hear the waves from there. It is a pretty blue-and-white tomb, clean, with a chunky white cross on top of it. There is only peace here. So far from Port-au-Prince, from the crush and the noise, the filth and the dust. This is a place where grief blows lightly.

  “Who else is buried there?” I ask Matant Marie-Lourdes.

  “Madanm Sento is there,” she replies. “They say she was a hundred and twenty when she died.” She begins to laugh. “She was the strictest, meanest old lady in all of Saint Juste, with long, long white hair. She was bent over like an old wire hanger, and she used to curse at all the kids who’d come knocking mangoes out of her tree.”

  “And who else?”

  “Benita’s nephew Wilmer. He was only three years old. He got malaria in his brain and he died before they could get him down the mountain to the clinic.”

  “Oh! Poor little boy.”

  “You see, Magdalie, life isn’t sweet here,” says Matant Marie-Lourdes quietly. “We are healthy only until we get sick, and when we get sick, there is nowhere to go. We don’t need money to live, until we need money not to die.” There’s no anger in her voice as she says this. These are simple facts, clear as the sky above.

  The last day of the denyè priyè is a party. It’s a good-bye party for Tonton Élie, Michlove, and me, too, because we have to go back to Port-au-Prince soon. “We did what we came to do.” Tonton Élie nods. “There’s nothing left for us here.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I think: Nothing doesn’t mean no one.

  “I know things haven’t been easy for you, Magdalie,” Tonton Élie adds haltingly. He can’t look me in the eye. It’s funny and awkward to watch him try to be nice, because his kindness is usually guarded in thorns.

  “It’s okay, Uncle,” I interrupt. “You don’t have to say it.”

  “I’m just saying—let’s try to make things different. I’ll try to make things different.”

  To prepare for the party, all the women of St. Juste came to Matant Marie-Lourdes’s kitchen this morning, where they sit on their heels or on low straw chairs, peeling, chopping, pounding, and chatting all day. Billows of delicious-smelling smoke emanate from the open walls of the kitchen, stretching high into the clear blue sky.

  Joanne and I spend the afternoon doing each other’s hair and makeup. I brought lip gloss and sparkly black eyeliner from Port-au-Prince, and she’s got a compact with a rainbow of eye shadow. “I want every color!” she declares.

  “You’ll look like a prostitute,” mutters Matant Marie-Lourdes.

  I straighten Joanne’s hair with a curling iron, heated up in the charcoal. She fusses and teases little Béa for the coarseness of her hair. “Look at this tèt grenn,” she mutters. “What can I do with this?”

  “You’re as much of a tèt grenn as she is,” I remind her.

  I braid Joanne’s hair into ti kouri—some start at the nape of her neck and go up, and others start at her forehead and go back, and they gather together into a ponytail on top. She looks like Rihanna. I’ve got a bounda poul bun, high on my head—with a piece of a kerchief stuffed inside the hair, so it’s flat and round like a chicken butt—with a green ribbon tied around it.

  “You look like a princess.” Joanne giggles. “Let’s see what your boyfriend says. He’s going to say, ‘Oh, how pretty, my cheri!’”

  My heart jumps. “What boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend!”

  “Oh! You know.”

  I feel myself blushing, because I know they are right: I’ve been dressing up all day for Mackenson.

  Tonton Élie has set up huge speakers in front of the house, running off an old Delco, blaring konpa that people can hear all the way up and down the mountain. While it is still light out, little children begin to dance, imitating grown-ups, moving their hips and kicking out their feet.

  This is the last day we are allowed to cry for Manman. This is the end of mourning, and it marks the moment when we are supposed to move on. We have liberated her spirit from where it dwelled in the cold underwater. We have released her from this mortal life. After this, if I want to cry, I will do it secretly, so that people will not get angry with me. I feel sad, thinking of this. Not because Manman is gone—that’s a different sadness. Now I am sad because her death isn’t new anymore, and because the world and my life have continued to turn without her. There was a comfort when the wound was fresh, because it meant that Manman was here—that she existed, that she was important, that she was part of our everyday life. Now we have not only buried her, but we’ve buried the loss itself.

  A huge round moon has risen, butter-yellow and glowing. I’m standing on the porch, leaning against a corner of the house and staring up at heaven, when Mackenson comes up to me, takes my hand, and asks me to dance. The song is “Pa leve men’w sou li,” which I used to hear all the time in Port-au-Prince, in taptaps. It’s a catchy, swirling melody, cheerful and bittersweet at once.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He’s a good dancer. He holds me tightly against him, as people do dancing konpa, and we move in unison. I feel warm and sweet. He brushes a lock of hair from my face.

  I feel happy, light, and relaxed from the kleren; my lips tingle. The world seems strange and new tonight. Everything feels possible and okay. Everything is okay, for this moment. The black, starry sky is shallow, as though the air around me were no deeper than the depth of a needle held in my outstretched hand, as though I could reach out and graze that yellow moon with my fingertips. Everything is peace, and there is no world beyond this corner of a mountain, beyond this swirling sweet konpa, beyond the soft weight of Mackenson pressed against me, his hand on my back, guiding me. The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

  “Je t’aime, I love you,” whispers Mackenson, so softly that I almost think I’ve imagined it.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t want to hurt him, but I also cannot lie. I just squeeze his hand. Maybe, someday, I might be able to love him back. But right now, I can’t see him the same way he sees me, and I look into his kind and trusting face, and I wish I could accept simple love. But I don’t have space for simple love in my heart or my head, at least not yet. It would have to fight with anger and fear and sadness, and, some days, anger, fear, and sadness are still winning.

  “I know,” I murmur. “I know.”

  “WOULD YOU STAY IF YOU COULD?” ASKS Mackenson. We are sitting side by side on the huge exposed roots of Tonton Seneren’s mango tree, which are almost as high and wide as church pews. It is my last afternoon here. I hate good-byes. Since Nadou left, every good-bye feels like forever.

  I know Mackenson is really asking, “Would you stay here with me if you could, if I asked you to?” But I cann
ot go down that path, and I cannot allow him to go down it, either. So I laugh and say as lightly as I can, “I’ll miss not having an avocado tree right in front of my house in Port-au-Prince. That’s the best thing here!”

  His voice is quiet. “Oh! You’re clever . . .” He knows how to hear what I am not brave enough to say.

  The earth is for cultivating and for burying. I hadn’t liked to think of Manman lying in the dust of Port-au-Prince, amid the rubble and the garbage, in the ground and the city that had killed her. I feel a little more peaceful now, knowing that her bones are here, in the tomb with her ancestors, in the soil her family had cultivated, that had nourished her during her childhood, in the ground she had once perhaps played hopscotch or oslè upon, years ago, as a little girl.

  I imagine all of us, everyone who loved Manman. Me and Nadine. Tonton Élie. Tonton Benisoit and Matant Marie-Lourdes. All her brothers and sisters who are still alive, and their children, my cousins. The machann she used to buy vegetables from every day, who would sometimes give her a hot cup of sweet coffee and invite her to sit and rest. The old man selling bread who always gave her an extra piece. We link hands and form a huge net, and we carry her—we carry Manman, her bones and her dreams, back to her home. And then, at last, we give her up to the ones we cannot see. We give her to the ancestors, to her own manman and papa, to her dead brothers, to the spirits. Welcome, they say, and they embrace her, and she goes to join them.

  “I’m scared,” I tell Mackenson, looking out, one last time, over the sea. “I don’t know if I belong in Port-au-Prince anymore. I don’t want to think about the earthquake anymore.”

  Mackenson doesn’t tell me not to be scared. He just says, “We’ll always wait for you here.” And then he asks, “What will you do there?”

  “I’ll go to school,” I say. “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I will.”

  I am filled with hope and fear, because I want so much for my future, and I don’t know how I will do it, but I know I must do it.

  When at last it is time to go, a parade of people walk us to Abricots, single file in the early summer sun, down the red path filled with roots and thorned bushes, snaking down the mountain. Tonton Élie carries a sack of breadfruit. Michlove carries baby Yolène. Mackenson carries my suitcase. Matant Marie-Lourdes carries a plastic bowl of boiled yams and sauce, tied up in a black plastic bag, for me to eat on the long trip. Joanne carries a basketful of sweet kenèp. Tonton Benisoit carries a heavy sack on his back, an old Tchako rice bag filled with coconuts, plantains, yams, pineapples, and avocados from his garden.

  When we finally get to Abricots, we refresh ourselves in the cool, sweet water of the lagoon, where all around us women scrub laundry and children splash, playing and bathing. Life marches on, no matter who is a part of it and who has left it. And now it is time to get on the motorcycle taxi to Jérémie.

  Tonton Élie settles Michlove and the baby in the center of the moto, then gets on the back, balancing a suitcase on his head with one hand. As my waiting moto driver ties the sack of breadfruit to the back and wipes the dust off his machine, I hug and kiss everyone good-bye.

  “When will you come back?” asks Joanne.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you forget us?” asks Joanne. “Will you let us go?”

  “No,” I reply. “No, no.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she says, and she shrugs.

  Tonton Benisoit sets down his sack. “Take care of yourself, pitit mwen. Pòte w byen.”

  Something in his words makes my eyes prickle. I am in perpetual motion. Another departure, another ending, another good-bye. Good-bye. I wish I could stay, but the place that I dread is also the only place of promise.

  When Mackenson and I embrace, no longer and no shorter than I’ve hugged anyone else, I slip a folded-up piece of paper into his hand.

  Mackenson asks, “When will I see you again, Magdalie?”

  My smile feels sad. It’s a different smile from the one I used to have, as if it’s an older person’s smile, worn and heavy with experience and containing the distance of the world.

  Down the cracked red-earth footpaths through banana leaves and thorns, down to the place where the sea waves meet sweet, fresh water, where children splash and fishermen in wide straw hats take to the sea in handmade sailboats and haul in their catch—that is where I have traveled. And over the sea and past the horizon, onto the capital, and to that other world—that is where I am returning. Later, Mackenson will open the page I’ve left in his hand, after I have already grown smaller and smaller, riding the back of the moto-taxi down Abricots’s paved streets, disappearing up and over the dusty mountain to Jérémie, and onto the boat that will carry me out of his life, for now, at least, to Port-au-Prince through the night.

  Home is etched into my memory and my bones.

  Home is

  Port-au-Prince

  city of haze, city of my youth,

  city of crumbled gray concrete, city of rebar,

  city of noise,

  city of konpa, bachata, and rap blasting from storefronts,

  city of merchants, city of tarps

  city of camps, city of victims

  city of corpses

  city-turned-graveyard

  city of survivors

  city of sewage, city of thieves,

  city of garbage, city of churches, city of schools

  city of children

  city of taptaps painted with soccer stars and Bible verses;

  city of promise, city of loss,

  city of lost hope.

  Home is

  Jérémie

  land of my mother

  land where my ancestors are buried

  land of the mountain, land of the sea,

  land of avocados as large as my head

  land of coral-rock, land of long-beaked birds

  land of no-more-possibility

  land without high school, land without hospital

  land without a future,

  land of my escape, land of my recovery,

  land of my first love.

  Home is

  the ocean wide and deep

  sea of spirits, passage of ancestors,

  sea of imagination, passage of myth,

  sea of blackness, passage of our theft,

  sea of rape, passage of humiliation,

  sea of transformation

  where we became slaves

  sea of what was lost

  and what remains.

  Home is

  in me

  Home is

  always with me

  Home is

  inscribed in my heart, my mind

  my flesh, my bones,

  Like the cement dust that blows out over the bay

  And sinks, and settles, and sediments at the bottom of the sea.

  OCTOBER 2011

  SOMETIMES THINGS FEEL OKAY NOW.

  Michlove and baby Yolène moved to the capital with us, finally. Tonton Élie is sending Michlove to a free program at a Protestant church, where she is learning to read and write. I do love Yolène, who has four teeth, and who is so smart that she has learned to grin and announce “Pipi! Pipi!” whenever she wets herself. Élie picks up free condoms sometimes and blows them up like balloons for Yolène. Michlove still isn’t very interesting, but sometimes it’s nice to have other people around.

  Last week I went to see Safira and her little boy. I didn’t tell Tonton Élie I was going into the middle of Cité Soleil, because he always talks bad about “those people” and how they’re criminals. I guess no matter how poor you are, you always need to feel better than somebody.

  “Chouchouuuuuu!” Safira shouted when she saw me, and she hugged me so tightly that she almost knocked me over. “Magdalie! Child! How are you? I’m so glad to see you! Come in and meet my manman!”

  Theirs is a neat little concrete house surrounded by rubble. “It’s not from the earthquake,” Safira told me matter-of-factly when she s
aw me looking. “It’s from the years of war, when MINUSTAH soldiers were looking for the bandi, and there was shooting all the time.” The broken lots are filled with rainwater and blackish mud, where garbage and clumps of feathery green algae have collected, and mosquitoes breed along the top. Ducks wade in and nibble at things. We had to play hopscotch to get to the front door.

  “You are Magdalie!” exclaimed Safira’s mother, embracing me. “Cheri, I have heard so much about you! I’m sorry about our little house. You see we have the sea right outside.” She laughed and gestured to the flat expanses of trash-filled rainwater beyond their front door.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to be ashamed of anything.” The house smelled like bleach and sheets dried in the sun. Safira’s manman looked so much like Safira. She was thin, but she didn’t look dried-out and old like someone with TB.

  “Are you well now?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she said. “Those medications weren’t easy, no! But I’m not coughing anymore. They wouldn’t let me have the baby here if I was coughing. Will you drink some coffee? We don’t have any food right now, just coffee and bread. Will you have coffee, pitit?”

  “Manman!” exclaimed Safira, embarrassed and pleased at the same time. “Come see Edensky, Magda,” she murmured excitedly. “He’s sleeping.”

  She took my hand and pulled me into the other room, where the baby was sleeping on his back in the middle of the bed. He made soft sounds. His hair was black and silky. Safira gently got onto the bed and curled her body around him and began fanning her hand back and forth, keeping the mosquitoes away.

  “He already had malaria once,” she whispered.

  If only the power of her love were enough to ensure his future. What a terrifying love. Safira must know every second contains the possibility of losing her entire world.

  I examined little Edensky’s plump, sleeping face, sticky with sweat, and tried hard to imagine him growing up: in his first school uniform, running through the Cité, chubby knees bobbing up and down.