day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.
“Yes,” I said, going along. “I did wander here simply to meet you.”
“I don’t give you much,” he said, “but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joël’s.”
I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones.
“Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joël’s corpse into the compound,” he said, “I thought about how both Yves’ father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane.”
I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
11
I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.
“It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else,” my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. “I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you remember?”
My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.
There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she’s reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.
As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I’m alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, “You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true.” Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she’s speaking from inside a very tall bottle. “I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young.”
While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don’t remember names other than my own, and that one only because I’ve just heard her say it while addressing me.
When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, “What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?”
“There is no such thing and no such doll,” my mother says. “The fever made you an
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.
“Yes,” I said, going along. “I did wander here simply to meet you.”
“I don’t give you much,” he said, “but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joël’s.”
I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones.
“Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joël’s corpse into the compound,” he said, “I thought about how both Yves’ father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane.”
I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
11
I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.
“It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else,” my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. “I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you remember?”
My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.
There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she’s reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.
As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I’m alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, “You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true.” Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she’s speaking from inside a very tall bottle. “I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young.”
While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don’t remember names other than my own, and that one only because I’ve just heard her say it while addressing me.
When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, “What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?”
“There is no such thing and no such doll,” my mother says. “The fever made you an
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