Babylon Sisters

by Pearl Cleage

  Miriam St. Jacques had been working for Amelia for a couple of months as a general office assistant, and she was looking for a younger sister she had lost track of. That was all I knew, but Amelia supervised a bilingual staff of lawyers who did a lot of work with clients of mine. It was not unusual for them to have interns or part-time employees who needed assistance.

  When I walked in, Amelia was standing in the lobby shaking hands with a distinguished-looking Japanese gentleman who was bowing and smiling happily at whatever deal they had just closed. Amelia was smiling, too. He nodded politely as he passed me on his way out, and Amelia watched him head for his car, which was waiting with his driver at the curb.

  “Good afternoon, Counselor,” I said. “Doing good or doing business?”

  “The idea that those two things are mutually exclusive is such a twentieth-century idea,” she said, grinning. “Mr. Tanaka wants to do business in Atlanta. He needs a translator.”

  “You don’t speak Japanese.”

  “No, but I’m fluent in African-American with a specialty in Atlanta Negro dialects.”

  “You’re crazy.” I laughed, waving at the receptionist and following Amelia to her office. Every cubicle, every desk, was occupied with people who were moving through their tasks efficiently and without visible stress in spite of the obvious need for more space. Amelia was going to need to expand pretty soon or they’d be taking statements on the front porch.

  Sitting at the desk outside of Amelia’s office, frowning intently at a computer screen, was a striking girl who looked about eighteen. Her skin was very dark and so smooth it seemed to have no pores at all. She had huge, dark eyes and a strong nose over a perfectly round, full-lipped mouth. An unexpected dimple in the middle of her chin was a lovely surprise. The only thing that marred her appearance was a painfully cheap wig perched on top of her beautiful head like a hat from hell. The long bangs and feathery layering of the clearly synthetic hair partially obscured her face and made you want to brush it aside so you could admire what God had made in this girl.

  She stood up immediately when she saw us coming her way. She was tall and skinny, with the awkward grace of hopeful young womanhood, and I knew who this was at once.

  “Miriam St. Jacques,” said Amelia, “this is Catherine Sanderson. Catherine, this is Miriam.”

  She smiled shyly from under that godawful wig, and I shook her hand and smiled back. Amelia ushered us into her private office and closed the door.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said as we crowded in and took our seats around a small round conference table. Miriam looked very nervous, but Amelia got right down to business, turning to the girl as if she didn’t even notice the wig hat working its show.

  “I’ve told Catherine a little bit about you and your sister, but why don’t you tell her what’s happened up to this point?”

  That didn’t seem to reassure Miriam.

  “All of it?” she said so softly I could barely hear her. She spoke English with a French accent, but it was easy to understand her.

  Amelia shrugged. “All that you think it’s important for her to know.”

  That was still too open-ended. This girl’s country had been a poor, angry, violent place for most, if not all, of her life. How could she begin to tell me where she’d been and what she’d seen? She looked at me helplessly.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you came to Atlanta?” I said, knowing she was here now on a temporary visa, due in no small part to Amelia’s sponsorship. “Did your sister come with you?”

  She nodded, relieved at a question she could answer directly. “We came together, Etienne and me. From Florida.”

  I smiled, trying to get her to relax. “Etienne is an unusual name for a girl.”

  She smiled a tiny smile back. “My father wanted a son so badly, to be named Etienne, as he had been named for my grandfather. When my sister was born, and Mama said there would be no more children, he insisted on calling her Etienne anyway.”

  “How did you get to Florida?”

  She looked at Amelia, who nodded. “It’s okay. She’s a friend.”

  “My parents paid a man to bring us, my sister and me, on a boat. There were fifteen of us. All women. My sister was fourteen.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back. “She’s fifteen now.

  “Some people met us with a van, two vans, when we landed. It was a beach, but it was very dark and there were no lights or signs, so I don’t know where exactly we were. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, imagining the terror of such a landing. “Did you know the people who met you?”

  She shook her head. “No. They were men, four men. They loaded us in the vans, seven in one, eight in the other. We had to sit on the floor. No seats and no stopping. No food. They gave us water, twice, and told us to be quiet unless we wanted to go to jail or back to our country.”

  She couldn’t even say its name.

  “Some of the girls were crying, but my mother had said these men were going to help us get jobs, so we could become citizens, so I told my sister not to be afraid. I told her everything was all right, but it wasn’t all right.”

  Her eyes filled up again and she shook her head miserably. “When we finally stopped driving, we still didn’t know where we were. Most of us spoke French, maybe a little English, but the men who drove us were speaking Spanish, so it was hard to know what was going on. They put us in a house with so many women, one bathroom, sleeping on the floor.”

  She wrinkled her nose at the memory.

  “They told us that was where we had to live, and that if we came outside, our neighbors would call the police and they would come take us away.”

  What she was describing was not news to me. People who come here illegally are terrified of being discovered and sent home to face whatever made them flee in the first place. Nobody risks life and limb to head out across miles of ocean on a rickety old boat if they’ve got any better options at all. Whatever made Miriam’s mother spirit her away from Haiti into the arms of shadowy strangers must have been every mother’s worst nightmare. Could I have kissed my Phoebe and put her on that boat? I hope I never have to find out.

  “Tell her about the jobs,” Amelia prompted gently.

  “Yes, yes, the jobs. They got us jobs cleaning.”

  “Cleaning what?”

  “Office buildings. The big glass ones. After everyone has gone home for the night. They would pick us up in darkness, drive us there, wait for us to finish, and take us home in darkness.”

  “Did they pay you?”

  “They paid us nothing. Barely enough to feed ourselves. The rest of the money they kept for themselves.”

  Somebody was amassing a sizable fortune trading on frightened people’s misery. Maybe Ezola’s programs were working so well, she was pricing her maids out of the market. These guys could charge less because they didn’t pay anything. It was all profit.

  “I told my sister it was wrong what they were doing and I was going to make them pay us so we could get our own place and live like human beings, but they sent my sister away. I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t.”

  She stopped and took a deep breath, fingering a gold locket around her neck.

  “They told me she ran away, but Etienne would never run away without me. Mama told us to stay together. She didn’t run. They took her.” Her voice cracked a little, and she pursed her lips as if to keep herself from saying any more.

  “Took her where?”

  “They wanted her,” Miriam said softly. “I know they wanted her even though she was a child. They wanted her and I think they took her. If I had stayed there, I think they would have taken me, too. So the next time they dropped us at work, I slipped out through the basement and ran as far as I could away from there until I was in a place with houses and trees. I hid until morning. When it got light outside, I saw a woman, a white woman, but she had a little girl, so I ran up to her and told her some people were after me and they had kidnapped
my sister. She took me to the police.”

  When Phoebe was a kid and we traveled internationally to places where she didn’t know the language, I told her that if she ever got separated from me to find a woman with a child and ask her for help. Miriam’s experience had proven the wisdom of that advice.

  “Did the police help you?”

  “They asked me so many questions,” she said, getting agitated. “How did I come to the United States? Who were the men in the vans? How long had I been in Atlanta? Did my parents have enemies? Where was the house where we were taken? So many questions and I couldn’t answer any of them.”

  Amelia broke in before Miriam got too worked up. “They blindfolded them coming and going to the job site, but we’ve got some clues based on things Miriam remembers that might at least narrow it down to a certain neighborhood.”

  “Good,” I said. “These places move around a lot just to stay one step ahead of the law and anybody else who’s looking for them, but they tend to stick to one general area.”

  These would be places where people were too poor or too high or too scared to care who lived in the house with the boarded-up windows and the two rottweilers chained up in the front yard.

  “The thing is,” Amelia said, “it looks like these guys are using more and more of these women as prostitutes in the same way they use them as janitors. What Miriam is saying bears out what we’ve been hearing.”

  “Do you have any proof?” I’d been hearing the rumors, too.

  Miriam shook her head, the wig trembling slightly. “Just things some of the women said. Two other girls ran away before they took my sister. Both of them were very young, like my sister, and very beautiful.”

  “Show her the picture,” Amelia said.

  Miriam opened the locket she’d been fingering and showed me a small photograph of a smiling young girl, her open face so alive you would swear you could hear her laughter.

  “I have to find her,” she said softly. “Whatever they have done to her, she is still my baby sister and I’m supposed to take care of her.”

  She closed the locket slowly and dropped it back inside her blouse. “I promised my mama.”

  Something about the simplicity of the way she said it really touched me. Like there was no question of whether she would do this, only a question of how.

  “I’ll see if I can find out anything,” I said. “Give me a couple of days to poke around.”

  Gratitude washed over Miriam’s face, and she grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said over and over again. “Oh, thank you.”

  “It may take some time,” I cautioned her. “These guys sound like pros.”

  The smile faded from her face, and I immediately felt bad for robbing her of a moment of optimism in what was a terrible situation.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, to reassure her. “I’m a pro, too.”

  As I walked to my car through the crisp fall day, I thought about how many women were going through what Miriam had just described. I had heard so many stories of sexual abuse, but so far no organized ring had emerged in this area. I hoped this wasn’t the start of something bigger. Forced prostitution was my great fear for these women, and many of the people who work with me share it, but we don’t know what to do to stop it from happening. The sexual marketplace, voluntary and involuntary, is such a brutal, dehumanizing, scary place that nobody on the outside can stand to look at it long enough to clean it up. Probably because at some level, we all know that what the elders say is true: When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks long into you.

  19

  Saturday I spent the morning looking for information on Miriam’s sister, but the trail, if there ever was one, was months old, and nobody had any leads at all. The afternoon was devoted to putting words into Sam Hall’s mouth, figuratively speaking, of course. He needed a speech for a ceremony honoring a group of Mandeville Maids who had earned their GEDs while working full-time. They were the flesh and blood at the heart of Ezola’s promise of a better life, and this ceremony meant something to her, Sam said, even if she wasn’t going to actually attend.

  I had never written a speech for anyone else, but I think I was able to strike what I hoped was the right balance between informative and inspirational. I tried not to be corny. These were not kids finishing high school. These were grown women reaping the rewards of their own discipline and hard work, and they deserved a little rah, rah for hanging in there.

  By the time I wrapped up everything it was sunset, and I hadn’t even been outside to get the mail. That’s the problem with working for yourself: there’s nobody to make you stop and smell the roses—literally. I couldn’t remember the last time I had enjoyed the pleasures of my own front yard. I grabbed the mail and took a deep breath of twilight. The woman across the street was watering her lawn while her husband played a game of catch with their son in the driveway. It looked like a scene out of some mythical small-town America, and that’s exactly what it felt like. I waved at my neighbor and she waved back. I had sent Phoebe away so she could understand the big picture, but something in me hoped she’d always appreciate the beauty of a snapshot as tiny as this one peaceful block.

  Thinking about Phoebe must have conjured her up. An envelope that bore her name was on the top of the stack, and the return address said, Smith College, Office of Admissions, Northampton, Massachusetts. She was waiting for this letter. She had completed all the requirements for early admission, and her interview had been, according to her, a mutual admiration society. They had encouraged her to apply and spoken with her several times during the process to be sure she was still interested. It was her first and only choice. Without thinking, I went back inside and reached for the phone. She would want me to open it and give her the news immediately. She would want to share this moment with me. . . .

  But I couldn’t call her. I didn’t have her number. I couldn’t forward it to her because I didn’t have her address, either. She was out there in the world, and the only way I could reach her was to call Louis. It hurt my feelings and it made me mad, but mostly it wore me out. It wasn’t my choice, but I had to live with it, and today it was just too much. I tossed the letter on the table and gave myself permission to think about it later. Amelia had invited me for a swim and I intended to take her up on it.

  I shifted through the rest of the mail, mostly bills and pleas for money from one desperate group of do-gooders or another, and I say that with love. I’m a do-gooder myself, although I think I’m more pragmatic than most. Telling an employer on-site day care is the right thing to do is usually less effective than showing how much money can be saved with fewer late or absentee mothers.

  There was one envelope that wasn’t a bill and didn’t seem to be a solicitation. The return address was a post office box in San Francisco. A lot of the young people who come through the Red Cross here go on to work on the West Coast, and I was famous for my glowing recommendations when they were job hunting. Probably somebody who needed a reference, I thought, tearing it open to see who needed me to put in a good word. No such luck.

  Dear Ms. Catherine Sanderson,

  I received a letter from someone claiming to be your only daughter. She wants me to take a DNA test to see if I’m her biological father.

  Here we go again. I sat down on the couch and read on.

  She gave me this address as to where I should send a copy of the results, which is why I’m writing to you at my partner’s suggestion.

  His partner?

  I do remember you from choir, but I don’t think we ever had sex. I don’t even remember us being close friends. On the other hand, I was trying so hard to play straight back then, I probably groped more girls than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And with all the cheap wine and bad dope that was floating around, who knows?

  I know, I thought. I know.

  All that’s over now. I’m gay and married.

  You gotta love San Francisco!

  But if you think I might be the daddy and
you want me to take the test, I will. My partner and I have a small design firm, and we’re not rich, but if she’s mine and you need some help, I’ll do the right thing.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jerome L. Pettigrew

  20

  “Of course I know him,” I said after I found Amelia and Louis in her yard and read them the letter aloud. “He was in the choir with me. He could really sing, so he was always trying to hog the solos.”

  “Well, his partner was a lot more understanding than that other guy’s wife,” Amelia said. She had paused in the middle of her daily fifty laps to hear my late-breaking news, and she was treading water effortlessly over the mermaid’s tail. Louis wasn’t swimming. He was watching.

  “I didn’t even know he was gay!”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Louis said. “Back then, he didn’t either.”

  “But everything turned out for the best,” Amelia said, gliding away from us.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “He moved to a gay-friendly part of the country and fell in love. That’s not too shabby,” she said, resuming her laps.

  “So he’s doing fine and I’m trapped in some kind of past-lives limbo,” I said, flopping down on a chair beside Louis and realizing he was dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ black suit, a little formal for an evening by the pool. “Where are you coming from all dressed up?”

  He sighed deeply. “I’ve been meeting with two possible investors.”