Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (3 page)

RESTAVEK

Jean-Robert Cadet

"A
blan
(white person) is coming to visit today. He's your papa, but when you see him, don't call him papa. Say
'Bonjour, monsieur'
and disappear. If the neighbors ask who he was, you tell them that you don't know. He is such a good man, we have to protect his reputation. That's what happens when men of good character have children with dogs," said Florence to me in
Kreyol
when I was about seven or eight years old. Before noon, a small black car pulled into the driveway and a white man got out of it. As I made eye contact with him, he waved at me and quickly stepped up to the front door before I had a chance to say
"Bonjour, monsieur."
Florence let him into the house and I disappeared into the backyard. Almost immediately I heard him leaving.

At the age of five I had begun to hate Florence. "I wish your
manman
was my
manman
too," I told Eric, a little boy my age who lived next door. One day while we played together, Eric's mother pulled a handkerchief from her bra, wet its corner on her tongue, knelt down on one knee, and wiped off a dirty spot on her son's face. Eric pushed her hand away.

"Ah,
Manman,
stop it," he said.

I looked at her with bright eyes. "Do it to me instead," I said.

She stared at my face for a moment and replied with an affectionate smile, "But your face is not dirty."

To which I answered, "I don't care. Do it to me anyway." She gently wiped at a spot on my face, as I grinned from ear to ear.

My biological mother had died before her image was ever etched in my mind. I cannot remember the time when I was brought to Florence, the woman I called
Manman.
She was a beautiful Negress with a dark-brown complexion and a majestic presence. She had no job, but earned a small income from tenants who leased her inherited farmland. She also entertained high government officials as a means to supplement her income. Her teenage son, Denis, was living with his paternal grandmother and attending private school. Florence claimed that her husband had died when her son was ten years old, but I never saw her wedding pictures.

I came into Florence's life one day when Philippe, her white former lover, paid her a surprise visit. He was a successful exporter of coffee and chocolate to the United States and Europe. Philippe lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with his parents, two brothers, and a niece. He arrived in his Jeep at Florence's two-story French country-style house in an upper-class section of the city. A bright-eyed, fat-cheeked, light-skinned black baby boy was in the backseat. Philippe parked the car, reached into the back seat, and took the baby out. He stood him on the ground and the baby toddled off. I was that toddler.

Philippe greeted Florence with a kiss on each cheek while she stared at the toddler. "Whose baby is this?" she asked, knowing the answer to her question.

"His mother died and I can't take him home to my parents. I'd like you to have him," said Philippe, handing Florence an envelope containing money.

"I understand," she said, taking the envelope. He embraced her again and drove off, leaving me behind. Philippe's problem was solved.

My mother had been a worker in one of Philippe's coffee factories below the Cahos mountains of the Artibonite Valley. Like the grand
blans
of the distant past who acknowledged their blood in the veins of their slave children by emancipating and educating them, Philippe was following tradition. Perhaps he thought that Florence would give me a better life.

"Angela," yelled Florence.

"Oui, Madame,"
answered the cook, approaching her.

"Take care of this little boy, will you? Find him something to eat," she instructed. Angela picked me up.

"What's his name?" she asked.

Florence thought for a moment and said, "Bobby." Florence did not want another child, but the financial arrangement she had with Philippe was too attractive for her to turn down. Every night I slept on a pile of rags in a corner of Florence's bedroom, like a house cat, until I was six years old. Then she made me sleep under the kitchen table.

Florence did not take care of me. From the time I entered the household, various cooks met my basic needs, which freed Florence from having to deal with me. I was never greatly attached to any of the cooks, since none of them ever lasted for more than a year. Florence would fire them for burning a meal or for short-changing her when they returned from the market.

As I got older, I learned what kind of day I was going to have based on Florence's mood and tone of voice. When she was cheerful, the four-strip leather whip, called a
matinet,
would stay hung on its hook against the kitchen wall.

I knew of two groups of children in Port-au-Prince: the elite, and the very poor, the
restaveks,
or slave children.

Children of the elite are often recognized by their light skin and the fine quality of their clothes. They are encouraged by their parents to speak proper French instead of
Kreyol,
the language of the masses. They live in comfortable homes with detached servants' quarters and tropical gardens. Their weekly spending allowance far exceeds the monthly salary of their maids. They are addressed by the maids as "Monsieur" or "Mademoiselle" before their first names. They are chauffeured to the best private schools and people call them
"ti (petit)
bourgeois."

Children of the poor often have dark skin. They appear dusty and malnourished. In their one-room homes covered with rusted sheet metal there is no running water or electricity. Their meals of red beans, cornmeal, and yams are cooked under clouds of smoke spewed out by stoves made of three coconut-size stones and fueled by dry twigs and wood. They eat from calabash bowls with their fingers and drink from tin cans with sharp edges, sitting on logs while being bothered by flies. They squat in the underbrush and wipe themselves with rocks or leaves. At night, they sleep on straw mats or cardboard spread over dirty floors while bloodsucking bedbugs feast on their sweaty flesh. They walk several miles to ill-equipped public schools, where they depend on lunches of powdered milk donated by foreign countries that once depended on the slave labor of their ancestors. After school, they rush home to recite their lessons loudly in cadence before the Caribbean daylight fades away, or they walk a few miles to Champ-de-Mars, the park, and sit under street lamps to do their homework while moths zigzag above their heads.

Restaveks
are slave children who belong to well-to-do families. They receive no pay and are kept out of school. Since the emancipation and independence of 1804, affluent blacks and mulattoes have reintroduced slavery by using children of the very poor as house servants. They promise poor families in faraway villages who have too many mouths to feed a better life for their children. Once acquired, these children lose all contact with their families and, like the slaves of the past, are sometimes given new names for the sake of convenience. The affluent disguise their evil deed with the label
restavek,
a term that means "staying with." Other children taunt them with the term because they are often seen in the streets running errands barefoot and dressed in dirty rags.

Restaveks
are treated worse than slaves, because they don't cost anything and their supply seems inexhaustible. They do the jobs that hired domestics, or
bonnes,
will not do and are made to sleep on cardboard, whether under the kitchen table or outside on the front porch. For any minor infraction, they are severely whipped with the cowhide implement that is still being made exclusively for that very purpose. And, like the African slaves of the past, they often cook their own meals, which are composed of inferior cornmeal and a few heads of dried herring. Girls are usually worse off because they are sometimes used as concubines for the teenage sons of their "owner." And if they become pregnant, they are thrown into the streets to earn their living as prostitutes. The boys are discarded to become shoeshine boys or itinerant gardeners.

I was a
restavek
in the making. Raising me as such was more convenient for Florence, because she didn't have to explain to anyone who I was or where I came from. As a
restavek,
I could not interact with Florence on a personal level; I could not talk to her about my needs. I could not speak until spoken to, except to give her messages that third parties had left with me. I also did not dare smile or laugh in her presence, as this would have been considered disrespectful—I was not her son but her
restavek.

My tin cup, aluminum plate, and spoon were kept separate from the regular tableware. My clothes were rags and neighborhood children shouted
"restavek"
whenever they saw me in the streets. I always felt hurt and deeply embarrassed, because to me the word meant motherless and unwanted. When visitors came and saw me in the yard, I was always asked.
"Tigargon
[little boy], where is your grownup?" Had I been wearing decent clothes and shoes, the question would have been, "TV
monsieur
[young gentleman], where is your mother or father?"

Every night in my bedding under the kitchen table, I wished that either I or Florence would never wake up again. I wanted to live in the world of dreams where I sometimes flew like a bird and swam like a fish. But in the dream world I always stopped to relieve myself against a tree, causing me to awake in a puddle of urine.

Returning to the real world was a nightmare in itself—I was always trying to avoid Florence, the woman I called
Manman.
Every day I wished Florence would die in her sleep—until I made a most frightening discovery. While cleaning the bathroom one early evening, I noticed a small canvas bag tied into a ball under the sink. Curious, I opened it and found several pieces of bloodstained rags. Suddenly my heart raced, and I became convinced that Florence was going to die. I had a strong desire to ask her where the blood came from, but I couldn't. I was allowed to speak to Florence only when she questioned me or when I had to deliver a message from a third party.

The thought of Florence dying was real in my mind. Sometimes I sobbed, asking God to take back my wish for her death. I began to watch Florence closely, staring at every exposed part of her body, trying to find the source of the blood. I spied on her through keyholes whenever she was in the bathroom or in the bedroom.

One hot and muggy afternoon, after she pinched me and pulled me by the skin of my stomach because I had forgotten to clean the kitchen floor, she gave me a small bag of laundry detergent labeled Fab, and a bottle of Clorox bleach. "Go to the bathroom and wash the rags in the bucket," she commanded with rage. I uncovered the metal bucket and saw a pile of white rags soaking in bloody water. I reached in the bucket and scrubbed each piece until the stains began to fade. I vomited in the toilet and continued with my chore.

After a small eternity, Florence opened the door. Fresh air rushed in and I filled my lungs. My ragged shirt was soaked with sweat. I looked up and realized for the first time that Florence was the tallest woman I had ever known. After she inspected the rags, she said, "Now soak them in the bleach. Tomorrow you can rinse them." As I followed her instructions, I stared at her feet, searching again for the source of the blood.

The following day, without being told, I scrubbed the rags again, one by one, and rinsed each piece. As I hung them to dry over the clothesline in the backyard, Florence came out to observe. "After they're dry, fold them and put them in this," she said as she handed me the small white canvas bag. I took it from her, scanning her arms and legs for scars. She had none.

I replied,
"Oui"
instead of the usual
"Oui, Manman."
At the end of the day, I followed her instructions and placed the bag on her bed. From then on, every month, Florence handed me the small white canvas bag with laundry detergent and commanded me to wash its contents.

Every day I lived with anxiety, wondering how soon my only guardian would die from bleeding. Since I had to wash the rags in the late evening in the bathroom, I assumed that Florence didn't want anyone to know about the bleeding. I though that it was a secret she wanted me to keep.

As I walked through a neighbor's yard one day, I noticed a small light blue cardboard box with the word
Kotex
on it in a garbage can. I walked toward the box and stopped. I wanted the box to make a toy car, with Coke bottle caps for wheels and buttons for headlights. While no one was watching, I took the box quickly, put it under my shirt, and fled. I hid it behind a bush at the side of Florence's house, waiting for free time to make a toy. After midday dinner, Florence lay down on her bed for her afternoon nap and called me in to scratch the bottom of her feet. I once heard that this was an activity female slaves used to perform for their mistresses. I despised this routine because I had to kneel at the foot of the bed on the mosaic floor, causing my abscessed right knee to hurt and ooze a foul-smelling liquid. Whenever I fell asleep at her feet, she would kick me in the face and shout, "You're going to scratch my feet until I fall asleep if I have to kick your head off, you
extrait caca
(essence of shit), you son of a whore." As Florence slept, I quickly left the room, thinking of the Kotex box I had hidden away. Once outside I crouched down and pulled the treasured box from the bush. I noticed several rolls of cloth material inside. I unrolled the first once and discovered a big bloodstain on it. Confused, I dropped it and went back to the neighbor's yard. I watched everyone's exposed skin surreptitiously, hoping to discover the source of the blood. I returned home and disposed of the box.