Edwidge Danticat - Breath, Eyes, Memory

The baby let out a sudden cry from Tante Atie's room. I rushed back in. Tante Atie was pacing as she carried her around the room. Brigitte stretched out her hands when she saw me. She pressed her face down on my neck when I held her against my body.

"Did the old woman leave for the cemetery?" Tante Atie asked.

"Is that where she's going?"

"She is going to pay her last respects to Dessalines."

Brigitte clawed my neck with her fingernails.

"You and Louise, you are very close, aren't you?" I asked Tante Atie.

"When you have a good friend," she said, "you must hold her with both hands."

"It will be hard for you when she leaves, won't it?"

"I will miss her like my own skin."

My grandmother had her veil on her arm as she walked back towards the house. Eliab ran to her and took a heavy bundle from her hand. He pulled out its contents, sniffing the coconuts before setting them down.

"Did you have a nice visit to the cemetery?" I asked.

"There are two ways to go to the cemetery. One is on your two feet, the other is in a box. Each way, it is a large travail. Where is your Tante Atie?"

"She is visiting with Louise."

"Why do I even ask?"

She picked up a machete from under the porch and chopped a green coconut in half. Eliab pushed an open gourd beneath the coconut and caught the cloudy liquid flowing out of it. My grandmother carved out the flesh with a spoon and stuffed it in her mouth.

She chopped another coconut and brought it over to me. The coconut milk spilled all over my chest as I raised the shell to my lips.

My daughter reached up to grab the coconut. My grandmother and Eliab sat on an old tree stump, sharing the soft mush inside the coconut. My grandmother threw some at the pig, which it leaped up to swallow.

…

Tante Atie did not come home for supper. My grandmother and I ate in the yard, while Brigitte slept in a blanket in my arms. My grandmother was watching a light move between two distant points on the hill.

"Do you see that light moving yonder?" she asked, pointing to the traveling lantern. "Do you know why it goes to and fro like that?"

She was concentrating on the shift, her pupils traveling with each movement:

"It is a baby," she said, "a baby is being born. The midwife is taking trips from the shack to the yard where the pot is boiling. Soon we will know whether it is a boy or a girl."

"How will we know that?"

"If it is a boy, the lantern will be put outside the shack. If there is a man, he will stay awake all night with the new child."

"What if it is a girl?"

"If it is a girl, the midwife will cut the child's cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light."

We waited. The light went out in the house about an hour later. By that time, my grandmother had dozed off. Another little girl had come into the world.

A rooster crowed at the next morning's dawn. I peeked into Tante Atie's room. Her bed was still made, without a wrinkle on it. She had not come home at all the night before. My grandmother made herself some bitter black coffee with a lump of salt to prepare her body for the shock of bad news.

I sat out on the porch with Brigitte waiting for the food vendors to come by. They trickled by slowly, each chanting the names and praises of their merchandise.

My grandmother bought some bananas, boiled eggs, and hard biscuits, Louise and Tante Atie came up the road. Tante Atie was ahead. Louise marched a few feet behind her.

My grandmother looked up without acknowledging their presence. Louise walked into the yard, charged towards the tree, untied her pig, picked it up, and walked away.

"Why? What are you doing?" I called after her.

She did not turn back.

"What is the matter with her?" I asked Tante Atie.

"Manman told her to come get the pig or she would kill it," Tante Atie said.

Tante Atie was carrying a small jar of water with three leeches inside.

"Is it true Grandme Ife? Did you say that?" I asked.

"We need a pig, we buy a pig," said my grandmother.

"I will buy it," I said.

"Non non," Tante Atie jumped quickly. "The money, it will surely go for her boat trip to Miami."

"You think you can keep money out of her hands?" asked my grandmother.

"I do not want to push her into the ocean," Tante Atie said.

She raised the leech jar towards the sun. The animals squirmed away from the light, their black slippery bodies coiling into small balls. She raised her skirt and stretched out her calf. Opening the jar, she tipped it over so that the water was soaking her skin. The leeches slowly crawled out of the jar and climbed on a lump on her calf.

She ground her teeth when one of the larger leeches bit into her skin. She leaned back against the porch railing, pulled her notebook from her sack, and began writing her name. She wrote it over and over, following a pattern at the top of the page.

The leeches sucked the blood out of her lump, until they were plump and full. She pulled them away one by one, slid her fingers down their backs, and pumped the blood into an empty jar. I felt my head spinning, my stomach about to turn inside out. Tante Atie noticed the pained expression on my face.

"It's no loss, angel," she said. "It's only blood, bad blood at that."

I asked my grandmother if I could cook supper for us that night.

Tante Atie offered to take me to a private vendor where food was cheaper than the maché. She put the leeches in some clean water and we started down the road.

"What are you making for us?" she asked.

"Rice, black beans, and herring sauce," I said.

"Your mother's favorite meal."

"That's what we cooked most often."

We followed a footpath off the road, down to a shallow stream. An old mule was yanking water vines fromtheedgeof the stream while baby crabs freely dashed around its nostrils.

A woman rilled a calabash a few feet from where my sandals muddied the water. Tante Atie chatted with the women as she went by. Some young girls were sitting bare-chested in the water, the sun casting darker shadows into their faces. Their hands squirted blackened suds as they pounded their clothes with water rocks.

A dusty footpath led us to a tree-lined cemetery at the top of the hill. Tante Atie walked between the wooden crosses, collecting the bamboo skeletons of fallen kites. She stepped around the plots where empty jars, conch shells, and marbles served as grave markers.

"Walk straight," said Tante Atie, "you are in the presence of family."

She walked around to each plot, and called out the names of all those who had been buried there. There was my great-grandmother, Beloved Martinelle Brigitte. Her sister, My First Joy Sophilus Gentille. My grandfather's sister, My Hope Atinia Ife, and finally my grandfather, Charlemagne Le Grand Caco.

Tante Atie named them all on sight.

"Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire."

From the cemetery, we took a narrow footpath to the vendor's hut. On either side of us were wild grasses that hissed as though they were full of snakes.

We walked to a whitewashed shack where a young woman sold rice and black beans from the same sisal mat where she slept with her husband.

In the yard, the husband sat under the shade of a straw parasol with a pipe in his mouth and a demijohn at his feet. He was pounding small nails into leather straps and thin layers of polished wood to make sandals.

The hammering echoed in my head until I reached the cane fields. The men were singing about a woman who flew without her skin at night, and when she came back home, she found her skin peppered and could not put it back on. Her husband had done it to teach her a lesson. He ended up killing her.