Edwidge Danticat - The Butterfly's Way - Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

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.

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.