1.
Wednesday, May 24, 1967. We arrive at our school’s courtyard. Our teacher, Madame Ladal, lines us up. “We’re going to our classroom a little early today. I ask you to sit down calmly.”
We climb the stairs to the first floor without making any noise. We enter the classroom, we get settled, and then two people come and stand in front of the door: the principal (with her smooth wig sliding over her head) and a white man in a suit.
The white man shakes hands with Madame Ladal and says to us, “Don’t mind me, children. I didn’t come here for you.”
The principal backs out of the door. (Did you see the little frizzy curls under her wig?)
Our teacher usually tells us when we’ll have visitors: Tomorrow someone is coming. He has things to teach us. But she didn’t say anything about this one.
He’s come but he has nothing to teach us. He isn’t standing next to her while we whisper. Usually that’s how it goes: We whisper, we laugh, and then we calm down and listen to the adult who talks to us. We discuss everything he says, and then after, during break, we talk some more. Especially in order to make fun of him . . .
The white guy sits at the back of the class. We turn around to look at him. “Pay no attention to me. I didn’t come for you. I’ve come for your teacher.”
The other teachers walk past our shutters with their students. We can see them through the slats. They slow down and look at Madame Ladal. Madame Desravins winks at our teacher, who’s trembling a little, but she smiles back.
The man grabs the notebook that belongs to Maryvonne, the queen of ink blobs. “Please, sir, not my notebook!” she says, smiling. Maryvonne always smiles.
She tries, she really does, but she can’t manage to “discipline her dip pen.” That’s what Madame Ladal says. Maryvonne smashes her pen on the page; the nib separates and bends, catches on the paper. Maryvonne grabs the pen with her fingers; she frees it and tries to make it stand straight. She has ink everywhere, on the table, on her fingers, on her dress, on her cheeks, everywhere. We make fun of her, and she gets angry. It’s always the same. Poor kid.
Maryvonne keeps on smiling, but the man shakes his head as he looks at the unlucky girl’s notebook. He moves his head a little, like this: from left to right, from left to right. I see he’s very, very angry, so I close my notebook. I get up, I hand it to him and say, “Sir, you’re scaring Maryvonne.”
“Mademoiselle Émilienne, please go back to your seat.” (Why is my teacher being so formal with me?)
The lesson goes on. My teacher smiles a little. Her smile is proud and courageous, a little sad too. We answer gaily. We know all the answers. Her thirty-two students.
“Raise your hands, children.” Our teacher is perfect, and we’re happy.
The white man in the suit is sweating so much that he takes off his jacket. His shirt is wet under the arms. If he had asked us, we would have told him not to sit at the back of the class. It’s not a good place to sit.
At our school, the wind blows in from the sea. So you should always pick the desks near the balcony, unless the teacher has made you sit somewhere else. Which is what she does. She starts by putting the best students at the desks near the balcony and she ends with the worst in the class near the window facing the street. She makes us change places from time to time. It depends on how hard we’ve been working, on whether we spend too much time watching what’s going on in the street instead of listening. But we want the desks near the balcony, not to look at the sea but to take advantage of the wind blowing through the branches of the big mango trees in the courtyard outside. A nice little breeze, like the one at home that comes fluttering through our neighbor’s palm tree.
We’d really like to tell the white man this; we try to signal to him to change places when the teacher isn’t looking, but he says, “I haven’t come for you.”
We’re not supposed to speak to him. We’re not supposed to bring him our notebooks. We’re not supposed to pay attention to him. So we forget him. We work the way we always work, and at the end, after math, spelling, and history, Madame Ladal has us sing: “Manman’w voyé’w lékol, blaw-la-ka-taw, pou aprann I’ABCD.” We sing. How we sing! “Your mother sends you to school to learn your ABCs. Tra la la la tra la.” We sing with the fear of God in us, as Mama would say!
It’s a song we learned when we went to Amandiers Beach on the school bus. We had huge gourds filled with rice and covered with checkered towels and containers of lemonade and big mats so we could spread out on the beach. (Papa, you were the one who made the road that goes to the beach, right? That’s what I told Madame Ladal.)
We keep on singing and the other classes leave their rooms before we do. The other teachers come to watch us sing. We can’t stop ourselves. We’re too happy. The teacher smiles and the man, the white guy, looks really surprised. It’s true, we’re usually not allowed to speak Creole at school.
The man puts his jacket back on. He’s going to take our teacher somewhere. She follows him, very serious, very solemn. During recess our teacher disappears. With the white man in the suit. They divide us up to go into other classrooms.
(But what’s happening?)
Madame Desravins tries to reassure us, “Your teacher is being evaluated, children. She’ll be back, but right now the examiner has to talk to her.”
2.
She’s already refusing to do what we say!
We’re talking about our neighbor Nono, who left this world two years ago, in 1965.
With her ninety-eight years of life on this earth, old Nono thinks she has priority to tell a part of this story.
She wants to be the first one to speak. Otherwise, she’s threatening to disappear. And what she says, she does. She claims she’s the accordion of this orchestra and that she’ll play her part until the end because she knows more than anybody else here. That’s why she thinks no one else has the right to speak before she does about Émilienne: “She’s my child, she is.”
Throughout her life she repeated that phrase, even if there’s no shared blood between us.
She thinks of herself as a member of the family: “A good neighbor is often worth more than a bad relative.” That’s what she said when she was alive, and she still thinks it. “It’s my duty to protect that little girl!”
Up till now, we thought that was our father’s role, that he was the only one who could calm our little sister’s nerves.
And she hasn’t stopped asking when he’ll come home. Next—if he really will come home. After that—why wasn’t he coming home?
But he hasn’t approached our shores today.
It seems his ship’s still docked!
This isn’t the first time Émilienne has waited for him, that we’ve all waited, and that he didn’t come home.
But we haven’t seen him since Wednesday.
And so, since he hasn’t made up his mind to enlighten our little star and chase away the darkness, it seems we should give the floor to those who have been waiting in the dark.
Let’s start with old Nono.
The privilege of age. Escort the Queen!
3.
As far as I’m concerned, this story about the disappeared schoolteacher is hiding another one, and we’ve got to