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

During my college years in Florida, I would beg my grandmother to speak onto the blank cassette tapes that I sent her. But they would go unrecorded, collecting dust on top of the refrigerator. Our phone conversations would be full of awkward pauses when I would ask questions about her life, about how she had raised my own mother in a southern town in Haiti that is surrounded by breadfruit trees, about raising eight children for a man who lived in another house with his wife and children in that very same neighborhood. How my mother barely knew that man. She only would see and smell the cologne-scented man in the white linen suit, who would come by for late evening supper.

"I'll explain everything to you some day," my grandmother insists, changing the subject as she sits in her well-worn leather easy chair, for hours. That day has never come. Her silence infected my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles. They all share something that is unspeakable: our family's history. Sad stories are not good to be passed down from generation to generation, my mother reasons, siding with her mother who didn't tell her much either.

The only time I could get people in my family to speak freely about their past was when a relative would come back from Haiti, bearing gifts. I don't remember when I came to realize how important it was to receive these items: food, liquor, embroidered cotton bed sheets, even a pair of plastic slippers. But I now know those things helped them to remember where they came from, to relive their cherished memories. For it was through those items that I was able to catch glimpses of a sweet and bitter Haiti, of my grandmother and parents. The bites of molasses candy packed with cashews, the sips of egg yolk liquor, the spices, loosened their tongues and they would speak about hunting for pheasants, horseback riding, and summers spent on family farms. My parents would tell us fragmented stories from their childhoods. Pasts that were broken in tiny pieces just like the jars that carried the pickled peppers and fine-shredded cabbage soaked in white distilled vinegar, the fiery odor clinging to the gift-bearers' shirts. Of my father's father abandoning his five children to start another family in neighboring Santo Domingo or Havana, Cuba. No one is really certain where he ended up. Only thing that is for sure is that he came back to Haiti, dying of cancer, so that his children, the ones who made it to America, could bury him. It was as if the odors wafting from the soaked, rickety suitcase brought to our home stirred memories in my parents' minds that were otherwise kept buried deep. In their new lives, in their home on a street called Phillips on the South Side of Chicago, these items served as a truth potion that helped soothe their ripped hearts, as they were transplanted to new jobs where they swept up powdered gum at a Wrigley factory and lifted sharp, cold iron parts at a steel mill.

"You realize how much you miss everything," one family member explained. "How life hasn't been what you expected it to be."

Now that I live on my own, catching my family reflecting on their lives is rare. Instead, when we get together now, we sit at tables, talking about who got married, when will I get married, and who is sick. Superficial topics I can easily discuss with the strangers I now interview. Aside from blood, my family is not connected by much else. Not like a Korean friend of mine, who at a young age was given a book about his lineage that spans thirty-three generations. That's a lot of history, permanence, and family pride. I, on the other hand, cannot even break the silence past my own mother's generation. However, I have jotted down notes, and bits and pieces of stories. And I fill blank cassettes daily on my job, fill them with stories. None of them my own.

A few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I was born in a Brooklyn hospital during a hot summer. Early in my life, my father introduced me to the civil-rights leader, for a picture of Dr. King hung on the living room wall of my parents' one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Although my father never spoke to me about why he displayed a picture of the slain activist next to that of John F. Kennedy in our home, I later came to understand the significance of their portraits.

In elementary school, I started to understand that the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. symbolized the struggle for racial equality. During Black History Month, my classmates and I sang "We shall overcome" as loudly as we could and recited poems resonating, "I have a dream…" Still, honoring Black History Month had a somber tone, not as exciting to me as the other cultural events celebrated at my bilingual public school. With great anticipation, I looked forward to celebrating Haitian Flag Day at school.

On Haitian Flag Day I always felt special marching in the auditorium wearing my Haitian folkloric attire, a red bandanna covering my head and a blue dress tucked in at the waist with a red scarf, while chanting the national anthem of Haiti. That was the only time I truly believed I was no different from my peers, as we all marched in unison, showing off the same colors of blue and red. My Haitian-born parents were there singing along with me while we paraded down the aisle. Celebrating Haitian history and culture at this elementary school seemed to foster a great sense of ethnic pride among many students in the French and Spanish bilingual programs, including the few students who were neither of Haitian nor Hispanic descent.

Other times, however, some of my schoolmates, notably the boys, reminded me that I was different. Instead of addressing me as "Annie" they preferred to call me "Blackie." Their teasing began to sound natural, since the term "Blackie" was often used by black people to describe their darker peers. Although I learned to tolerate the taunting, I was somewhat confused about how dark a person needed to be in order to be called "Blackie" since many of the individuals who belittled me were just a shade or two lighter.

As my preteen years approached, I wanted to interact more with young people of different cultural backgrounds. I grew tired of studying French and celebrating Haitian Flag Day. One day I convinced my parents to enroll me in a Catholic grammar school attended by some of the children living on my block. I was hoping to start anew. To my dismay, attention to my dark hue followed me to Catholic school. On the first day of class at my new school, I was greeted with loud laughter by a group of boys sitting in the back of the classroom. Thereafter, one of the boys from that group, who was of Jamaican descent, also chose not to address me as "Annie." This time my new name was "Crispy." He stopped calling me "Crispy" the day I exploded in Language Arts class and cried out loud before all my classmates. From then on, he referred to me by my proper name. The insults by some of the other students did not end though. Occasionally, I was "the Creature from the Black La- goon" or the child whose mamma left her "in the toaster too long." One time a female classmate snidely remarked, "It's getting darker in here," as I entered the classroom and when I was leaving she said, "It's getting lighter in here." A girl with fair complexion asked me one day, "Do you ever wish you were light-skinned?"

At this grammar school, I did have the opportunity to make more friends of different cultural backgrounds: African-American, Trinidadian, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and others. But there was also a large student population of Haitian descent. Being of Haitian descent at my school brought little pride and prestige, however. The 1980s rolled in with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, linking the disease to Haitians. Meanwhile, numerous Haitians were fleeing their homeland in shabby boats to reach American shores. Unfortunately, the Haitian-American students were not exempt from being stigmatized even in a school in which they dominated. Some students pretended they couldn't speak a word of Haitian Kreyol while others tried to distance themselves from their Haitian-born parents, identifying themselves as Americans.