The click-clicking of high heels on the pavement below our window was terrifying. The ladies strutting like seagulls along the water’s edge, day and night, were worse than those demons that used to gather on rooftops to inventory the souls of homeless children in Port-au-Prince. The ladies kept Manman awake at night. New York was an unnatural place, she concluded, an open grave with dirt and snow piled high on either side. She wanted to fly back toward the familiar island sun and never return.
“I brought you out of there and now you want to go back!” Frisner was stunned. “If you leave New York . . . I swear . . .” He did not have to say the rest. If you leave now, we’re done, through, over, divorced. “You hated your life there,” he reminded her. “Have you forgotten how much you couldn’t wait to leave?”
“I was happy!” I could not believe Manman uttered those words. If anyone was happy in Haiti, it was me. Unhappiness came only when a certain someone made me read fifty thousand psalms when I was too tired to do anything but close my eyes and dream about Yseult Joseph. Until Yseult got on a plane and left me without a best friend, I was the happiest person on the island, wasn’t I? She used to come to my house every day after school. We’d eat mangoes and sweetsop until our stomachs ached. We kept our eyes on the doll in the upstairs room, and she never bothered us, did she? The doll was happy too, wasn’t she? Until she heard all that talk about us going to New York. It was only then that she left her cobweb-ridden high chair and was never seen again.
* * *
Frisner was supposed to quiver with joy upon meeting the girls he’d fathered but left behind for Manman to raise on her own. Reality in the form of indifference erased that thought and filled Manman’s mouth with a taste so sour that to this day she cannot help but be bitter.
He was nowhere near thrilled to rediscover the particulars of full-time fatherhood.
Taking care of himself hadn’t been so expensive and time-consuming. (A few kind women picked up the slack here and there—cooking warm meals, ironing sheets that didn’t need it.) Now, in addition to the landlord demanding to be paid, the grocer, the doctor, the dentist, and the pharmacist also wanted money. Even the washing machines at the laundromat didn’t care if there was only a nickel left to be split five ways. Feed me or wear filthy clothes, they hummed.
Frisner’s unexpected announcement came one payday after he counted the change that was left once all the bills were paid. “Children are like industrial-strength juicers,” he said. Manman listened quietly. “By the time they’re done with us, we won’t have any pulp left. But we could have a good life, if we sent them back. They’d be fine down there. They’re young. They’d go back to school. A year’s tuition costs less than what I spend on food in a single week. We could have a happy life, you and me. This country isn’t good for children anyway. Especially girls. What do you say, chérie?”
Manman was too stunned to answer right away. After a few minutes of deliberation she said, “Flora is the oldest. I suppose we could send her back.”
“On top of that,” Frisner went on contemptuously, unaware that Manman had made up her mind about what she would do, “there are laws in this country that dictate what we can and can’t do inside our own house. If you step out of line, your own children can crush you like the grasshopper you keep talking about. If they don’t feel like doing what you tell them, they can just pick up the phone and off to jail you go to eat your meals with rapists and murderers.”
Manman had heard rumors about American children having their parents arrested for setting them straight. “Not Haitian children,” Manman said. “My Karine and Marjorie would never.”
“Children are the real giants in this country,” Frisner half-joked. “They’re expensive as hell to keep. And they have rights! In Haiti you can erase them like mistakes on a sheet of paper. Do anything you want with them. It’s not like that here. You look at them wrong and an avalanche of trouble will tumble down on you. How many times, back on the island, did someone give away an unwanted child to a neighbor, a friend, a stranger? You could take a kid to the countryside and leave him there like a bag of old clothes. Who would care? There are so many abandoned kids on the island, who could count them all? Try any of that here. Try dropping them off somewhere and see what happens. Someone is always watching.” Frisner was laughing and slapping his knees.
Manman sucked her teeth. She was repulsed by his words, however true they were. “Karine and Marjorie would never hurt us,” she maintained.
“We could have a nice life here,” Frisner reiterated. “You and me.”
“If I stay, my girls stay with me.”
“You’ll regret it,” Frisner snapped.
He was no longer laughing. No longer listening. He did not hear the compromise: “Flora, on the other hand, would get along just fine without us. In fact, the sooner we send her back . . .”
“To hell with all this,” Frisner said, and slammed the door behind him.
He returned many hours later. A woman’s perfume was mingled up with the smell of engine grease embedded in his woolen jacket. The perfume filled every inch of the apartment, daring us to try and ignore it. Daring Manman to state the obvious: This is not Joie de Vivre. This is not my perfume.
Manman soon found a solution to Frisner’s problem (the high cost of raising a family) and hers (the click-clicking of the prostitutes’ heels on the pavement below our window). She took a factory job working from sundown to sunup. She would silence the ladies’ heels as well as Frisner’s pleas to toss her girls back to the island like unwanted catch into the sea.
Frisner now walked around the apartment with his head down all the time, sulking like a boy who could not find his favorite toy. Manman had traded him in for a job and was punching a time clock at the exact moment when they were supposed to slip into bed together. He took solace in endowing himself with the gift of prophecy. “You’re wrong,” he told Manman angrily one morning upon picking her up from the factory. “You’re very wrong: New York won’t crush me like some little grasshopper. But it will crush you. And it will make your daughters walk the streets, day and night. It will turn all of them into bouzen. Whores. Mark my words.”
“Not my Karine and Marjorie,” Manman fired back. “Those girls take after me. Flora has too much of your blood in her veins. She looks and acts just like you. If you say New York will turn her into a bouzen, who would I be to disagree?”
FLORA DESORMEAU
Sister Bernadêtte doesn’t want me to sit next to Yseult, but she doesn’t want me near the other girls in class either. “You’ll contaminate them,” the nun says. I prefer to be near Yseult; she’s my right arm. She lets me copy the pages I need to memorize for the next day’s recitations.
“La Reine Anacaona fut enchaînée.” Yseult is standing in front of the class now, reciting her history homework. “Anacaona, the queen, was captured and taken to Santo Domingo. She was hung at the public square.”
“Very good,” Sister Bernadêtte says. “Very good” that the queen was captured and hung, or “Very good” that Yseult recited the lesson perfectly? Sister Bernadêtte smiles. The irony of it all: a citizen of the old mother country teaching Haitian children about history.
Yseult curtsies before returning to the seat next to me. I am not surprised when Sister Bernadêtte calls me next. I make my way to the front of the class and begin to recite the part about the Indiens being exterminated by a handful of Spaniards.
“When did the first blacks arrive in Haiti?” Sister Bernadêtte likes to try and confuse me. Her question has nothing to do with my recitation. And she knows I’m not