This scene, as Orvil, Olmène’s father, would often have to repeat later, left him with the first strong and indelible impression of what he was and what this messenger represented. Of who was big and who was not. Who was strong and who was weak. Of the hunter and the prey. Of who charges and who is trampled. Orvil Clémestal was just twelve years old. He and his younger sister Ilménèse hid in the folds of his mother’s skirt.
That night, Bonal appeared to Dieula in a dream—“Like I see you here,” she told her children and all of us. And Bonal had told her everything. Absolutely everything: the sale of the lands, the hidden paths to Baudelet, the finger pointed at him, buying the clairin, and, on the road, a sharp pain in his back. Inflicted by the point of a cutlass. And then nothing. Nothing more.
The next day, with Orvil, her oldest son, she went at dawn, without the slightest hesitation, to the exact place where Bonal’s body was found: at the bottom of a ravine, in the middle of the brambles and bayahondes. Bonal’s pockets were empty and a cloud of flies was swirling around his body, which was starting to swell. We were stunned, shocked, but not the least bit surprised. Dieula only reminded us of the power of dreams, the strength and the solidity of the threads that tied us to the Invisibles. We cried out our pain, and then we silenced ourselves. Returning to our placidity. To our place. To our peasant silence.
Bonal’s service had no drums. No wailing. Tears were swallowed. No cries pulled up from the insides of women. No open reminiscing on the life of the deceased. Just the moaning and murmuring among the jerky sway of bodies back and forth. The priests, gendarmes, and Marines knew nothing of it. A lugubrious and sad service whose only sound was the asson,* the prayers, the grief, the songs cornered between throat and mouth. Despite the three sacred words murmured into Bonal’s ear and all of Dieula’s skill, the celebrated mambo,* the deceased didn’t designate anyone among us to welcome his met-tet* and look after our heritage and our blood. The désounin* had failed, and Bonal left carrying his Spirits with him. Those who led him, led his house and protected the lakou.* And we were not sure that he had heard all of our messages to our Dead, to our lwas* and all our Invisibles. So we all were afraid for the protection and life of the lakou.* We were afraid for each one of us.
Once Bonal was buried not far from his house, Dieula called all her Invisibles for a whole day and night. All of them. Her gods and her Spirits. Her Invisibles from the paternal side and those from her maternal side. The brave, the magnetic, the wise, the compassionate, the powerful Ogou Kolokosso, Marinette Pyé-Chèch, Grann Batala Méji, Bossou Trois Cornes, Ti-Jean Pétro, Erzuli Dantò, and all the others…
Two days later, her low chair at the door to her hut, Dieula started to sing a strange psalm that seemed to come from afar. Not from her insides but from further away. From the very heart of the earth.
And it climbed up her legs, into her organs. And from her throat it came out like a thread through a needle until it went beyond the heavens. Not one of us dared to bother her, out of fear of breaking this thread. She sang without ever stopping:
Yo ban mwen kou a
Kou a fè mwen mal o!
M ap paré tann yo
They hit me
The blows hurt me very badly!
I wait for them at the bend
And then, slowly, Dieula got up, put on a rough blue cotton dress, tied a red handkerchief around her head and another around her waist, where she buried an enameled goblet, half of a small empty calabash, and a bag holding her pipe and a little tobacco. She summoned Orvil, her older son, and told him what she had to do and that she would return soon. We saw her disappear on the other side of the Peletier Morne. Without a cent, without bread, without water, she walked in the thickets, the bayahondes, and the bushes, begging for food and shelter, to do penance and plead to her divinities to respond.
Dieula returned the afternoon of the eve of the storm, beneath a wall of menacing clouds. She did not want to be carried away by the powerful current of the Mayonne River, she told us. The penance had lasted a whole month. As proof, her feet were badly beat up and pain radiated from her lower back. Seeing her return, we cried out, wept, and danced. We had all been waiting—at once confident and worried. Dieula was exhausted, but her eyes were clear like the sky after rain. As though in all the time we hadn’t seen her, her eyes had been soaked in light. Or fire. Or Gods.
She sat down with difficulty on her low straw chair at the entrance to her hut, her bloody and blistered feet in sandals whose thin leather had been marred by the dust of the trails and the water of the rivers and streams. She took off her shoes and asked Orvil to draw a tub of water so that she could soothe her feet, then asked for something to eat and drink. She swallowed a plateful of corn with black beans and bananes musquées, Orvil and Philogène standing behind her, and the two little ones at her sides.
Four days after her return, Anastase Mésidor’s fourth son, who was born two years after Tertulien, died unexpectedly. Typhoid? Poisoning? Meningitis? The Mésidors never knew. We, in Anse Bleue, Ti Pistache, and Roseaux, without saying a word, believed beyond the shadow of a doubt…and we believe it still, that Dieula Clémestal had taken death by the hand and led it dutifully to the Mésidors’ front door.
After the death of Bonal, who was then our danti,* the life of the lakou was marked by prudence and vigilance. We had been hobbled, and we were afraid of falling until the day Bonal appeared in a dream to his brother, Présumé Lafleur. The latter gathered everyone in the early morning at the entry of his hut to tell us of the strange dream: “I saw Bonal walking toward me, as straight as an arrow. Dieula walked behind him but it was like she had shrunk, and it was Orvil, with his broad chest, who led them both.” As Présumé Lafleur told his dream, tears rolled down Dieula’s cheeks. She was relieved and pleased. Présumé went on: “I stood there, frozen, shocked. And, just when I lifted a foot to walk toward my brother, he disappeared over the water as he pointed his finger to Orvil. And Dieula wept, wept, like she is weeping here before us.” We all took Présumé at his word and we bowed to Bonal’s will to make Orvil his successor, and the new danti of the lakou.
Dieula made some offerings to the divinities, waiting for Orvil to pass through all the steps of his initiation before he took asson. That ended a few weeks before his brother Philogène left for Cuba, a year before Dieula died, and three months after the Americans departed the island.
Orvil became our danti and oversaw everything, the fishing, the work in the jardins, the punishments, the offerings to the divinities, our protection against those more powerful than us—like the Mésidors, Frétillons, the chief of police. Our protection against all who resemble us as two drops of water do each other, but who were not us. Who were not from the lakou. He made sure that ambition never nested in any of the hearts of the lakou. None. We were branches of the same tree, arms from the same trunk, and we had to stay there.
But Orvil, though he was our danti, couldn’t do anything to treat the underlying wounds, from which the blood of the earth gushed. The primal scars that dug into the sides of the hills. The rivers that shriveled and shriveled, bleeding out. The earth and rocks that kept piling up at the feet of the slopes when we pushed them away. The growing power of the hurricanes. The droughts, each one more devastating than the previous. Against those who left, detached themselves from the tree for a reason that was not ambition but looked a lot like it. Orvil was powerless against these events that only seemed to want to follow, straight, straight ahead, a one-way road with no escape from fate.
6.
Nothing upset Olmène more than these acts of hate, tears, and blood between the Lafleurs and the Mésidors. Orvil, her father, sometimes relived them as though they had taken place the day before and not forty years earlier. Yet nothing troubled her as much in this dawn as the look of the lord and thug Tertulien Mésidor. A wind coming from the mountains stirred up the waves. Olmène looked at the sea, which seemed to breathe