“Leave your shovel behind the house,” Miriam had instructed him before the funeral. That thing was like an extension of his hand. He carried it everywhere, always hoping someone would hire him. “You can start tonight,” Miriam had added, to his delight. She had read the impatience in his eyes, though she was the one who could no longer wait once word had reached her ear about some sneaky schoolgirl who had dropped her newborn into a nearby latrine. A suspicious houseboy had followed the trail of blood from the outhouse to the girl’s thighs, and she’d confessed. Jean-Jean almost slipped into the hole and died himself, when frantic neighbors sent him down there with a bucket on a rope to try and scoop out the remains.
“I remember your mother well,” Jean-Jean said. The thought of getting paid in just a few hours had cured his stutter for now. “She was a good person.” Gwo Manman always had a kind word for him. He would do anything, anything at all, for the Malbranche family.
“We need ice,” Miriam told him.
“I’ll get it,” replied Jean-Jean. For once, no one seemed to care where his hands had been.
Miriam embraced her sister, saying, “Pran kouraj. You did what you thought was best.” She lifted up her hand and her voice: “A toast to Gwo Manman!”
Someone gave Miriam a fresh bottle of rum. She put it to her mouth and drank. She passed the bottle to Foufoune. Do this in remembrance of me.
“To Gwo Manman,” Foufoune said. The liquid burned her throat on its way down. She was not a drinker. Her petite frame had never been able to meet rum on its own terms. A single sip would send her head spinning. But for Gwo Manman … just this once …
When Jean-Jean returned with the ice, the disgruntled mourner thanked him and drank and toasted for several hours before he stumbled out of the house. Foufoune, too, continued to toast her departed mother until her stomach churned and her thoughts began to swirl. Everyone was now stumbling with five-star grief. Foufoune teetered toward the bathroom. It was occupied, but she could not wait.
“Of course,” Miriam said when Foufoune, trembling like a little girl, asked her sister to escort her to that wooden stall behind her house. It had been years since she last used it, but if memory served her correctly, it would be pitch-black inside and densely populated with flying roaches. She would have waited, if she could have, but the rum had instigated a riot inside her stomach and everything she’d ever eaten in her life was seconds away from a violent uprising.
Miriam listened as Foufoune retched into the thirty-foot drop.
“Water.” Foufoune could barely say the word. She would splash her face with water; surely that would make her feel better.
“Yes,” Miriam responded. “I’ll get you some.”
Miriam returned to the house for a pitcher. Jean-Jean was leaning against the wall, an anxious look in his eyes. The last of the stumbling mourners kissed her goodbye and said, “Be strong.”
Miriam filled the pitcher and headed back to the outhouse.
Foufoune slurred something Miriam did not understand as she bent over the latrine, vomiting—too intoxicated to care about the stench or the roaches. Her chignon was still intact, Miriam noted.
The back of Foufoune’s neck was bare, except for the heart-shaped links of a gold chain which Miriam had given to Gwo Manman one Mother’s Day—purchased with money she should have used to extract a molar that was so infected it ended up costing her half of her bottom teeth. Miriam wondered if Foufoune had taken the necklace off their mother’s neck after she died, or if Gwo Manman had willingly given it away.
Without taking her eyes off the gold hearts, Miriam gripped the pitcher in a tight fist and drenched Foufoune in a vengeful baptism.
Stunned, Foufoune turned to ask why. In that second, Miriam reached outside the door and wrapped her fingers around the wooden handle of Jean-Jean’s shovel. She shifted her weight and steadied herself on her callused heels, leaning back just so. As deftly as stirring lumps out of her cornmeal, Miriam delivered a blow so precise that Foufoune’s chignon came undone. She fell sideways over the latrine’s mouth. Miriam hit her again and again.
“This is for Gwo Manman.”
Blood streamed out of Foufoune’s mouth. Her eyelids pulled back in blinding shock. Miriam snatched off the heartshaped necklace, and with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, worked Foufoune’s ever-so-svelte little frame into the hole. Foufoune’s body went through with minimal force, landing with a sound as faint as a serving of rice and beans onto a Styrofoam takeout container.
Miriam held the necklace in a clenched fist, peering into the darkness. She tried but could not see her sister below.
Thick mud clogged Foufoune’s mouth, her nostrils, her ears. Her head was heavy with mud—was it mud? She could not move her legs. Dear God, help me, she tried to say, but the words could not make it past the gunk in her throat. She attempted to lift her hands toward the strange dappled light filtering out of the darkness, but the movement caused her to sink even deeper.
Miriam covered the hole with a sheet of plywood. Soon Jean-Jean would pour concrete, turning the latrine into a memory. She sighed heavily as she returned to the house. Jean-Jean was standing like a shadow on the porch, waiting for her to give him the word. The sooner he started, the sooner he would be done. The sooner he would be paid.
“Everyone is gone,” he said.
“Then get to work,” Miriam told him. It had been a long day. She was tired, but took comfort in knowing that her mother and sister had both returned home to her in Puits Blain. This time to stay.
DEPARTURE LOUNGE
BY NADINE PINEDE
Cap Haitien
Drenched in sweat. A bad idea to wear black cotton, even if it hides stains. A worse idea to lie to my boss at The Well-Seasoned Traveler and tell him I’m fluent in Creole. So he booked me as a private tour guide for Miranda Wolcott, who has her own show on the Food Network. The best thing about her show is that huge house in Westport. Now she’s writing a cookbook on “Caribbean fusion,” and she wants to include Haiti.
I’ve been waiting at Toussaint Louverture International Airport an hour to meet her flight coming in from Kennedy before we fly north together to Cap Haitien. We have only three days, which is way too short, but Miranda has to be back in time to tape her Easter special. We’re traveling with two Haitians from Plant for Peace, some nonprofit group. Not that anyone can seriously believe planting trees can change the world. Anyway, they’re taking care of security, plus the van and driver.
There was no way I would tell anyone my real reason for coming. What could I say? My dead grandmother told me to do it? It started like this: A few months ago, my phone rang in the middle of the night. I picked it up and heard those bleeps you get when someone’s trying to send you a fax. So I lurched to the fax machine, thinking it must be a last-minute itinerary. All I got was a blank sheet.
First thing in the morning, I called New York and asked them what was so important that they tried to fax me in the middle of the night. Josette, the new executive assistant from Paris, was as charming as usual, but she insisted no one from the office had sent me anything yesterday. She liked to speak French to me so she could correct my pronunciation. A nice way of feeling instantly superior.
Then my mother called. She’d just been to church to light a candle for Grandmère Lucille who died two years ago on that day. We talked about her for a while. I was just about to hang up when out of curiosity I asked her what time of day Grandmère Lucille died.
“Three-thirty. Why?”
“In the morning, right?”
“Of course. You don’t remember how we tried your cell?” I’d turned it off after a fourteen-hour day dealing with one client’s stolen luggage and another’s food poisoning, and then that valerian tea had knocked me out. One of my biggest regrets.
“No reason. I have to go now. Love you. Bye.” I looked at the fax. The time stamp was three-thirty a.m.
The next night I dreamed Grandmère Lucille was angry with me, but she w
ouldn’t tell me why. Then I dreamed she was crossing the street, only it was a street in Haiti, and she was waving over at me to join her, but my street was in New York and there was too much traffic. When it was finally safe for me to cross over, she was gone.
After a month of this, I couldn’t take it anymore.
Which is why I lied to get this job. That, and the fact that bankruptcy is staring me in the face. And I have no idea how I’ll make it through this week.
The news is bad. Haiti is suffering the worst drought in years. The rainy season is months away, yet people still pray for a miracle. Haiti’s floods are as violent as its politics, sweeping away entire villages. What used to be forest is now something more like a desert. There’s a Haitian proverb for hard, brutal rain during bright sunshine. The devil is beating his mother. Grandmère Lucille explained that one for me. The sunshine is the devil laughing, and the raindrops are his mother’s tears.
You’d think with all this humidity there would be rain. I seem to be sweating more than I ever have in my life. I scan the airport departure lounge for a ceiling fan because the airconditioning, if it ever existed, is kaput. Where the hell is Miranda Wolcott? Her flight landed an hour go. I’ve left three messages on her cell. Customs wouldn’t hold her up that long. The way things are going, we’ll miss the last flight today. Driving to Cap Haitien is out, thanks to illegal roadblocks and gangs that specialize in trailing cars from the airport to rob them at gunpoint. Or kidnap the people and hold them for ransom. I’m glad we have security.
I ask Manuel if we’ll really manage to do everything on the itinerary. He’s an agronomist and the program manager at Plant for Peace. Nice guy from what I can tell so far. The three of us will fly north, via Aérogare Guy Malary, to meet Alexis Auguste, the director, and visit some co-ops. Then we’ll drive to the border to meet a few farmers before we head to the Central Plateau to the training center in Papay. Manuel tells me not to worry. His eyes seem genuinely calm as he pats my hand. I’ve seen that kind of look before, mainly on blissed-out Buddhists and born-again Christians. Actually, he looks a bit like my older brother Philippe, the one my mother worships. The Saint of Our Family. Youngest partner in his law firm who works pro bono for Haitian detainees. The only thing he can’t do is walk on water. Too bad I can’t stand his Polish wife.
“On the last day, we leave at dawn,” Manuel says.
“Why are we missing the big march?” It doesn’t make any sense to me, until Manuel gives me a tight smile and changes the subject. My guess is someone doesn’t want the march to happen, and Manuel is expecting trouble. I don’t really want to know more. Politics has never been my thing.
I’m sitting right under a ceiling fan to cool off and look halfway presentable when Miranda finally shows up. Maybe I should use this time to rehearse my script. Did she read any of the books I suggested? Did she watch The Comedians? Okay, so it was filmed in Africa, but Graham Greene got a lot of details right. Nearly fifty years later, the airport’s murals and the earnest slogans could be the same, except for the face of the president. The tarmac is still pockmarked asphalt that shimmers in the heat. The mountains are dusty from erosion. Men dressed in starched white shirts wait outside the airport terminal, dreaming of departure.
Miranda first told my boss that she wanted to “see some real voodoo.” Vodou, I corrected her by e-mail. What did I really know about it? The last time I was here, I was just a girl. “Baby Doc” had recently been exiled, and people were hopeful about the future. My family decided it was safe again to visit.
Despite Haiti’s tragic history, or perhaps because of it, we were always proud of where we came from. The world’s first black republic. The second republic in the New World, after the U.S. The first country created from a successful slave revolution in 1804, boycotted for decades should any other slaves get the same idea.
Back then, when we arrived at the airport, a smiling crowd of black and brown faces lined the balcony overlooking the tarmac, waving as we disembarked and made the long hot walk to the terminal. I thought the crowd was there just for us, filled with our relatives who wanted to welcome us back. This must be what it feels like to be home.
Politics and Vodou were all most people knew about Haiti in those days, and they were both steeped in blood. The politics were the reason my parents had left and couldn’t go back. One uncle was assassinated, another thrown in jail for a year. More than that they wouldn’t say.
They didn’t talk much about Vodou either, since we were raised as Catholics (although my father only went to church on Christmas Eve and Easter). My mother did tell me some stories, but just as I’d get all caught up in it and suspend my disbelief, she’d let me down with: “Of course, it’s all nonsense.” For months before our family trip to Haiti, I’d been begging my parents to let us attend a Vodou ceremony because I thought it would be a cool thing to tell my friends. So they finally relented. I’d been looking forward to that night for a long time. We all went together, with Philippe on one side of me and my mother on the other.
The Vodou priest, Monsieur Duval, began by explaining that this was a real ceremony, and that we should forget most of what we’d heard or seen in the movies.
“I will not stick any pins into any dolls,” he said smiling, “and if you behave, I won’t turn anyone into a zombie.”
I rolled my eyes when the crowd laughed. The drummers began slowly. From the left of the amphitheater came a single file of men and women dressed in white, doing a two-step meringue shuffle to the beat of the drum. Duval picked up a bottle from his altar. He took a swig and sprayed it out into the air.
“Do you think it’s rum?” Philippe’s eyes were bright with excitement.
“I think it’s gross.”
Monsieur Duval was tall, with the broad-muscled shoulders of an athlete and smooth caramel skin. He would have looked just as good in a designer suit as in the white robe of the ougan. He probably still had some business suits from his days as a chemical engineer, before his father summoned him back to Haiti to assume the mantle. My parents knew him as a student in Paris, where he was a real bon vivant, popular with the French girls he took dancing to all the best jazz clubs.
The believers were now in the middle of the room, chanting and clapping between the drumbeats. Their luminous faces seemed even darker in the candlelight. Duval pointed to one of the complicated line drawings on the dirt floor. To me it looked like a cross standing on a coffin. “These are vèvès, which we draw with cornmeal and wood ash. Each lwa has his or her own.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Duval set fire to a small pile of twigs near the vèvès. The smoke snaked along the poto mitan, the middle post holding up the temple. Grandmère Lucille would always say women were the poto mitan of the world. Then one day I asked her why all the priests at our church were men. Her face lit up and she hugged me tight, like she was proud of me.
Duval closed his eyes and muttered a few words while the believers circled him, still doing that two-step. The hypnotic chanting became a call-and-response, lulling me to the edge of sleep. I rubbed my eyes and opened them wide.
“Look at that!” I cried out, and my mother hushed me.
A woman had stopped right in front of us. She had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a kind of midnight-blue, and her arms and legs were trembling in spasms. She threw back her head and screamed. I grabbed my brother’s arm. No way would I let my mother see me get scared.
“What’s happening?” I whispered to Philippe.
“She’s possessed, in a trance.”
I glanced at my mother and her expression of calm bemusement.
Now the woman was bent over, still shaking, lunging toward Duval. She grabbed his bottle from the floor and drank from it. We all gasped when we heard the sound of glass breaking and saw her chewing.
“No way,” said Philippe. My mouth hung open in disbelief.
The candles glowed brighter, as if fueled with gasoline. The possessed woman picked up a piece of wood
from the fire and put it in her mouth. I flinched but didn’t turn away. A stream of black and red trickled from her lips, inching its way to the white of her collar.
Please don’t let her come over here. I should never have insisted on sitting in the front. Now she was bent over again near the fire. Only when she turned to face us did we see the white rooster she held by its feet, which she began to swing in circles above her head.
Oh no. Not that.
It was all over in less than a second. Blood gushed from its severed head, and the rooster’s feet seemed to tremble and kick in her hands. The crowd let out a collective groan with hands over mouths. The gods ride the possessed like horses, Monsieur Duval had explained, and of course they demand sacrifices. The rooster’s lifeless corpse was laid to rest on the vèvè by the fire.
I had always been the squeamish one, letting Philippe hack the family of snakes in our rose garden with a hoe, or drown my mouse Ivory, white like that rooster, in a jar of alcohol when it grew a huge tumor in its neck. Later I would laugh and pretend I’d never been scared. I stared at the ground to the stop the awful rollercoaster in my stomach. If only I could manage not to throw up. By the time I realized Philippe was nudging me, it was too late. Here she was. The possessed woman’s mouth was splattered with blood and soot. She was looking right at me, still holding a charred piece of wood from the fire.
The audience was quiet, the drums muted. She stood in silence in front of me, as if she could hear my heart pounding. She took my right hand. Her eyes were strange, like a tunnel of darkness, but suddenly I wasn’t afraid anymore because it felt like I had stepped out of my skin and was floating to the ceiling, watching all of this from above. She turned my hand over and using a sooty twig, she marked my palm with an X.
I looked down at the mark, then back at her, thinking she would say something to me, but she dropped my hand and spun away, joining the believers in their hypnotic shuffle around the fire. A few minutes later, she fainted and was carried off. The drumming died out and the candles were extinguished. The house lights came on to reveal the bare earth spattered red.