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

By daylight we were in D.C. Radio reports stated that at least half a million other black men were pouring into the place at that very moment. Women waved to us on their way to work. They had a gleam in their eyes and I'm sure I did too. Part of the March was about this; it was about reconciling with women. And for me, it was just the first step. Maybe this would help me laugh-just laugh a good clean laugh. We got off the bus and walked toward the subway.

The train ride had everybody laughing somehow because the cars were packed-I don't think our car could have held another body. There was a young white woman on the platform who stood right next to me. In front of all these black faces, her own color must have gone through her mind, but I didn't get the feeling that she felt threatened. I spent the rest of the day obsessed with observing white people who were at the March. I would watch them and try to snap their picture.

As we emerged from the train, two Muslim women watched us from a trailer window. They never looked at me. One woman in particular had beautiful, piercing eyes. Our group dispersed into a sea of black men. By eight o'clock in the morning it was impossible to get to the front of the Washington Mall. I could not fathom the number of people I saw whenever I looked back into the crowd. Every tree was occupied; every statue framed with bodies; there were even people perched on stoplights. I was drawn to a group of Rastafarians who had formed a circle and were playing drums. I moved around with my uncle the entire day. We just kept moving as we met brothers from everywhere. I met a woman from the Bahamas. I looked up to one of the massive monitors to see who was speaking. The man said he'd just received a fax from Africa, and they were watching us. There was thunderous applause. Sometime later Rosa Parks stepped up to the microphone. I was awed to think that this tiny, delicate woman had helped bring us to the mall by refusing to sit in the back of a southern bus and starting the Civil Rights Movement. Without her, the March might have never existed. I saw her on the monitor and it was the first of many times that day I wanted to start crying. Her frail voice rang in my ears. I could feel my eyes getting really moist and I fought to keep from crying.

I fought that feeling all day. As a race of men, I felt like we had never really arrived until that day. The March was a step toward being seen as human. It felt like redemption to me. At no time did I feel nervous. Even if a bomb went off in the middle of the crowd, it felt like the spiritual presence of all our souls and those watching from above could and would contain it. And maybe the absence of that paranoia was what made me feel like crying. I didn't cry though. I had been holding back the water of my eyes long before the March. I still have the water from the March and water from before. I still have these tears. I have new ones, too.

I went off to one side and was about to sit down when I saw a white man standing like a pillar in the ground. He was frozen. He was holding an American flag upside down and he held a cardboard sign in front of the flag. The sign read: A MILLION AND ME. Scrawled on the flag were the words: UNITED WE STAND DIVIDED WE FALL. The man had large, ice-blue eyes and somehow he looked cornered. I didn't want to get too close because I was unsure just what he would do. He looked like a real-life Marlboro man. I guess I was scared of this man's courage, too. If someone called for a million white men to come to Washington, D.C., I would never show up, and I have good reason not to. At first, I figured this guy was some zany, white-boy leftist. I walked away from him, but I kept thinking about him. It took a couple of years and an incidental conversation before I realized what message he was conveying with the flag. In the military an upside-down flag is a distress signal. The truth of it shook me hard. There could never be an all-white or an all-black concern, we can't escape each other that way.

As we were leaving the mall and heading back toward the bus, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam began speaking. I only caught bits and pieces of his speech as I made my way through the streets of D.C. His voice floated through the air, his tone dipped into a subtle call, and he paused elegantly, then shifted as his speech became more serious. He spoke about responsibility, and the word hammered over the P.A. system and it sank into my eardrums and that was the message I carried home with me. I heard it over and over as I left the mall. Thousands of people registered to vote at the March, hundreds of thousands latched onto ideas and a million plus probably felt reborn or at least rejuvenated somehow. For me the March happened in tiny clips. Every step I had taken led me to D.C, and what America was moving toward and how it changed and how it stayed the same led me to D.C.

Most of the group from my neighborhood in Rockland County walked back together to where the bus was parked. Minister Farrakhan could be heard for what seemed like miles around. We boarded the bus and he was still talking. The sign on the bus read: THE CHICKENBONE EXPRESS. Someone next to me remarked that he was offended by the stereotypical implications of the sign, that all black people love chicken. The sign didn't bother me at all; what had happened on the mall that day had stomped all over any stereotype someone might have wanted to use. To me, the sign was harmless. Besides, I love chicken and I'm black. Pass me some chicken, I'll deal with the stereotype in my own way. Gracias.

I was going home reconciled. I felt American. I felt I had taken part in an American tradition. I felt our numbers couldn't be ignored and I felt that a lot of discussion that day all over the country would have to include black males and it would have to include a different way of looking at us. I didn't go home "angry" at anyone. In fact I felt better about America as a whole. I sensed from all the eyes around me that something very deep had been resolved for a lot of brothers. There hadn't been any violence to disrupt the March. And we were alive. There was no bomb under D.C.

I saw a brother the next day walking with his son on Franklin. I had never seen him walking with his son before. He had been on the bus. I made my way to the deli where I usually eat lunch and got into a conversation with a family from Tennessee. It was probably that drawl of theirs that provoked me into conversation with them. I had been talking about the March to someone else and the older southern woman looked at me and said with an intriguing twang that she had been "praying for us." I believed her. I believed what her eyes were saying to me, and I thanked her for her prayers because her prayers had fused with the spirit I was carrying from the March. I believed her because I imagined that everyone had been watching and praying for us. The slaves had been watching. The Quakers had been watching, and so had John Brown, Nat Turner, and George Jackson. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe were watching. So was Crispus Attucks. Servicemen like him were watching from their posts. And heroes were watching from their graves. The white man with the distress signal was watching somewhere. I believed her drawl. I believed her eyes. And for that moment, it felt impossible to be invisible.

1980

My first nightmare was provoked by a doll. She sat on my toybox, regal in her peasant dress and scarf. I dreamt that she cackled, and attacked my Spiderman comic book, then went after me. My mother saved me. She took the doll away and sent it back to my father.

I imagined my father as a bogeyman, like the macoutes my mother described to me from her childhood-they would take you away in the night. My father would arrive unannounced, with the court order, to take me for the weekend, even if I kicked and screamed, even if my mother cried.