Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (15 page)

By now it was a liquid black night and if the ticket could talk it would have said that my fingers felt like bricks against its skin because I clutched onto it until the time came to fork it over. I got on the bus and moved toward the middle. Years ago I thought the back of the bus was the only place I could sit. It was where the cool people sat. It was from these folks that I learned a thing or two about having dark skin and about having nappy hair. These were all the things that belonged somewhere in the back. They were supposed to be underneath, hidden away in a trunk in some closet. They felt connected somehow, and they never left my mind even when I was trying to be cool—and being cool was the most important thing for me back then. Being cool meant that I was accepted. Among these people, all of whom were pretty much marginalized by poverty, I had another layer of blackness. I was one of these Haitians—those boat people, those funny-clothes-wearing people, those cats with AIDS, those people who speak funny. My uncle, not the one who asked to go to the March with me, had to fight his way back and forth to school when he first came to America from Haiti. Once, another uncle told me that I was from Africa. I didn't buy it for a second. When I was about nine, I developed an answer if someone asked if I was Haitian: I would say that I was West Indian. I was born here, and had never stepped out of this country, but no one accepted me as an American.

My favorite subject in grade school was history—I loved Washington, I loved Jefferson, I loved the war cards that Time/Life used to sell because they had stories on the back of them. I loved the American Revolution. I didn't love Crispus Attucks, a black hero of the American revolution, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre. I didn't know who he was. I loved the War of 1812. And in a school chock full of Haitian-American kids, we didn't learn a thing about the Haitian trinity of revolutionaries Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, and Henri Christophe. It was only after getting out of the school system that I learned about American blacks and about myself. I was angry then, because when I finally began to get a sense of who I was and what I wanted to become, I regretted all the time I had wasted believing what other histories and other institutions said about me.

The bus got quiet for a couple of minutes before we rolled off. The elder cat on the bus led a prayer—we asked God for a safe trip. A couple of seats away there was a father sitting with his son, and I studied them hard. A part of me always studies a father sitting with his son. It's an involuntary act. As I watched them talking back and forth, my mind slipped back to another time when I was on the phone with a friend of mine. I made a joke and he started laughing and in the background his father started laughing too. The sound of the two of them laughing in clumsy union kept playing in my head. It became like music to me, listening to them laugh. Those notes of a father and son's laughter blended with the voices of the father and son next to me on the bus. The sound conveys a certain feeling to me. It's a certain sound that I have never had with my own father. When I heard my friend on the phone with his dad laughing, I realized there was a key sound that was missing whenever I shared a laugh with my father. Every laugh I've ever had with my father has been guarded. It's always been a weary laugh with him. There has never been just an easy, natural laugh between us. When I laugh with him on the phone or when I'm sitting in front of him, there's always something triggered, something underneath, and it always cancels out any comfort or ease that we might have felt. Every laugh has always been like two strangers breaking the ice, but over and over again. When I heard my friend on the phone with his father and when I saw the father and son on the bus together, I was overwhelmed by a sense that this laughter happened for these fathers and sons on a regular basis.

The men on the bus were like an extended family. Some of them I already knew; some had lived on or around Franklin. The word
brother
was used over and over. We were all brothers at this point, bound together by the same goal. The buzz on the bus felt a tiny bit divine. The last thing I remember before dozing off was the cool and steady purring of the bus engine. A brother was at the wheel and a brother owned the bus.

I woke up once to hear the bus driver arguing with a truck driver over the CB. The trucker had a southern drawl. He had said over the air, "I hear a whole bunch of niggers are heading down to D.C." It didn't sound real. I woke up to hear this drawl over the driver's CB and in that drawl I heard some of the reason I was going to the March. The casual and deceptive way that the trucker used the word
nigger
over the airwaves really got to me. It wasn't so much him, but more the general feeling that what he was saying was accepted in a broad American sense. It was that attitude I was hoping to counter by going to the March. I did not want to end up just as another American statistic. I did not want to show up in some American catalog as another young black male dead or in prison. I did not want to be beaten or disgraced by a cop who felt that it was okay to brutalize or kill a black male based on an accepted American suspicion of him, which on any given day, could mean me. On any given day my mother could get the call. Mrs. Calypso? We found your son with a gun. (I've never carried a gun or any weapon). Ma'am, your son looked suspicious. (I wear my hair in long dreadlocks.) We questioned him. He resisted the arresting officer. Please come and identify the body.

I wanted America to know that if my only crime was being black, then my mother would never survive that call. I wanted America to know that no mother can survive that call, and that call destroys families every day. I wanted America to know that there are families all over America trying to pick up the pieces that some Lone Ranger left behind while on his shift. I wanted America to know that I just want to work and live without any interruption of that. I wanted America to feel Franklin Street. I wanted America to know that I had been at a job for close to seven years and a white male on the job less than six months made more than I did. I wanted America to try to understand the kind of humiliation I went through every time I went to the bank to cash my check. There was more. There was much more.

By daylight we were in D.C. Radio reports stated that at least half a million other black men were pouring into the place at that very moment. Women waved to us on their way to work. They had a gleam in their eyes and I'm sure I did too. Part of the March was about this; it was about reconciling with women. And for me, it was just the first step. Maybe this would help me laugh—just laugh a good clean laugh. We got off the bus and walked toward the subway.

The train ride had everybody laughing somehow because the cars were packed—I don't think our car could have held another body. There was a young white woman on the platform who stood right next to me. In front of all these black faces, her own color must have gone through her mind, but I didn't get the feeling that she felt threatened. I spent the rest of the day obsessed with observing white people who were at the March. I would watch them and try to snap their picture.

As we emerged from the train, two Muslim women watched us from a trailer window. They never looked at me. One woman in particular had beautiful, piercing eyes. Our group dispersed into a sea of black men. By eight o'clock in the morning it was impossible to get to the front of the Washington Mall. I could not fathom the number of people I saw whenever I looked back into the crowd. Every tree was occupied; every statue framed with bodies; there were even people perched on stoplights. I was drawn to a group of Rastafarians who had formed a circle and were playing drums. I moved around with my uncle the entire day. We just kept moving as we met brothers from everywhere. I met a woman from the Bahamas. I looked up to one of the massive monitors to see who was speaking. The man said he'd just received a fax from Africa, and they were watching us. There was thunderous applause. Sometime later Rosa Parks stepped up to the microphone. I was awed to think that this tiny, delicate woman had helped bring us to the mall by refusing to sit in the back of a southern bus and starting the Civil Rights Movement. Without her, the March might have never existed. I saw her on the monitor and it was the first of many times that day I wanted to start crying. Her frail voice rang in my ears. I could feel my eyes getting really moist and I fought to keep from crying.

I fought that feeling all day. As a race of men, I felt like we had never really arrived until that day. The March was a step toward being seen as human. It felt like redemption to me. At no time did I feel nervous. Even if a bomb went off in the middle of the crowd, it felt like the spiritual presence of all our souls and those watching from above could and would contain it. And maybe the absence of that paranoia was what made me feel like crying. I didn't cry though. I had been holding back the water of my eyes long before the March. I still have the water from the March and water from before. I still have these tears. I have new ones, too.

I went off to one side and was about to sit down when I saw a white man standing like a pillar in the ground. He was frozen. He was holding an American flag upside down and he held a cardboard sign in front of the flag. The sign read: A MILLION AND ME. Scrawled on the flag were the words: UNITED WE STAND DIVIDED WE FALL. The man had large, ice-blue eyes and somehow he looked cornered. I didn't want to get too close because I was unsure just what he would do. He looked like a real-life Marlboro man. I guess I was scared of this man's courage, too. If someone called for a million white men to come to Washington, D.C., I would never show up, and I have good reason not to. At first, I figured this guy was some zany, white-boy leftist. I walked away from him, but I kept thinking about him. It took a couple of years and an incidental conversation before I realized what message he was conveying with the flag. In the military an upside-down flag is a distress signal. The truth of it shook me hard. There could never be an all-white or an all-black concern, we can't escape each other that way.

As we were leaving the mall and heading back toward the bus, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam began speaking. I only caught bits and pieces of his speech as I made my way through the streets of D.C. His voice floated through the air, his tone dipped into a subtle call, and he paused elegantly, then shifted as his speech became more serious. He spoke about responsibility, and the word hammered over the P.A. system and it sank into my eardrums and that was the message I carried home with me. I heard it over and over as I left the mall. Thousands of people registered to vote at the March, hundreds of thousands latched onto ideas and a million plus probably felt reborn or at least rejuvenated somehow. For me the March happened in tiny clips. Every step I had taken led me to D.C, and what America was moving toward and how it changed and how it stayed the same led me to D.C.

Most of the group from my neighborhood in Rockland County walked back together to where the bus was parked. Minister Farrakhan could be heard for what seemed like miles around. We boarded the bus and he was still talking. The sign on the bus read: THE CHICKENBONE EXPRESS. Someone next to me remarked that he was offended by the stereotypical implications of the sign, that all black people love chicken. The sign didn't bother me at all; what had happened on the mall that day had stomped all over any stereotype someone might have wanted to use. To me, the sign was harmless. Besides, I love chicken and I'm black. Pass me some chicken, I'll deal with the stereotype in my own way.
Gracias.

I was going home reconciled. I felt American. I felt I had taken part in an American tradition. I felt our numbers couldn't be ignored and I felt that a lot of discussion that day all over the country would have to include black males and it would have to include a different way of looking at us. I didn't go home "angry" at anyone. In fact I felt better about America as a whole. I sensed from all the eyes around me that something very deep had been resolved for a lot of brothers. There hadn't been any violence to disrupt the March. And we were alive. There was no bomb under D.C.

I saw a brother the next day walking with his son on Franklin. I had never seen him walking with his son before. He had been on the bus. I made my way to the deli where I usually eat lunch and got into a conversation with a family from Tennessee. It was probably that drawl of theirs that provoked me into conversation with them. I had been talking about the March to someone else and the older southern woman looked at me and said with an intriguing twang that she had been "praying for us." I believed her. I believed what her eyes were saying to me, and I thanked her for her prayers because her prayers had fused with the spirit I was carrying from the March. I believed her because I imagined that everyone had been watching and praying for us. The slaves had been watching. The Quakers had been watching, and so had John Brown, Nat Turner, and George Jackson. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe were watching. So was Crispus Attucks. Servicemen like him were watching from their posts. And heroes were watching from their graves. The white man with the distress signal was watching somewhere. I believed her drawl. I believed her eyes. And for that moment, it felt impossible to be invisible.

IN SEARCH OF A NAME

Miriam Neptune

1980

My first nightmare was provoked by a doll. She sat on my toybox, regal in her peasant dress and scarf. I dreamt that she cackled, and attacked my
Spiderman
comic book, then went after me. My mother saved me. She took the doll away and sent it back to my father.

I imagined my father as a bogeyman, like the
macoutes
my mother described to me from her childhood—they would take you away in the night. My father would arrive unannounced, with the court order, to take me for the weekend, even if I kicked and screamed, even if my mother cried.

1986

In the fourth grade, we presented our family stories to the class. I announced that my parents were from Haiti. I repeated what my mother had taught me in singsong tones, "Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It is next to Puerto Rico and Cuba." My classmates laughed. They had already decided that I was an alien. The only Haiti they could imagine was an island where "everybody
hates
each other."

1986 was the year my father left. I remember he drove by our house in Los Angeles on his way to New York with his new family. He sent for me during Easter. I remember not caring. Maybe a father was like a first cousin—someone you played with once a year.

On one trip my father and I explored the city together, recording everything we saw. There is still a magic that takes over when I remember holding his camera for the first time. As we stood on the edge of Central Park, I narrated, "Here we are
in
New York City, across from the Natural History Museum, and Central Park. Let's see how many interesting things there are. There are dogs, there are bus-waiters, and fathers." As I zoomed in on his face, he cautioned, "I think you are little bit too close."

1986 was also a big year for Haiti. Mommy and I watched as Baby Doc and his wife fled with the national treasury in a silver Mercedes. Baby Doc really was a big baby—a boy, whose father made him president at nineteen, who ran away when his toy soldiers began to burn.

I finally thought to ask my mother how long it had been since she was home. "Twenty years," she replied. I could not imagine time that long.

1989

When I turned thirteen, I was finally allowed to watch
The Serpent
and the Rainbow,
the horror movie everyone had seen but me. I remember feeling captivated by Marielle, the young Haitian doctor who guides an American on his journey to find the "zombie drug." I was taken in by her elegance, her ability to move so fluidly between this world and the beyond. She was a dancer, the embodiment of Erzulie Freda. This was the type of Haitian woman I wanted to be.

My dream ended when I viewed her making "love" to the American, scratching at him gently like a lioness eating her pray. I understand now that Marielle is just another black exotic, and the story is not about her. I searched for other images. What I found was the Haiti of an American imagination, an island of a million horrors. Haitians were zombies, mobsters, and angry witches. The movies I found failed to depict the true horror: that we were a prideful people being eaten by the shadow of colonialism, unable to speak for ourselves.

1991

At fifteen, I started to care more about Haitian politics. I read everything I could about Aristide. He was like my Nelson Mandela. I saw him as the only hope for democracy in Haiti. I watched as he rose from champion of the poor to president of the nation, then was plucked from his pedestal and muzzled like a rabid dog. I learned not to put all of my eggs in one basket.

On my fifteenth birthday, my father reappeared. He brought me more rice and beans and cake than I could eat. He told me the story of how he met my mother at a wedding in Brooklyn—she was wearing an orange dress.

We took a picture together, and for the first time I realized our smiles were the same. My mother accused me of betrayal. "Your father's family are Duvalierists," she said, warning me that he could not be trusted.

1994

In the middle of the coup, my mother taught me to speak out about the way we were treated. She put me on stage one night a meeting of peace activists, and told me to describe what I knew about the raping and killing of dissenters in Haiti. My voice cracked and my knees shook as I felt her pass on the burden to me, to represent us.

I thought of taking my mother's name, Bateau. Boat. I imagine the boat, floating on the seas with no place to land. How could I take that name when even she chooses not to associate with the father who gave it to her?

1995

Twenty years have passed, and now it is my turn to go home. As I board the plane to Port-au-Prince, I am suddenly conscious of my bent shoulders and drab clothing. The woman ahead of me in a bright blue dress holds her head high, despite the weight of the sacks she grips in each hand. If someone at this moment were to ask me who I am, I would not know how to respond.

When we arrive, a small band plays ballads on the runway. The man checking my passport stares at me then decides to speak English instead
of Kreyol.
I am an election observer, an American who brings some semblance of justice by recording the voting process. We hover over college students as they count ballots at midnight in Les Cayes. We count them again, and write down our results. The answer is easy: Rene Preval has won. Twenty percent of voters have voiced their opinion. The other eighty percent watch silently as "democracy" changes hands.

The morning after the elections in Les Cayes, a man approaches me to ask my name. I tell him, "Miriam Neptune." He says I am his second cousin, the daughter of his first cousin. The Neptunes live here, he tells me. I smile at the coincidence, but cry inside because the name is only a name, not a family.

1998

Does name determine lineage? The only lineage I embrace is the one that raised me: my mother, her mother, and the mothers who created her. What is nation? What is my nation? Nation is in part, the imagination. Nation exists only where we create boundaries. My nation lives in the waters between spiritual and physical homes.