Edwidge Danticat - Breath, Eyes, Memory

We stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Two swans were floating along trying to catch up with one another. The crew team was rowing towards the edge of the river.

"During your visit, did you go to the spot where your mother was raped?" Rena asked. "In the thick of the cane field. Did you go to the spot?"

"No, not really."

"What does that mean?"

"I ran past it."

"You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you'll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts."

My mother met us on the stoop outside the house. She was wearing a large tent dress with long puffy sleeves. She looked calmer, rested. Her skin was evened out with a powdered mahogany glow.

Joseph had driven in our station wagon, while I brought Brigitte in my mother's car.

"Ca va byen?" My mother kissed Joseph four times on the cheek. "I brought your wife and daughter back in one piece."

She took the baby from my arms and shoved Marc forward to introduce himself.

Marc was a bit fatter than I remembered. He was squeezed into a small gray jacket and a large pair of pants held up by suspenders.

Marc recited his full name as he shook Joseph's hand.

"Marc has a lot of the old ways," my mother said to Joseph.

The kitchen smelled like fried fish, boiled cabbage, and mayonnaise.

"What have you been up to?" my mother said, curling Brigitte up in her arms. Brigitte reached up to grab my mother's very short hair.

"She said Dada," Joseph announced proudly.

"Even when she grows up and gets a doctorate," Marc said, "it will not count as much."

Marc wrapped an apron around his waist and turned over the fish in the skillet.

My mother took Joseph on a tour of the house, the tour he had never gotten. He followed her obediently, beaming.

She moved us into the backyard where she had placed her picnic table near her hibiscus patch. She stood over Joseph's shoulder, to show him how to sprinkle chopped pickled peppers on his plantains.

"What kind of music do you do?" Marc asked Joseph as we sat down to eat.

"I try to do all kinds of music," Joseph said. "I think music should speak not only to the ear, but mostly to the soul."

"That's a very vague answer," my mother said.

"I think they want to know if you get paid," I said.

"We're not being as graceless as that," Marc said. "I was thinking more in terms of merengue, calypso, soka, samba?"

"Is there money in it?" asked my mother.

"I do okay," Joseph said. "I play with friends when they need someone, but trust me, I have a little nest egg saved up."

My mother winked for only my eyes to see. She had prepared for this, was set to make Joseph love her. "I have something to tell you," she said to me. "I have made a decision."

Turning back to Joseph, my mother asked, "Is that how you bought your place in Providence?"

"Sure is," Joseph said.

"I really was asking more about your opinion of music," Marc insisted.

"We hear you," said my mother.

"He has much of the old ways," she whispered again in my ear.

Marc pretended not to hear.

"Where are your roots?" my mother asked Joseph as she fed plantain chunks to the baby.

"I was born in the South," he said. "Louisiana."

"They speak some kind of Creole there," she said.

"I know it," he said. "Sometimes I try to talk the little I know with my wife, your daughter."

"I feel like I could have been Southern," my mother said.

"We're all African," said Marc.

"Non non, me in particular," said my mother. "I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?" she said turning to Marc.

Marc shrugged.

"I try to get him to church," my mother said, "just to listen to them, but he won't go. You tell him, Joseph. Tell this old Haitian, with his old ways, about a Negro spiritual."

"They're like prayers," Joseph said, "hymns that the slaves used to sing. Some were happy, some sad, but most had to do with freedom, going to another world. Sometimes that other world meant home, Africa. Other times, it meant Heaven, like it says in the Bible. More often it meant freedom."

Joseph began to hum a spiritual.

Oh Mary, don't you weep!

"That's a Negro spiritual," said my mother.

"It sounds like vaudou song," said Marc. "He just described a vaudou song. Erzulie, don't you weep," he sang playfully.

"I told you I could have been Southern." My mother laughed.

"Do you have a favorite Negro spiritual?" Joseph asked my mother.

"I sure do."

"Give us a rendition," urged Marc.

"You'll regret asking," said my mother.

"All of you will help me if I stumble." She rocked Brigitte's body to the solemn lift of her voice.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

A long ways from home.

We all clapped when she was done. Brigitte, too.

"I want that sung at my funeral," my mother said. "My mother's got me thinking this way; you've got to plan for everything."

The day ended too soon for my mother. We never got a moment alone for her to tell me what she had decided. That night as we said good-bye, she wrapped her arms around my body and would not let go.

"She will come back," Marc said, separating us.

"Us Caco women," she said, "when we're happy, we're very happy, but when we're sad, the sadness is deep."

On the ride back to Providence, Joseph kept singing my mother's spiritual, adding some bebop to the melody, as though to reverse the sad tone.

"Your mother's good folk," he said. "I always understood why she didn't like me. She didn't want to give up a gem like you."

My mother had left two messages on our machine by the time we got home.

"We had a nice day, pa vrè?" she said when I called back. "Did Joseph enjoy himself? The two of you, you go very well together. Marc thought he was old for you, but he liked meeting him anyway."

She stopped to catch her breath.

"Are you really okay?" I asked.

"It was wonderful to see you."

"The nightmares, have they stopped?"

"I didn't tell you what I had decided. I am going to get it out of me."

"When did you decide?"

"Last night when I heard it speak to me."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I am sure, it spoke to me. It has a man's voice, so now I know it's not a girl. I am going to get it out of me. I am going to get it out of me, as the stars are my witness."

"Don't do anything rash."

"Everywhere I go, I hear it. I hear him saying things to me. You tintin, malpròp. He calls me a filthy whore. I never want to see this child's face. Your child looks like Manman. This child, I will never look into its face."

"But it's Marc's child."

"What if there is something left in me and when the child comes out it has that other face?"

"You mean what if it looks like me?"

"No, that is not what I mean."

"Marc has no children; he must want some."

"If he wants some badly enough, he can have some."

I heard Marc asking who she was talking to.

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said before hanging up. "Pray to the Virgin Mother for me."

I had a late afternoon session on the bare floor of Rena's office. Through her smoked French doors, the river looked a breathless blue.

"How was the visit with your mother?" she asked.