Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (6 page)

BLACK CROWS AND ZOMBIE GIRLS

Barbara Sanon

Gendarme Janeau, the officer at the Casernes de Jeremie—the local military jail house—had been summoned by the neighbors to come save our house from evil. All was quiet, for his two prisoners had been fed their daily dose of cornmeal and beans, so Janeau ran, baton and rifle in hand, to our gate. And there it was, a large black crow circling over our roof. I held on tightly to my mother's skirt to see if it would shield me until some miracle put an end to the bird's targeted prowling. Unable to find another solution, Gendarme Janeau fired into the air. The sound lingered for minutes while I hid myself behind my mother as she screamed.

The black crow bled to death in front of the large oak tree where I often played with my sisters. Gendarme Janeau, still wallowing in his triumph, convinced my mother that the crow was indeed a lustful evil spirit.

"Keep a watch out for it," he told my mother. "If it is restless, it might return. It does not get enough pleasure at night so it comes in the heat when the sun shines brightest to continue its seduction."

My mother, alone in a house with five children and a husband in New York, trembled as she took my hand and led me inside the house. For years, the townspeople would recount the tale of the black bird and Gendarme Janeau's ability to shoot anything that looked him in the eye too directly.

Janeau became the town hero and secretly my terror. That night, I dreamt of the
gendarme
again killing the black crow. I dreamt of his large hands around the black crow's neck as it screeched. In the dream, I draped my mother's skirt to cover the bird's blood on the ground, but the blood seeped through the cloth and Janeau, watching, smirked, amused by my naivete.

The next day, I cringed as I rushed past the Casernes on my way to school, fearing that I would have to stand still, frozen in place, during the Casernes' 8:30 a.m. salute when Gendarme Janeau raised the black-and-red Duvalierist flag that he would kill for.

Every night after that, I saw the shadow of Janeau's hand moving above my head. Somewhere, through the window in the distance, a light would flicker on and off and I would think that it was him reminding me that even in my house, in my own bed, I could not escape him. He became the bogeyman and I was his prisoner. My sister would tell me to close my eyes under the covers in order to prevent him from seeing me.

"Let the bad spirits pass by on their way and not look at us," she would say. "For any contact with them will make us their victims forever." My mother could not help us for she, too, was afraid. So we lay quietly in the dark, waiting for the evil to pass.

A few years later, in my mother's bedroom in New York, I would see the bogeyman again. Like the lustful crow, he, too, appeared in the daytime in the form of my mother's boyfriend—the man who was supposed to replace my father. This man, my mother's boyfriend, wrapped his familiar arms around my frail ten-year-old body, drawing me with his warm smile toward his lap. How paternal he seemed, pretending that he was offering me a warm place to sit—a warm place to be a child. In that moment, as he fondled my body, I decided that I was dead. My body was as ice cold as all the dead relatives' foreheads we children were made to kiss at family wakes.
I
heard voices but they could not hear
me,
for I was choking on the dirt my mother's boyfriend threw on my corpse as his nails kept on digging, digging—restless—until he reached my skeleton.

I was dead but no one realized it. People were too busy reviving the favorite Haitian pastime called political discussion. The ousting of Duvalier and the stories surrounding the event inevitably found their way into all community functions, baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals.

Maybe one day, I thought, there would be stories also told about me, the girl who was attacked by the bogeyman in her own mother's bedroom in broad daylight. There was no room for my own horrors in the midst of the political tales though. Mine was a story that could only be told through silences too horrific to disturb.

When family and friends assembled for gatherings, there was always a little girl there that I would recognize, a girl who would have her head down, her eyes lowered a certain way. I could always experience with her the pain of her bruised genitals hidden under immaculate petticoats that pressed her into her girlhood and kept her there so she would shut up. She was always so quiet, that girl, so confused, so
egare,
that people would joke that she was a zombie. A zombie, who in the midst of the endless political discussions on right and wrong was not allowed to disclose the bad things she swallowed.

In the mythical world, a zombie is someone who is buried alive while comatose and is then revived to serve others in whatever way they want, without questioning. A zombie is someone who has lost her soul, her will, her good angel, someone who can only regain her true self once she's been given a taste of salt. But outside this mythical world, zombies howled for their salt. Whether it was the political prisoners, the protagonists of all the political fables recounted, or the little girls whose secrets I knew too well, all these zombies were howling for their life back. Some of the political prisoners were finally beginning to be heard because of the pressure from a tenacious mass. The little girls I knew, however, were dumped deeper in their coffins by adults who were supposed to have been safeguarding them.

For the girl down the street, whose school principal demanded that she be taken away from her home for a reason none of us wanted to talk about, there was no salt. The principal said she was raped by her stepfather. But there was no mythical element to that story, nothing like the black crow spirit who had come to our house.

At least with Duvalier, we could pinpoint his kind of evil, for he smirked at the howling of the corpses under his feet. But this raped girl? Why did she need to be conquered? Why was she made a zombie? And the other girl I knew, who actually had a child by her uncle, why her? Why even talk about them, these zombie girls? Their tales were not mythical enough. Their zombification was harder to explain.

And me, without even a clear narrative, without a scar as obvious as those of the other girls, or of the political victims who could point to their burnt flesh or bullet wounds, what to make of my story? A man who had vowed to my mother and our family that he would protect us from the abandonment of my natural father, chose instead to impose his need for power on me. So, I became possessed by my fright and my shame. I had become the zombie at the dinner table, at the baptisms, the wedding receptions, the funerals. I had become the girl who sat quietly with her head lowered, her eyes on the ground, and her silence intact.

I was not alone though. We had a collective, we zombies. We began to know each other. At parties, in school, in our nightmares, we dreamt of saving each other. In some cases, this zombie state was even inherited. We were children of zombie women, a matriarchal line of silence. Whether it was 1957 or 1987, our situation had not changed. Our zombie dance began with a first outing, our first lace dress for church, our first communion, our first dance. It started with the immaculate way the white talcum powder around a girl's neck suppressed the heat and ended with a dress torn and soiled with a patch of blood. It ended with our mothers chanting softly, hoping a kinder, less lustful spirit would save us both. It ended with our mothers' careful sewing of undergarments and secretly scrubbing blood off panties long before we ever reached puberty. It ended with our mothers washing, bleaching, even boiling our panties in order to make their husbands, their cousins, their lovers, their town judges, their military officers, seem clean.

Did the zombie mothers fight? Indeed they did. They wrapped their hands around their bodies, and tightened their stomachs with layers of cloth in order to press the pain inside. They stuck wire hangers inside their young daughters and scraped the evil out. They fought with their heads lowered, their eyes fixed on the ground, using as weapons plaited hair, bright satin ribbons, dresses layered in taffeta and lace.

Our nightmares became our zombie calls. We told ourselves tales of little girls who were taken by evil spirits and never seen again until they returned as skeletons, walking, tiptoeing, dancing with their families' lies.
"Aba
Duvalier!" they shouted even as the cries of so many little girls went unheard at night.

Now I know why I dreamt of covering the dead crow with my mother's dress after it died. Now I know why even my mother's large beautiful skirt could not contain the blood. Now I know why Gendarme Janeau could smirk and force me to hide. He knew then what I didn't know. There was no place to hide.

So now in my dreams, the dead crow killed by Gendarme Janeau resurrects itself over and over again as all spirits do. Roaming endlessly, it will not die, but will try to settle near yet another black oak, seeking peace.

MIGRATION

ANOTHER ODE TO SALT

Danielle Legros Georges

We navigate snow not ours

but grown used to, one cold foot

over another, adopt accoutrements:

a red scarf, wind-wrapped and tight,

boots, their soles teethed like sharks,

shackling our ebon ankles, the weight

of wool coats borrowed

from
our ancestors, the Gauls.
*
Masters at this now,

we circumvent ice

as we do time, reach home.
The salt you bend to cast

parts the snow around us.

I bend and think

of a primary sea,

harbors of danger and history,

passing through the middle

in boats a-sail in furious storms,

cargo heavy,

of
mysteres,
renamed,

submerged and sure,

riding dark waves,

floating long waves

to the other side of the water,

and the other side

and the next.

AMERICA, WE ARE HERE

Dany Laferriere

I was trying to write a book and survive in America at the same time. (I'll never figure out how that ambition wormed its way into me.) One of those two pursuits had to go. Time to choose, man. But a problem arose: I wanted everything. That's the way drowning men are. I wanted a novel, girls (fascinating girls, the products of modernity, weight-loss diets, the mad longings of older men), alcohol, and laughter. My due—that's all. That's what America had promised me. I know America has made a lot of promises to a large number of people, but I was intent on making her keep her word. I was furious at her, and I don't like to be double-crossed. At the time, I'm sure you'll remember, at the beginning of the 1980s (so long ago!), the bars in any North American city were chock-full of confused, aging hippies—empty-eyed Africans who always had a drum within easy striking distance—the type never changes, no matter the location or the decade—Caribbeans in search of their identity, starving white poetesses who lived off alfalfa sprouts and Hindu mythology, aggressive young black girls who knew they didn't stand a chance in this insane game of roulette because the black men were only into white women, and the white guys into money and power. Late in the evening, I wandered through these lunar landscapes where sensations had long since replaced sentiment. I took notes. I scribbled away in the washrooms of crummy bars. I carried on endless conversations until dawn with starving intellectuals, out-of-work actresses, philosophers without influence, tubercular poetesses, the bottomest of the bottom dogs. I jumped into that pool once in a while and found myself in a strange bed with a girl I didn't remember having courted (I left the bar last night with the black-haired girl, I'm sure I did, so what's this bottle-blonde with the green fingernails doing here?) But I never took drugs. God had given me the gift of loud, powerful, happy contagious laughter, a child's laugh that drove girls wild. They wanted to laugh so badly, and there wasn't much to laugh about back then. When I immigrated to North America, I made sure I brought that laughter in my battered metal suitcase, an ancestral legacy. We always laughed a lot around my house. My grandfather's deep laughter would shake the walls. I laughed, I drank wine, I made love with the energy of a child who's been locked inside a candy shop, and I wrote it all down. As soon as the girl scampered off to the bathroom, I would start scribbling down notes. The edge of the bed or the corner of a table was my desk. I'd note down a good line, a sensual walk, a pained smile, all the details of life. Everything fascinated me. I wrote down everything that moved, and things never stopped moving, believe me. All around me, the world (the girl, the dress on the floor, my underwear lost in the sheets, that long naked back moving toward the stereo, then Bob Marley's music), the elements of my universe turned at top speed. How could words halt the flight of time, girls wheeling away, desire burning anew? Often I would fall asleep with my head against my old Remington, asking myself those unanswerable questions. Am I the troubadour of low-rent America, always on the edge of an overdose, up against the walls, handcuffs slapped on, with two cops breathing down my neck? America discounting her life, counting her pennies, the America of immigrants, blacks, and poor white girls who've lost their way? America of empty eyes and pallid dawn. In the end, I wrote that damned novel, and America was forced, as least as far as I was concerned, to come through on a few of her promises. I know she gives more to some than they need; with others, she swipes the hunk of stale bread from their clenched fists. But I made her pay at least a third of her debt. I'm naive, I know, I can see the audience smiling, but my mental system needs to believe in this victory, as tiny as it may be. A third of a victory. For others, not a penny of the debt has been paid. America owes an enormous amount to third world youth. I'm not just talking about historical debt (slavery, the rape of natural resources, the balance of payments, etc.), there's a sexual debt, too. Everything we've been promised by magazines, posters, the movies, television. America is a happy hunting ground, that's what gets beaten into our heads every day, come and stalk the most delicious morsels (young American beauties with long legs, pink mouths, superior smiles), come and pick the wild fruit of this new Promised Land. For you, young men of the third world, America will be a doe quivering under the buckshot of your caresses. The call went around the world, and we heard it, even the blue men of the desert heard it. Remember the global village? They've got American TV in the middle of the Sahara. Westward, ho! It was a new gold rush. And when each new arrival showed up, he was told, "Sorry, the party's over." I can still picture the sad smile of a Bedouin, old in years but still vigorous (remember, brother, those horny old goats from the Old Testament), who had sold his camel to attend the party. I met up with all of them in a tiny bar on Park Avenue. While you're waiting for the next fiesta, the Manpower counselor told us, you have to work. There's work for everyone in America (the old carrot and stick, brother). We've got you coming and going. What? Work? Our Bedouin didn't come here to work. He crossed the desert and sailed the seas because he'd been told that in America the girls were free and easy. Oh, no, you didn't quite understand! What didn't we understand from that showy sexuality, that profusion of naked bodies, that total disclosure, that Hollywood heat? You should know we have some very sophisticated devices in the desert; we can tune in America. The resolution is exceptional, and there's no interference in the Sahara. In the evening, we gather in our tents lit by the cathode screen and watch you. Watching how you do what you do is a great pleasure for us. Some pretty girl is always laughing on a beach somewhere. The next minute, a big blond guy shows up and jumps her. She slips between his fingers, and he chases her into the surf. She fights, but he holds her tight and both of them sink to the bottom. Every evening it's the same menu, with slight variations. The sea is bluer, the girls blonder, the guys more muscled. All our dreams revolve around this life of ease. That's what we want: the easy life. Those breasts and asses and teeth and laughter—after a while, it started affecting our libido. What could be more natural? And now, here we are in America, and you dare tell us that we didn't understand? Understand what? I ask the question again. What were we supposed to have understood? You made us mad with desire. Today, we stand before you, a long chain of men (in our country, adventure is the realm of men), penises erect, appetites insatiable, ready for the battle of the sexes and the races. We'll fight to the finish, America.