The roads to the city were covered with sharp pebbles only half buried in the thick dust. I chose to go barefoot, as my mother had always done on her visits to the Massacre River, the river separating Haiti from the Spanish-speaking country that she had never allowed me to name because I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living there.
The sun was just rising when I got to the capital. The first city person I saw was an old woman carrying ajar full of leeches. Her gaze was glued to the Madonna tucked under my arm.
"May I see it?" she asked.
I held out the small statue that had been owned by my family ever since it was given to my great-great-great-grandmother Defile by a French man who had kept her as a slave.
The old woman's index finger trembled as it moved toward the Madonna's head. She closed her eyes at the moment of contact, her wrists shaking.
"Where are you from?" she asked. She had layers of 'respectable' wrinkles on her face, the kind my mother might also have one day, if she has a chance to survive.
"I am from Ville Rose," I said, "the city of painters and poets, the coffee city, with beaches where the sand is either black or white, but never mixed together, where the fields are endless and sometimes the cows are yellow like cornmeal."
The woman put the jar of leeches under her arm to keep them out of the sun.
"You're here to see a prisoner?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I know where you can buy some very good food for this person."
She led me by the hand to a small alley where a girl was selling fried pork and plantains wrapped in brown paper. I bought some meat for my mother after asking the cook to fry it once more and then sprinkle it with spiced cabbage.
The yellow prison building was like a fort, as large and strong as in the days when it was used by the American marines who had built it. The Americans taught us how to build prisons. By the end of the 1915 occupation, the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings of flame.
The prison yard was as quiet as a cave when a young Haitian guard escorted me there to wait. The smell of the fried pork mixed with that of urine and excrement was almost unbearable. I sat on a pile of bricks, trying to keep the Madonna from sliding through my fingers. I dug my buttocks farther into the bricks, hoping perhaps that my body might sink down to the ground and disappear before my mother emerged as a ghost to greet me.
The other prisoners had not yet woken up. All the better, for I did not want to see them, these bone-thin women with shorn heads, carrying clumps of their hair in their bare hands, as they sought the few rays of sun-shine that they were allowed each day.
My mother had grown even thinner since the last time I had seen her. Her face looked like the gray of a late evening sky. These days, her skin barely clung to her bones, falling in layers, flaps, on her face and neck. The prison guards watched her more closely because they thought that the wrinkles resulted from her taking off her skin at night and then putting it back on in a hurry, before sunrise. This was why Manman's sentence had been extended to life. And when she died, her remains were to be burnt in the prison yard, to prevent her spirit from wandering into any young innocent bodies.
I held out the fried pork and plantains to her. She uncovered the food and took a peek before grimacing, as though the sight of the meat nauseated her. Still she took it and put it in a deep pocket in a very loose fitting white dress that she had made herself from the cloth that I had brought her on my last visit.
I said nothing. Ever since the morning of her arrest, I had not been able to say anything to her. It was as though I became mute the moment I stepped into the prison yard. Sometimes I wanted to speak, yet I was not able to open my mouth or raise my tongue. I wondered if she saw my struggle in my eyes.
She pointed at the Madonna in my hands, opening her arms to receive it. I quickly handed her the statue. She smiled. Her teeth were a dark red, as though caked with blood from the initial beating during her arrest. At times, she seemed happier to see the Madonna than she was to see me.
She rubbed the space under the Madonna's eyes, then tasted her fingertips, the way a person tests for salt in salt water.
"Has she cried?" Her voice was hoarse from lack of use. With every visit, it seemed to get worse and worse. I was afraid that one day, like me, she would not be able to say anything at all.
I nodded, raising my index finger to show that the Madonna had cried a single tear. She pressed the statue against her chest as if to reward the Madonna and then, suddenly, broke down and began sobbing herself.
I reached over and patted her back, the way one burps a baby. She continued to sob until a guard came and nudged her, poking the barrel of his rifle into her side. She raised her head, keeping the Madonna lodged against her chest as she forced a brave smile.
"They have not treated me badly," she said. She smoothed her hands over her bald head, from her fore-head to the back of her neck. The guards shaved her head every week. And before the women went to sleep, the guards made them throw tin cups of cold water at one another so that their bodies would not be able to muster up enough heat to grow those wings made of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath.
Manman pulled the meat and plantains out of her pocket and started eating a piece to fill the silence. Her normal ration of food in the prison was bread and water, which is why she was losing weight so rapidly.
"Sometimes the food you bring me, it lasts for months at a time," she said. "I chew it and swallow my saliva, then I put it away and then chew it again. It lasts a very long time this way."
A few of the other women prisoners walked out into the yard, their chins nearly touching their chests, their shaved heads sunk low on bowed necks. Some had large boils on their heads. One, drawn by the fresh smell of fried pork, came to sit near us and began pulling the scabs from the bruises on her scalp, a line of blood drip-ping down her back.
All of these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire. A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of causing the death of a child. A few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed.
I remembered so clearly the day Manman was arrest-ed. We were new to the city and had been sleeping on a cot at a friend's house. The friend had a sick baby who was suffering with colic. Every once in a while, Manman would wake up to look after the child when the mother was so tired that she no longer heard her son's cries.
One morning when I woke up, Manman was gone. There was the sound of a crowd outside. When I rushed out I saw a group of people taking my mother away. Her face was bleeding from the pounding blows of rocks and sticks and the fists of strangers. She was being pulled along by two policemen, each tugging at one of her arms as she dragged her feet. The woman we had been staying with carried her dead son by the legs. The policemen made no efforts to stop the mob that was beating my mother.
"Lougarou, witch, criminal!" they shouted.
I dashed into the street, trying to free Manman from the crowd. I wasn't even able to get near her.
I followed her cries to the prison. Her face was swollen to three times the size that it had been. She had to drag herself across the clay floor on her belly when I saw her in the prison cell. She was like a snake, some-one with no bones left in her body. I was there watching when they shaved her head for the first time. At first I thought they were doing it so that the open gashes on her scalp could heal. Later, when I saw all the other women in the yard, I realized that they wanted to make them look like crows, like men.
Now, Manman sat with the Madonna pressed against her chest, her eyes staring ahead, as though she was looking into the future. She had never talked very much about the fut
ure. She had always believed more in the past.
When I was five years old, we went on a pilgrimage to the Massacre River, which I had expected to be still crimson with blood, but which was as clear as any water that I had ever seen. Manman had taken my hand and pushed it into the river, no farther than my wrist. When we dipped our hands, I thought that the dead would reach out and haul us in, but only our own faces stared back at us, one indistinguishable from the other.
With our hands in the water, Manman spoke to the sun. "Here is my child, Josephine. We were saved from the tomb of this river when she was still in my womb. You spared us both, her and me, from this river where I lost my mother."
My mother had escaped El Generalissimo's soldiers, leaving her own mother behind. From the Haitian side of the river, she could still see the soldiers chopping up her mother's body and throwing it into the river along with many others.
We went to the river many times as I was growing up. Every year my mother would invite a few more women who had also lost their mothers there.
Until we moved to the city, we went to the river every year on the first of November. The women would all dress in white. My mother would hold my hand tightly as we walked toward the water. We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze. We came from the bottom of that river where the blood never stops flowing, where my mother's dive toward life—her swim among all those bodies slaughtered in flight—gave her those wings of flames. The river was the place where it had all begun.
'At least I gave birth to my daughter on the night that my mother was taken from me," she would say. 'At least you came out at the right moment to take my mother's place."
Now in the prison yard, my mother was trying to avoid the eyes of the guard peering down at her.
"One day I will tell you the secret of how the Madonna cries," she said.
I reached over and touched the scabs on her fingers. She handed me back the Madonna.
I know how the Madonna cries. I have watched from hiding how my mother plans weeks in advance for it to happen. She would put a thin layer of wax and oil in the hollow space of the Madonna's eyes and when the wax melted, the oil would roll down the little face shedding a more perfect tear than either she and I could ever cry.
"You go. Let me watch you leave," she said, sitting stiffly.
I kissed her on the cheek and tried to embrace her, but she quickly pushed me away.
"You will please visit me again soon," she said.
I nodded my head yes.
"Let your flight be joyful," she said, "and mine too."
I nodded and then ran out of the yard, fleeing before I could flood the front of my dress with my tears. There had been too much crying already.
Manman had a cough the next time I visited her. She sat in a corner of the yard, and as she trembled in the sun, she clung to the Madonna.
"The sun can no longer warm God's creatures," she said. "What has this world come to when the sun can no longer warm God's creatures?"
I wanted to wrap my body around hers, but I knew she would not let me.
"God only knows what I have got under my skin from being here. I may die of tuberculosis, or perhaps there are worms right now eating me inside."
When I went again, I decided that I would talk. Even if the words made no sense, I would try to say something to her. But before I could even say hello, she was crying. When I handed her the Madonna, she did not want to take it. The guard was looking directly at us. Manman still had a fever that made her body tremble. Her eyes had the look of delirium.
"Keep the Madonna when I am gone," she said. "When I am completely gone, maybe you will have someone to take my place. Maybe you will have a person. Maybe you will have some flesh to console you. But if you don't, you will always have the Madonna."
"Manman, did you fly?" I asked her.
She did not even blink at my implied accusation.
"Oh, now you talk," she said, "when I am nearly gone. Perhaps you don't remember. All the women who came with us to the river, they could go to the moon and back if that is what they wanted."
A week later, almost to the same day, an old woman stopped by my house in Ville Rose on her way to Port-au-Prince. She came in the middle of the night, wearing the same white dress that the women usually wore on their trips to dip their hands in the river.
"Sister," the old woman said from the doorway. "I have come for you."
"I don't know you," I said.
"You do know me," she said. "My name is Jacqueline. I have been to the river with you."
I had been by the river with many people. I remembered a Jacqueline who went on the trips with us, but I was not sure this was the same woman. If she were really from the river, she would know. She would know all the things that my mother had said to the sun as we sat with our hands dipped in the water, questioning each other, making up codes and disciplines by which we could always know who the other daughters of the river were.
"Who are you?" I asked her.
"I am a child of that place," she answered. "I come from that long trail of blood."
"Where are you going?"
"I am walking into the dawn."
"Who are you?"
"I am the first daughter of the first star."
"Where do you drink when you're thirsty?"
"I drink the tears from the Madonna's eyes."
'And if not there?"
"I drink the dew."
"And if you can't find dew?"
"I drink from the rain before it falls."
"If you can t drink there?"
"I drink from the turtle's hide."
"How did you find your way to me?"
"By the light of the mermaid's comb."
"Where does your mother come from?"
"Thunderbolts, lightning, and all things that soar."
"Who are you?"
"I am the flame and the spark by which my mother lived."
"Where do you come from?"
"I come from the puddle of that river."
"Speak to me."
"You hear my mother who speaks through me. She is the shadow that follows my shadow. The flame at the tip of my candle. The ripple in the stream where I wash my face. Yes. I will eat my tongue if ever I whisper that name, the name of that place across the river that took my mother from me."
I knew then that she had been with us, for she knew all the answers to the questions I asked.
"I think you do know who I am," she said, staring deeply into the pupils of my eyes. "I know who you are. You are Josephine. And your mother knew how to make the Madonna cry."
I let Jacqueline into the house. I offered her a seat in the rocking chair, gave her a piece of hard bread and a cup of cold coffee.
"Sister, I do not want to be the one to tell you," she said, "but your mother is dead. If she is not dead now, then she will be when we get to Port-au-Prince. Her blood calls to me from the ground. Will you go with me to see her? Let us go to see her."
We took a mule for most of the trip. Jacqueline was not strong enough to make the whole journey on foot. I brought the Madonna with me, and Jacqueline took a small bundle with some black rags in it.
When we got to the city, we went directly to the prison gates. Jacqueline whispered Manman s name to a guard and waited for a response.
"She will be ready for burning this afternoon," the guard said.
My blood froze inside me. I lowered my head as the news sank in.
"Surely, it is not that much a surprise," Jacqueline said, stroking my shoulder. She had become rejuvenated, as though strengthened by the correctness of her prediction.
"We only want to visit her cell," Jacqueline said to the guard. "We hope to take her personal things away."
The guard seemed too tired to argue, or perhaps he saw in Jacqueline's face traces of some long-dead female
relative whom he had not done enough to please while she was still alive.
He took us to the cell where my mother had spent the last year. Jacqueline entered first, and then I fol-lowed. The room felt damp, the clay breaking into small muddy chunks under our feet.
I inhaled deeply to keep my lungs from aching. Jacqueline said nothing as she carefully walked around the women who sat like statues in different corners of the cell. There were six of them. They kept their arms close to their bodies, like angels hiding their wings. In the middle of the cell was an arrangement of sand and pebbles in the shape of a cross for my mother. Each woman was either wearing or holding something that had belonged to her.
One of them clutched a pillow as she stared at the Madonna. The woman was wearing my mother's dress, the large white dress that had become like a tent on Manman.
I walked over to her and asked, "What happened?"
"Beaten down in the middle of the yard," she whispered.
"Like a dog," said another woman.
"Her skin, it was too loose," said the woman wearing my mother's dress. "They said prison could not cure her."
The woman reached inside my mother's dress pock-et and pulled out a handful of chewed pork and handed it to me. I motioned her hand away.
"No no, I would rather not."
She then gave me the pillow, my mother's pillow. It was open, half filled with my mother's hair. Each time they shaved her head, my mother had kept the hair for her pillow. I hugged the pillow against my chest, feeling some of the hair rising in clouds of dark dust into my nostrils.
Jacqueline took a long piece of black cloth out of her bundle and wrapped it around her belly.
"Sister," she said, "life is never lost, another one always comes up to replace the last. Will you come watch when they burn the body?"
"What would be the use?" I said.
"They will make these women watch, and we can keep them company."