When Jacqueline took my hand, her fingers felt balmy and warm against the lifelines in my palm. For a brief second, I saw nothing but black. And then I saw the crystal glow of the river as we had seen it every year when my mother dipped my hand in it.
"I would go," I said, "if I knew the truth, whether a woman can fly."
"Why did you not ever ask your mother," Jacqueline said, "if she knew how to fly?"
Then the story came back to me as my mother had often told it. On that day so long ago, in the year nine-teen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.
In the prison yard, I held the Madonna tightly against my chest, so close that I could smell my mother's scent on the statue. When Jacqueline and I stepped out into the yard to wait for the burning, I raised my head toward the sun thinking, One day I may just see my mother there.
"Let her flight be joyful," I said to Jacqueline. 'And mine and yours too."
a wall of
fire rising
"Listen to what happened today," Guy said as he barged through the rattling door of his tiny shack.
His wife, Lili, was squatting in the middle of their one-room home, spreading cornmeal mush on banana leaves for their supper.
"Listen to what happened to me today!" Guy's seven-year-old son—Little Guy—dashed from a corner and grabbed his father's hand. The boy dropped his composition notebook as he leaped to his father, nearly step-ping into the corn mush and herring that his mother had set out in a trio of half gourds on the clay floor.
"Our boy is in a play" Lili quickly robbed Little Guy of the honor of telling his father the news.
"A play?" Guy affectionately stroked the boy's hair.
The boy had such tiny corkscrew curls that no amount of brushing could ever make them all look like a single entity. The other boys at the Lycée Jean-Jacques called him "pepper head" because each separate kinky strand was coiled into a tight tiny ball that looked like small peppercorns.
"When is this play?" Guy asked both the boy and his wife. 'Are we going to have to buy new clothes for this?"
Lili got up from the floor and inclined her face towards her husband's in order to receive her nightly peck on the cheek.
"What role do you have in the play?" Guy asked, slowly rubbing the tip of his nails across the boy's scalp. His fingers made a soft grating noise with each invisible circle drawn around the perimeters of the boy's head. Guy's fingers finally landed inside the boy's ears, forcing the boy to giggle until he almost gave himself the hiccups.
"Tell me, what is your part in the play?" Guy asked again, pulling his fingers away from his son's ear.
"I am Boukman," the boy huffed out, as though there was some laughter caught in his throat.
"Show Papy your lines," Lili told the boy as she arranged the three open gourds on a piece of plywood raised like a table on two bricks, in the middle of the room. "My love, Boukman is the hero of the play"
The boy went back to the corner where he had been studying and pulled out a thick book carefully covered in brown paper.
"You're going to spend a lifetime learning those." Guy took the book from the boy's hand and flipped through the pages quickly. He had to strain his eyes to see the words by the light of an old kerosene lamp, which that night—like all others—flickered as though it was burning its very last wick.
'All these words seem so long and heavy," Guy said. "You think you can do this, son?"
"He has one very good speech," Lili said. "Page forty, remember, son?"
The boy took back the book from his father. His face was crimped in an of-course-I-remember look as he searched for page forty.
"Boukman," Guy struggled with the letters of the slave revolutionary's name as he looked over his son's shoulders. "I see some very hard words here, son."
"He already knows his speech," Lili told her husband.
"Does he now?" asked Guy.
"We've been at it all afternoon," Lili said. "Why don't you go on and recite that speech for your father?"
The boy tipped his head towards the rusting tin on the roof as he prepared to recite his lines.
Lili wiped her hands on an old apron tied around her waist and stopped to listen.
"Remember what you are," Lili said, "a great rebel leader. Remember, it is the revolution."
"Do we want him to be all of that?" Guy asked.
"He is Boukman," Lili said. "What is the only thing on your mind now, Boukman?"
"Supper," Guy whispered, enviously eyeing the food cooling off in the middle of the room. He and the boy looked at each other and began to snicker.
"Tell us the other thing that is on your mind," Lili said, joining in their laughter.
"Freedom!" shouted the boy, as he quickly slipped into his role.
"Louder!" urged Lili.
"Freedom is on my mind!" yelled the boy.
"Why don't you start, son?" said Guy. "If you don't, we'll never get to that other thing that we have on our minds."
The boy closed his eyes and took a deep breath. At first, his lips parted but nothing came out. Lili pushed her head forward as though she were holding her breath. Then like the last burst of lightning out of clearing sky, the boy began.
"A wall of fire is rising and in the ashes, I see the bones of my people. Not only those people whose dark hollow faces I see daily in the fields, but all those souls who have gone ahead to haunt my dreams. At night I relive once more the last caress-es from the hand of a loving father, a valiant love, a beloved friend."
It was obvious that this was a speech written by a European man, who gave to the slave revolutionary Boukman the kind of European phrasing that might have sent the real Boukman turning in his grave. How- ever, the speech made Lili and Guy stand on the tips of their toes from great pride. As their applause thundered in the small space of their shack that night, they felt as though for a moment they had been given the rare plea-sure of hearing the voice of one of the forefathers of Haitian independence in the forced baritone of their only child. The experience left them both with a strange feeling that they could not explain. It left the hair on the back of their necks standing on end. It left them feeling much more love than they ever knew that they could add to their feeling for their son.
"Bravo," Lili cheered, pressing her son into the folds of her apron. "Long live Boukman and long live my boy."
"Long live our supper," Guy said, quickly batting his eyelashes to keep tears from rolling down his face.
The boy kept his eyes on his book as they ate their sup-per that night. Usually Guy and Lili would not have allowed that, but this was a special occasion. They watched proudly as the boy muttered his lines between swallows of cornmeal.
The boy was still mumbling the same words as the three of them used the last of the rainwater trapped in old gasoline containers and sugarcane pulp from the nearby sugarcane mill to scrub the gourds that they had eaten from.
When things were really bad for the family, they boiled clean sugarcane pulp to make what Lili called her special sweet water tea. It was supposed to suppress gas and kill the vermin in the stomach that made poor children hungry. That and a pinch of salt under the tongue could usually quench hunger until Guy found a day's work or Lili could manage to buy spices on credit and then peddle them for a profit at the marketplace.
That night, anyway, things were good. Everyone had eaten enough to put all their hunger vermin to sleep.
The boy was sitting in front of the shack on an old plastic bucket turned upside down, straining his eyes to find the words on the page. Sometimes when there was no kerosene for the lamp, the boy would have to go sit by the side of the road and study under the street lamps with the rest of the neighborhood children. Tonight, at least, they had a bit of their own light.
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Guy bent down by a small clump of old mushrooms near the boy's feet, trying to get a better look at the plant. He emptied the last drops of rainwater from a gasoline container on the mushroom, wetting the bulging toes sticking out of his sons' sandals, which were already coming apart around his endlessly growing feet.
Guy tried to pluck some of the mushrooms, which were being pushed into the dust as though they wanted to grow beneath the ground as roots. He took one of the mushrooms in his hand, running his smallest finger over the round bulb. He clipped the stem and buried the top in a thick strand of his wife's hair.
The mushroom looked like a dried insect in Lili's hair.
"It sure makes you look special," Guy said, teasing her.
"Thank you so much," Lili said, tapping her husband's arm. "It's nice to know that I deserve these much more than roses."
Taking his wife's hand, Guy said, "Let's go to the sugar mill."
"Can I study my lines there?" the boy asked.
"You know them well enough already," Guy said.
"I need many repetitions," the boy said.
Their feet sounded as though they were playing a wet wind instrument as they slipped in and out of the puddles between the shacks in the shantytown. Near the sugar mill was a large television screen in a iron grill cage that the government had installed so that the shantytown dwellers could watch the state-sponsored news at eight o'clock every night. After the news, a gendarme would come and turn off the television set, taking home the key. On most nights, the people stayed at the site long after this gendarme had gone and told stories to one another beneath the big blank screen. They made bonfires with dried sticks, corn husks, and paper, cursing the authorities under their breath.
There was a crowd already gathering for the nightly news event. The sugar mill workers sat in the front row in chairs or on old buckets.
Lili and Guy passed the group, clinging to their son so that in his childhood naïveté he wouldn't accidentally glance at the wrong person and be called an insolent child. They didn't like the ambiance of the nightly news watch. They spared themselves trouble by going instead to the sugar mill, where in the past year they had dis-covered their own wonder.
Everyone knew that the family who owned the sugar mill were eccentric 'Arabs," Haitians of Lebanese or Palestinian descent whose family had been in the country for generations. The Assad family had a son who, it seems, was into all manner of odd things, the most recent of which was a hot-air balloon, which he had brought to Haiti from America and occasionally flew over the shantytown skies.
As they approached the fence surrounding the field where the large wicker basket and deflated balloon rested on the ground, Guy let go of the hands of both his wife and the boy.
Lili walked on slowly with her son. For the last few weeks, she had been feeling as though Guy was lost to her each time he reached this point, twelve feet away from the balloon. As Guy pushed his hand through the barbed wire, she could tell from the look on his face that he was thinking of sitting inside the square basket while the smooth rainbow surface of the balloon itself float-ed above his head. During the day, when the field was open, Guy would walk up to the basket, staring at it with the same kind of longing that most men display when they admire very pretty girls.
Lili and the boy stood watching from a distance as Guy tried to push his hand deeper, beyond the chain link fence that separated him from the balloon. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small pocketknife, sharpening the edges on the metal surface of the fence. When his wife and child moved closer, he put the knife back in his pocket, letting his fingers slide across his son's tightly coiled curls.
"I wager you I can make this thing fly," Guy said.
"Why do you think you can do that?" Lili asked.
"I know it," Guy replied.
He followed her as she circled the sugar mill, leading to their favorite spot under a watch light. Little Guy lagged faithfully behind them. From this distance, the hot-air balloon looked like an odd spaceship.
Lili stretched her body out in the knee-high grass in the field. Guy reached over and tried to touch her between her legs.
"You're not one to worry, Lili," he said. "You're not afraid of the frogs, lizards, or snakes that could be hid-ing in this grass?"
"I am here with my husband," she said. "You are here to protect me if anything happens."
Guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a lighter and a crumpled piece of paper. He lit the paper until it burned to an ashy film. The burning paper float-ed in the night breeze for a while, landing in fragments on the grass.
"Did you see that, Lili?" Guy asked with a flame in his eyes brighter than the lighter s. "Did you see how the paper floated when it was burned? This is how that balloon flies."
"What did you mean by saying that you could make it fly?" Lili asked.
"You already know all my secrets," Guy said as the boy came charging towards them.
"Papa, could you play Lago with me?" the boy asked.
Lili lay peacefully on the grass as her son and husband played hide-and-seek. Guy kept hiding and his son kept finding him as each time Guy made it easier for the boy.
"We rest now." Guy was becoming breathless.
The stars were circling the peaks of the mountains, dipping into the cane fields belonging to the sugar mill. As Guy caught his breath, the boy raced around the fence, running as fast as he could to purposely make himself dizzy.
"Listen to what happened today," Guy whispered softly in Lili's ear.
"I heard you say that when you walked in the house tonight," Lili said. "With the boy's play, I forgot to ask you."
The boy sneaked up behind them, his face lit up, though his brain was spinning. He wrapped his arms around both their necks.
"We will go back home soon," Lili said.
"Can I recite my lines?" asked the boy.
"We have heard them," Guy said. "Don't tire your lips."
The boy mumbled something under his breath. Guy grabbed his ear and twirled it until it was a tiny ball in his hand. The boy's face contorted with agony as Guy made him kneel in the deep grass in punishment.
Lili looked tortured as she watched the boy squirming in the grass, obviously terrified of the crickets, lizards, and small snakes that might be there.
"Perhaps we should take him home to bed," she said.
"He will never learn," Guy said, "if I say one thing and you say another."
Guy got up and angrily started walking home. Lili walked over, took her son's hand, and raised him from his knees.
"You know you must not mumble," she said.
"I was saying my lines," the boy said.
"Next time say them loud," Lili said, "so he knows what is coming out of your mouth."
That night Lili could hear her son muttering his lines as he tucked himself in his corner of the room and drifted off to sleep. The boy still had the book with his monologue in it clasped under his arm as he slept.
Guy stayed outside in front of the shack as Lili undressed for bed. She loosened the ribbon that held the old light blue cotton skirt around her waist and let it drop past her knees. She grabbed half a lemon that she kept in the corner by the folded mat that she and Guy unrolled to sleep on every night. Lili let her blouse drop to the floor as she smoothed the lemon over her ashen legs.
Guy came in just at that moment and saw her bare chest by the light of the smaller castor oil lamp that they used for the later hours of the night. Her skin had coarsened a bit over the years, he thought. Her breasts now drooped from having nursed their son for two years after he was born. It was now easier for him to imagine their son's lips around those breasts than to imagine his anywhere near them.
He turned his face away as she fumbled for her night-gown. He helped her open the mat, tucking the blanket edges underneath.
Fully clothed, Guy dropped onto the mat next to her. He laid his head on her chest, rubbing the spiky edges of his hair against her nipples.
"What was it that happened today?" Lili asked, running her fingers along Guy's hairline, an angular hair-line, almost like a triangle, in the middle of his forehead. She nearly didn't marry him because it was said that people with angular hairlines often have very troubled lives.
"I got a few hours' work for tomorrow at the sugar mill," Guy said. "That's what happened today."
"It was such a long time coming," Lili said.
It was almost six months since the last time Guy had gotten work there. The jobs at the sugar mill were few and far between. The people who had them never left, or when they did they would pass the job on to another family member who was already waiting on line.
Guy did not seem overjoyed about the one day's work.
"I wish I had paid more attention when you came in with the news," Lili said. "I was just so happy about the boy."
"I was born in the shadow of that sugar mill," Guy said. "Probably the first thing my mother gave me to drink as a baby was some sweet water tea from the pulp of the sugarcane. If anyone deserves to work there, I should."
"What will you be doing for your day's work?"
"Would you really like to know?"
"There is never any shame in honest work," she said.
"They want me to scrub the latrines."
"It's honest work," Lili said, trying to console him.
"I am still number seventy-eight on the permanent hire list," he said. "I was thinking of putting the boy on the list now, so maybe by the time he becomes a man he can be up for a job."
Lili's body jerked forward, rising straight up in the air. Guy's head dropped with a loud thump onto the mat.
"I don't want him on that list," she said. "For a young boy to be on any list like that might influence his destiny. I don't want him on the list."
"Look at me," Guy said. "If my father had worked there, if he had me on the list, don't you think I would be working?"
"If you have any regard for me," she said, "you will not put him on the list."
She groped for her husband's chest in the dark and laid her head on it. She could hear his heart beating loudly as though it were pumping double, triple its normal rate.