Martine Caco Character Analysis

[Tante Atie] took the card from my hand. The flower nearly fell off. She pressed the tape against the short stem, forced the baby daffodil back in its place, and handed the card back to me. She did not even look inside.

“Not this year,” she said. […] “It is not mine. It is your mother’s. We must send it to your mother.

Tante Atie told me that my mother loved daffodils because they grew in a place that they were not supposed to. They were really European flowers […] meant for colder climates. A long time ago, a French woman had brought them to Croix-des-Rosets. […] A strain of daffodils had grown that could withstand the heat, but they were the color of pumpkins, […] as though they had acquired a bronze tinge from the skin of the natives who had adopted them.

“Ou byen? Are you all right?” I asked her.

She shook her head yes.

“It is the night,” she said. “Sometimes, I see horrible visions in my sleep. […] Don’t worry, it will pass,” she said, avoiding my eye. “I will be fine. I always am. The nightmares, they come and go.”

“You’re a good girl, aren’t you? […] You understand my right to ask as your mother, don’t you? […] When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie […] used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure.”

As she tested me, to distract me, she told me, “The Marasas were two inseparable lovers. They were the same person, duplicated in two. […] What vail lovers they were, those Marasas. Admiring one another for being so much alike… When you love someone, you want him to be closer to you than your Marasa. Closer than your shadow. […] You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marasas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand? There are secrets you cannot keep.”

The story goes that there was once a woman who walked around with blood constantly spurting out of her unbroken skin. This went on for twelve long years. […] Finally, the woman got tired and said she was going to see Erzulie. […] After her consultation, it became apparent to the woman what she would have to do. If she wanted to stop bleeding, she would have to give up her right to be a human being. She could choose what to be, a plant or an animal, but she could no longer be a woman. […]

“Make me a butterfly,” she told Erzulie.

“Who would have imagined it?” [Tante Atie] said. “The precious one has your manman’s black face. She looks more like Martine’s child than yours.”

I had spent two days in the hospital in Providence and four weeks with stitches between my legs. Joseph could never understand why I had done something so horrible to myself. I could not explain to him that it was like breaking manacles, an act of freedom.

“The new lady,” [Eliab] said, “does she belong to you?”

“Sometimes I claim her,” I said, “sometimes I do not.”

“I did it,” she said, “because my mother had done it to me. I have no greater excuse. I realize standing her that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day.”

After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother’s anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had “caught” from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own. […] I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. […] The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.

“My grandmother was preparing her funeral,” I said. “It’s a thing at home.” […]

“You called it home?” [Joseph] said. “Haiti.”

“What else would I call it?”

“You have never called it that since we’ve been together. Home has always been your mother’s house, that you could never go back to.”

“Your mother never gave him a face. That’s why he’s a shadow. That’s why he can control her. I’m not surprised she’s having nightmares. […] You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you’ll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts.”

“There is a place […] where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter?”

My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.

“Now,” she said, “you will know how to answer.”