Bonne annee personal essay by jean pierre benoit

the butterfly's way

Also by Edwidge Danticat

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Krik? Krak!

The Farming of Bones

the butterfly's way

VOICES FROM THE HAITIAN DYASPORA IN THE UNITED STATES

EDITED BY Edwidge Danticat

The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Copyright © 2001 by Edwidge Danticat

All rights reserved.

"You and Me against the world," by Martine Bury, copyright © 1999, is reprinted by permission of the author. "Restavek" is from Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American by Jean-Robert Cadet, copyright 1998, reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press. "The Million Man March" by Anthony Calypso, copyright © 1998, first appeared as "The Chicken Bone Express" under the pen name, Tbnven Bolewo, in Tea for One and appears here by permission of the author. "Present Past Future" by Marc Christophe is adapted from the poem "Present Passe Futur" which appeared in Le Pain De L'Exile, copyright © 1988, and is reprinted by permission of the author. "A Cage of Words" by Joel Dreyfuss, copyright © 1999, first appeared in The Haitian Times and is reprinted by permission of the author. "Another Ode to Salt" by Danielle Legros Georges first appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Volume 9, copyright © 1995, and is reprinted by permission of the author. "America, We Are Here" by Dany Laferriere, copyright © 1987, first appeared in his book Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (David Homel translator, Coach House Press, Toronto) and appears here by permission of the author. "Homelands" by Marie-Helene Laforest first appeared in slightly different form in Diasporic Encounters (Liguori Editore, Naples, January 2000) and is reprinted by permission of the author. "Made Outside" by Francie Latour first appeared in a slightly different form in The Virginian-Pilot, copyright © 1995, and is reprinted by permission of the author. "Something in the Water ... Reflections of a People's Journey" by Nikol Payen first appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, copyright © 1997, and is reprinted by permission of the author. "The White Wife" by Gary Pierre-Pierre first appeared in Essence Magazine, copyright © 1998, and is reprinted by permission of the author. "Haiti: A Memory Journey" by Assoto Saint is from Spells of a Voodoo Doll, copyright © 1996, and appears by permission of Michele Karlsberg, Estate of Assoto Saint. "Looking for Columbus" is from Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, copyright © 1996 by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. "Do Something for Your Soul, Go to Haiti," by Babette Wainwright, copyright © 1999, first appeared in slightly different form as "Fencing in the People" in Sheperd Express, April 15, 1999 and is reprinted by permission of the author. All other contributions first appear here by permission of their respective authors, copyright © 2001.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The butterfly's way : voices from the Haitian dyaspora [sic] in the United States / edited by Edwidge Danticat.

p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-218-7

1. American literature—Haitian American authors. 2. American literature—20th century. 3. Haitian Americans—Literary collections.

4. Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-

PS508.H33 B88 2001 810.9'97294'0904—dc21

00-064085

10 9 8 7 6 5

CONTENTS

Introduction, Edwidge Dantkat

CHILDHOOD Present Past Future, Marc Christophe Dyaspora, Joanne Hyppolite Restavek, Jean-Robert Cadet Homelands, Marie-Helene Laforest Bonne Annee, Jean-Pierre Benoit Haiti: A Memory Journey, Assotto Saint Black Crows and Zombie Girls, Barbara Sanon

MIGRATION Another Ode to Salt, Danielle Legros Georges America, We Are Here, Dany Laferriere A Cage of Words, Joel Dreyfuss The Red Dress, Patricia Benoit Something in the Water ... Reflections of a People's Journey, Nikol Payen Haiti: A Cigarette Burning at Both Ends, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel My Suitcases, Maude Heurtelou The White Wife, Garry Pierre-Pierre You and Me against the world, Martine Bury Mashe Petyon, Katia Ulysse Pour Water on My Head: A Meditation on a Life of Painting and Poetry, Marilene Phipps

HALF/FIRST GENERATION Chainstitching, Phebus Etienne Made Outside, Francie Latour The Million Man March, Anthony Calypso In Search of a Name, Miriam Neptune Reporting Silence, Leslie Casimir Vini Nou Bel, Annie Gregroire Home Is ..., Sophia Cantaue Map Viv: My Life as a Nyabinghi Razette, Marie Nadine Pierre Exiled, Sandy Alexandre

RETURN Lost Near the Sea, Leslie Chassagne Adieu Miles and Good-bye Democracy, Patrick Sylvain Looking for Columbus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot Do Something for Your Soul, Go to Haiti, Babette Wainwright

A Poem about Why I Can't Wait, Gina Ulysse

FUTURE Lazarus Rising: An Open Letter to My Daughter, Myriam J.A. Chancy

Contributors Glossary

if you don't know the butterfly's way, you will pass it by without noticing: it's so well hidden in the grass.

—"Ten O'clock Flower" Jean-Claude Martineau

INTRODUCTION

I have the extremely painful task of beginning this introduction on the same day that one of Haiti's most famous citizens, the radio journalist Jean Dominique, was assassinated. I woke up this morning to a series of increasingly alarming phone calls, the first simply mentioning a rumor that Jean might have been shot while arriving at his radio station, Radio Haiti Inter, at six thirty in the morning, for the daily news and editorial program that he co-anchored with his wife, Michele Montas. The next few calls declared for certain that Jean had been shot: seven bullets in the head, neck, and chest. The final morning calls confirmed my worst fears. Jean was dead.

The following hours would slip by in a haze as I went to teach my classes at the University of Miami. When I came back to my office that afternoon, there were still more phone calls and e-mails from relatives, friends, and acquaintances who could not believe what had happened. In those real and virtual conversations, the phrase that emerged most often was "Not Jean Do!" During the varying lengths of time that many of us had known Jean Dominique— either as a voice on Haitian radio or in person—we had all come to think of him as heroically invincible. He was someone who expressed his opinions freely, seemingly without fear, criticizing groups as well as individuals, organizations, and institutions who had proven themselves to be inhumane, unethical, or simply unjust. Of course, Jean's life was too multifaceted and complex to fully grasp and make sense of in these very early hours so soon after his death. All that seems undeniably compelling and memorable about him right now is his exceptional passion for Haiti and his profound, often expressed longing to see all Haitians realize the full potential for greatness that our forefathers and foremothers had displayed when they had battled their way out of slavery almost two hundred years ago, to create the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

I can't even sort out now, under this full assault of memories, the exact moment I met Jean Dominique. As a child in Haiti, I had heard his voice on the radio so many times, and as an adult in New York, had seen him at so many different Haiti-related gatherings that I can't even pinpoint our first meeting. However, I do remember the first time we had a lengthy conversation. It was at an art exhibit at Ramapo College in New Jersey in the early 1990s. Jean was in exile, yet again, after the Haitian military had deposed the democratically elected government and had raided his radio station.

That night, Jean and I talked at length about the paintings, which I remember much less vividly than the extreme nostalgia that they evoked in him, the hunger to return to his home and his radio station in Haiti as soon as he could.

A few weeks later, our mutual friend, the filmmaker Jonathan Demme, asked Jean and me to work with him on a project about the history of Haitian cinema. Every week, the three of us would meet on the Ramapo College campus to discuss Haitian cinema while some communications students watched and videotaped us. My job was to find prints of the films that we would discuss; Jean's was to help us all understand them by putting them in context as Jonathan questioned him about technique, style, and content.

The task of finding the films proved to be a herculean one. Many of the filmmakers themselves had lost track of their own prints during nomadic lives in exile under the Duvalier regime. However, in our videotaped sessions each time we would mention a film title to Jean he would proceed to describe at length not only the plot of the film, but details of the method of its distribution and the political framework surrounding it. The film Anita, for example, made by the talented Rassoul

Labuchin, told the story of a servant girl whose experiences are much like those described here by Jean-Robert Cadet in "Restavtk." According to Jean, Labuchin had traveled with the film from province to province and had shown it to peasants in the Haitian countryside. Jean had done something similar himself when he had broadcast on Radio Haiti Inter the Kreyol soundtrack of a film based on the classic Haitian novel Gouvemeurs de la Rosee (Masters of the Dew) by Jacques Roumain. This was something he was extremely proud of because, when he visited the Haitian countryside, the peasants for whom he had such extreme admiration and respect would tell him how they had recognized themselves and their lives in the words of the novel.

At the insistence of some of his friends in New York, Jean would occasionally participate in a television or radio program dealing with the injustices of the military regime in Haiti which by then had killed almost five thousand people, including among them the businessman Antoine Izmery and the Haitian justice minister, Guy Malary, people Jean had known. After Malary's death, Jean appeared as a guest on a panel on The Charlie Rose Show and was seated in the audience at a taping of The Donahue Show where the subject was Haiti. During the taping, Jean squirmed in his seat, while Phil Donahue held up the stubbed elbow of Arlete Belance, who had been attacked with a machete by paramilitary forces. After the taping, he seemed almost on the verge of tears as he said, "Edwidge, my country needs hope."

Our Haitian cinema project came to an end at the end of the school semester. However, Jonathan, Jean, and I would occasionally meet in Jonathan's office in Nyack for further discussions. One day, while driving to Nyack with Jonathan's assistant Neda, Jean told us about a word he had rediscovered in a Spanish film he had seen the night before, Guapa!

While puffing on his ever-present pipe, Jean took great pains to explain to us that someone who was guapa was extremely beautiful and courageous. Demanding further clarification, Neda and I would take turns shouting out the names of women the three of us knew, starting with Jean's wife.

"Michele is very—" "Guapa!" he yelled back with great enthusiasm. This was one of many times that Jean's vibrant

love for life easily came across. On that guapa day, Neda had to stay in Nyack, so she gave me the car and told me to drive Jean

back to Manhattan. I refrained from telling her that even though I'd had my license for three years, I had never driven any car but the one owned by the driving school where I had learned. When I confessed this to Jean, he wisely offered to drive. We drove for hours through New York's Rockland County and the Palisades, and then in New Jersey and over the George Washington Bridge, finding ourselves completely lost because Jean was trying to tell some hysterical story, smoke a pipe, and follow my uncertain directions all at the same time.

When we finally got to Manhattan late in the afternoon, Jean turned the car over to me. He seemed worried as I pulled away from the sidewalk and watched until I turned the corner, blending into Manhattan traffic.

* * * The democratically elected government was returned to power soon afterward. The next time I would see Jean would be at his and Michele's house in Haiti.

"Jean, you're looking guapa," I told him. He laughed. It was wonderful to see Jean move about his own walls, surrounded by his own books and pictures

and paintings, knowing that he had been dreaming about coming back home almost every minute that he was in exile.

Later at dinner, Jean spoke mournfully about those who had died during and after the coup d'etat: Antoine Izmery, Guy Malary, and later a well-loved priest, Father Jean-Marie Vincent. Adding Jean's name now to those of these very public martyrs still seems unimaginable, given how passionately he expressed his hope that these assassinations would no longer take place.

"It has to stop," I remember him saying. "It has to stop."

The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean's funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty-six minutes were young rich college students returning from Miami-area college campuses for the weekend, vendors— madan and mesye saras traveling with suitcases filled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cluster of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and up front the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami. That we were all on this plane listening to flight announcements in French, English, and Kreyol, seemed to me somewhat unreal, as would most of the events that would unfold up to and after Jean's funeral at the Sylvio Cator stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince.

On the plane, I couldn't help but recall one of the many conversations that Jean and I had had while lost in the Palisades in New York that afternoon.

I had told him that I envied the certainty with which he could and often did say the words, "My country."

"My country is sufFering," he would say. "It is being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away."

"My country, Jean," I said, "is one of uncertainty. When I say 'my country' to some Haitians, they think of the United States. When I say 'my country' to some Americans, they think of Haiti."

My country, I felt, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti has nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living in the dyaspora.

I meant in another type of introduction to struggle to explain the multilayered meaning of the word dyaspora. I meant to borrow a phrase from a speech given by Gerard Alphonse Ferere, Ph.D., at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on August 27, 1999, in which he describes diaspora/dyaspora as a term "employed to refer to any dispersal of people to foreign soils." But in our context used "to identify the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in many countries of the world." I meant in another type of introduction to list my own personal experiences of being called "Dyaspora" when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti, who knew that they could easily silence me by saying, "What do you know? You're a Dyaspora." I meant to recall some lighter experiences ofbeing startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces when a stranger who wanted to catch my attention would call out, "Dyasporal" as though it were a title like Miss, Ms., Mademoiselle, or Madame. I meant to recall conversations or debates in restaurants, parties, or at public gatherings where members of the dyaspora would be classified—- justified or not—as arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious people who were eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country that they had

fled during difficult times. Shamefacedly, I would bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty for my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve years during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile or death. However, in this introduction, I can't help but think of Jean's reaction to my dyaspora dilemma in a conversation we had when I visited his radio station while in Haiti one summer.

"The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds," he had said. "There is no reason to be ashamed of being Dyaspora. There are more than a million of you. You are not alone." Having been exiled many times himself to that very dyaspora that I was asking him to help me define, Jean could commiserate with all those exiles, emigres, refugees, migrants, naturalized citizens, half- generation, first-generation, American, Haitian, Haitian-American men, women, and children who were living here in the United States and elsewhere. Migration in general was something he understood extremely well, whether it be from the provinces, the peyi andeyo, the outside country, to the Haitian capital or from Haitian borders to other shores. Like many of us, what he wanted to see ultimately was a Haiti that could unite all her sons and daughters, be they inside or outside.

Before Jean's death, I had been hopeful that this book would give voice to some singular experiences of an admittedly small but wide- ranging fragment of the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. After his death, I find myself cherishing the fact that the people whose lives are detailed and represented here do travel between many worlds. This book for me now represents both a way to recount our silences—as in Leslie Casimir's "Reporting Silence"—and to say good-bye—as in Patrick Sylvain's "Adieu Miles and Good-bye Democracy." However, we are not saying good-bye to a country, but to a notion that as "Dyaspora" we do not own it and it does not own us. At the same time, we are also saying, in the words of Dany Laferriere's essay, "America, We Are Here." And we are not, as Joel Dreyfuss reminds the world in his essay, "A Cage of Words," just people from "the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere," but also people who "have produced great art like that of Ireland and Portugal. . . great writers and scholars like those of Russia and Brazil." And great heroes like Jean Dominique.

A few weeks before Jean's death, Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-American man, was gunned down by a New York City police officer in a Manhattan street across the bridge from where another Haitian man, Abner Louima, was beaten, then sexually assaulted in a Brooklyn precinct by a police officer. I ask myself now what Jean— as he inevitably would have had to report these events on his radio program—must have said about these incidents, which so closely resemble the atrocities that Haitians over the years have fled Haiti to escape. It has not been lost on us that of three black men tortured and killed by police in New York in the past two years, two were Haitian. Reading the essays in this book again after these events impels me to think of the many more pages that could be—and will be written—about our experiences as people belonging to the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. But anyone who has ever witnessed a gathering of the likes described by Jean-Pierre Benoit in "Bonne Annee" or Barbara Sanon in "Black Crows and Zombie Girls" knows our voices will not be silenced, our stories will be told.

In her essay, poet and painter Marilene Phipps writes, "Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. . . Living in another country, I use my pen or my brush to voice incantations to a particular world that has created me and, to a certain extent, now uses me to re-create itself." In this collection, the writers define themselves as well as the worlds that define them, through tragedies, like the deaths of Jean Dominique and Patrick Dorismond, but also through celebrations like the New York, Boston, and

Miami street parades that followed the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986. Or through voices like that of Joanne Hyppolite turning a sometimes dreaded word in her favor, celebrating her "dyaspora" status, reminding us that we are not alone.

"When you are in Haiti, they call you Dyaspora," writes Hyppolite. "... you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening."

Guapa!

CHILDHOOD

PRESENT PAST FUTURE

Marc Christophe

What will I tell you, my son? What will I say to you, my daughter? You for whom the tropics Are a marvelous paradise A blooming garden of islands floating In the blue box Of the Caribbean sea What will I tell you When you ask me Father, speak to us of Haiti? Then my eyes sparkling with pride I would love to tell you Of the blue mornings of my country When the mountains stretch out Lazily In the predawn light The waterfalls flowing With freshness The fragrance of molasses-filled coffee In the courtyards The fields of sugar cane Racing In cloudy waves Towards the horizon The heated voices of peasant men Who caress the earth With their fertile hands The supple steps of peasant women On top of the dew The morning clamor In the plains the small valleys And the lost hamlets Which cloak the true heart Of Haiti. I would also tell you Of the tin huts Slumbering beneath the moon In the milky warmth

Of spirit-filled Summer nights And the countryside cemeteries Where the ancestors rest In graves ornate With purple seashells And the sweet and heady perfumes Of basilique lemongrass I would love to tell you Of the colonial elegance of the villas Hidden in the bougainvilleas And the beds of azaleas And the vast paved trails Behind dense walls The verandahs with princely mosaics Embellished With large vases of clay Covered With sheets of ferns Pink cretonnes Verandahs where one catches A breath of fresh air During nights Of staggering heat By listening to The sounds of the city Rising up to the foothills I would love to recite for you The great history Of the peoples of my country Their daily struggles For food and drink Tireless people Hardworking people Whose lives are a struggle With no end Against misery Fatigue Dust In the open markets Under the sun's blazing breath I would want to make you see The clean unbroken streets

Straight as arrows Bordered by the green Of royal palms and date palms in bloom I would love to make you admire The shadowed dwellings The oasis of green Of my Eden I would carry you On my shivering wings To the top of Croix D'Haiti And from there Your gaze would travel over These mountains These plains These valleys These towns These schools These orphanages These studios These churches These factories These hounforts These prayer houses These universities These art houses Conceived by our genius Where hope never dies.

DYASPORA

Joanne Hyppolite

When you are in Haiti they call you Dyaspora. This word, which connotes both connection and disconnection, accurately describes your condition as a Haitian American. Disconnected from the physical landscape of the homeland, you don't grow up with a mango tree in your yard, you don't suck keneps in the summer, or sit in the dark listening to stories of Konpe Bouki and Malis. The bleat of vaksins or the beating of a Yanvalou on Rada drums are neither in the background or the foreground of your life. Your French is nonexistent. Haiti is not where you live.

Your house in Boston is your island. As the only Haitian family on the hillside street you grow up on, it represents Haiti to you. It was where your granmk refused to learn English, where goods like ripe mangoes, plantains, djondjon, and hard white blobs of mints come to you in boxes through the mail. At your communion and birthday parties, all of Boston Haiti seems to gather in your house to eat griyo and sip kremas. It takes forever for you to kiss every cheek, some of them heavy with face powder, some of them damp with perspiration, some of them with scratchy face hair, and some of them giving you a perfume head-rush as you swoop in. You are grateful for every smooth, dry cheek you encounter. In your house, the dreaded matinet which your parents imported from Haiti just to keep you, your brother, and your sister in line sits threateningly on top of the wardrobe. It is where your mother's andeyb Kreyol accent and your father's lavil French accent make sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible music together. On Sundays in your house, "Dominika-anik-anik" floats from the speakers of the record player early in the morning and you are made to put on one of your frilly dresses, your matching lace-edged socks, and black shoes. Your mother ties long ribbons into a bow at the root of each braid. She warns you, your brother and your sister to "respect your heads" as you drive to St. Angela's, never missing a Sunday service in fourteen years. In your island house, everyone has two names. The name they were given and the nickname they have been granted so that your mother is Gisou, your father is Popo, your brother is Claudy, your sister is Tinou, you are Jojo, and your grandmother is Manchoun. Every day your mother serves rice and beans and you methodically pick out all the beans because you don't like pwa. You think they are ugly and why does all the rice have to have beans anyway? Even with the white rice or the mayi moulen, your mother makes sbspwa— bean sauce. You develop the idea that Haitians are obsessed with beans. In your house there is a mortar and a pestle as well as five pictures of Jesus, your parents drink Cafe Bustelo every morning, your father wears gwayabel shirts and smokes cigarettes, and you are beaten when you don't get good grades at school. You learn about the infidelities of husbands from conversations your aunts have. You are dragged to Haitian plays, Haitian bah, and Haitian concerts where in spite of yourself konpa rhythms make you sway. You know the names of Haitian presidents and military leaders because political discussions inevitably erupt whenever there are more than three Haitian men together in the same place. Every time you are sick, your mother rubs you down with a foul- smelling liquid that she keeps in an old Barbancourt rum bottle under her bed. You splash yourself with Bien-etre after every bath. Your parents speak to you in Kreyol, you respond in English, and somehow this works and feels natural. But when your mother speaks English, things seem to go wrong. She makes no distinction between he and she, and you become the pronoun police. Every day

you get a visit from some matant or monnonk or kouzen who is also a tnarenn or parenn of someone in the house. In your house, your grandmother has a porcelain kivet she keeps under her bed to relieve herself at night. You pore over photograph albums where there are pictures of you going to school in Haiti, in the yard in Haiti, under the white Christmas tree in Haiti, and you marvel because you do not remember anything that you see. You do not remember Haiti because you left there too young but it does not matter because it is as if Haiti has lassoed your house with an invisible rope.

Outside of your house, you are forced to sink or swim in American waters. For you this means an Irish-Catholic school and a Black-American neighborhood. The school is a choice made by your parents who strongly believe in a private Catholic education anyway, not paying any mind to the busing crisis that is raging in the city. The choice of neighborhood is a condition of the reality of living here in this city with its racially segregated neighborhoods. Before you lived here, white people owned this hillside street. After you and others who looked like you came, they gradually disappeared to other places, leaving you this place and calling it bad because you and others like you live there now. As any dyaspora child knows, Haitian parents are not familiar with these waters. They say things to you like, "In Haiti we never treated white people badly." They don't know about racism. They don't know about the latest styles and fashions and give your brother hell every time he sneaks out to a friend's house and gets his hair cut into a shag, a high-top, a fade. They don't know that the ribbons in your hair, the gold loops in your ears, and the lace that edges your socks alert other children to your difference. So you wait until you get to school before taking them all off and out and you put them back on at the end of your street where the bus drops you off. Outside your house, things are black and white. You are black and white. Especially in your school where neither you nor any of the few other Haitian girls in your class are invited to the birthday parties of the white kids in your class. You cleave to these other Haitian girls out of something that begins as solidarity but becomes a lifetime of friendship. You make green hats in art class every St. Patrick's day and watch Irish step- dancing shows year after year after year. You discover books and reading and this is what you do when you take the bus home, just you and your white schoolmates. You lose your accent. You study about the Indians in social studies but you do not study about Black Americans except in music class where you are forced to sing Negro spirituals as a concession to your presence. They don't know anything about Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

In your neighborhood when you tell people you are from Haiti, they ask politely, "Where's that?" You explain and because you seem okay to them, Haiti is okay to them. They shout "Hi, Grunny!" whenever they see your grandmother on the stoop and sometimes you translate a sentence or two between them. In their houses, you eat sweet potato pie and nod because you have that too, it's made a little different and you call it pen patat but it's the same taste after all. From the girls on the street you learn to jump double-dutch, you learn to dance the puppet and the white boy. You see a woman preacher for the first time in your life at their church. You wonder where down South is because that is where most of the boys and girls on your block go for vacations. You learn about boys and sex through these girls because these two subjects are not allowed in your island/house. You keep your street friends separate from your school friends and this is how it works and you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening.

Then when you get to high school, things change. People in your high school and your neighborhood look at you and say, "You are Haitian?" and from the surprise in their voice you realize that they

know where Haiti is now. They think they know what Haiti is now. Haiti is the boat people on the news every night. Haiti is where people have tuberculosis. Haiti is where people eat cats. You do not represent Haiti at all to them anymore. You are an aberration because you look like them and you talk like them. They do not see you. They do not see the worlds that have made you. You want to say to them that you are Haiti, too. Your house is Haiti, too, and what does that do to their perceptions? You have the choice of passing but you don't. You claim your dyaspora status hoping it will force them to expand their image of what Haiti is but it doesn't. Your sister who is younger and very sensitive begins to deny that she is Haitian. She is American, she says. American.

You turn to books to lose yourself. You read stories about people from other places. You read stories about people from here. You read stories about people from other places who now live here. You decide you will become a writer. Through your writing they will see you, dyaspora child, the connections and disconnections that have made you the mosaic that you are. They will see where you are from and the worlds that have made you. They will see you.

RESTAVEK

Jean-Robert Cadet

"A blan (white person) is coming to visit today. He's your papa, but when you see him, don't call him papa. Say 'Bonjour, monsieur' and disappear. If the neighbors ask who he was, you tell them that you don't know. He is such a good man, we have to protect his reputation. That's what happens when men of good character have children with dogs," said Florence to me in Kreyol when I was about seven or eight years old. Before noon, a small black car pulled into the driveway and a white man got out of it. As I made eye contact with him, he waved at me and quickly stepped up to the front door before I had a chance to say "Bonjour, monsieur." Florence let him into the house and I disappeared into the backyard. Almost immediately I heard him leaving.

At the age of five I had begun to hate Florence. "I wish your manman was my manman too," I told Eric, a little boy my age who lived next door. One day while we played together, Eric's mother pulled a handkerchief from her bra, wet its corner on her tongue, knelt down on one knee, and wiped off a dirty spot on her son's face. Eric pushed her hand away.

"Ah, Manman, stop it," he said. I looked at her with bright eyes. "Do it to me instead," I said. She stared at my face for a moment and replied with an affectionate smile, "But your face is not

dirty." To which I answered, "I don't care. Do it to me anyway." She gently wiped at a spot on my face, as

I grinned from ear to ear. My biological mother had died before her image was ever etched in my mind. I cannot remember

the time when I was brought to Florence, the woman I called Manman. She was a beautiful Negress with a dark-brown complexion and a majestic presence. She had no job, but earned a small income from tenants who leased her inherited farmland. She also entertained high government officials as a means to supplement her income. Her teenage son, Denis, was living with his paternal grandmother and attending private school. Florence claimed that her husband had died when her son was ten years old, but I never saw her wedding pictures.

I came into Florence's life one day when Philippe, her white former lover, paid her a surprise visit. He was a successful exporter of coffee and chocolate to the United States and Europe. Philippe lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with his parents, two brothers, and a niece. He arrived in his Jeep at Florence's two-story French country-style house in an upper-class section of the city. A bright-eyed, fat-cheeked, light-skinned black baby boy was in the backseat. Philippe parked the car, reached into the back seat, and took the baby out. He stood him on the ground and the baby toddled off. I was that toddler.

Philippe greeted Florence with a kiss on each cheek while she stared at the toddler. "Whose baby is this?" she asked, knowing the answer to her question.

"His mother died and I can't take him home to my parents. I'd like you to have him," said Philippe, handing Florence an envelope containing money.

"I understand," she said, taking the envelope. He embraced her again and drove off, leaving me behind. Philippe's problem was solved.

My mother had been a worker in one of Philippe's coffee factories below the Cahos mountains of the Artibonite Valley. Like the grand blans of the distant past who acknowledged their blood in the veins of their slave children by emancipating and educating them, Philippe was following tradition. Perhaps he thought that Florence would give me a better life.

"Angela," yelled Florence. "Oui, Madame," answered the cook, approaching her. "Take care of this little boy, will you? Find him something to eat," she instructed. Angela picked

me up. "What's his name?" she asked. Florence thought for a moment and said, "Bobby." Florence did not want another child, but the

financial arrangement she had with Philippe was too attractive for her to turn down. Every night I slept on a pile of rags in a corner of Florence's bedroom, like a house cat, until I was six years old. Then she made me sleep under the kitchen table.

Florence did not take care of me. From the time I entered the household, various cooks met my basic needs, which freed Florence from having to deal with me. I was never greatly attached to any of the cooks, since none of them ever lasted for more than a year. Florence would fire them for burning a meal or for short-changing her when they returned from the market.

As I got older, I learned what kind of day I was going to have based on Florence's mood and tone of voice. When she was cheerful, the four-strip leather whip, called a matinet, would stay hung on its hook against the kitchen wall.

I knew of two groups of children in Port-au-Prince: the elite, and the very poor, the restaveks, or slave children.

Children of the elite are often recognized by their light skin and the fine quality of their clothes. They are encouraged by their parents to speak proper French instead of Kreyol, the language of the masses. They live in comfortable homes with detached servants' quarters and tropical gardens. Their weekly spending allowance far exceeds the monthly salary of their maids. They are addressed by the maids as "Monsieur" or "Mademoiselle" before their first names. They are chauffeured to the best private schools and people call them "ti (petit) bourgeois."

Children of the poor often have dark skin. They appear dusty and malnourished. In their one-room homes covered with rusted sheet metal there is no running water or electricity. Their meals of red beans, cornmeal, and yams are cooked under clouds of smoke spewed out by stoves made of three coconut-size stones and fueled by dry twigs and wood. They eat from calabash bowls with their fingers and drink from tin cans with sharp edges, sitting on logs while being bothered by flies. They squat in the underbrush and wipe themselves with rocks or leaves. At night, they sleep on straw mats or cardboard spread over dirty floors while bloodsucking bedbugs feast on their sweaty flesh. They walk several miles to ill-equipped public schools, where they depend on lunches of powdered milk donated by foreign countries that once depended on the slave labor of their ancestors. After school, they rush home to recite their lessons loudly in cadence before the Caribbean daylight fades away, or they walk a few miles to Champ-de-Mars, the park, and sit under street lamps to do their homework while moths zigzag above their heads.

Restaveks are slave children who belong to well-to-do families. They receive no pay and are kept out of school. Since the emancipation and independence of 1804, affluent blacks and mulattoes have reintroduced slavery by using children of the very poor as house servants. They promise poor

families in faraway villages who have too many mouths to feed a better life for their children. Once acquired, these children lose all contact with their families and, like the slaves of the past, are sometimes given new names for the sake of convenience. The affluent disguise their evil deed with the label restavek, a term that means "staying with." Other children taunt them with the term because they are often seen in the streets running errands barefoot and dressed in dirty rags.

Restaveks are treated worse than slaves, because they don't cost anything and their supply seems inexhaustible. They do the jobs that hired domestics, or bonnes, will not do and are made to sleep on cardboard, whether under the kitchen table or outside on the front porch. For any minor infraction, they are severely whipped with the cowhide implement that is still being made exclusively for that very purpose. And, like the African slaves of the past, they often cook their own meals, which are composed of inferior cornmeal and a few heads of dried herring. Girls are usually worse off because they are sometimes used as concubines for the teenage sons of their "owner." And if they become pregnant, they are thrown into the streets to earn their living as prostitutes. The boys are discarded to become shoeshine boys or itinerant gardeners.

I was a restavek in the making. Raising me as such was more convenient for Florence, because she didn't have to explain to anyone who I was or where I came from. As a restavek, I could not interact with Florence on a personal level; I could not talk to her about my needs. I could not speak until spoken to, except to give her messages that third parties had left with me. I also did not dare smile or laugh in her presence, as this would have been considered disrespectful—I was not her son but her restavek.

My tin cup, aluminum plate, and spoon were kept separate from the regular tableware. My clothes were rags and neighborhood children shouted "restavek" whenever they saw me in the streets. I always felt hurt and deeply embarrassed, because to me the word meant motherless and unwanted. When visitors came and saw me in the yard, I was always asked. "Tigargon [little boy], where is your grownup?" Had I been wearing decent clothes and shoes, the question would have been, "TV monsieur [young gentleman], where is your mother or father?"

Every night in my bedding under the kitchen table, I wished that either I or Florence would never wake up again. I wanted to live in the world of dreams where I sometimes flew like a bird and swam like a fish. But in the dream world I always stopped to relieve myself against a tree, causing me to awake in a puddle of urine.

Returning to the real world was a nightmare in itself—I was always trying to avoid Florence, the woman I called Manman. Every day I wished Florence would die in her sleep—until I made a most frightening discovery. While cleaning the bathroom one early evening, I noticed a small canvas bag tied into a ball under the sink. Curious, I opened it and found several pieces of bloodstained rags. Suddenly my heart raced, and I became convinced that Florence was going to die. I had a strong desire to ask her where the blood came from, but I couldn't. I was allowed to speak to Florence only when she questioned me or when I had to deliver a message from a third party.

The thought of Florence dying was real in my mind. Sometimes I sobbed, asking God to take back my wish for her death. I began to watch Florence closely, staring at every exposed part of her body, trying to find the source of the blood. I spied on her through keyholes whenever she was in the bathroom or in the bedroom.

One hot and muggy afternoon, after she pinched me and pulled me by the skin of my stomach because I had forgotten to clean the kitchen floor, she gave me a small bag of laundry detergent

labeled Fab, and a bottle of Clorox bleach. "Go to the bathroom and wash the rags in the bucket," she commanded with rage. I uncovered the metal bucket and saw a pile of white rags soaking in bloody water. I reached in the bucket and scrubbed each piece until the stains began to fade. I vomited in the toilet and continued with my chore.

After a small eternity, Florence opened the door. Fresh air rushed in and I filled my lungs. My ragged shirt was soaked with sweat. I looked up and realized for the first time that Florence was the tallest woman I had ever known. After she inspected the rags, she said, "Now soak them in the bleach. Tomorrow you can rinse them." As I followed her instructions, I stared at her feet, searching again for the source of the blood.

The following day, without being told, I scrubbed the rags again, one by one, and rinsed each piece. As I hung them to dry over the clothesline in the backyard, Florence came out to observe. "After they're dry, fold them and put them in this," she said as she handed me the small white canvas bag. I took it from her, scanning her arms and legs for scars. She had none.

I replied, "Oui" instead of the usual "Oui, Manman." At the end of the day, I followed her instructions and placed the bag on her bed. From then on, every month, Florence handed me the small white canvas bag with laundry detergent and commanded me to wash its contents.

Every day I lived with anxiety, wondering how soon my only guardian would die from bleeding. Since I had to wash the rags in the late evening in the bathroom, I assumed that Florence didn't want anyone to know about the bleeding. I though that it was a secret she wanted me to keep.

As I walked through a neighbor's yard one day, I noticed a small light blue cardboard box with the word Kotex on it in a garbage can. I walked toward the box and stopped. I wanted the box to make a toy car, with Coke bottle caps for wheels and buttons for headlights. While no one was watching, I took the box quickly, put it under my shirt, and fled. I hid it behind a bush at the side of Florence's house, waiting for free time to make a toy. After midday dinner, Florence lay down on her bed for her afternoon nap and called me in to scratch the bottom of her feet. I once heard that this was an activity female slaves used to perform for their mistresses. I despised this routine because I had to kneel at the foot of the bed on the mosaic floor, causing my abscessed right knee to hurt and ooze a foul-smelling liquid. Whenever I fell asleep at her feet, she would kick me in the face and shout, "You're going to scratch my feet until I fall asleep if I have to kick your head off, you extrait caca (essence of shit), you son of a whore." As Florence slept, I quickly left the room, thinking of the Kotex box I had hidden away. Once outside I crouched down and pulled the treasured box from the bush. I noticed several rolls of cloth material inside. I unrolled the first once and discovered a big bloodstain on it. Confused, I dropped it and went back to the neighbor's yard. I watched everyone's exposed skin surreptitiously, hoping to discover the source of the blood. I returned home and disposed of the box.

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.

One day in July 1969—I had taken a summer job in a department store on Queens Boulevard—an African-American girl asked me if any "brothers" had been hired. Brothers? I wondered. I did not know what she meant. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. A revolution had started in the American world of which I was not yet aware. The black nation had been re-founded and I was part of it. African America was taking me into its fold and I willingly let it embrace me.

My new family would include all peoples of African heritage. Exile had made me black. Still, I cannot deny the influence of my later migrations, first to Puerto Rico, then to Italy. I cannot disown my grandmother's French songs and the French classics—Corneille, Racine—which some family members recited by rote. I cannot ignore the influence of my current life in Italy, my Italian husband, my Italian son. I speak five languages, I can guess meanings in several others I have not studied. As I did in my childhood between my grandmother's family room and her backyard, I straddle many borders, physical and otherwise. In recent years I have been to Grenada, Antigua, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, coming always closer to the island of my birth, but never actually going back to it, never making the final journey, the dream of our years of exile. Between languages and borders, identities and colors, however, I have grieved for this. I am still grieving for it.

BONNE ANNEE

Jean-Pierre Benoit

It is the 1960s, a cold New Year's day in New York. The men are huddled but it is not for warmth; if anything, the Queens apartment is overheated. Important matters are to be discussed. The women are off to the side, where they will not interfere. The location of the children is unimportant; they are ignored. I am in the last category, ignored but overhearing. French, English, and Kreyol commingle. French, I understand. My English is indistinguishable from that of an American child. Kreyol, the language of my birthplace, is a mystery. Kreyol predominates, but enough is said in French and English for me to follow. He is leaving. Any day. Father Doctor. Papa Doc. Apparently he is the reason we are in New York, not Port-au-Prince. And now he is leaving. And this will make all the difference. My father is clear. We are returning to Haiti. As soon as this man leaves. No need to await the end of the school year, although my schooling is otherwise so important.

I have no memory of Haiti. No memory of my crib in Port-au-Prince, no memory of the neighbors' children or the house in which we lived. My friends are in New York. My teachers are in New York. The Mets are in New York. I do not know Papa Doc, but our destinies are linked. If he leaves, I leave. I do not want him to leave.

Another January first, another gathering. If it is the beginning of a new year, that is at best incidental. January first is the celebration of Haitian independence. A glorious day in world history, even if someone seems to have forgotten to tell the rest of the world. But it is not bygone glory that is of the moment. A new independence is dawning. It is more than just a rumor this time. Someone has inside information. It is a matter of months, weeks, maybe days, before Duvalier falls. I am one year older now, and I understand who Duvalier is. An evil man. A thief and a murderer. A monster who holds a nation prisoner. A man who tried to have my father killed. A man who will soon get his justice. My father is adamant, Duvalier's days are numbered. And then we will return. Do I want to leave? I am old enough to realize that the question is unimportant.

Go he must, but somehow he persists. A new year and he is still in power. But not for long. This time it is true. The signs are unmistakable, the gods have finally awoken. Or have they? After so many years, the debates intensify. Voices raised in excitement, in agitation, in Haitian cadences. Inevitably, hope triumphs over history. Or ancient history triumphs over recent history. Perhaps there will be a coup, Haitian exiles landing on the shores with plans and weapons, a well-timed assassination.

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.

Then there are the children. Despite having been raised in the United States, I have no special love for this country. Despite the searing example of my elders, I am not even sure what it means to love a country. Clearly, it is not the government that one is to love.

Is it then the land, the dirt and the grass, the rocks and the hills? The people? Are one people any better than another? I have no special love for this country, but neither do I desire a return to a

birthplace that will, in fact, be no real return at all. If nothing else, the United States is the country that I know, English is my daily language. Another New Year, but I am not worried; we will not be back in Port-au-Prince anytime soon. With their crooked ruler the adults can no longer draw a straight line, but I can still connect the dots and see that they lead nowhere.

II The Haitian sun has made the cross-Atlantic journey to shine on her dispossessed children. This time it is not just wispy speculation, something has changed. It is spring 1971 and there is death to celebrate. The revolutionaries have not landed on the coast, the assassin's poison has not found its blood. Nonetheless, Duvalier is dead. Unnaturally, he has died of natural causes. Only his laughable son remains. Bebe Doc, Jean-Claude Duvalier. Everyone agrees that Bebe Doc will not be in power long enough to have his diapers changed.

Laughable Bebe Doc may be, but it turns out to be a long joke, and a cruel one. The father lasted fourteen years, the son will last fifteen. Twenty-nine years is a brief time in the life of a country, but a long time in the life of its people. Twenty-nine years is a very long time in the life of an exile waiting to go home.

Three years into Bebe Doc's terrible reign there is news of a different sort. For the first time, Haiti has qualified for the World Cup. The inaugural game is against eternal powerhouse Italy. In 1974 there are not yet any soccer moms, there is no ESPN all-sports network. Americans do not know anything of soccer, and this World Cup match will not be televised. Yet America remains a land of immigrants. For an admission fee, the game will be shown at Madison Square Garden on four huge screens suspended in a boxlike arrangement high above the basketball floor. I go with my younger brother. In goal, Italy has the legendary Dino Zoff. Together they have not been scored upon in two years. The poor Haitians have no hope. And yet, Haitians hope even when there is no hope. The trisyllable cry of "HA-I-TI" fills the air. It meets a response, "I-TA-LIA," twice as loud but destined to be replaced by an even louder HA-I-TI, followed by IT-A-LIA and again HA-I-TI in a spiraling crescendo. The game has not even started.

My brother and I join in the cheer; every time Haiti touches the ball is cause for excitement. The first half ends scoreless. The Italian fans are nervous, but the Haitian fans are feeling buoyed. After all, Haiti could hardly be expected to score a goal, not when the Germans and the English and the Brazilians before them have failed to penetrate the Italian defense. At the same time, the unheralded Haitian defenders have held. The second half begins. Less than a minute has gone by and Emanuel Sanon, the left-winger for Haiti, has the ball. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he had foolhardily predicted that he will score. Zoff is fully aware of him. Sanon shoots. There is a split second of silence and then madness. The ball is in the back of the net, Sanon has beaten Zoff. The Italians are in shock. The world is in shock. Haiti leads 1-0.

"HA-I-TI, HA-I-TI." Half of Madison Square Garden is delirious, half is uncomprehending. The Haitians are beating the Italians. Haiti is winning. Haiti is winning. For six minutes. Then the Italians come back to tie the score, 1-1. The Italians score again. And then again. The Haitians cannot respond. Italy wins 3-1.

Still. Still, for six minutes Haiti is doing the impossible, Haiti is beating Italy. Italy, which twice

has won the World Cup. Six minutes. Perhaps the natal pull is stronger than it seems. For that one goal, that brief lead, those six minutes, mean more to me than all the victories of my favorite baseball team.

III

February 7, 1986, amid massive protests in Haiti, Jean-Claude flees the country. There is a blizzard in New York, but this does not prevent jubilant Haitians from taking to the snowy streets, waving flags, honking horns, pouring champagne. Restaurants in Brooklyn serve up free food and drink. The Duvalier regime has finally come to an end. The New Year's prediction has finally come true. If he leaves, I leave. In July, I fulfill my destiny, more or less. I return to Haiti, on an American passport, for a two-week visit.

In October the Mets win their second World Series. The city celebrates with a tickertape parade attended by over two million people. A pale celebration indeed, compared to the celebrating that took place earlier in the year.

HAITI: A MEMORY JOURNEY

Assotto Saint

Early Friday morning, February 7, 1986, drinking champagne and watching televised reports of Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier fleeing for his life aboard a U.S. Air Force plane, I can't help but reminisce about my childhood experiences, and reflect on the current political and social situation, along with my expectations as a gay man who was born and grew up there.

Having seen, so many times during the AIDS crisis, Haitian doctors and community leaders deny the existence of homosexuality in Haiti; having heard constantly that the first afflicted male cases in Haiti were not homosexual, but alas, poor hustlers who were used by visiting homosexual American tourists who infected them and thus introduced the disease into the country; having felt outrage at the many excuses, lies, denials, and apologies—I am duty-bound to come out and speak up for the thousands of Haitians like me, gay and not hustlers, who for one reason or another, struggle with silence and anonymity yet don't view themselves as victims. Self-pity simply isn't part of my vocabulary. Haunted by the future, I'm desperate to bear witness and settle accounts. These are trying times. These are times of need.

For years now, Haiti has not been a home but a cause to me. Many of my passions are still there. Although I did my best to distance myself from the homophobic Haitian community in New York, to bury painful emotions in my accumulated memories of childhood, I was politically concerned and committed to the fight for change in my native land. It's not surprising that the three hardest yet most exhilarating decisions I have faced had to do with balancing my Haitian roots and gay lifestyle. The first was leaving Haiti to live in the United States. The second was going back to meet my father for the first time. The third, tearing up my application to become a U.S. citizen. Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.

I was born on October 2, 1957, one week after Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier was elected president. He had been a brilliant doctor and a writer of great verve from the Griots (negritude) movement. Until that time, the accepted images of beauty in Haiti, the images of "civilization," tended to be European. Fair skin and straight hair were better than dark and kinky. Duvalier was black pride. Unlike previous dictators who had ruled the country continuously since its independence from the French in 1804, Duvalier was not mulatto, and he did not surround himself with mulattoes, a mixed- race group that controlled the economy. Duvalier brought Vodou to the forefront of our culture and, later in his reign, used it to tyrannize the people.

I grew up in Les Cayes, a sleepy port city of twenty thousand in southwest Haiti, where nothing much happened. Straight A's, ran like a girl, cute powdered face, silky eyebrows—I was the kind of child folks saw and thought quick something didn't click. I knew very early on that I was "different," and I was often reminded of that fact by my schoolmates. "Masisi" (faggot), they'd tease me. That word to this day sends shivers down my spine but, being the town's best-behaved child, a smile, a kind word were my winning numbers.

We—my mother (a registered nurse anesthetist), grandfather (a lawyer who held, at one time or

another, each of the town's top official posts, from mayor on down), grandmother, and I—lived in a big beautiful house facing the cathedral. The Catholic Mass, especially High Mass on Sundays and holy days, with its colorful pageantry, trance-inducing liturgy, and theatrical ceremony, spellbound me. And that incense—that incense took me heaven-high each time. I was addicted and I attended Mass every day. Besides, I had other reasons. I had developed a mad crush on the parish priest, a handsome Belgian who sang like a bird.

I must have been seven when I realized my attraction to men. Right before first communion, confused and not making sense, I confessed to this priest. Whether he understood me or not, he gave me absolution and told me to say a dozen Hail Marys. Oh Lord, did I pray. Still girls did nothing for me. Most of my classmates had girlfriends to whom they sent passionate love poems and sugar candies, and whom they took to movies on Sunday afternoons. All I wanted to do with girls was skip rope, put makeup on their faces, and comb their hair. I was peculiar.

Knowing that I probably would never marry, I decided that I wanted to be a priest when I grew up. For one, priests are celibate, and I had noticed that they were effeminate. Some even lisped, like me. I built a little altar in my bedroom with some saints' icons, plastic lilies, and colored candles and dressed in my mother's nursing uniform and petticoat. I said Mass every night. The archbishop of Haiti, Francois W. Ligonde, a childhood friend of my mother and uncles, even blessed my little church when he once visited my family. I was so proud. Everybody felt that I'd be the perfect priest, except my mother, who I later found out wanted me to become a doctor like my father—who I never met, never saw pictures of, never heard mention of, and accepted as a nonentity in my life.

I used to believe that I was born by immaculate conception, until one day I was ridiculed in school by my science teacher, who had asked me for my father's name. When I told him of my belief, he laughed and got the entire class to laugh along. Until then I had never questioned the fact that my last name was the same as that of my mother, who was not married. It was then that I smelled foul play and suspected that I was the result of sexual relations between my mother and grandfather. I didn't dare ask.

In the early 1960s, Papa Doc declared himself President-for-Life and things got worse and worse. I remember hearing of anti-Duvalier suspects being arrested. I remember hearing of families being rounded up and even babies being killed. I remember the mysterious disappearances at night, the mutilated corpses being found by roads and rivers the next day. I remember the public slayings, adults whispering and sending my cousins and me to another room so they could talk. Rumors of invasions by exiled Haitians abounded. Some of these invasions were quickly stopped by government forces. The tonton macoutes (bogeymen) were everywhere, with their rifles slung over their shoulders and their eyes of madness and cruelty.

Poverty was all around me and, in my child-mind, I had accepted this. Some had, some had not. Fate. Cyclones, hurricanes, floods came and went. Carnival was always a happy time, though. Dressed in a costume, I, along with thousands, took to the streets each year with our favorite music bands. Grandmother died during Mardi Gras '65. I was miserable for weeks and kept a daily journal to her. Soon after, mother left for Switzerland and I moved in with my aunt Marcelle and her husband.

In 1968, my aunt had her first and only child. Was I jealous! I had been quite comfortable and so spoiled for three yean that when she gave birth to Alin, it was difficult for me to accept that I was not her real child, a fact I had, at times, forgotten. That year she gave me a beautiful birthday party. My schoolmates were making fun of me more than ever. I still wanted to be a priest. I said a Mass for

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy when each was assassinated. Duvalier declared himself the flag of the nation and became more ruthless. I took long walks on the beach by myself. It was a year of discovery.

One afternoon, I saw Pierre swimming alone. He called me to join him. I was surprised. Although we went to the same school and we had spoken to each other once or twice, we were not buddies. Three or four years older, tall and muscular, Pierre was a member of the volleyball team and must have had two or three girlfriends. I didn't have a swimsuit, so I swam naked. I remember the uneasiness each time our eyes met, the tension between us, my hard-on. We kept smelling each other out. He grabbed me by the waist. I felt his dick pressing against my belly. Taut smiles. I held it in my hand and it quivered. I had never touched another boy's dick before. I asked him if he had done this with other boys. He said only with girls. Waves.

He turned me around and pushed his dick in my ass. Shock. I remember the pain. Hours later, the elation I felt, knowing that another person who was like me existed. In Les Cayes, there had been rumors about three or four men who supposedly were homosexual, but they were all married. Some had no fewer than seven children. Knowing Pierre was a turning point for me. The loneliness of thinking that I was the only one with homosexual tendencies subsided.

In 1969, man walked on the moon. I was happy. Pierre and I met each other three or four times (once in my grandfather's study, and he almost caught us). I didn't say anything about this to anyone, not even at confession. I didn't pray as much. I passed my certificat, which is like graduation from junior high school in the U.S. Mother moved from Geneva to New York City, where I visited her in the summer of 1970. To me, New York was the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, hot dogs and hamburgers, white people everywhere, museums, rock music, twenty-four-hour television, stores, stores, and subways.

I remember the day I decided to stay in the U.S. A week before I was to go back to Haiti, my mother and I were taking a trip to Coney Island. Two effeminate guys in outrageous short shorts and high heels walked onto the train and sat in front of us. Noticing that I kept looking at them, my mother said to me that this was the way it was here. People could say and do whatever they wanted; a few weeks earlier thousands of homosexuals had marched for their rights.

Thousands! I was stunned. I kept thinking what it would be like to meet some of them. I kept fantasizing that there was a homosexual world out there I knew nothing of. I remember looking up in amazement as we walked beneath the elevated train, then telling mother I didn't want to go back to Haiti. She warned me of snow, muggers, homesickness, racism, alien cards, and that I would have to learn to speak English. She warned me that our lives wouldn't be a vacation. She would have to go back to work as a night nurse in a week, and I'd have to assume many responsibilities. After all, she was a single mother.

That week, I asked her about my father and found out that they had been engaged for four years while she was in nursing school and he in medical school. She got pregnant and he wanted her to abort. A baby would have been a burden so early in their careers, especially since they planned to move to New York after they got married. Mother wouldn't abort. She couldn't. Though the two families tried to avoid a scandal and patch things up, accusations were made, and feelings hurt. Each one's decision final, they became enemies for life.

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.

*Our ancestors, the Gauls (nos ancitres, les Gaulois)—a phrase from a French children's history text used widely, until recently, in Francophone primary schools.

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.

A CAGE OF WORDS

Joel Dreyfuss

I call it "the Phrase" and it comes up almost anytime Haiti is mentioned in the news: the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere. These seven words represent a classic example of something absolutely true and absolutely meaningless at the same time.

On a recent trip to Haiti, I asked a young journalist working for an international news organization why the Phrase always appeared in her stories. "Even when I don't put it in," she confided, "the editors add it to the story."

The Phrase is a box, a metaphorical prison. If Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, that fact is supposed to place everything in context. Why we have such suicidal politics. Why we have such selfish politicians. Why we suffer so much misery. Why our people brave death on the high seas to wash up on the shores of Florida. After all, in this age where an advocacy of free markets is a substitute for foreign policy and Internet billionaires are created by the minute, being poor automatically makes you suspect. You must have some moral failing, some fatal flaw, some cultural blindness to not be prosperous. And what applies to the individual also applies to entire countries.

In my parents' generation, more than a few middle-class Haitians tried to deny that poverty back home was so prevalent. When I heard older Haitians stammer and object to the characterization, I wondered if they were trying to put Haiti's best foot forward, or just trying to convince themselves. Of course, the poverty was not always as obvious as it is now, having moved from the countryside into Port-au-Prince so that it spills into the main thoroughfares and the fashionable neighborhoods. Too many of us Dyasporas, having the advantage of distance to confront the truths of Haiti, would not even consider denying the desperate state of our poor brethren.

But the Phrase still grates with us because it also denies so much else about Haiti: our art, our music, our rich Afro-Euro-American culture. It denies the humanity of Haitians, the capacity to survive, to overcome, even to triumph over this poverty, a historical experience we share with so many other in this same Western Hemisphere. The Second American Invasion cast a harsh media spotlight on Haiti. The first black republic got more attention from the powerful news organizations of the West than it ever had in its history. But that scrutiny was ultimately disappointing. We learned once again that coverage is not the same as understanding. The Phrase became an easy out for reporters confronting the complexities they could barely begin to plumb. What a difference it would have been if American, or French, or British journalists had looked through the camera at their audience and declared, "Yes, this is a poor country, but like Ireland or Portugal, it has also produced great art. Yes, this poor country has suffered brutal government and yet, like Russia or Brazil, it has produced great writers and scholars. Yes, many of Haiti's most downtrodden, like the Jews in America or the Palestinians in the Middle East, have fled and achieved more success in exile than they ever would at home." Such statements would have linked Haiti to the rest of the world. They would have made it seem less mysterious, less unsolvable, less exotic. But then, that really wasn't the purpose of most reporting about Haiti over the last few years. Keeping the veil over the island was easier than trying to understand factions and divisions and mistrust and history. And it gave America

an out if the intervention failed. So foreign journalists fell back on the Phrase. It was shorthand. It was neat. And it told the world nothing about Haiti that it didn't already know.

THE RED DRESS

Patricia Benoit

1982. TV. The nightly news. Bodies on the beach, faces behind barbed wire. Any one of them could be related to me. Rudolph Giuliani, then assistant attorney general of the United States, now New York City mayor, finger wagging: we have no problem with refugees as long as they come by the proper channels: (Rude refugees. Bad refugees. Ca ne se fait pas, it's just not done to come by boat and die on U.S. beaches). These refugees are economic, not political. There are no human-rights abuses in Haiti.

I want to break the television. What about the women, men, and children who died fighting for freedom? What about my father,

imprisoned then released and lucky enough to escape before the macoutes came for him again and lucky enough to get asylum and bring us out by the proper channels twenty years ago? I get tired of yelling and decide to do something.

The United States government transforms an abandoned building into a detention center in Brooklyn's former Navy Yard. After much political wrangling, a group of activist priests, themselves exiled by the Duvalier dictatorship, are finally allowed to organize English classes in the center.

I start teaching in one of those January winters so hard on island people. It is an out-of-the-way place, a group of abandoned industrial buildings not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, several highway overpasses, and a housing project. The streets are almost empty.

A hundred women and men live in this red building with windows covered with dirt and wire mesh. Black and Latino guards have been hired especially for the occasion. After the guard at the door inspects the contents of my bag, he flashes a smile and reprises with perfect comic timing the refrain of a television commercial: "Welcome to Roach Motel. Roaches check in but they don't check out." Humor as a weapon against a dirty job?

The men and women have been separated into different parts of the building and are not allowed to see each other. There is no yard, no place for physical activity or even a short walk in the sun.

When I start, they have been there for two months. They will end up spending more than a year without ever going out, except for the rare authorized medical or legal appointment.

After I pass inspection I wait as several guards bring the women out of the "living" area, one by one, through a metal door. There are about twenty of them, many in their twenties like me, none older than fifty, all waiting impatiently to get on with their lives. This must be a special occasion, a break in the monotony, for the women make the most of the secondhand clothing donated through the Haitian priests. They dress impeccably. No pants; only dresses, skirts and blouses, pretty and demure as if for church. The youngest, barely out of their teens, highlight their youth and beauty with perfect makeup and brightly painted nails.

I am not allowed into the living area, but later the women tell me that there are dormitories with bunk beds, guards everywhere, and a common room with the television always on. The windows are so dirty they can barely see outside. Where are we? What is this place? Nothing to do except watch TV. No family to take care of. No meals to cook. They miss their husbands and boyfriends, and relatives and friends who are on the other side of these walls and on the other side of the sea. Six

months later, one of their lawyers argues unsuccessfully to at least let them have rice and beans instead of hot dogs and canned food.

Class is in a room with fluorescent lighting, no windows, and a guard at the door. I teach but I also ask for help with my Kreyol. My pronunciation is bad. I make mistakes. They laugh. We laugh together. This helps narrow the gulf between us: my twenty years of exile.

A face, an expression, a gesture reminds me of an aunt, a friend, my grandmother. Do you need anything? I ask.

They give me letters to send back home to worrying relatives and dictate a list of hair products. I stuff the letters into my shoulder bag and take them to the post office. I feel useful.

The night before class, I transfer hair relaxers and pomades from their forbidden glass containers (glass shards as a way out?) into plastic ones.

As the Latina guard carefully examines the containers and their messy contents, she finally blurts out: They have so many donations! People have given them so much, so many boxes, we have to put them in special storage! Looks at me like I'm stupid, like I've been had, taken by people already getting so much for free. They have so much, she says. Doesn't she know about divide and conquer? Setting the have-little against the have-not? Doesn't she know they—we— are the descendants of Toussaint and Dessalines, who led the only successful slave uprising in the history of the world and defeated Napoleon's troops and founded the first black republic? She probably doesn't even think I'm Haitian.

I want to narrow the gap. I am lucky. They are unlucky. Accidents of birth. I give out my home phone number in case of emergencies. I hesitate slightly before I do, fearing a deluge of phone calls, but days pass and no one calls, until Philocia. She is one of the youngest, distracted and hesitant whenever I ask her a question, not one of my best students.

Please, she says, can you do something for me? Of course, I say, worried by her sudden assertiveness. Well, Valentine's Day is coming and next Friday there is going to be a party and they are going to

let us see the men. I am going to see my boyfriend—so I need a dress. A dress? I ask. Maybe I haven't heard right. Yes, she says. A red dress. Size eight. I look through my closet as if a red dress might miraculously appear. This is not what I had in mind

when I gave out my number. Didn't I say in case of an emergency? I call a friend. A red dress? she asks. Yes. Red for hearts and roses? I guess. Have any of the other women asked for dresses? No. Her reaction convinces me not to ask anyone else. This one frivolous request I am sure will make

the other refugees look bad, make people think that Giuliani is right after all, that they have just come here for economic advantages, that they have come here to shop.

I go to the clothing stores in my East Village neighborhood. No red dress in sight, and certainly no dress that I could imagine her ever wanting to wear. Too funky and outrageous, nothing her style. Besides, what if I do find one? I don't even have a real job. She must think I'm rich. Maybe the guard

was right, maybe I'm being had. Two days before the party, I take Philocia aside. I'm sorry, I say, but I couldn't find a red dress. I

tried, but it's not easy. She smiles sweetly. I look down at her carefully manicured nails and think someone must have donated red nail polish to go with the dress she won't be wearing. Thank you, she says, mesi, like someone used to not getting what she wants. Why couldn't she have asked for something serious, something vital and important? Then I would have done anything!

Valentine's Day has come and gone. We are in the middle of class when Jeanne, an attentive, serious student, a woman in her forties, a madansara who used to sell pots and pans in the market of Jacmel, starts to cry.

What's wrong? someone asks. What's wrong, Jeanne? I ask. More tears. Silence. She rocks herself gently, back and forth. I can't stand it anymore, she says, I want to go back home. But they will kill you if you go back, someone says. I don't care. I want to die in my country like a moun, like a person, not here like a dog. More silence. I hand her a tissue. Are they all thinking the same thing? Now, I say, surprised at the authority of my voice, this is what they want. They want to wear you

down, so that you will go back and tell the others and they will be afraid to come. More silence. What is Jeanne thinking? What are they all thinking? Then, from the back of the room, a small still voice. Not me. It is Philocia of the red dress. Mwen mem. I will never go back. I don't care what they do to me. I

spent two days in the water holding on to a piece of wood from the boat. There were dead people all around me. I'm not going back.

I look at her and she has not moved. I realize that she has never left the water and that I have understood nothing.

Now I want to find her a dress in every possible shade of red . . . for roses. . . for hearts. . . red for the blood of Toussaint and Des-salines flowing in her veins.

SOMETHING IN THE WATER . . . REFLECTIONS OF A PEOPLE'S JOURNEY

Nikol Payen

The windowed door of my hospital room framed scurrying white uniforms. Inside, the silence of isolation left plenty of time for interior monologues. The medication and its lingering scent made my head fuzzy and paralyzed my tongue. My spirit seemed to be having difficulty catching up with my body, like the distorted windshield view of a rainstormed road. I anxiously waited to see whether or not this physician would corroborate my overseas diagnosis of bronchial asthma, which was beginning to seem mild now that I was up against possible heavy hitters like tuberculosis, PCP pneumonia, and HIV.

Lying there, I could almost see my dad's concerned face, his eyes widening as his deep, stern voice prepared me with Haitian proverbs, tales about our clan, warnings and cautions for my work at Guantanamo Bay. Most important, however, was his promise of ancestral protection. So off I went, surrounded by my invisible army.

The IV stand was beginning to feel like an awkward extension of my anatomy, contributing to my claustrophobia. As I lay there, I struggled to pinpoint exactly when and why my body broke down. Was it the night-and-day contrast in temperature? Days with temperatures that sometimes sent boa constrictors, iguanas, and banana rats looking for shelter under my cot, then onto the clothes that dangled from my partially open dufflebag. At times the leftover wind from the Windward Passage would stir up the baked sand, lashing my face or filling my nose and mouth with grit. Or perhaps it was the cobalt-blue, diamond-lit evening sky that would seduce me into rolling up the sides of the tent, allowing the night's chilling vapors to invade my lungs.

Time was strangely distorted on that mound of land—days long, nights short, and mornings difficult to embrace. I could always set my watch, though, by the chants of exercising soldiers that began with the 5 a.m. dosage of pesticide the military used to wage the war against bugs. When it was kind, the fumes tickled inside your nostrils. Otherwise, you went into a choking cough that could rage for twenty minutes.

Before three days could come and go, my life had undergone a complete metamorphosis. Kreyol, the language whose purpose in my life up until now had been to pain and confuse me, would prove an asset. It became my passport to the American-occupied naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Justice Department would use me as a medium—or, as my contract stipulated, an interpreter—to execute its mission. Haitians fleeing political persecution—unleashed by a coup d'etat that had overthrown Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide—were being detained while they awaited interviews for political asylum.

I was one of sixteen language specialists. We worked in a defunct airplane hangar, freshly painted white, which held about fourteen thousand people when full. The scent of sweaty bodies thickened the already damp air. Their united sound of confused chatter echoed from the hollow interior, creating a dense hum of marketplace conversation. Bodies lay in rows on olive-green cots, all their worldly possessions on the concrete floor beside them—clothes, shoes, personal documents, in black plastic

garbage bags or homemade straw sacks. I rode the yellow school bus that transported service people through the camp. It was my means of

getting to work as well. On the days when I arrived at the bus stop early, I would sit on a wooden park bench while an awakening sun pierced my sunglasses. All too often, the bath I had taken in insect repellent proved fruitless as last night's rainfall summoned what seemed like the island's entire mosquito population to feast on my exposed arms and legs. Waiting impatiently, I waved off a buzzing bee that had grown tired of a sugar-coated bottle neck from a nearby steel-grid garbage can. In the distance, a topless green army truck appeared, hauling soldiers to work. The overcrowded vehicle screeched at the red light, burying us in a fog of dust.

While I hadn't any preconceived notions about the architectural layout of a military base, never had I imagined it to be so elaborate— an actual replication of a city, a setup I suspect to be crucial in setting the underlining tone for the severity and intensity of the military training process. Like any other American town, it had a post office, a bank, a church, a gas station, credit union, firehouse, schools, hospital, restaurants, a 7-Eleven, a mall, and even a McDonald's. The neighborhoods seemed lifted directly from a suburban blueprint onto the desert landscape, the houses bearing prefabricated faces reminiscent of small towns in upstate New York. But even with the skeletal details of everyday life surrounding them, Guantanamo remained a wall-less prison.

I had committed to memory the entire bus route, which was easy to do. We would ride past Treasures & Trivia, a thrift store operated by civilian wives to occupy their day while their husbands worked. Up the hill brought us to the Jamaican Club, an after-hours spot where contracted Jamaican workers earning below minimum wage convened to bond and essentially keep sane amidst the sterility. We careened around the corner to a port and picked up a few more sailors who seemed anxious to get to their destination.

As usual, the day seemed innocent until we pulled into the ferry landing—the stop before mine. Like clockwork my stomach knotted and my heart pounded against my chest, asking to be let out. Winding around the final hill, we passed the grandest edifice on the island— the Pink Palace, the military's administrative headquarters, strategically planted on top of the hill overlooking the entire camp. This was where most of the important meetings were held by high-ranking military officials to plan and strategize with their Washington counterparts. The bus gave a final jerk indicating the end of its route.

Each day found me unprepared to digest the misery and despair that awaited me at the gate. Going back in there day after day seemed pointless, attempting to nurse physical and emotional wounds that I could not yet fully comprehend, let alone heal.

"A boat of forty-five was intercepted last night near the Windward Passage," was my substitute morning greeting from my supervisor. This tidbit was sure to structure much of the day's work. The voyage almost always promised an illness of some sort, followed by the culture shock of camp conditions. Sometimes the newcomers' eyes were weary, hazed by dehydration and seasickness. Some were badly sunburned, some wore big grins, usually a sign of relief at having been spared the swallow of the ocean. Others were generally happy about the possibilities that awaited them. After exchanging greetings and tips from familiar faces from the same or neighboring towns, the newcomers awaited the formal unveiling of their new reality. Sometimes the camp provided a ground for family reunification. When they arrived—some barefoot and meagerly attired, others clad in church-wear of

sequined, taffeta dresses—they were taken to Camp Alpha, where the processing began. Hours would pass before they could all be photographed, fingerprinted, and given identification cards.

Fighting the fierce sunrays, children hopped about, alternating feet to keep their soles from burning on the cooked tar. Colonies of flies comfortably rested on their choice of heads and faces of those awaiting the final step: acquisition of an ID bracelet, marked with a bar code similar to those found on the side of household products. Some days, this long ritual—the stamping of the refugees with the marks of ownership—accounted for an entire workday. The refugees were happy to find Kreyol speakers among the processing staff. I often walked around continuously answering any questions, explaining the ensuing immigration procedures, tending to those who were ill, and troubleshooting for anything from diapers to emergency-room arrangements and anything in between.

Feeding time introduced the newcomers to the dietary convenience of the Western world— packaged food, a first for many. They curiously deciphered the contents of their brown plastic "Meals Ready to Eat," or MREs. Some ate ravenously, while others whose palates could not make an instant adjustment to the foreign taste eagerly passed on their unused rations to unsated neighbors. Sometimes they were used for bartering. The box of chicken a la king, stroganoff, and beef stew, a favorite among the brave, contained all the components of a well-thought-out meal: an entree, instant beverages, condiments, and for dessert, various junk foods, M&M's the most popular. The military often complained of the haughtiness of Haitians. How dare they criticize perfectly delicious war- ready meals?

Creative survival instincts blossomed before my eyes under less than favorable conditions, unfolding a culture. The women converted sheets into Sunday dresses, while the men went as far as creating a radio station from transistor radios given to them by the military. The two most memorable parts of the day, as in the hospital, were mealtimes and visiting hours. The neighboring camps were also established communities. As the families were scattered throughout, visitation rights were sometimes granted. While the women cooked, cleaned, washed, nurtured the children, and carried on the traditions, the men created furniture and paintings, took in a game of soccer, cards, or dominoes, or circularly discussed politics. Conversations were stimulated by their current isolated condition as well as the Miami-based Haitian Kreyol radio broadcast, Voix de L'Amerique— the only outside news to penetrate the wall-less penitentiary. Even the children created dolls, toys, puppets, boats, trains, planes. I marveled at an ability they took for granted.

Unfortunately the tragedies were equally colorful. The camp was nearly hit by a cyclone; three hundred and fifty people drowned trying to escape to "Castro's" Cuba to see if communism could offer a kinder hand.

When the glare of the sun, the chaos of the camp, and the rhetoric became overwhelming, I walked long and hard, away from everything as far away as possible, though never far enough. On one such occasion I escaped to the bathroom, located in a neighboring hangar. Halfway to my destination, the glare of the sun reflected off a steel cage, immediately attracting me. I walked toward the object, sinking into the cooked tar of the gummy pavement with each step. En-caged, a seven-year-old boy sat listlessly playing with a pair of broken flip-flops. "A soldier put me here because when I went to eat I kept getting pushed from the food line," explained the boy. "He said I was making trouble, so I have to sit here until I learn my lesson. Can you get me some water, Miss?" High up, a guard sat post in a twenty-foot tower equipped with a rifle, a gun, binoculars, and a video camera. He recorded my interaction while adjusting his walkie-talkie.

The sun hid behind a darkening stratus cloud, transmitting an orange-yellow tint that hovered over the entire island. The bus took the dusty route to my living quarters. The glow of a setting sun outlined the smoke of floating dust left by the tires. I usually liked to linger in the camp after hours, when things began to settle and the true culture of the environment surfaced, transcending the cohesion of the makeshift community, but that day I was anxious to leave on time. At a distance, a caterpillar of soldiers clad in white T-shirts and gray shorts getting in their mandatory evening exercise swerved by, their chanting fading as the distance between us widened. As the bus pulled up near my barrack, I made a quick run for it. Walking through a patch of swamp land, a swarm of fruit fly-like insects took cover in my ears, eyes and mouth. It was nearly seven and I hoped to complete my cooking and laundry.

McCalla was a small city. Each day I took a twenty-minute ferry ride from Leeward, where I lived, to the Windward side of the island, where I worked. The ride was awkward and always reminded me of my outsider status. Some days the 7 a.m. ferry was filled to capacity: I would be sandwiched between servicemen, which I hated, or have to stand by the rail for the entire ride. As much as I loved the view of the water and the wind gently stroking my face, these visions of serenity were eclipsed by my own paranoia. The ferry seats reminded me of church pews and some mornings they were equally precious, as I tried to get the last twenty minutes of sleep. Sometimes, I resorted to sitting in the compartment under the deck. The ferry also transported large trucks and machinery to the work side of the island. When we docked, the machinery backed off the lower deck first. The sailor in charge then hand-signaled for passengers from the top deck to single-file off the craft. Once on the ferry landing, we'd wait for the bus that took us to work. Some mornings, time permitting, we procrastinated, putting off going into the camp by stopping at McDonald's and picking up a high- sodium, nutritionally unsound breakfast. I often found myself gobbling down a sausage McSomething or Another not for any reason other than to reconnect me to home, where such rubbish would never touch my lips.

One night on the last ferry with two other translators returning from a party from the Windward side to our living quarters on the Leeward side, I discovered the strategic design of the island. A man's eyes rolled back in his head after he vomited uncontrollably. Panic-stricken, the other translator screamed at him questions of concern, while I quickly alerted the driver to our crisis. He pushed some odd buttons that made strange noises and in two minutes, like a scene from Batman, a secret tunnel produced a motor raft that transported us to the principal naval hospital. This, complemented by the acres of land mines strategically plotted throughout the burned grass partitioned by steel fences with barbed-wire topping, a deterrent for Cubans who were curious about democracy, not the ones who crossed the border every morning to work for the U.S. government, left me in awe of the island's intricate readiness for war. The chopping of helicopters was a familiar noise, as was the arbitrary explosion of cannons. The twenty-four-hour guard towers reassured both sides protection of their respective countries. Sun up to sundown, soldiers stood guard at the borders with their guns permanently aimed in the direction of the enemy.

That morning found me fussing with the contents of my knapsack, trying to get to some important notes from a recent meeting. Dashing in late to the eight-thirty meeting already under way, I arrived in time for the tail end of a heated debate about the nutritional value of the meals fed to refugees. These meetings were, for the most part, a waste of time because no one intended to rectify any wrongdoing; not really. So far as I could gather, the interpreters' meetings were held for sheer appeasement, an

answer to our complaints of exclusion from the seven o'clock meetings with high-ranking government officials and asylum officers.

Today's hot debate was centered on a memo warning us against fraternizing with the "migrants," an offense that would not go unpunished. The list was long in its definition and examples of fraternizing were thoroughly spelled out, so there would be no misunderstandings. The content of the memo was the end result of yet another recent problem. It was rumored that military personnel and interpreters were beginning to establish intimate relationships with some of the migrants and the purchase of luxury items such as shampoo, conditioners, permanents, hair grease, and in some instances clothes on their behalf, was proof of this foul act. I was particularly embarrassed when one interpreter was caught on video accepting money from the migrants in exchange for a definite place on the next plane to Miami—a promise he was unauthorized to make.

Near my assignment's end, repatriation offered a free ride to refugees who had failed to prove a "credible fear" of persecution and were consequently to be returned to Haiti. I reluctantly volunteered to accompany them back. Though the two-day journey promised to be a grueling experience, I was prepared to make any sacrifice to return to my homeland after fifteen years of unintended absence.

It cost the U.S. approximately one million dollars per day to run the camp, and each repatriation neared $100,000, so filling the cutter to capacity was a must before we could be on our way. I arrived at the pier to find three other ships, housing a total of fifteen hundred refugees, ready to leave. We were scheduled for a 9 a.m. departure but were running late. On a good day, the deck fit five hundred bodies comfortably, if they were aligned sardine-style. Our ship housed only two hundred people on board, thus the holdup. Six-and-a-half hours later, with only fifty bodies added to the count, we were given clearance to leave so as to avoid an evening departure, when the ferocity of the Windward Passage would peak. I was escorted to my two-by-four cabin, which I believed to belong to some high-ranking officer. It offered me the privilege of a private bathroom half the size of the room. A pinup of Kathy Ireland graced the tiny closet door. A navy-blue jumpsuit, the only visible item of clothing, dangled solo in the darkness.

As the only civilian and the only woman working on the U.S. Escanaba, a Coast Guard cutter—the steel shark that guarded our national "security" in the form of international "drug busts"—I was at everyone's disposal twenty-four hours a day and partly responsible for maintaining order on board, whatever happened. En route, clandestine discussions held by the refugees and me in the camp were openly voiced here on the ship. Both the refugees and I found comfort in our mutual distrust of the asylum process. I had often overheard conversations corroborating these allegations from higher-ups. Programmed to spit out whatever numbers Washington entrusted them to produce that day in the name of efficiency and a job well done, these functionaries lost neither sleep nor appetite over the desperate accounts of a people whose destiny lay in their hands. "How are those numbers coming along?" was the question of the day, every day.

I remember being told the story of one twelve-year-old boy from Cite-Soleil: He was so thin that a thumb and index finger alone could have encircled his thigh. With tears rimming his eyes, he fought to keep from crying as he explained his dilemma. After the coup, his father had gone out to search for oil. When his father failed to return, his mother sent him out to search for his father and instead he found his father's corpse. He finally made it home, only to find his mother riddled with bullets, murdered by soldiers seeking revenge on democracy supporters. His family supported Lavalas, the people's movement, and for that he was wanted by the authorities.

Then there were two teenage girls, stocky, angry, and confused by the unexpected turn of events that left their lives upside down. It was as if someone had scrambled up a puzzle and asked them to fix it. They complained nonstop, frustrated by their inability to see what stared them right in the face. "I'm going to kill myself," one said. "What do I have ahead of me? I'm not going to Miami despite the fact that the Section Chief killed my parents in front of me. The only reason I was spared rape was because I had my period. I managed to get on a boat, and now I'm returning to the hell I thought was behind me." Though she put on a tough exterior, I told her to reverse it and to let her toughness flow from inside. This would enable her to better deal with life's unexpected blows. The human spirit is so resilient, its elasticity often surprised me, I told her enthusiastically. So far as I was concerned, she had already dealt with the most difficult part. But then again, I was merely speculating. I suppose I'll never know for certain from what she fled nor exactly what awaited her. "But that's all God's business isn't it?" I said. She smiled.

Dinner calmed everyone down somewhat. All concerns, needs, and worries finally began to drift with the fading day. Hours later when the sun made way for the moon and the stars, the chaos of the day began to subside, as did the buzzing of those returning home. No longer were there conversations about hypocrisy, distrust, and injustice. All had come to accept that which was most dreaded— returning home. There was a hush now, the ferocity of the clouds and the strength of the wind had calmed everyone's frustration and demanded silence.

Some time during the dark morning I was awakened by frantic pounding on my cabin door. It was one of the soldiers, breathlessly ordering me to tend to an emergency. He disappeared long before I could become coherent enough to ask for an explanation. I made my way up the tiny steel staircase, to find a robust fifteen-year-old unaccompanied minor under restraint, the girl I had been consoling that afternoon. It required the strength of three men to hold down this poor child convulsing in a screaming fit. Finally, she was pinned flat on her stomach while another serviceman tied her feet together. Two sailors simultaneously struggled to handcuff her hands behind her back as a fellow Haitian was instructed to hold her head fixed to one side.

We were entering the mouth of the Windward Passage. The wind fiercely rocked our vessel while lightning illuminated the dark, angry sky. Roaring thunder drowned my conversations, pulling rain from the clouds and pouring it over our bodies. This outburst caused some to grumble explanations of a jilted lover, others claimed her insanity came by way of a hex from the other woman. As she went in and out of piranha-like biting fits, a thinly built, gray-haired, mild-mannered man from the girl's native town of Jeremie accounted for her epileptic history. She had been fine for both his and my conversation of earlier that day. It seemed that the young lady I had tried to dissuade from suicide had manifested these feelings after all. Eventually she was subdued with her hand and foot securely tied to a pole on the flight deck. Lightning ripped across the sky and spotlighted her crucified shadow followed by the sky's disapproving grumble. I wrapped her in a wool blanket to shield her from the wind.

What was to have been a two-day voyage turned into a week of drifting in the Atlantic between Haiti and Cuba, in preparation to intercept incoming refugees even before the ink on President Bush's newly imposed executive order could fully dry. My trek through the Middle Passage dragged me through the murky road of history, determined to make me feel a pain that was centuries deep and supposedly resolved. Yet this nightmare gnawed so deep within me, not even my assimilationist

lifestyle could mitigate it. Witnessing two hundred fifty bodies enroped in slave-ship fashion on deck to be baked by the

summer blaze or soaked by impulsive skies if nature willed left me feeling helpless and uneasy. We seemed to be going backward—in time—in history. But time spoke softly, gently unveiling its truth before me. The pieces of my parents' past, which they had difficulty talking about, were gladly exhibited through the troubled spirits of those who sat before me to translate their perplexities. An Abyssinian-looking beauty sat before me complaining about the factory where she worked sewing bras. A mandatory eighteen-hour day with no lunch and no break except those to fight off advances by her boss who promised her, in return, a raise of fifteen cents per hour. But this was mild compared to the threats of death received by her husband, whose goat had wandered off into a section chief's yard and fed on his garden. Or the woman whose community group was plastered with photos of a rooster and Aristide, thereby making her a candidate for death. Young men complained that Haiti was so plagued politically that their congregation for any reason, even for church, left them suspect of political activities. Or the tailor who was commissioned to make clothes for the sister of a certain section chief who, disagreeing with the asking price of her new dress, sicced her brother on him. Others reached the camp by happenstance, as one gentleman explained that he'd been fishing and fell asleep.

I'll never forget my first reintroduction to Haiti. We were nearing the pier when a refugee pointed to Gonaives, and Port-de-Paix, up north. "There's Mole Saint Nicolas," exclaimed a young man, proudly explaining the century-old U.S. desire to construct a military base there. This would be strategically ideal since Cuba and Jamaica, the other two largest countries occupying the Caribbean basin, are a stone's throw away. The fog revealed a sketch of our intended destination, the ship chaplain pointed to Sacre Coeur, a century-old landmark church. I gazed in disbelief, reflecting vaguely on the times when this cathedral served as the ultimate sanctuary for me and my family for Sunday mass some two decades ago.

The refugees were instructed to return their yellow I.D. cards, at last relieved from the tight wrist- squeezing of plastic bar-coded bracelets. Their curiosity about what lay ahead provided an occasion for me to give a briefing outlining the final phase of the procedure. At the wharf they were met by Red Cross personnel, sometimes accompanied by U.S. Embassy officials, who dealt with politically complex cases. The returnees were given an exit interview and fifteen Haitian dollars, which many claimed was insufficient for their long journey home. That day, the string of armed Haitian military officials awaiting their disembarkation left many fearful for their lives. Panic was lent validity by concerns about being followed home by the same would-be attackers who had been responsible for their initial departure. The U.S. military promised safety, but even if they hadn't, the Haitians had no means to negotiate. So they halfheartedly, yet peacefully, disembarked. When the ship was nearly vacant, I caught a U.S. State Department staff member handing the bag of I.D. cards to Haitian soldiers. Confused and frustrated, I looked for an ally until it dawned on me that no one on board remotely shared my concern.

On the return trip, the calm night sky twinkled on the ocean while angry phosphorescent waters pounded at the ship from bow to stern. The ordeal cast me into a four-day bout with insomnia. Even the ocean, hard as she tried, was unable to cradle me to sleep. For each night while they weathered the cold winds on deck, I wrestled with the displaced faces that haunted me in my cabin while I lay

nestled in wool blankets. With their concerns and uncertainties etched deeply into their faces, strong and tired eyes imposed inquisitive gazes, looking for answers I also sought.

Meanwhile, back in the captain's dining room I began wondering to what I owed the honor of past- life luxuries—cloth napkins, sterling silver flatware, and china actually used and not only displayed. And waiters, four waiters who stood post on each corner of the table, eager to tend to the captain's every need. The quality and size of one's portions matched one's rank. Contrary to the migrants' restricted diets food flowed nonstop in the forms of soup, salad, entree, dessert, coffee, followed by the point of the dinner invitation. The closing conversation was to get an assessment of my personal limitations regarding the perils of my assignment. In other words, to size up the distance I would go for my people and my two countries, one that had my allegiance as a birthright, the other hoping to win it.

Despite the hazardous duty conditions, which had already claimed the life of one interpreter, I volunteered to be lowered by rope from the cutter into a tiny motor raft in an attempt to negotiate with prospective refugees on behalf of the United States government. Looking at the flimsy craft in the middle of the hungry, shark-infested waters, I felt the pressure of pleading to win their confidence as their boat repeatedly threatened to capsize. The sun began its descent and my sneakers were soaked from the puddle that collected in our motor boat. One of the teenage boys leaned on the bow. Their ragged sail was tied to the flimsy pole that struggled to hold it. "Why should I go on the ship, why should I trust you?" asked a dark-skinned man in his early twenties, turning up his nose as if he literally smelled something foul. I was lost for an adequate response except, I'm all you've got here and you have to believe in my good intentions. And besides, I was unprepared to watch them drown.

The mother wore only the bottom half of what used to be a dress, her shriveled sagging breasts dangled lifelessly against her badly scarred body. With dark spots and welts all over her back, her hair was ravaged and she spoke in delirium, a blur. "My sister, my baby," she muttered. Each time she tried to express herself, she was unable to add any more information to where she had left off. "My aunt and her baby were with us on the boat, the baby became ill. She plunged in the ocean with the baby saying she could no longer stand the suffering," explained the young man. "She's not good in her head," he finished.