The Dew Breaker

Anne, Papa, and Ka are driving to Christmas Eve Mass, and Anne is talking about miracles. Ka announces that she was an atheist while in college, and this, combined with Papa’s obsession with the Ancient Egyptians, makes Anne feel as if she is “outnumbered by pagans.” They pass a cemetery and Anne holds her breath. When she was a child, Anne’s three-year-old brother drowned in the ocean back in Haiti. Anne often has visions of her brother’s spirit wandering through cemeteries, looking for a tombstone that belongs to him. She thinks it’s strange and disrespectful to have built a busy road right through the middle of a cemetery.

Every time Anne passes a cemetery she also closes her eyes. Ka vaguely knows that her mother’s intense relationship to cemeteries has something to do with her life back in Haiti. Ka asks Anne to tell them about another miracle, and Anne wants to mention the miracle of Papa’s transformation from someone who hurt people while working in a prison in Haiti to the calm husband and father driving them to Mass today. However, instead she tells a story about a young Filipino man who saw the Virgin Mary in a rose petal.  The family discusses how foreigners have more religious faith than Americans, who prefer rational explanations.

When Ka was little, all the families in the neighborhood would compete to put up the most extravagant Christmas light display. Anne and Papa never did this, fearing the attention it would draw. In reality, “it was their lack of participation that made them stand out.” Ka was never very interested in Christmas, though she enjoyed the ritual of touring the neighborhood light displays and critiquing each one. When they get to the church, Ka smokes a cigarette outside before going in. Anne tried to persuade Ka to wear a dress or skirt, but instead she is wearing her usual “paint-stained blue jeans.”

Recently Anne has been regretting her and Papa’s decision not to make any friends. She established her beauty shop on Nostrand Avenue, the heart of Brooklyn’s Haitian community, because she thought it would attract clients. They avoided making friends to avoid having Papa’s story discredited, but it has become clear that everyone believes Papa’s story about his past anyway; no one realizes that he was actually a “dew breaker,” a torturer.

When the clock strikes midnight and the priest walks in, Anne feels as if the whole world is suspended in the same enchanted moment. Anne prays that the Virgin Mary welcomed her little brother into heaven. Meanwhile, Ka whispers to Papa, pointing at someone sitting nearby. Papa explains that Ka thinks she has seen Emmanuel Constant. Pictures of Constant have been circling around the community accompanied by the words: “WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE HAITIAN PEOPLE.” These flyers claim that Constant tortured, raped, and murdered 5,000 people as part of a militia called the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti.

Anne and Papa have both noticed the flyers, though they haven’t discussed it. By now the flyers are faded, and people have scribbled horns and curses on the them, such that they now have “as many additions as erasures.” Before seeing them, Anne was already familiar with Constant, who formed his militia after a military coup exiled the Haitian president. The militia violently suppressed support for the president and engaged in “facial scalping,” which involved removing the skin from corpses’ faces to stop them from being identified. When the president returned, Constant escaped a life sentence in Haiti by fleeing to New York.

Despite feeling no sympathy for Constant, Anne dreams of pulling down the flyers because they make her scared people will find out about Papa’s past, too. Now, in church, she asks Papa if the man near them could really be Constant. Ka seems furious, which makes Anne proud, but also terrified of the possibility of Ka learning the truth about her own father. When Anne gets up to take Holy Communion, she scrutinizes the man to see if it is really Constant. Yet she also isn’t sure what to do if it is him. She feels connected to him and unable to judge him, due to her faith and the fact that she is married to a former torturer herself.

As Anne gets closer, she realizes that the man is certainly not Constant. She tells Ka and Papa this. As the choir sing her favorite hymn, “Silent Night,” Anne panics that she may not be able to come to Christmas Eve Mass ever again, as the risk of someone recognizing Papa is too great. She sees Papa mouthing the words in order to make her happy. As they leave church, Ka tries to reach out to the man they thought was Constant, but Papa stops her. Ka insists she was just going to ask his name.

Outside, Anne says hello to the priest and other members of the congregation while Ka and Papa wait, eager to go. Anne nervously asks Ka if she enjoyed the mass, but Ka replies with an apology for “overreact[ing]” to the man they thought was Constant. Anne feels a swell of relief; it is a “small miracle” that almost feels like a “resurrection.”