Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (4 page)

I sat under the mango tree in the yard with my catechism trying to memorize as much as I could in preparation for my first communion. As I recited passages, I visualized myself wearing long white pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, red bow tie, and shiny black shoes. Entering the church with my classmates, I was at the communion rail, the priest said, "The body of Christ," and I answered, "Amen" as I opened my mouth to receive the Host. I didn't imagine a big dinner reception with a house full of friends and relatives who brought gifts and money for me, but I was certain that I was going to have my first communion because my school—Ecole du Canada— was preparing a group of students for the sacrament. I was probably eight or ten years old at the time.

During classes on Saturday afternoons, everyone was eager to answer questions and display his knowledge of the Bible and catechism. Every class started the same way.

Teacher: What is catechism?

Students: A catechism is a little book from which we learn the Catholic religion.

Teacher: Where is God?

Students: God is in heaven, on earth, and everywhere.

Teacher: Recite the Ten Commandments of God.

Thou shalt not have other gods besides me.

Thou shalt not. . .

Thou shalt not. . .

Everyone responded to every question and command in unison and with enthusiasm. At the end of the class, we told each other with gleaming eyes what our parents planned to prepare for dinner the day of the first communion. It seemed that everyone's parents had been fattening either a goat or a turkey. Some talked about their trip to the tailor or the shoemaker. Everyone had a story to tell— even I, but my stories were all made up. During every trip back home, I thought about the First Commandment and wondered why Florence worshipped several other gods immediately after she returned home from church. She must have known about the Ten Commandments, because I read them in her prayer book every time she visited her neighbors.

Saturday evening, the week before confession, the students were very excited, knowing the day of the first communion was getting closer. After class, everyone told stories of how his shoes and clothes were delivered or picked up. At home, I searched Florence's bedroom for new clothes and shoes and found nothing that belonged to me. I wanted to ask Florence if she had purchased the necessary clothes for me, but I could not, since I wasn't allowed to ask her questions. I considered asking her anyway and taking the risk of being slapped. But I couldn't vocalize the words—my fear of her was too intimidating. Thursday afternoon, I searched again in every closet and under the bed and found nothing.

I began to worry. Maybe she forgot, I thought. I placed the catechism on the dining-room table as a reminder to Florence. She placed it on the kitchen table instead. "She remembers," I said to myself with a grin.

Friday afternoon, the evening of confession, a street vendor was heard hawking her goods. "Bobby, call the vendor," yelled Florence. I ran to the sidewalk and summoned the woman vendor, who had coal-black skin and was balancing a huge yellow basket on top of her head. Several chickens with colorful plumage were hung upside down from her left forearm. Once in the yard and under the tree, she bent down and placed the pile of poultry on the ground. Florence's cook assisted her in freeing her head from the heavy load. After several minutes of bargaining, Florence bought two chickens. I felt very happy, thinking that a big dinner was being planned to celebrate my first communion. But deep down inside, a small doubt lingered. Saturday morning, the eve of my first communion, Florence left in a taxi. I had never been so happy.
"Manman
went to buy clothes for my first communion," I told the cook, smiling, dancing, and singing. She paid no attention to me, but the expression on her face dampened my festive mood. By noon a taxi stopped in front to the house. I ran to see. It was Florence, carrying a big brown paper bag. I danced in my heart as I fought against the urge to hug her, knowing she would slap me away.

She walked in without saying a word. I went inside and fetched her slippers. She changed into another dress and began to supervise the cook, who was preparing dinner. In the early afternoon, after I finished my chores, I approached Florence with a pail of water and a towel and began to wash her feet. She was sitting in her rocking chair, sipping sweet hot black coffee from a saucer. With pounding heart, I spoke, "Confession is at six o'clock and communion is tomorrow at nine o'clock in the morning."

She stared at me for a long moment as she ground her teeth. Her face turned very angry. "You little shithead bedwetter, you little faggot, you shoeshine boy. If you think I'm gonna spend my money on your first communion, you're insane," she shouted. Trembling with fear, I dried her feet, slipped on her slippers, and stood up, holding the pail and towel. I felt as though my feet and legs were too heavy for me to move. I was stunned by her words. "Get out of my face," she yelled. I went into the kitchen and sat quietly in my usual corner without shedding a tear.

"Amelia!" called Florence loudly.

"Out,
Madame Cadet," the cook responded.

"You don't need to prepare the chicken for tomorrow; I'm spending the day with my niece. Her son is having his first communion tomorrow," she said.

I went to her bedroom to find out the contents of the bag and saw a pair of shoes she intended to wear to her godson's first communion. I felt crushed, but at the same time resigned myself to believe that only children with real mothers and fathers go to communion, receive presents from Santa Claus, and celebrate their birthdays.

HOMELANDS

Marie-Helene Laforest

My truth, like many truths, is partial. As I set out to tell this story, I suspect the other characters involved would tell it differently. Only on one point would my relatives and I agree: we had not been black before leaving the Caribbean. In a country of dark-skinned people, my lighter skin color and my family's wealth made me white. My white grandfather was a coffee and sisal exporter in a small town to the north of Port-au-Prince. He conducted his business out of his general store, which imported construction materials and basic foodstuffs like flour. He was the honorary consul of Norway. Before the National Bank of Haiti closed for the weekend on Fridays, a large trunk painted green, full of his money, was put onto a dray, held in place with a thick rope, and pushed by a bare-chested man through the Grande Rue to the bank. My grandfather's half-brother had brown skin and green eyes. Perhaps my grandfather had a better knack for business, but I could not help thinking, as a child, that his skin color put him on the Grande Rue whereas his half-brother conducted his business on a back street near the market. My grandmother's brother, too, had his business on the main street. He was light-skinned and his wife was a woman whose veins showed through her white skin. The Europeans, mostly the clergy, and the Canadians, who exploited a copper mine in the area, patronized my grandfather's and his brother-in-law's businesses.

I had not been a "Caribbean" either before leaving Haiti. I knew a few of the other islands by name but had not met anyone from there. My mother and her sister had gone to Cuba for their trousseaus. They spoke of Havana City being like Paris, but they spoke of it in the past tense. It had lost its glamour after Fidel Castro took over. When I was six years old, my mother took me on a trip to Miami to see the Seminoles on their reservation and the dolphins in the Seaquarium. There was a stopover in Montego Bay, Jamaica. I was allowed to stand by the plane door before the Jamaican passengers boarded. Rows and rows of people stood away from the tarmac behind a wire fence, none black, all Chinese. I ran inside to inform my mother we had landed in China. Little did I know that thirty years after this incident I would be taken for a Caribbean person of Chinese ancestry by a group of Jamaicans.

On the island of my birth, my life of privilege was constructed with great conviction. There were many invisible lines marking off paths from which I could not swerve. I remember one October, on the first day of school, dressed in my starched blue uniform, waiting for my father and the oyster man. A huge mango gropo tree grew in our backyard by the pool side, a green-and-white-leaf vine coiled around its trunk. My father sat underneath that tree to have his shoes cleaned by the shoeshine man at his feet. At the same time, the oyster man arrived and cracked open the oysters, which we slurped down with a dash of lemon. My father drove to work. The yardman took me to school on his bicycle. Sometimes we took the hospital road where we passed men carrying sick children on their backs in the bright morning sun. This is the image the word
poverty
evokes in my mind, a father traveling on foot to a faraway hospital, his sick child on his back.

Walking back from school, I stopped first at my great uncle's store, where he and his wife interrupted their activities to hug and kiss me and give me presents in the form of candies or, if I had received my report card that day, perfumes, jewelry, or pieces of fabric from England or France. Broderie anglaise was my favorite. Then I proceeded to my grandfather's shop. At lunchtime, my grandfather drove me to the two-story house with the balcony skirting the top floor where my grandmother sat on her rocking chair. Lunch was always our favorite food. My grandfather and I both liked food that was considered too ordinary for people with means:
tchaka, akra,
crabs, fish stew and cornmeal, salted fish and boiled bananas. After lunch, while my grandparents napped, I went down to the ground floor. The back door opened onto the yard where the numerous household workers lived: the cook, the two housemaids with their children, the woman who ironed, the boy who cleaned the yard, the boy who did errands. This was another world, a life of chatter, of blue indigo, thick white com starch, scallions, hot peppers, coffee beans roasting on a wood fire, a world where many things were done at once. The women hulled peas, ironed clothes, sang, plaited hair, reprimanded the children, and laughed. For me it was the place where I could eat with a spoon instead of a fork, even with my hands, a place where I spoke
Kreyol
instead of French and learned riddles and songs. I preferred staying there to spending time upstairs or at my parents' house, where I had no playmates.

My parents' house stood away from the center of town. Our property was surrounded by almond, mango, and palm trees, a barrier before the vast extension of sugarcane fields. Our closest neighbors were the poor farmers of the area. This was my brothers' realm. My brothers played with the boys their age, climbing trees, carving bows from branches, chasing birds with slingshots, making kites. As a girl I was seldom allowed to play with them. My only playmate and friend was Yanyan, a young
restavek
girl who lived at my grand- mother's house. She was older than me, old enough to be in charge of me and my cousins when they visited, but young enough to play with us. She came on car rides, Sunday outings to the river; we jumped rope and picked mangoes from trees together. Yanyan and I were always together except when I was called for lunch or dinner. I went upstairs, she stayed downstairs in the yard in the maids' quarters. Church was yet another moment of social separation for Yanyan and me. She went to the four o'clock Sunday Mass, the one the priests said at the cathedral for house servants who started their day's work at six in the morning, grinding or brewing coffee to be brought to their employers' bedside by seven. I went to ten o'clock Mass and sat in the front-row pew, paid for by my family and reserved for us. Yanyan's brother and mother visited my grandmother's yard, most often to eat. If my parents were not there, my grandmother would give me permission to join Yanyan and the maids and their families in the evening. If my parents were present, I had to tiptoe my way down the wooden stairs to the back of the house where everyone sat on low chairs and told riddles and stories. The cook was the best narrator. Her stories were all interspersed with songs. All the tales ended with "someone kicked me and that's how I got here to tell you this story." With me, Yanyan spoke a mixture of
Kreyol
and French, with the adults, she only spoke
Kreyol,
fearing their scorn. At the dinner table in my family no one was allowed to speak
Kreyol
and no child could address an adult in the family in
Kreyol.
Our command of French reaffirmed our social status.

One day in March 1963 my father, a factory owner, had to leave the island. A few weeks earlier, he had been arrested by Francois Duva-lier's henchmen while we were attending Sunday Mass. My father and his friends would usually stand in the back of the church and step out right after communion. Before the priest pronounced
"he Missa
est,"
they would already be chatting on the church steps. We noticed my father's absence when the service was over. It was not clear to me why he was arrested. Was it because he had attended the military academy in his youth? The other four taken to the police station that day were men who were loved by everyone, men who'd had no connections to the military. What my father and those men all had in common was that they were light-skinned Haitians, members of the so-called "elite." The next morning all five were freed. Their arrest was a rehearsal for what would follow—Duvalier's reign of terror.

A few weeks after my father's brief detention, he closed his factory in Port-au-Prince and left for New York. My mother, my brothers and sister, and I were to join him there at the end of the school year. In the months in which we were separated, many of our neighbors' houses were burned down and schools often stayed closed. At the end of June our exile began.

New York held no welcome signs for us. We lived in one of the many peripheral cities within the City, in a world made of Cuban and South American exiles, surrounded by white Americans. We moved into a building in Elmhurst, Queens, where two Haitian families, the very first victims of Duvalier's purge, had settled. They had taken refuge in foreign embassies and then found their way to New York. One of them was my mother's cousin. Through him we were able to rent an apartment in an attractive eight-story building with two elevators. Unlike the wide-open spaces we had left on the island where kites had risen into the infinite sky, the apartment building called for hushed voices and quietness. We did not speak in the hallways or in the elevator. When we encountered our white American neighbors, they could not help but stare at us. Their silence was ominous like their stares. I did not associate this with racism until much later. Our very presence, it seemed, disturbed the world they had created for themselves. To them we had no right to these surroundings, to settle on their street. From one day to the next they were all gone, as if they had boarded the same ship. The clean-shaven superintendent—thanks to whom the fountain surrounded with ferns in the lobby hissed all day—left in their wake. The new super wore dirty, sleeveless undershirts and spoke unintelligible English. He did not clean the lobby; the fountain stopped spouting water.

While my brothers, sister, and I were forced to gain quick familiarity with things American, our parents remained suspended between New York and Haiti, the past and the present. Puzzled by events such as semiformals and proms, inviting boys to dance, and wearing corsages on wrists, I received no help at home. I remember writing notes to my teachers and my brothers' teachers for my mother to sign. I became her substitute, speaking to the teachers, buying my younger siblings school uniforms. In the daytime the male adults in our little group were dispersed throughout the city, each busy with his own survival. They traveled huge distances in subway cars while the women, still refusing to eat off of paper plates or bring food home in Styrofoam containers, wept for the loss of home. My mother became a housewife, which meant doing the work the numerous household help had done for her in Haiti. There was very little talking within our apartment walls, as if each one of us was pondering alone on his or her lot in the new spaces we'd come to inhabit. Communication with home was costly and difficult. No direct phone lines to Haiti. No traveling back and forth. We lived with the desire to return.

Six years into our exile, our former house help, who had since migrated, came to visit us. Their fur stoles and fashionable hairstyles indicated that they were making a nice living for themselves. Unlike those of us who were waiting for the Duvalier reign to end in order to go home, they had no intention of returning, no desire to give up material well-being and the advance in social status that they had acquired here. We hugged them, exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about their families and ours, about former neighbors. I wondered about Yanyan. I'd heard that she had gotten pregnant and was living with her mother in a shack not far from the wharf in our hometown. She was among the ones who would never make it to New York.

When our visitors left, my family considered the oddness of it all, the apparent leveling that American society offered, seeing us all as equally black.

There was a club in Port-au-Prince—it probably still exists today— in which the members' skin tone went from white to brown to dark brown. Those of pure African ancestry and those who could not afford the high yearly fees could not belong. It was a place in which people did not need to be introduced to each other, where people were known by their family names. While the children would sit by the pool and order sandwiches, Cokes, and ice cream, their parents would play bridge or tennis. The club's name was Bellevue. My cousins and I spent many Saturday afternoons by the Bellevue pool, which was larger and had a higher diving board than the ones we had in our homes. There and elsewhere children like me were trained to accept our privileged status, to see ourselves as separate from the rest of the population, as if we came from a superior breed. There and elsewhere we learned the nuances in glances which indicate degrees of familiarity or lack of acknowledgment.

I was never aware of the fact that I don't look at people who are considered social inferiors to me in the eyes, until my Italian husband recently pointed it out to me in our home in Naples. It was then that I realized that whiteness was rarely mentioned in my family, blackness often. Dark-skinned people who frequented our homes were hand-picked: my grandfather's best friend whom he saw every day; my mother's school friend and my grandmother's old neighbor who came and went as they pleased. There were others, too, but they had been singled out. In our family, wholesale acceptance of blackness was unthinkable. My mother had an obsession with her lower lip and consequently with mine, reminding me all the time to pull it in, something I found impossible to do. When my hair was loose she called it a
papousserie,
a French term deriving from their descriptions of the people of Papua.