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

She hasn't visited me for months.

I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,

that she looks in and turns away

because I didn't remain a virgin until I married,

because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make

corsages to honor living mothers.

I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled

by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.

But I remember that first Mother's Day without her,

how it pissed me off to watch a seventy-year-old daughter

escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,

I planted creeping phlox on my mother's grave,

urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year

like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor's gate.

I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.

Tonight, I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,

add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me, sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.

I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,

keep stitching her presence in my life.

It was like a reunion with a stranger. Like many children of immigrants born and raised in the United States, I have skated precariously along the hyphen of my Haitian-American identity. On one side, I bask in the efficiencies of American life: mail-order catalogs, direct-deposit checking, and interoffice envelopes. From the other side, I take the comfort food of Haitian oatmeal and tap into the ongoing debate Haitians love more than any other: politics. It's an endless menu of traits and qualities that I access and draw from, mixing and matching to fit the situation. But I knew that my return to Haiti wouldn't allow me to pick and choose as I pleased. My identity would no longer be defined by me; it would be defined by the Haitians around me.

Eleven years had passed since I had visited the many relatives who still live on the island. I longed to see them and store up new, vivid memories to replace the ones time had turned into faded snapshots.

"Why Haiti?" colleagues in the newsroom asked. Why should a Hampton Roads newspaper report on a third-world Caribbean island? The question made me impatient.

Why Haiti? Because one year before, Americans had changed the lives of its seven million people by sending twenty-one thousand troops there. Because one year later, Haitians continued to live with-and in spite of-that intervention. And because Haiti's social and cultural landscape is far more textured than the images offered by network television: Haitians as boat people, as AIDS carriers, as PWoH-enthralled zombies. There was no excuse for Americans to know so little about, or think so little of, a neighbor whose history and future are so intertwined with theirs.

Still, as I packed my bags, I felt more like an intruder trespassing onto property that was in no way mine, not a proud descendant carrying the torch back to the mainland. What could I tell Americans about a country whose poverty was not my poverty?

My claim to Haitianness was about to be tested. As the airplane touched down on Haiti's cracked soil, the hyphen that held me together started to feel more like the fulcrum of a seesaw whose plank was about to tip on one end or the other.

Haiti, from the window of American Airlines flight 1291, is white sun, blue ocean, brown mountains. Even from this high, the color of the soil is barren and unkind. Since the last time I had this view, much of Haiti's land has been deforested.

Inside, a flight attendant goes into an unusually long explanation about customs forms. She walks through the aisles, where some Haitians flag her down with raised hands. The fact that she is helping them fill out forms they can't read won't come to me until days later.

Outside the airport, the parking lot is a dusty chaos of barbed wire, begging crowds, and obliquely parked cars. The boy begging for money by our car is too young to be a hustler. His fingers hang inside my window; the nails are blunt and crusted with coal-colored dirt. As the car begins to pull away, he doesn't let go. He hangs on and runs with the car, pleading. That is when I make my choice. I stop asking myself how old he is, where his parents are, and when his last meal was. I block him out; I make him disappear. It will be the hardest choice of the entire journey, but it's so easy compared with the life this boy must live.

Beth Bergman, a white American photographer who works for the newspaper, is also here. For Beth, who has never been to Haiti and understands little of its ways, I am an interpreter, a buffer, and a bridge. But to a passerby who eyes us as we make our first forays into the street, I am a traitor. I am the one who has "brought whites to photograph our trash and ask us how much it smells."

To a homeless woman washing off her plate with sewage water, I am an opportunity, for money, for food, for water. Here in this isolated country, where electricity and phone lines are chancy, some of the most media-sawy people I have ever met work their spin of survival on the foreign press.

"I have no money," she says, coming toward us. "I built a house and they tore it down. I have to take my son to the hospital and I can't afford it. What are you going to do for me?"

Without knowing why, I start listing my Haitian credentials: my relatives who live here, my trips here as a child. But this woman is too smart and too poor to care. To her, I am still a stranger. An American stranger.

Beside her, her son, no older than five, looks up into the lens of the camera. Across his face comes the slow realization that he is no longer the same person he was a second ago. He is a commodity now. He's the face of poverty that we will capture and bring back with us to sell newspapers. So he acts accordingly: The liquid brown eyes grow wider, the small hand tugs at mother's skirt, the head tilts with innocence.

I have no right to be surprised at this. As a reporter, I want them to tell me their story; I don't want them to implicate me in it. But how can I fault them? This mother knows already what I am afraid to admit to myself: A one-year anniversary story about Haiti that enlightens Hampton Roads readers won't do anything for her or her baby.

It's 7:10 a.m. Sunday. Beth and I stand outside Saint Gerard Church in the cool breeze before the day's punishing heat sets in. It took hours to pick out the one nice blouse I knew I would need to bring for church. Dressing up is part of Sunday worship, no matter how rich or how poor one is. Etched in my mind are black-and-white images of my mother as a young girl in a ruffled white dress bordered with lace, her cotton socks perfectly folded over.

Today, women file in through the church doors in long, cotton dresses and checkered skirts; the men wear paisley ties and leather shoes.

Just before I take my seat inside, a woman next to me points to my sleeveless silk shirt and whispers, "They're not going to give you communion dressed like that. You didn't cover your arms enough. You need sleeves."

But later as we wound our way of the capital's main cemetery, where Catholic rites merge with Vodou rituals in sacred beauty, I realize that I would need far more than a pair of sleeves to belong.

For many Haitian immigrants and their children, Vodou is a loaded word. Nine years ago, I watched an episode of Miami Vice through what I thought were Haitian eyes. I hated it. In my mind, it invoked pretty much every stereotype of Vodou and the Haitians who practice it. By the third commercial break, Vodou serum had turned Detective Tubbs into a zombie. Dazed by the pounding chants of crazed Haitian worshippers, the rogue cop became possessed. He twitched miserably with fever. Even his partner, Crockett, couldn't snap him out of it. From the TV in the basement of my parents' house, I smoldered in anger. No one watching this would understand the complexity of this African-based religion that meant so much to Haitians, nor the symbolism of the gods that made up its hierarchy.