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

A few weeks after my father's brief detention, he closed his factory in Port-au-Prince and left for New York. My mother, my brothers and sister, and I were to join him there at the end of the school year. In the months in which we were separated, many of our neighbors' houses were burned down and schools often stayed closed. At the end of June our exile began.

New York held no welcome signs for us. We lived in one of the many peripheral cities within the City, in a world made of Cuban and South American exiles, surrounded by white Americans. We moved into a building in Elmhurst, Queens, where two Haitian families, the very first victims of Duvalier's purge, had settled. They had taken refuge in foreign embassies and then found their way to New York. One of them was my mother's cousin. Through him we were able to rent an apartment in an attractive eight-story building with two elevators. Unlike the wide-open spaces we had left on the island where kites had risen into the infinite sky, the apartment building called for hushed voices and quietness. We did not speak in the hallways or in the elevator. When we encountered our white American neighbors, they could not help but stare at us. Their silence was ominous like their stares. I did not associate this with racism until much later. Our very presence, it seemed, disturbed the world they had created for themselves. To them we had no right to these surroundings, to settle on their street. From one day to the next they were all gone, as if they had boarded the same ship. The clean-shaven superintendent-thanks to whom the fountain surrounded with ferns in the lobby hissed all day-left in their wake. The new super wore dirty, sleeveless undershirts and spoke unintelligible English. He did not clean the lobby; the fountain stopped spouting water.

While my brothers, sister, and I were forced to gain quick familiarity with things American, our parents remained suspended between New York and Haiti, the past and the present. Puzzled by events such as semiformals and proms, inviting boys to dance, and wearing corsages on wrists, I received no help at home. I remember writing notes to my teachers and my brothers' teachers for my mother to sign. I became her substitute, speaking to the teachers, buying my younger siblings school uniforms. In the daytime the male adults in our little group were dispersed throughout the city, each busy with his own survival. They traveled huge distances in subway cars while the women, still refusing to eat off of paper plates or bring food home in Styrofoam containers, wept for the loss of home. My mother became a housewife, which meant doing the work the numerous household help had done for her in Haiti. There was very little talking within our apartment walls, as if each one of us was pondering alone on his or her lot in the new spaces we'd come to inhabit. Communication with home was costly and difficult. No direct phone lines to Haiti. No traveling back and forth. We lived with the desire to return.

Six years into our exile, our former house help, who had since migrated, came to visit us. Their fur stoles and fashionable hairstyles indicated that they were making a nice living for themselves. Unlike those of us who were waiting for the Duvalier reign to end in order to go home, they had no intention of returning, no desire to give up material well-being and the advance in social status that they had acquired here. We hugged them, exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about their families and ours, about former neighbors. I wondered about Yanyan. I'd heard that she had gotten pregnant and was living with her mother in a shack not far from the wharf in our hometown. She was among the ones who would never make it to New York.

When our visitors left, my family considered the oddness of it all, the apparent leveling that American society offered, seeing us all as equally black.

There was a club in Port-au-Prince-it probably still exists today- in which the members' skin tone went from white to brown to dark brown. Those of pure African ancestry and those who could not afford the high yearly fees could not belong. It was a place in which people did not need to be introduced to each other, where people were known by their family names. While the children would sit by the pool and order sandwiches, Cokes, and ice cream, their parents would play bridge or tennis. The club's name was Bellevue. My cousins and I spent many Saturday afternoons by the Bellevue pool, which was larger and had a higher diving board than the ones we had in our homes. There and elsewhere children like me were trained to accept our privileged status, to see ourselves as separate from the rest of the population, as if we came from a superior breed. There and elsewhere we learned the nuances in glances which indicate degrees of familiarity or lack of acknowledgment.

I was never aware of the fact that I don't look at people who are considered social inferiors to me in the eyes, until my Italian husband recently pointed it out to me in our home in Naples. It was then that I realized that whiteness was rarely mentioned in my family, blackness often. Dark-skinned people who frequented our homes were hand-picked: my grandfather's best friend whom he saw every day; my mother's school friend and my grandmother's old neighbor who came and went as they pleased. There were others, too, but they had been singled out. In our family, wholesale acceptance of blackness was unthinkable. My mother had an obsession with her lower lip and consequently with mine, reminding me all the time to pull it in, something I found impossible to do. When my hair was loose she called it a papousserie , a French term deriving from their descriptions of the people of Papua.

One day in July 1969-I had taken a summer job in a department store on Queens Boulevard-an African-American girl asked me if any "brothers" had been hired. Brothers? I wondered. I did not know what she meant. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. A revolution had started in the American world of which I was not yet aware. The black nation had been re-founded and I was part of it. African America was taking me into its fold and I willingly let it embrace me.

My new family would include all peoples of African heritage. Exile had made me black. Still, I cannot deny the influence of my later migrations, first to Puerto Rico, then to Italy. I cannot disown my grandmother's French songs and the French classics-Corneille, Racine-which some family members recited by rote. I cannot ignore the influence of my current life in Italy, my Italian husband, my Italian son. I speak five languages, I can guess meanings in several others I have not studied. As I did in my childhood between my grandmother's family room and her backyard, I straddle many borders, physical and otherwise. In recent years I have been to Grenada, Antigua, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, coming always closer to the island of my birth, but never actually going back to it, never making the final journey, the dream of our years of exile. Between languages and borders, identities and colors, however, I have grieved for this. I am still grieving for it.

It is the 1960s, a cold New Year's day in New York. The men are huddled but it is not for warmth; if anything, the Queens apartment is overheated. Important matters are to be discussed. The women are off to the side, where they will not interfere. The location of the children is unimportant; they are ignored. I am in the last category, ignored but overhearing. French, English, and Kreyol commingle. French, I understand. My English is indistinguishable from that of an American child. Kreyol , the language of my birthplace, is a mystery. Kreyol predominates, but enough is said in French and English for me to follow. He is leaving. Any day. Father Doctor. Papa Doc. Apparently he is the reason we are in New York, not Port-au-Prince. And now he is leaving. And this will make all the difference. My father is clear. We are returning to Haiti. As soon as this man leaves. No need to await the end of the school year, although my schooling is otherwise so important.