Edwidge Danticat - Breath, Eyes, Memory

"What is it?"

"What do you do in America, Sophie? What is your profession?"

"I am dactylo," I said.

"Ki sa?"

"A secretary."

"You make money?"

"I haven't worked since I had the baby."

"Had enough for this journey, non?"

"I didn't plan on this journey."

I laid Brigitte on my lap. Her cheeks swayed back and forth like flesh balloons.

"I want to go to America," Louise said. "I am taking a boat."

"It is very dangerous by boat."

"I have heard everything. It has been a long time since our people walked to Africa, they say. The sea, it has no doors. They say the sharks from here to there, they can eat only Haitian flesh. That is all they know how to eat."

"Why would you want to make the trip if you've heard all that?"

"Spilled water is better than a broken jar. All I need is five hundred gourdes."

"I know the other side. Thousands of people wash up on the shores. They put it on television, in newspapers."

"People here too. We pray for them and bury them. Stop. Let us stop talking, so sad. It is bad luck in front of a baby. How old is your baby?"

She reached over and tickled Brigitte's forehead.

"Twenty weeks."

"The birthing? What it feel like?"

"Like passing watermelons."

"Wou." She cringed. "You look very meg, bony. Not like women here who eat to fill a hole after their babies come out. When you were pregnant, you didn't eat corn so the baby could be yellow?"

"I never thought of that."

"You should have eaten honey so her hair would be soft."

"I will remember that."

"The next time, maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Your daughter? What is her name?"

"Brigitte Ife Woods."

"Woods? It is not a Haitian name."

"No, non. Her father, he is American."

She called the boy with the kite over and squeezed a penny between his muddy fingers. With a few whispers in the child's ear, she sent him dashing down the road.

She rushed across to her stand and came back with a bottle of papaya cola.

My whole body felt cooler as the liquid slipped down my throat.

"I know you will pay me later," she said.

Tante Atie was standing at the crossroads, with a very wide grin on her pudgy face. She had not changed at all. She walked with her hands supporting her back, as if it hurt her. A panama hat tightly covered her head. On her shoulder was a palmetto sewing basket, flapping against her wide buttocks.

"She must have been on the way," Louise said.

"Mim mwoin!" I shouted to Tante Atie. I'm over here!

Tante Atie raced towards us. She had to look at me closely to see the girl she had put on the plane. It seemed so very long ago. The years had changed me.

"You are already chewing off my niece's ear," she said, tapping Louise's behind. "Always trying to give away your soul."

Louise sprang back to her stand.

"I would throw myself around you," my aunt said. "I would, just like a blanket, but I don't want to flatten the baby."

I handed Brigitte to her, as I raised myself from the ground.

"Who would have imagined it?" she said. "The precious one has your manman's black face. She looks more like Martine's child than yours."

Leaves were still piling up on the creeks along the road.

A tall girl passed us with a calabash balancing on her head.

I carried a small suitcase, mostly filled with Brigitte's things. Brigitte napped as Tante Atie carried her in her arms.

The women we met on the road called Tante Atie Madame, even though she had never married.

"I cannot see this child coming out of you," Tante Atie said, rocking Brigitte in her arms.

"Sometimes, I cannot see it myself."

"Makes me think back to when you were this small and I had you in my arms. Feels the same too. Like I am holding something very valuable. Do you sometimes think she is going to break in your hands?"

"She is a true Caco woman; she is very strong."

A woman was sitting by the road stringing factory sequins together, while her daughter braided her hair.

"Louise tells me you've learned your letters," I said to Tante Atie.

"She must think I want that shouted from the hills."

"I was very happy to hear it."

"I alway felt, I did, that I knew words in my head. I did not know them on paper. Now once every so often, I put some nice words down. Louise, she calls them poems."

An old lady was trying to kill a rooster in the yard behind her house. The rooster escaped her grasp and ran around headless until it collapsed in the middle of the road. We walked around the bloody trail as the lady picked up the dead animal.

"Have you brought your daughter to Martine?" Tante Atie asked.

"She never answers my letters. When I called her, she slammed the phone down on me. She has not seen my daughter. We have not spoken since I left home."

"That's very sad for both of you. Very sad since you and Martine don't have anybody else over there. And Martine's head is not in the best condition."

A man hammered nails into a coffin in front of his roadside hut.

"Honneur, Monsié Frank," Tante Atie called out to the coffin builder.

"Respect." He flashed back a friendly smile.

"We have always heard that it is grand there," said Tante Atie. "Is it really as grand as they say, New York?"

"It's a place where you can lose yourself easily."

"Grand or not grand, I am losing myself here too."

We passed Man Grace's farm, with the bamboo fence around it. The house was worn out and wind-whipped. There were large wooden boards on the windows.

"When did Man Grace die?" I asked Tante Atie.

"Almost the day I came back to live here," she said.

"What was wrong with her?"

"She went to bed and just stopped breathing. It must have been her time. It was very hard on Louise when her monman died. Louise and Grace, they had slept in the same bed all her life. Louise was in the bed when Grace went to Guinea. To this day, it tears her open to sleep alone."

My grandmother's house still looked the same. I dropped my suitcase on the porch and followed Tante Atie out to the back.

Grandmè Ifé was sprinkling water in the dust, before doing her sweeping.

"Old woman, I brought your children," Tante Atie said.

"Age and wedlock tames the beast," said my grandmother. "Am I looking at Sophie?"

I moved closer, pressing her fingers against my cheeks.

"Did you even have breasts the last time I saw you?" asked my grandmother.

"It has not been that long," Tante Atie said.

My grandmother's eyes were filled with tears. She buried her face in my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist.

"I called my daughter Brigitte Ife," I said. "The Ife is after you."

She stretched her neck to get a closer look.

"Do you see my granddaughter?" she asked, tracing her thumb across Brigitte's chin. "The tree has not split one mite. Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?"

The lights on a distant hill glowed like a candle light vigil. We ate supper at the small table on the back porch, A New York skyline was emblazoned in sequins across Tante Atie's chest. I had hurriedly bought a matching pair of i LOVE NEW YORK sweatshirts for her and my grandmother, forgetting about the lifelong deuil, which kept my grandmother from wearing anything but black, to mourn my grandfather.

My grandmother chewed endlessly on the same piece of meat, as her eyes travelled back and forth between my face and Tante Atie's chest. I swallowed a mouthful of soursop juice, savoring the heavy screen of brown sugar lingering on my tongue.

"Does your mother still cook Haitian?" asked Tante Atie with a full mouth.

"I am not sure," I said.