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

Her last letter is dated January 4, 1962, three days after Haitian independence is celebrated. Her first lines reveal that she has finally gathered nearly all the money necessary for the voyage. She is missing only eighty-five U.S. dollars. At this point, she hopes that the trip will take place in the coming summer. She writes of possibly selling her house as some businessmen have made her an offer for the property. She hesitates to sell her children's childhood home and is afraid that the affair "causera ma mort" [will cause my death]. There are three more letters in the packet, dated the eighth, ninth, and tenth of January 1962. Each recounts the final moments of Mama Fofo, who passed away on Epiphany, the sixth of January 1962, after some days of complaining that her heart was tight as a fist. Did she die of a broken heart? Of a heart attack? This is something only she knew. The letters written by other hands reveal how loved she was by her children and closest family friends, how much love she had during the course of her hard-working life, even though, in the end, she could not make her way to one, among the others, whom she loved greatly.

My mother received Mama Fofo's last letters along with the announcements of her death. How deep her shock, her loss-I cannot imagine. At this age, still reaching out toward my own dreams, I cannot imagine my life without my mother and father even though I see my own parents rarely, living as we do in different countries. I was born eight years after her death, but I am very much like her. My mother and I have had the opportunity to give life to aspects of a relationship that was taken away prematurely, in reverse. I can learn from my grandmother's errors and build on her legacy. Her generosity need not be forgotten. The fact that she passed away on Epiphany, the day on which Catholics celebrate the adoration of the Three Kings bearing gifts for Christ, impresses upon me the necessity of remembering that even within the most humble of beings and across racial, class, and gender lines-there can be a noble heart. It is that heart that I celebrate and want to nurture in myself. It is not lost upon me, too, that Independence Day had just been celebrated and that she could not, as a working-class, single, Haitian woman of a certain age, secure her own independence.

Aimee, when I sense the pain in Mama Fofo's letters, I think that if there is only one thing I can teach you, it would be this: to value and to take the best care of yourself. Without this grounding in your own center of being, the world you are about to enter will be all the more difficult. I have only begun to enact this lesson. It remains my greatest challenge.

I want to tell you about another Haitian woman, my paternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, whose care for me in my earliest years has left a permanent impression upon my mind, body, and soul. When I began to write you this letter, I reread the last card she wrote me. She was seventy-five years old when she wrote it; she had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment for advanced breast cancer in Miami. Because of the absence of preventive health care in Haiti, her cancer was discovered too late-yet as a member of the working middle class, she was lucky to have had health attention at all. I had just begun my first job, fresh out of graduate school, as a college professor at a private university in the southern United States. I did not have the time and means to make my way to her side so I wrote to her instead. She did not reply about her pain. As she always did in her letters, she thanked me for thinking of her and wrote of her plans to return to Port-au-Prince for the Christmas holidays. She missed her home. It is clear from the content of the card that she knew her days were numbered. She wrote of how much she loved me. She also wrote advice she had never given me before. A firm believer in the Catholic Church and its teachings, she counseled me to stay close to God. Though I left the Catholic Church at the age of fourteen (objecting to its missionary work in Haiti and other developing countries, sexist hierarchy, and homophobia), I am a strong believer in a greater power. I don't know what form that power takes, but I respect it and I believe I have been able to live up to the spirit of my grandmother's advice if not to its letter. I have faith in the energy that surrounds and guides us in this world. On the back of the card, she tells me that when I need help in the future, to look to my Bible for assistance. I know she wrote this because when I was a child and things in my life were beyond my comprehension, I would write her a few lines, never letting her know exactly what the problem was, but just that I needed some affirmation. Months later, often after I had forgotten the source of my earlier grievance, a letter would appear in response, letting me know that someone in Haiti held my spirit dear and loved me unconditionally despite the distance between us. I knew with finality when I read those lines that she was saying good-bye, just in case, in her own way. She referred me to the Bible, to John: 11. "There," she wrote, "you can read about everything." I don't know if I turned to that passage then. I don't remember doing so. I may have done so sometime in the haze of the depression that hit me following her death in 1995, three months after I finally had the chance to see her in Haiti, my first trip back to my native land since our family trips had come to an abrupt end in the late seventies. Today, I read this card again, hoping it would provide me with something to pass on to you. And so I turned to John: 11, wondering what was there that could contain the "everything" Mamie (as I have called her from infancy) wrote about. I found, to my surprise, the story of Lazarus and his resurrection from the dead.

This is how the story goes, Aimee: Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, was very ill. His sisters sent for Jesus to perform a miracle so that Lazarus would not die. Jesus went to him but by the time he reached Lazarus's home, he had already expired. One of Lazarus's sisters tells him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." After some discussion, Jesus makes this pronouncement: "I am the resurrection; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." After this they enter the tomb of Lazarus, and find the body already in a state of decay. Jesus calls to Lazarus to walk out of the grave and Lazarus emerges, wrapped in his burial cloth, resurrected.

I read this story and realized what my grandmother had been trying to tell me, in the only words she knew inside and out. She was about to die but she believed in a power greater than herself. She knew she would live in an altered state, somewhere removed from the earth-bound, but still with us. Although I have left the Church and I never thought that I would be recounting a biblical story to you in this way, Aimee, I know that my grandmother was wise to point me in this direction. Because the Bible is, like the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, and so many others, a sacred text. And although my grandmother did not believe in Vodou , as I have begun to in my adult years (not firsthand but through extensive reading), this story reminds me of African beliefs in the rebirth of the spirits, the idea that spirits never die. I know that my grandmother lives on in me and so shall she in you. As long as our memories are alive, so is she and all of the ancestors who preceded her own life. At the end of the card, she expresses concern that I work too hard and live my life alone. She hopes these words will bring me solace in times of loneliness. As I said earlier, though I can't remember if I read the story of Lazarus rising when I received this card or shortly after her death, now, four years later, I am thankful for it as I acknowledge my own rebirth. I am claiming my Haitianness in the United States, an identity made especially suspect in this country by racism and xenophobia. I am claiming my solitude and the memories isolation affords me the privilege of revisiting.