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

At the entrance to the main cemetery in Port-au-Prince, a sign in black letters reads, YOU ARE NOTHING BUT DUST. On any given day here, solemn processions of mourners draped in rosaries prop each other up as they walk beside caskets. But today, what we find is an angry woman determined to curse an enemy.

It's the first Vodou ceremony I've ever seen, and I can't make sense of it. The woman splashes clear moonshine and dark rum around a charred stone cross. On a straw chair in front of the cross, a flame burns inside a metal bowl. Her thin, tough arms tie a rope around the cross into a tight knot. Later, she will toss salt and crack eggs around the cross to ward off any bad spirits that could interfere with her mission.

"She's calling on the god Baron," Faubert, our driver, tells me. "Baron is a Vodou god. When she ties the rope around the cross, it's like she's tying it around a person. And from now on, when that person tries to do anything, he won't do it right. He can do nothing good anymore because Baron has that person tied up."

Beside me, Beth is crouched down, snapping pictures. I hear the opening and closing of the shutter in slow motion, and my thoughts split off in all directions. How is what comes through my lens any different than the view from Hollywood cameras that once enraged me? I try to unravel the symbols and chants, but I keep hitting a cultural wall. I don't have the knowledge.

In the warped recesses of my mind, I ask myself this question: If I were ever put on trial by a Committee for Haitian Authenticity, how would I defend myself? How would I explain what has led me and my friend to this place, scribbling and shooting furiously for an American audience?

At the end of my workday, a battery of questions awaited me at my grandmother's house in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. Was I doing well in my career? How is my older brother, her godson? Did I have a boyfriend? Would I ever bear her great-grandchildren? And why did I cut my hair so short?

"You've accomplished too much in your young life to be walking around with a head like that," she says, inspecting my closely cropped cut. "You've got to think about getting married."

When I used to come to Haiti with my family, this is where we would stay. Each step through the house brings back another memory: the blue-green bathroom tiles where I nursed mosquito bites with Caladryl and cotton swabs; the kitchen where my grandmother stirred long sticks of cinnamon and vanilla extract into the breakfast oatmeal; my uncle Eddie's room off in the comer where no one was ever supposed to go.

Standing over the dining-room table, she shows us pictures of her cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II and her journeys in the Spanish countryside. "I am eighty years old," she says, "and I have lived a good life." That is all she wants for her children and her grandchildren.

When I graduated from college three years ago, my grandmother came for the long day of ceremonies. When they called my name to receive my diploma, my grandmother shouted louder than anyone else. I could actually hear her cheering as I climbed the steps and reached for my degree. I am the granddaughter who has succeeded in America.

"You were made outside." This is the way many Haitians speak of those of us who were born or grew up in the United States. It is as much a badge of pride as it is a stinging resentment. The ones made outside have proven how well Haitians can flourish in the land of opportunity. But, in all our successes, we have also abandoned them. For Haitians who have struggled through the poverty and terror of daily life, there is no room for hyphens in a person's identity. Because I have not suffered with them, I can never be of them. The best I could hope for was to make my journey count. To take everything I was told and shown and tell a story in which both Haitians and Americans could see a sliver of themselves and of each other. A story that didn't tell the truth, but told the many truths I could never tell alone.

It was about 10:30 p.m. or a little bit later when I started walking down the hill to the convenience store at the Mobil Station on Broadway. I couldn't figure out what snacks to buy for the trip because I didn't get to take trips very often. I can count on one hand how many times I've left town.

I took the long way down the hill, and ran into a friend of mine from Albany who was already two hours into his journey by the time he'd made it to Nyack.

"You going to the March?" he asked me. This brother had these big eyes and as I peered into his car in the darkness, they looked like floodlights. I felt something beginning to pump in me. I wanted to hop in the car with him and start the road trip right then and there, but I had a ticket for the bus, and about an hour longer to wait before it left. I looked again at his eyes and we started talking the way brothers talk sometimes. It's in the eyes. Like, say the both of us were checking out the same girl. The eyes might say, "Did you catch that?" Or if I was looking at some other cat's girl, the brother might stare me down or UPS me a quick message with his eyes like, "Bro, she's with me. You can stare up and down, but ain't nothin' you can do about it-might hurt your eyes, too." It's all in the eyes sometimes.

Anyway, I told him to watch out-there was going to be a massive police force all over the highways on the route to D.C. I hoped to convey this warning to him with my eyes, "It's October fifteenth, brother. Be careful on the road. Everyone knows about the March." There was way too much electricity in the air between us to even mouth that.

It finally started to click that I, too, was headed to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The March was all over the news. I had caught a clip on CNN of some brothers who were from Seattle; they were already there. When I saw my boy jet off with a carload of folks to D.C, I felt like I was late even though the march hadn't really started yet. There was a current running through my body, pulling me like a chain. Get to D.C.

The street felt quiet, as if something was going to happen, that this something was so massive that a path would have to be cleared in order to move through it-I left the Mobil with a couple of snacks-some pudding, chips, a Snapple. I had a turkey sandwich at home. On the way back to my house, I ran into this cat who I only knew by sight.

"You know where we were lining up?"

"Corner of Franklin and Depew."

I walked with him around the corner and back to Franklin Street. I lived one block up from Franklin. As we walked up the street together, he started telling me about how he'd said good-bye to his folks. He asked me if I had said good-bye to my folks yet.

"Good-bye?"

"Yeah, man. I told my moms and all my folks that if I don't make it back from D.C.-if something happens to me down there-I told them that I loved them."

"Word?"

"You gotta say good-bye to them."

Until he'd said that, I'd had every intention of making it back from D.C.-I hadn't thought about just how much could go wrong down there.

We were on Franklin talking and I was going to see him again pretty soon on Franklin. And the thing about Franklin-or at least the part of it where the bus was going to pull up-is that it's undeniably black. It's a pretty safe bet that if you walk or drive down Franklin, something in the air will give you the sense that it's a black neighborhood. It may be a couple of cars parked on the street corner playing music. Or a small crew of fellas talking on the corner, shooting dice, or just hanging out next to the laundromat. Or it may just be an unmarked police car circling the block. You might find some older folks sitting on porches, too. There are loud conversations here, and a person passing by might get to hear the way black folks can transform English. It can sound dirty, but crisp and proper too, on Franklin, and whichever way the language comes out, it seems somehow to lurk along the street. When kids play or yell down this way, it feels like their voices stick to the metal bars that surround the projects. In the same way, when the older folks talk, their words drift into the wall and live deep inside the brick and cement. A good chunk of black culture resonates at this intersection of Franklin and Depew. And because of that, this particular intersection makes the rest of the town look lily white.