“And my daughter favors you,” she said. “My daughter is a chameleon. She’s taken your color from the mere sight of your face.” […] “Amabelle do you think my daughter will always be the color she is now?” Senora Valencia asked. “My poor love, what if she’s mistaken for one of your people?”
“She didn’t show a lot of affection to me. I think she believed this was not a good way to raise a girl, who might not have affection the rest of her life. She also didn’t smile often.” […] “Her name was Irelle Pradelle,” I say, “and after she died, when I dreamt of her, she was always smiling. Except of course when she and my papa were drowning.”
“[A] boy carrying his dead father from the road, wobbling, swaying, stumbling under the weight. The boy with the wind in his ears and pieces of the tin roofs that opened the father’s throat blowing around him. The boy trying not to drop the father, not crying or screaming like you’d think, but praying that more of the father’s blood will stay in the father’s throat and not go into the muddy flood, going no one knows where.”
Señor Pico Duarte bore the name of one of the fathers of Dominican independence […] His eyes lingered on his son, his heir […]“I will name him Rafael, for the Generalissimo,” he said as Juana reswaddled the children even more securely than before. The señora agreed to this name with a coy nod. And so the boy became Rafael like the Generalissimo, the president of the republic.
Above Papi’s head loomed a large portrait of the Generalissimo, which Señora Valencia had painted at her husband’s request. Her painting was a vast improvement on many of the Generalissimo’s public photographs. She had made him a giant in full military regalia, with vast fringed epaulets and clusters of medals aligned in neat rows under the saffron braiding across his chest. Behind him was the country’s red and blue flag with the white cross in the middle, along with the coat of arms and the shield: Dios, patria, libertad. God, country, liberty.
I did something I always did at times when I couldn’t bring myself to go out and discover an unpleasant truth. (When you have so few remembrances, you cling to them tightly and repeat them over and over in your mind so time will not erase them.) I closed my eyes and imagined the giant citadel that loomed over my parents’ house in Haiti. […] As a child, I played in the deserted war rooms of Henry I’s citadel. I peered at the rest of the world from behind its columns and archways, and the towers that were meant to hold cannons for repelling the attack of ships at sea. From the safety of these rooms, I saw the entire northern cape […].
The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river. I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice […] I walk down to the sands to throw [myself] into the water […]
Two of the river boys grab me and […] pin me down to the ground until I become still. “Unless you want to die,” one of them says, “you will never see those people again.”
“Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
Now Kongo was bathing in the middle of the stream, scrubbing his body with a handful of wet parsley […] We used pesi, perejil, parsley […] for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year’s dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and—along with boiled orange leaves—a corpse’s remains one final time.
“I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrían Kreyòl and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues […]
“To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmèmès’ granmèmès were born in this country,” a man responded in Kreyol, which we most often spoke—instead of Spanish—among ourselves.
At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold […] it was their way of returning home, with you as a witness […]. In [Father Romain’s] sermons to the Haitian congregants of the valley he often reminded everyone of common ties: language, foods, history, carnival, songs, tales, and prayers. His creed was one of memory, how remembering—though sometimes painful—can make you strong.
“Are you certain you don’t want to keep this face for yourself?” I asked.
“I’ve made many,” he said, “for all those who, even when I’m gone, will keep my son in mind. If I could, I would carry them all around my neck, I would, like some men wear their amulets […] The elder of your house, Don Ignacio, he’s not asked again to come and see me, no? […] I’m not surprised,” he said, “that my son has already vanished from his thoughts.”
“You never believed those people could injure you… Even after they killed Joël, you thought they could never harm you.”
[…] Perhaps I had trusted too much. I had been living inside dreams that would not go away, the memories of an orphaned child. When the present itself was truly frightful, I had perhaps purposely chosen not to see it.
“We are Dominicanas,” Dolores explained.
“They took him,” Doloritas added. “They came in the night and took him from our bed.”
“We have yet to learn your language,” Dolores said.
“We are together six months, me and my man,” Doloritas said. “I told him I would learn Kreyòl for when we visit his family in Haiti.”
“I know nothing,” Dolores said. “Doloritas was lost when they took him. She wanted to go to the border to look for him.
“This is their country. Let them find the border themselves. They can go to any village in these mountains, and the people will welcome them.”
[…] The sisters would not have as many obstacles as we would in Dajabón. If they were asked to say “perejil,” they could say it with ease. In most of our mouths, their names would be tinged with or even translated into Kreyòl, the way the name of Doloritas’ man slid towards the Spanish each time she evoked him.
“Tell us what this is,” one said. “Que diga perejil.”
At that moment I did believe that had 1 wanted to, I could have said the word properly, calmly, slowly, the way I often asked “Perejil?” of the old Dominican women and their faithful attending granddaughters at the roadside gardens and markets, even though the trill of the r and the precision of the j was sometimes too burdensome a joining for my tongue […] with all my senses calm, I could have said it. But I didn’t get my chance.
“You call me Man Rapadou,” she said. “I know your story.”
Which story of mine did she know? Which story was she told?
“Everything you knew before this slaughter is lost,” she said. Perhaps she was encouraging me to […] forsake Sebastien, even my memories of him, those images of him that would float through my head repeatedly, like brief glimpses of the same dream.
“When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young […] But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no? […] Leave me now,” she said. ”I’m going to dream up my children.”
The priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter […] They’re collecting tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”
[…] “Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.
“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”
Perhaps working the earth […] could make him believe that he had forgotten […] I imagined [other refugees] going forward in their lives, I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong […]
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
[…] “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”
“On this island, walk too far in either direction and people speak a different language,” continued Father Romain with aimless determination. “Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? […] We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less than three generations, we will all be Haitians.”
[...] “He was beaten badly every day,” the sister said. […] “Sometimes he remembers everything. Sometimes, he forgets all of it, everything, even me.”
You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.
My dreams are now only visitations of my words for the absent justice of the peace, for the Generalissimo himself.
He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will.
“Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body […] From time to time, life takes you by surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.”
I knew she meant this as a compliment to me, a kind word for my sudden arrival at her house some years before.
I thought that if I relived the moment often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself. I also thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I.
I slipped into the current […]with my shoulders only half submerged, the current floating over me in a less than gentle caress, the pebbles in the riverbed scouring my back.
I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears to the river flow.
