“When’s the funeral?” Jean-Claude asked softly.
“In two days. You miss school on Friday and—”
“What about tomorrow?” I interrupted, shocked. I had been looking forward to not seeing Samona tomorrow. “Shouldn’t we stay home and wear black or something?”
“No. School tomorrow like normal. Your manmi’s taking the day off from work.” He stopped at the sound of rising voices from the living room. It sounded like Tant Renee and Monnonk Roddie were about to get into it.
“Jean-Claude, go give your uncle some help. And you two put your shoes on. We’re going out to eat so your manmi can have some rest.”
Chantal and I looked at each other in surprise after Jean-Claude and Papi left the room. We hardly ever get out to eat—not even to McDonald’s. Manmi can’t stand for us to eat junk food. Soon my mind was so full of the thought of french fries and apple pie that it wasn’t until late that night that I realized I still didn’t know what this wake thing was that we were going to.
It was Samona who finally let me in on what a wake was. All the way to school the next day my cousin Enrie and I had been talking about it and getting nowhere. Enrie was a grade lower than me and he knew even less than I did. We were just about to give up on the whole thing when I was nearly blinded for life by the sight of Samona coming into the schoolyard in one of those bright neon green sweat suits with matching socks. Just looking at her gave me a headache.
“Something wrong?” Samona asked, standing about five feet away from us with a funny look on her face. It was probably giving her shocks that I wasn’t running in the other direction. But I decided right then and there that Samona might be the best person to ask about this wake thing. She was always telling me all sorts of strange things that I never even heard of and most of the time didn’t want to hear about. Now maybe I could get some information out of her.
“Come here, Samona.” I put on my friendliest smile and waved her over.
Samona lifted one of her black eyebrows and stood her ground. “What for?”
“I want to ask you a question,” I said.
Samona moved forward slowly. The normal tone of my voice must have put her at ease. Enrie’s eyes widened as he took in the way she was dressed but he didn’t say anything. Sometimes I think Samona scared the wits out of him, with her loud talk and wild manners. As for me, I wanted to ask her if that outfit glowed in the dark but I knew that was no way to get information out of her.
“What’s a wake?” I asked when she finally reached us.
“Whatcha wanta know for?” Samona said, running her words together.
“I just do, okay?”
“Well, what for?”
Enrie interrupted us. “W-We have to go to a wake, Samona.”
Samona put her hands on her hips in concern. “Well, who’s gone to meet the Lord?”
“Matant Margaret,” I answered, squinting so I could make out Samona’s face over the glare of her clothes. I was glad to see her hair was back in cornrows instead of its fried hairdo from yesterday.
Samona’s eyes bugged and her mouth dropped wide open. “And y’all are going to a real, bona fide wake?”
Enrie moved closer to me at Samona’s reaction. “Yeah, is—is it bad?”
Samona nodded gravely. “And you don’t even know what it is?”
“I got an idea,” I mumbled, trying not to show how affected I was by Samona’s tone of voice.
“A wake,” Samona whispered to herself. “A real bona fide wake.”
“What?” Enrie asked in a high-pitched squeal.
“Well …” Samona took a deep breath. “The reason I know what a wake is is on account of my aunt Delia’s wake that Nigel and Anthony got to go to last year.” Nigel and Anthony were Samona’s older brothers.
“Your aunt Delia ain’t dead! She did my mother’s hair at the shop last week,” I said, frowning.
“Course she ain’t, ’cause of the wake. Anthony told me all about it. There’s moaning and screaming and singing and everybody’s wearing black. Anthony said they was all grieving so hard Aunt Delia just woke up and started banging on the coffin and screaming for somebody to let her out. We all got our time to die, and this wasn’t hers. Anthony said it was a real good wake—’cause oftentimes the body just stays dead. That’s why you gotta make arrangements for the funeral, just in case they don’t wake up,” Samona said, sighing and snapping her bubble gum.
Enrie’s mouth dropped open. “Really, Samona?”
I let out a little laugh to show her that I wasn’t scared. “Stop fooling around, Samona.”
But Samona didn’t smile one of her big grins or laugh or anything. She held up two fingers and crossed her heart. “That’s what Anthony told me.”
Then she turned around and skipped out of the schoolyard, her sweat suit getting dimmer and dimmer with each hop, leaving me and Enrie to stare at each other.
Morton’s funeral home in Mattapan Square did not seem one bit like a place where a dead person would be waking up. In fact, it looked like the kind of house I wish we could live in. It was two stories high with big windows. It was painted white with black shutters and it even had a little green lawn with a white picket fence around it. That was on the outside.
Now I don’t believe in superstitions or evil signs and all. Finding out Mrs. Fabiyi was no witch doctor had cured me of believing in anything that I didn’t see with my own eyes. And I sure couldn’t put much faith in anything Samona said. But when puffy clouds the color of wet cement started rolling in just as Papi was driving Jean-Claude and Chantal and me to the funeral home that night, and when lightning all of a sudden lit up the sky like firecrackers, even I had to believe it meant something.
I had been thinking hard about what Samona told me all day. I wanted to believe she was fooling, but Samona would never cross her heart and lie at the same time. And come to think of it, I do remember her aunt Delia being very sick last year. Manmi and Granmè had gone to visit her in the hospital. And all day I was remembering that movie Enrie and me had seen last month about zombies that came alive and voodoo stuff. Manmi was so mad when I told her about it. She sat me down and tried to get me to see that the movie was just twisting stuff around and that the people who made the movie didn’t know nothing about it in the first place. She said all that movie was about was distorting reality.
But this was for real. Maybe it’s just me, but the way I figure it, if a body up and dies, they should make it their business to stay that way. Mrs. Whitmore was telling the class the other day that the world has a terrible population problem and that death was one of the few things that kept this problem from getting out of control. Then I started to feel bad ’cause I know how much Granmè loved her sister and I know how I would feel if Chantal died. I knew that I should pray real hard with everybody and hope that Matant Margaret would wake up and go back to the nursing home. But at the same time, I was not looking forward to this wake. Especially when I heard all the wailing before we even got up the steps.
I could hear a low moaning sound coming from behind the door. Jean-Claude had to push me up those stairs. It sounded like a pack of dogs howling and moaning in the middle of the night. I moved a little closer to Jean-Claude as the door opened up to a little hallway with a deep red carpet. At the same time, I heard a scream coming from somewhere inside. Maybe we’d missed the whole thing. Maybe Matant Margaret was jumping out of her coffin right now and walking around shaking people’s hands!
“Seth.” Jean-Claude looked down at me and I realized I was holding on to the edge of his dark blue suit jacket. He looked older in his suit and tie. He had even taken his earring out of his ear in respect to Granmè. She wouldn’t talk to him for two weeks after he got his ear pierced. She kept saying that the next thing Jean-Claude would do is start wearing a dress. “Take it easy, man.”
I let go of Jean-Claude’s suit quickly. If Jean-Claude wasn’t scared, then I wasn’t gonna be scared either. Besides, what could happen with Pa
pi and Manmi and the rest of the family there? I made up my mind to pray as hard as I could for Matant Margaret to wake up. I would even shake her hand if she wanted.
A short, fat man in a black suit came up to us and began talking to Papi. He had skin the color of peanut butter and a round bald head that looked like it had been greased to make it shine. He was shaking his head and talking very fast. I wondered if working here around all these dead bodies was what made his hair fall out, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to ask.
After a few minutes, we started to follow the bald man down the hallway with the red carpet. The closer we got, the louder the moaning became. I thought I could feel vibrations coming through the floor, like when someone is playing music too loud. The bald man led us all the way to the back of the house to a set of double doors. From all the noise slipping through the cracks under the door, it sounded like there was a circus going on in there. The bald man opened his mouth to say something, then just shook his head, pointed at the door and walked back down the hallway.
Papi turned to look down at the three of us. His eyebrows were close together and he had those wrinkles on his forehead. That meant he had something serious to tell us. We could tell he was trying to tell us to behave ourselves. Jean-Claude, Chantal and I nodded quietly. Then Papi reached out to open the door and he barely touched it before it flew open and all this rush of sound erupted from the room and filled the hallway, the entryway and the whole building.
I stepped inside the door behind Chantal and stared at what was going on in amazement. The room was full of relatives and family friends in black dresses and suits. There were wooden-back chairs all over the place and set up in no kind of order. There was singing going on in one corner and crying in another. Some people were sitting and talking, others were standing and laughing. I saw old Madame Germaine who used to give me candy to eat while we were in church and Alberthe with her big red cane and more of Granmè’s friends sitting with two rows of old ladies weaving back and forth in their seats and making that terrible moaning sound I had heard from way outside the house. Behind them were three or four white-haired old men, including Ti Jacques, who was sitting with them rubbing his curly white beard. They had their heads hanging low and their feet stomping out a quiet and regular beat on the floor and they were humming all the while. I saw Tant Renee on her knees in the middle of a group of kneeling women leading a rosary chant. Tant Cherise was jumping out of her seat every couple of minutes and screaming “Amwe!” and falling to her knees and pulling her hair out. Manmi and Monnonk Roddie would pull her back up and sit her down and she would start all over again. And right in front of it all was Matant Margaret lying in a long, shiny casket with brass handles on the sides and flowers sitting all around it.
Papi led us through the maze of people and chairs to the front of the room where Manmi and Granmè were sitting. Manmi had her eyes closed and was singing something in Kreyol. Her dark hair had come loose from her scarf and was hanging down the sides of her face. Granmè was sitting very quiet and looking at the coffin in concentration. She didn’t take her eyes off of it even when I leaned down to kiss her. But she felt for my hands, so I could tell she knew I was there. Way in the back of the room I noticed Jerome sitting in a corner. He’d dressed up in a suit too and was looking straight at Chantal. I hoped Jean-Claude didn’t see him or this wake would get even louder.
I moved down the rows of chairs to sit next to Enrie. He was wearing a new gray suit and a blue and black tie. He was sitting way back in his chair and watching everything with round eyes. We looked at each other and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: If this wake didn’t get Matant Margaret up, nothing would. We sat back to wait.
All of a sudden, it got real quiet and still except for some low singing and the quiet stomping. One by one, people began to go up to the coffin and spend a few minutes looking at Matant Margaret. Some of the people had sad looks on their faces; some of them had tears dripping off their chins. Other people looked like they didn’t know what to do, and didn’t look straight in her face. It made me feel strange watching all of them. At the same time it made me feel peaceful, too. All those people really knew Matant Margaret. They had talked to her and played with her when they were as small as me. I didn’t know her at all except from the stories about her. Granmè would tell us that Matant Margaret was the one who would suck the mango seeds dry and ran the fastest and told the funniest stories. If she wore her hair in three braids, the other girls would want to do the same. If she decided to play kache kache li byen, the rock-hiding game, everybody would want to play with her. It was Matant Margaret who went to America first. She saved all her money from working in the casinos and took a plane—not a boat, Granmè would make sure to tell us—to New York. Then she saved all her money working as a maid to bring Manmi and Tant Cherise. Then they all saved money to bring Monnonk Roddie, who was still little, and Granmè and Tant Renee. Granmè said the first thing Matant Margaret did when all of the family was in New York was quit her job as a maid and go to City College cause she figured it was time she did a little something for herself and let everyone else support her now. She was forty-eight years old when she got her nursing degree. Manmi always says that if it wasn’t for Matant Margaret, she would never have met Papi in New York and they would never have gotten married and we would never have been born.
But I most remember the story that Granmè told me about Matant Margaret and their own grandfather—my gran-gran-granpapa. He was old and yellow when they were just little girls, Granmè had said. Everybody was saying he was losing his mind ’cause he took to mumbling to himself all the time and was making mistakes. He would go out fishing and come back with a goat or a chicken and swear until he cried that he had caught it in the sea. He would talk to the chairs and listen like they were going to talk back to him. He would get up and walk out of the house in the middle of dinner, thinking he had to go to work. Everybody except Matant Margaret would start laughing and talk about the old people’s disease. It was Matant Margaret who would always go after Gran-gran-granpapa. She would catch up with him at the end of the road, take his hand and walk with him wherever he wanted to go. They would stop on the street and buy some akara, which is fried beans, or burnt plantain to eat from whoever was selling it on the side of the road. Then they would walk and walk and not go back home until it was dark and dinner was over. Granmè said that Matant Margaret was the only one who didn’t cry when Gran-gran-granpapa finally died.
Thinking about that story, I knew I wasn’t gonna be scared when it was my turn to look at Matant Margaret. I thought about how long she had been living in that nursing home and I knew—no matter what Samona said—that she wasn’t going to wake up. For the first time, I started to feel sad about Matant Margaret dying.
When there was no one left but our two families, Enrie whispered to me that he figured Samona had been lying to us the whole time and all of a sudden, I didn’t care. I would get Samona for making a fool of me tomorrow but for now, I wanted to think about Matant Margaret some more.
When Manmi asked me to bring some food over to Mrs. Gemini’s the day after the funeral, I was glad to go. We had tons of food left over because everybody had come over to our apartment afterwards. Grio, which is fried pork; du riz djon-djon, which is rice and dried mushrooms; macaroni; cake—everybody brought something and our refrigerator was so full you couldn’t open it up without something falling out.
Our apartment was still full of relatives, too, who came from New York, Miami, Canada and Haiti. Everybody came to say good-bye to Matant Margaret and to spend some time with Granmè. It was a real big deal now that she was the oldest living person in the family. Our apartment was so crowded that Jean-Claude and I had to sleep on the floor in the living room. And it gets very tiring having to kiss a whole roomful of relatives good morning and good night and hello all the time. What’s really tiring, though, was all the noise. They spent all day arguing politics about Haiti and nobody agreed about
anything except that Haiti is in bad shape and something has to be done about it. My cousins who live in Haiti said that gas has gotten so expensive that people are stealing it from other cars and there’s no electricity at night. Ti Odette said that in Port-au-Prince, there are bodies found every day because the secret police are trying to put down any resistance to the Haitian army. It all sounds like a nightmare and I know that Manmi and Papi feel bad that they can’t take us to Haiti in the summers like they used to. We haven’t gone in five years so I don’t even remember much about it.
Anyway, with all the noise at our apartment, going to Samona’s house was like an escape. I was surprised when Chantal came into the kitchen and told Manmi that she would help me carry the food. Chantal had been busy with Marie and Rochelle, two of our cousins from Haiti. They’d never been to the United States and Chantal loved showing them around Boston.
Chantal hadn’t gone with me to Mrs. Gemini’s in a long time. She used to be good friends with Samona’s big sister, Leticia, but they stopped hanging around together after Chantal started seeing so much of Jerome.
Jerome. That was it.
As soon as we got outside I stopped and turned to Chantal. “You’re sneaking out to see Jerome, right?”
Chantal sighed and dug her hands into her jeans. “Don’t tell Manmi or Papi.”
We started walking down the street together. Chantal knew I wouldn’t tell Manmi or Papi but I didn’t like the way she was putting me in the middle of all of it. Suddenly I wanted to know what was so special about Jerome that Chantal would lie and sneak away for him.
“Why do you like Jerome so much?” I asked.
Chantal looked surprised. She searched my face for a minute. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding.
“He listens to me, for one thing.”
I frowned. “We listen to you too.”
“No you don’t.” Chantal sucked her teeth. “Neither does Manmi or Papi. Jean-Claude used to listen to me when we were little but he’s so busy playing street hero these days, he doesn’t have time. You don’t listen either, Seth. You think I’m just a little Manmi to take care of the house. You and Jean-Claude get attention for other things. I get good grades like you and Jean-Claude, but it doesn’t count as much.”
Seth and Samona Page 3