Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (23 page)

EPIPHANY

As I write to you today, resting next to me is a packet of letters my mother gave to me a year or so ago. Some of the letters are written in her mother's hand. This is all I have by which to know her. They are the last letters penned by her my mother received. My mother had just left Haiti for graduate law study in Paris. Her mother intended to visit her there—it would be her own first journey off of the island. The letter paper is thin, the ink beginning to fade in places. The first letter, dated December 1, 1961, begins:

Les chants de Noel avaient commence a me jeter dans I'angoisse; tu
sais ce n'est pas du sentiment
—
quand on les entonne Us me vont droit
au coeur et me donnent un frisson de coeur qui agit sur tous mes
membres est-ce pourquoi je ferai tous mes efforts pour realiser mon
voyage. II parait que ce sera la ma guirison aussi j'ai commence sens
m'illusioner a confectionner mes linges; il est encore tot mais cela uaut
mieux.
[The Christmas carols had begun to throw me into a deep state of anguish; you know, it isn't nostalgia that I feel, when they are sung they go straight to my heart and send a chill through it that permeates all of my limbs. Thus, I have decided to do all in my power to bring about my voyage; it seems that it will be my cure and so I have begun, without giving in to disillusionment, to make my travel clothes; it is still early for such things, but it is preferable to do so.]

I read these lines and feel the deep emotions my grandmother must have felt at being separated from her youngest daughter. I see in her words also the heart of a poet. I see myself in these lines, knowing how sensitive I am to change of any kind, how deeply loyal to those I love, always missing those who are at a distance. Mama Fofo, as she was called, was an artist of a kind, a seamstress. She was, thus, literally planning to make her clothes for the voyage, in the same loving way that she had made her own daughters' dresses, the same way she had dutifully put fingers to needle, to thread, to cloth in the making of wardrobes for others, back curved over her Singer sewing machine, in order to make a living for herself and her family. She was a single mother raising four children in Haiti from the late 1920s through the 1930s.

Reading Mama Fofo's letters help me to restore some missing links in my own life; they help me to recapture a connection to a woman whom I never met but from whom I have inherited some personality traits: warmth, sensitivity, but also a tendency, at times, not to take best care of myself. Through these letters, I better understand both her and my own character.

Mama Fofo is preparing to go on this voyage which both lifts her spirit and creates great anxiety in her. She does not have the money to go and is trying to call in loans made to friends in need. Many of them refuse to return the money, sums at times as low as twenty dollars. They do not seem to think that the trip is so serious; they do not realize her true need. Mama Fofo's money is lost, so it seems, and in the midst of trying to realize this dream of crossing the Atlantic in order to see her daughter, she finds out that she has placed her trust in the wrong people. She writes:
"reellement on ne doit compter
quesursoi"
[really, we can only count on ourselves]. The letters then detail, over the course of a few weeks, what money she has been able to put aside or reclaim. There are gifts from her other children and also from my mother. Mama Fofo was sixty-five at the time she wrote this letter. And I, some thirty years after her death, have just begun to learn such lessons, to be generous without expense to oneself.

I read a meditation today that speaks of this, a Taoist teaching on the theme of caring. It was written by Deng Ming Dao in his book,
365 Tao.
Let me set it down for you here:

Those who follow Tao believe in using sixteen attributes on behalf of others: mercy, gentleness, patience, nonattachment, control, skill, joy, spiritual love, humility, reflection, restfulness, seriousness, effort, controlled emotion, magnanimity, and concentration. Whenever you need to help another, draw upon these qualities. Notice that self-sacrifice is not included in this list. You do not need to destroy yourself to help another. Your overall obligation is to complete your own journey along your personal Tao. As long as you can offer solace to others on your same path, you have done the best that you can.

I believe that Mama Fofo embodied most of the above but it was in the last moments of her life that she realized that she did not need to destroy herself in order to help others. Had she learned this lesson sooner, would she have made it to Paris? Would the last moments of her life have been less fraught with the fear of never seeing her daughter again? Or had she already realized that she was losing a battle against time, losing that battle to her penury, her lesson learned too late?

Her last letter is dated January 4, 1962, three days after Haitian independence is celebrated. Her first lines reveal that she has finally gathered nearly all the money necessary for the voyage. She is missing only eighty-five U.S. dollars. At this point, she hopes that the trip will take place in the coming summer. She writes of possibly selling her house as some businessmen have made her an offer for the property. She hesitates to sell her children's childhood home and is afraid that the affair
"causera ma mort"
[will cause my death]. There are three more letters in the packet, dated the eighth, ninth, and tenth of January 1962. Each recounts the final moments of Mama Fofo, who passed away on Epiphany, the sixth of January 1962, after some days of complaining that her heart was tight as a fist. Did she die of a broken heart? Of a heart attack? This is something only she knew. The letters written by other hands reveal how loved she was by her children and closest family friends, how much love she had during the course of her hard-working life, even though, in the end, she could not make her way to one, among the others, whom she loved greatly.

My mother received Mama Fofo's last letters along with the announcements of her death. How deep her shock, her loss—I cannot imagine. At this age, still reaching out toward my own dreams, I cannot imagine my life without my mother and father even though I see my own parents rarely, living as we do in different countries. I was born eight years after her death, but I am very much like her. My mother and I have had the opportunity to give life to aspects of a relationship that was taken away prematurely, in reverse. I can learn from my grandmother's errors and build on her legacy. Her generosity need not be forgotten. The fact that she passed away on Epiphany, the day on which Catholics celebrate the adoration of the Three Kings bearing gifts for Christ, impresses upon me the necessity of remembering that even within the most humble of beings and across racial, class, and gender lines—there can be a noble heart. It is that heart that I celebrate and want to nurture in myself. It is not lost upon me, too, that Independence Day had just been celebrated and that she could not, as a working-class, single, Haitian woman of a certain age, secure her own independence.

Aimee, when I sense the pain in Mama Fofo's letters, I think that if there is only one thing I can teach you, it would be this: to value and to take the best care of yourself. Without this grounding in your own center of being, the world you are about to enter will be all the more difficult. I have only begun to enact this lesson. It remains my greatest challenge.

RISING

I want to tell you about another Haitian woman, my paternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, whose care for me in my earliest years has left a permanent impression upon my mind, body, and soul. When I began to write you this letter, I reread the last card she wrote me. She was seventy-five years old when she wrote it; she had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment for advanced breast cancer in Miami. Because of the absence of preventive health care in Haiti, her cancer was discovered too late—yet as a member of the working middle class, she was lucky to have had health attention at all. I had just begun my first job, fresh out of graduate school, as a college professor at a private university in the southern United States. I did not have the time and means to make my way to her side so I wrote to her instead. She did not reply about her pain. As she always did in her letters, she thanked me for thinking of her and wrote of her plans to return to Port-au-Prince for the Christmas holidays. She missed her home. It is clear from the content of the card that she knew her days were numbered. She wrote of how much she loved me. She also wrote advice she had never given me before. A firm believer in the Catholic Church and its teachings, she counseled me to stay close to God. Though I left the Catholic Church at the age of fourteen (objecting to its missionary work in Haiti and other developing countries, sexist hierarchy, and homophobia), I am a strong believer in a greater power. I don't know what form that power takes, but I respect it and I believe I have been able to live up to the spirit of my grandmother's advice if not to its letter. I have faith in the energy that surrounds and guides us in this world. On the back of the card, she tells me that when I need help in the future, to look to my Bible for assistance. I know she wrote this because when I was a child and things in my life were beyond my comprehension, I would write her a few lines, never letting her know exactly what the problem was, but just that I needed some affirmation. Months later, often after I had forgotten the source of my earlier grievance, a letter would appear in response, letting me know that someone in Haiti held my spirit dear and loved me unconditionally despite the distance between us. I knew with finality when I read those lines that she was saying good-bye, just in case, in her own way. She referred me to the Bible, to John: 11. "There," she wrote, "you can read about everything." I don't know if I turned to that passage then. I don't remember doing so. I may have done so sometime in the haze of the depression that hit me following her death in 1995, three months after I finally had the chance to see her in Haiti, my first trip back to my native land since our family trips had come to an abrupt end in the late seventies. Today, I read this card again, hoping it would provide me with something to pass on to you. And so I turned to John: 11, wondering what was there that could contain the "everything" Mamie (as I have called her from infancy) wrote about. I found, to my surprise, the story of Lazarus and his resurrection from the dead.

This is how the story goes, Aimee: Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, was very ill. His sisters sent for Jesus to perform a miracle so that Lazarus would not die. Jesus went to him but by the time he reached Lazarus's home, he had already expired. One of Lazarus's sisters tells him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." After some discussion, Jesus makes this pronouncement: "I am the resurrection; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." After this they enter the tomb of Lazarus, and find the body already in a state of decay. Jesus calls to Lazarus to walk out of the grave and Lazarus emerges, wrapped in his burial cloth, resurrected.

I read this story and realized what my grandmother had been trying to tell me, in the only words she knew inside and out. She was about to die but she believed in a power greater than herself. She knew she would live in an altered state, somewhere removed from the earth-bound, but still with us. Although I have left the Church and I never thought that I would be recounting a biblical story to you in this way, Aimee, I know that my grandmother was wise to point me in this direction. Because the Bible is, like the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, and so many others, a sacred text. And although my grandmother did not believe in
Vodou,
as I have begun to in my adult years (not firsthand but through extensive reading), this story reminds me of African beliefs in the rebirth of the spirits, the idea that spirits never die. I know that my grandmother lives on in me and so shall she in you. As long as our memories are alive, so is she and all of the ancestors who preceded her own life. At the end of the card, she expresses concern that I work too hard and live my life alone. She hopes these words will bring me solace in times of loneliness. As I said earlier, though I can't remember if I read the story of Lazarus rising when I received this card or shortly after her death, now, four years later, I am thankful for it as I acknowledge my own rebirth. I am claiming my Haitianness in the United States, an identity made especially suspect in this country by racism and xenophobia. I am claiming my solitude and the memories isolation affords me the privilege of revisiting.

Aimee, I am twenty-nine and I have just begun to rise from the ashes of my childhood fears. I was twenty-five when my grandmother passed away and though I had spent most of those years away from her side (seeing her every three or four years), my body is as if tattooed by the imprints of her palms as she bathed me as a child and fed me baby food as I lay between her bosom and arm. Can any touch be more sacred than this? Much has been made of the fact that the body remembers its injuries, its traumas. But what happens to the good touch, especially when that touch occurs early in life, when a child is full of potential and knows nothing of the difficulties of life? I have been thinking that the body must remember such a touch as sacred, and that if one is blessed with it, whatever traumas the body may sustain later on can be more easily overcome. I believe my body remembers its movements in water as my grandmother bathed me as if they were movements in the womb: safe, soundless, magical. I believe that the first touches we experience in life are as sacred as the last ones, the ones that prepare us for the journey home, to Vilokan, Ginen, Dahomey, or to a glorious heaven. I was not there to bathe her in return, to cleanse the feet that had walked many miles for her children and grandchildren, to close the eyelids that had seen more heartbreak in the busy streets of Port-au-Prince daily than most people in developing countries will experience in a lifetime. After she died, part of my own spirit seemed to follow; I felt as if a limb had been taken away; it ached in the absence of her presence. I have come to understand that it was a necessary loss, one that ensured that I would mature in ways that I had not explored because her presence and memory both provided me with the kind of nurture of soul which discouraged my creation of my own sources of sustenance. I was told at her funeral that the day after I had left Haiti, she took to her bed and never rose from it until her death, as if she had just waited for my return and our last encounter. It is enough for me to know that I was there to embrace her, as she had me, in childhood, in the last months of her life. Now that she is gone, something else has come to be in that space of spiritual connectedness that once belonged to us both—a second chance at life, the opportunity to live out the lessons gleaned from observing my grandmother's existence from a distance: how to be a new kind of Haitian woman, one who reveres the old ways and yet knows her own power and is not afraid of putting that power to good use. I am in the fourth year of my own resurrection and every step forward is small but strong.