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

During my stay, my aunt Venide made me help her cook, buy groceries, wash and iron clothes, feed the chickens and the pig, clean the yard, run errands for and keep company with my elderly aunt. Whatever she did, I emulated to the best of my abilities. Whatever I was told to do, I did. I never disliked doing these chores. I approached them as if they were small adventures. I wanted to prove that I was not as American as I had been accused and convicted of being. I felt a sense of kinship when I sat on a small wooden chair beside my aunt and, imitating her, wrapped my thighs around the little ceramic basin in which she washed clothes. She scrubbed the clothes with masterful skill while I, her apprentice, scrubbed like a madwoman for want of that skill. Under her expert hands, the clothes squeaked relentlessly as if to complain about the pain they suffered from being scrubbed too vigorously. Mante Venide's pursed lips and deeply furrowed brow told me that she was oblivious to their cries. I liked that our laundry detergent was simply a big block of soap. Everything I used, from the outhouse that threatened to swallow me whole to the bed I slept on, was as unpretentious as my cousins, my family, and our living arrangements. After we were done with the wash, I felt a sense of genuine achievement when I saw our whites gleaming on the rocks we had laid them on to dry. I felt important when I carried water from the well without spilling it.

Like all prisoners, at some point I was even allowed recreation. I got to play games and run reasonably wild with my cousins. We played with marbles; we sang songs; we gossiped about a neighborhood hussy whom I never met; we competed to see who could tell the funniest joke to the pig; we played hide-and-seek, and when we were really bored we teased the dangerous "Ti Malis" out of its underground home with cupfuls of water. "L ap mode 'ou -it's going to bite you!" Alex would scream every time the insect showed its annoyed head.

But as acclimated as I may have seemed on the surface, I was still unabashedly American in essentials.

On Sunday morning we went to church. Since I was already familiar with this ritual from my mass-attending Sundays in America, I ironed my favorite green-and-black dress to wear for the occasion. When I went to search my suitcases for a pair of nylon stockings so that I could put the finishing touches to my ensemble, I was annoyed to discover that my mother had not packed a pair for me. I informed my aunt that I could not attend mass without pantyhose. She laughed. It was too hot to wear stockings. I felt wronged and misunderstood. What did practicality or comfort have to do with style? I found her a bit too Haitian, too country, too old-fashioned. My sense of style was being undermined by someone who actually let the weather get in the way of appearance. I was also angry that it was actually hot outside. I knew better than to confront my aunt with my opinions. Because I was still a child, freedom of speech, especially that of dissent, wasn't my right. Unnerved, but still adorned in green-and-black polyester finery, I walked to church alongside my aunt and my cousins. By the time we reached the church, I realized that my dress-unlike anyone else's-bore a sheen that was too immodest, too gaudy for church. I was being loud without having said a word. I stood out when I should have blended in. Bowing my head in prayer, I was glad to discover that my patent leather shoes had turned from conspicuously shiny to humbly dusty. Haiti's dirt redeemed me, but only to embarrass me later that afternoon.

After we had returned home from church and had eaten lunch, my cousins and I went to play hide and seek in the yard. Tififi and I went to hide while Alex counted un deux trois… Still unfamiliar with the area, I found it hard to find a place to hide. Alex was already at quinze and I was still looking for a hiding place. I began to panic. Spotting a kenep tree, I dashed for cover behind it. As I ran toward the tree, I slipped and fell in a small pool of mud. The first word out of my mouth was "Shit!" Alex and Tififi came running. They laughed and pointed in my direction while Alex kept giggling and repeating the word shit over and over again.

I was angry and refused to get up. I was embarrassed for myself and for Alex who, I assumed, would be punished for his imitation of the corrupt, and now contagious, American exile. I lay brooding in the mud. I didn't try to get up. I wanted my aunt to locate the cause of my profane reaction outside of myself. Was it my fault that this part of the yard was so muddy? Maybe if I were more familiar with the yard, I would not have reacted as I did. I relied on my foreignness as an excuse.

Even during the night, surrounded and disguised by utter darkness as I was, I was every bit a foreigner. To my unsympathetic cousins, I had no qualms about revealing my fears of the zombie population that I was certain inhabited Haiti's nights. When my cousins ventured into the yard away from the house to play and tell stories, I pleaded for them to stay on the porch with me. Haiti's nights had a quality that loomed too huge and formidable in relation to my physical size, my naivete and my city-girl upbringing. The porch was solid and dependable. The nights, on the other hand, were a bit too dark, a bit too quiet… a bit too vast and intangible. Haiti's nights made you think that you could have nightmares with your eyes wide open, so that you'd want to close your eyes just to situate yourself in your own darkness-too afraid to blend in and get lost in a darkness that wasn't your own… a nightmare that wasn't your own. Here in Haiti, I easily (if even unfairly) equated good and evil with things diurnal and nocturnal. Whenever the sun set, I felt taunted by a darkness that knew me as a foreigner… a Haitian darkness that sensed my fears and had no pity for the American me.

For two weeks, my life as a stranger in a strange land continued in this manner. I didn't feel at home. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to return to my mother.

The Monday following the second week of my stay in Haiti, my uncle Yvero claimed to have received a letter from my mother. "If you think that you have truly reformed, your mother says that she would like you to return home. So do you think that you've reformed?" my uncle asked.

Of course I have, I thought to myself, especially if it means that I can go back home. But for the sake of seeming sincere and apologetic, I hesitated in my response. I wanted my uncle to understand that I was using this moment of silence to reflect on my wrongdoings. Finally after a few minutes I bowed my head in contrition and said, " Wi, I have reformed." And after a long speech from my uncle and my aunt about how lucky I was to have a mother who cared about me and how deeply foolish I was not to cherish and appreciate that fact, I was told to go and say good-bye to the rest of my extended family. I was going to be leaving for Florida the next day. My stint as an exile was over.

Although I am the only girl that I know of who has had such an experience to recount, I am certainly not the only Haitian American who has an exiled-to-Haiti-for-reform story, for I know several Haitian-American boys who (like me) have been sent to Haiti to change their potentially self-destructive behaviors. Like my mother, the mothers of these young men relied on the tried-and-true effect of stubborn love, pride, and hope to discipline their children. Because we seemed caught in a frenzy to fit in, our mothers attempted to rescue us, if not by superseding, then by tempering the present with the past, the modern with tradition, America with Haiti. With each child that a Haitian mother has to raise in America, she has to deal with the triple -consciousness of its Haitian, American, and Black identities. In junior high school, I was known to my black peers as the just-got-off-the-banana-boat refugee or the Vodou queen. I fit into neither of their notions of what it means to be Black or American. Out of ignorance of my own culture, I let those insults sting. Out of ignorance of what it truly means to be Haitian, I let those insults define me. Not now. Not ever. Years later, while on a study-abroad trip to China, although I knew no Swahili nor had ever been to Africa, I was referred to as "the African." While visiting one of the autonomous regions in Northern China, I met a little girl who, pointing in my direction, greeted me as "Kunta Kinte"-the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots. The television movie series had just been shown there. My black face summoned the association with the only other black face this little girl had ever seen. I wasn't an individual, nor did the fact that I am female, and Kinte male, matter. I was just Black. In China when I insisted I was American the Chinese raised skeptical eyebrows.