Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Read online

  Walking back from school, I stopped first at my great uncle's store, where he and his wife interrupted their activities to hug and kiss me and give me presents in the form of candies or, if I had received my report card that day, perfumes, jewelry, or pieces of fabric from England or France. Broderie anglaise was my favorite. Then I proceeded to my grandfather's shop. At lunchtime, my grandfather drove me to the two-story house with the balcony skirting the top floor where my grandmother sat on her rocking chair. Lunch was always our favorite food. My grandfather and I both liked food that was considered too ordinary for people with means: tchaka, akra, crabs, fish stew and cornmeal, salted fish and boiled bananas. After lunch, while my grandparents napped, I went down to the ground floor. The back door opened onto the yard where the numerous household workers lived: the cook, the two housemaids with their children, the woman who ironed, the boy who cleaned the yard, the boy who did errands. This was another world, a life of chatter, of blue indigo, thick white com starch, scallions, hot peppers, coffee beans roasting on a wood fire, a world where many things were done at once. The women hulled peas, ironed clothes, sang, plaited hair, reprimanded the children, and laughed. For me it was the place where I could eat with a spoon instead of a fork, even with my hands, a place where I spoke Kreyol instead of French and learned riddles and songs. I preferred staying there to spending time upstairs or at my parents' house, where I had no playmates.

  My parents' house stood away from the center of town. Our property was surrounded by almond, mango, and palm trees, a barrier before the vast extension of sugarcane fields. Our closest neighbors were the poor farmers of the area. This was my brothers' realm. My brothers played with the boys their age, climbing trees, carving bows from branches, chasing birds with slingshots, making kites. As a girl I was seldom allowed to play with them. My only playmate and friend was Yanyan, a young restavek girl who lived at my grand- mother's house. She was older than me, old enough to be in charge of me and my cousins when they visited, but young enough to play with us. She came on car rides, Sunday outings to the river; we jumped rope and picked mangoes from trees together. Yanyan and I were always together except when I was called for lunch or dinner. I went upstairs, she stayed downstairs in the yard in the maids' quarters. Church was yet another moment of social separation for Yanyan and me. She went to the four o'clock Sunday Mass, the one the priests said at the cathedral for house servants who started their day's work at six in the morning, grinding or brewing coffee to be brought to their employers' bedside by seven. I went to ten o'clock Mass and sat in the front-row pew, paid for by my family and reserved for us. Yanyan's brother and mother visited my grandmother's yard, most often to eat. If my parents were not there, my grandmother would give me permission to join Yanyan and the maids and their families in the evening. If my parents were present, I had to tiptoe my way down the wooden stairs to the back of the house where everyone sat on low chairs and told riddles and stories. The cook was the best narrator. Her stories were all interspersed with songs. All the tales ended with "someone kicked me and that's how I got here to tell you this story." With me, Yanyan spoke a mixture of Kreyol and French, with the adults, she only spoke Kreyol, fearing their scorn. At the dinner table in my family no one was allowed to speak Kreyol and no child could address an adult in the family in Kreyol. Our command of French reaffirmed our social status.

  One day in March 1963 my father, a factory owner, had to leave the island. A few weeks earlier, he had been arrested by Francois Duva-lier's henchmen while we were attending Sunday Mass. My father and his friends would usually stand in the back of the church and step out right after communion. Before the priest pronounced "he Missa est," they would already be chatting on the church steps. We noticed my father's absence when the service was over. It was not clear to me why he was arrested. Was it because he had attended the military academy in his youth? The other four taken to the police station that day were men who were loved by everyone, men who'd had no connections to the military. What my father and those men all had in common was that they were light-skinned Haitians, members of the so-called "elite." The next morning all five were freed. Their arrest was a rehearsal for what would follow—Duvalier's reign of terror.

  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.

  BONNE ANNEE

  Jean-Pierre Benoit

  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.

  I have no memory of Haiti. No memory of my crib in Port-au-Prince, no memory of the neighbors' children or the house in which we lived. My friends are in New York. My teachers are in New York. The Mets are in New York. I do not know Papa Doc, but our destinies are linked. If he leaves, I leave. I do not want him to leave.

  Another January first, another gathering. If it is the beginning of a new year, that is at best incidental. January first is the celebration of Haitian independence. A glorious day in world history, even if someone seems to have forgotten to tell the rest of the world. But it is not bygone glory that is of the moment. A new independence is dawning. It is more than just a rumor this time. Someone has inside information. It is a matter of months, weeks, maybe days, before Duvalier falls. I am one year older now, and I understand who Duvalier is. An evil man. A thief and a murderer. A monster who holds a nation prisoner. A man who tried to have my father killed. A man who will soon get his justice. My father is adamant, Duvalier's days are numbered. And then we will return. Do I want to leave? I am old enough to realize that the question is unimportant.

  Go he must, but somehow he persists. A new year and he is still in power. But not for long. This time it is true. The signs are unmistakable, the gods have finally awoken. Or have they? After so many years, the debates intensify. Voices raised in excitement, in agitation, in Haitian cadences. Inevitably, hope triumphs over history. Or ancient history triumphs over recent history. Perhaps there will be a coup, Haitian exiles landing on the shores with plans and weapons, a well-timed assassination.

  We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.

  Then there are the children. Despite having been raised in the United States, I have no special love for this country. Despite the searing example of my elders, I am not even sure what it means to love a country. Clearly, it is not the government that one is to love.

  Is it then the land, the dirt and the grass, the rocks and the hills? The people? Are one people any better than another? I have no special love for this country, but neither do I desire a return to a birthplace that will, in fact, be no real return at all. If nothing else, the United States is the country that I know, English is my daily language. Another New Year, but I am not worried; we will not be back in Port-au-Prince anytime soon. With their crooked ruler the adults can no longer draw a straight line, but I can still connect the dots and see that they lead nowhere.

  II

  The Haitian sun has made the cross-Atlantic journey to shine on her dispossessed children. This time it is not just wispy speculation, something has changed. It is spring 1971 and there is death to celebrate. The revolutionaries have not landed on the coast, the assassin's poison has not found its blood. Nonetheless, Duvalier is dead. Unnaturally, he has died of natural causes. Only his laughable son remains. Bebe Doc, Jean-Claude Duvalier. Everyone agrees that Bebe Doc will not be in power long enough to have his diapers changed.

  Laughable Bebe Doc may be, but it turns out to be a long joke, and a cruel one. The father lasted fourteen years, the son will last fifteen. Twenty-nine years is a brief time in the life of a country, but a long time in the life of its people. Twenty-nine years is a very long time in the life of an exile waiting to go home.

  Three years into Bebe Doc's terrible reign there is news of a different sort. For the first time, Haiti has qualified for the World Cup. The inaugural game is against eternal powerhouse Italy. In 1974 there are not yet any soccer moms, there is no ESPN all-sports network. Americans do not know anything of soccer, and this World Cup match will not be televised. Yet America remains a land of immigrants. For an admission fee, the game will be shown at Madison Square Garden on four huge screens suspended in a boxlike arrangement high above the basketball floor. I go with my younger brother. In goal, Italy has the legendary Dino Zoff. Together they have not been scored upon in two years. The poor Haitians
have no hope. And yet, Haitians hope even when there is no hope. The trisyllable cry of "HA-I-TI" fills the air. It meets a response, "I-TA-LIA," twice as loud but destined to be replaced by an even louder HA-I-TI, followed by IT-A-LIA and again HA-I-TI in a spiraling crescendo. The game has not even started.

  My brother and I join in the cheer; every time Haiti touches the ball is cause for excitement. The first half ends scoreless. The Italian fans are nervous, but the Haitian fans are feeling buoyed. After all, Haiti could hardly be expected to score a goal, not when the Germans and the English and the Brazilians before them have failed to penetrate the Italian defense. At the same time, the unheralded Haitian defenders have held. The second half begins. Less than a minute has gone by and Emanuel Sanon, the left-winger for Haiti, has the ball. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he had foolhardily predicted that he will score. Zoff is fully aware of him. Sanon shoots. There is a split second of silence and then madness. The ball is in the back of the net, Sanon has beaten Zoff. The Italians are in shock. The world is in shock. Haiti leads 1-0.

  "HA-I-TI, HA-I-TI." Half of Madison Square Garden is delirious, half is uncomprehending. The Haitians are beating the Italians. Haiti is winning. Haiti is winning. For six minutes. Then the Italians come back to tie the score, 1-1. The Italians score again. And then again. The Haitians cannot respond. Italy wins 3-1.

  Still. Still, for six minutes Haiti is doing the impossible, Haiti is beating Italy. Italy, which twice has won the World Cup. Six minutes. Perhaps the natal pull is stronger than it seems. For that one goal, that brief lead, those six minutes, mean more to me than all the victories of my favorite baseball team.

  III