I carried a small suitcase, mostly filled with Brigitte's things. Brigitte napped as Tante Atie carried her in her arms.
The women we met on the road called Tante Atie Madame, even though she had never married.
'I cannot see this child coming out of you,' Tante Atie said, rocking Brigitte in her arms.
'Sometimes, I cannot see it myself.'
'Makes me think back to when you were this small and I had you in my arms. Feels the same too. Like I am holding something very valuable. Do you sometimes think she is going to break in your hands?'
'She is a true Caco woman; she is very strong.'
A woman was sitting by the road stringing factory sequins together, while her daughter braided her hair.
'Louise tells me you've learned your letters,' I said to Tante Atie.
'She must think I want that shouted from the hills.'
'I was very happy to hear it.'
'I alway felt, I did, that I knew words in my head. I did not know them on paper. Now once every so often, I put some nice words down. Louise, she calls them poems.'
An old lady was trying to kill a rooster in the yard behind her house. The rooster escaped her grasp and ran around headless until it collapsed in the middle of the road. We walked around the bloody trail as the lady picked up the dead animal.
'Have you brought your daughter to Martine?' Tante Atie asked.
'She never answers my letters. When I called her, she slammed the phone down on me. She has not seen my daughter. We have not spoken since I left home.'
'That's very sad for both of you. Very sad since you and Martine don't have anybody else over there. And Martine's head is not in the best condition.'
A man hammered nails into a coffin in front of his roadside hut.
'Honneur, Monsie Frank,' Tante Atie called out to the coffin builder.
'Respect.' He flashed back a friendly smile.
'We have always heard that it is grand there,' said Tante Atie. 'Is it really as grand as they say, New York?'
'It's a place where you can lose yourself easily.'
'Grand or not grand, I am losing myself here too.'
We passed Man Grace's farm, with the bamboo fence around it. The house was worn out and wind-whipped. There were large wooden boards on the windows.
'When did Man Grace die?' I asked Tante Atie.
'Almost the day I came back to live here,' she said.
'What was wrong with her?'
'She went to bed and just stopped breathing. It must have been her time. It was very hard on Louise when her monman died. Louise and Grace, they had slept in the same bed all her life. Louise was in the bed when Grace went to Guinea. To this day, it tears her open to sleep alone.'
My grandmother's house still looked the same. I dropped my suitcase on the porch and followed Tante Atie out to the back.
Grandme Ife was sprinkling water in the dust, before doing her sweeping.
'Old woman, I brought your children,' Tante Atie said.
'Age and wedlock tames the beast,' said my grandmother. 'Am I looking at Sophie?'
I moved closer, pressing her fingers against my cheeks.
'Did you even have breasts the last time I saw you?' asked my grandmother.
'It has not been that long,' Tante Atie said.
My grandmother's eyes were filled with tears. She buried her face in my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist.
'I called my daughter Brigitte Ife,' I said. 'The Ife is after you.'
She stretched her neck to get a closer look.
'Do you see my granddaughter?' she asked, tracing her thumb across Brigitte's chin. 'The tree has not split one mite. Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?'
Chapter 15
The lights on a distant hill glowed like a candle light vigil. We ate supper at the small table on the back porch, A New York skyline was emblazoned in sequins across Tante Atie's chest. I had hurriedly bought a matching pair of i LOVE NEW YORK sweatshirts for her and my grandmother, forgetting about the lifelong deuil, which kept my grandmother from wearing anything but black, to mourn my grandfather.
My grandmother chewed endlessly on the same piece of meat, as her eyes travelled back and forth between my face and Tante Atie's chest. I swallowed a mouthful of soursop juice, savoring the heavy screen of brown sugar lingering on my tongue.
'Does your mother still cook Haitian?' asked Tante Atie with a full mouth.
'I am not sure,' I said.
My grandmother lowered her eyelids, sheltered her displeasure, and continued chewing.
'And you? Can you make some dishes?' Tante Atie asked.
'You will have to let me cook a meal,' I said.
A small draft blew the cooking embers through the yard. My daughter eagerly clawed my neck as I slipped her bottle into her mouth.
'Do you go there again tonight?' my grandmother asked Tante Atie.
'The reading, it takes a lot of time,' Tante Atie said.
'Why do you not go to the reading classes?'
'You want me to go the whole distance at night?'
'If you had your lessons elsewhere,' said my grandmother, 'they would be during the day. The way you go about free in the night, one would think you a devil.'
'The night is already in my face, it is. Why should I be afraid of it?'
'I would like it better if you were learning elsewhere.'
'I like where I am.'
'Can you read only by moonlight?'
'Knowledge, you do not catch it in the air, old woman. I have to labor at it. Is that not right, Sophie?'
My grandmother did not give me a chance to answer.
'You can only labor in the night?'
'Reading, it is not like the gifts you have. I was not born with it.'
'Most people are born with what they need,' said my grandmother.
'I was born short of my share.'
'You say that to your Makers when you see them in Guinea.'
'Do not send me off to my Makers, old woman. Besides, my Makers should hear me from this place.' My aunt raised her head to the star-filled sky. 'Hear me! Great gods that made the moon and the stars. You see what you have done to me. You were stingy with the clay when you made this creature.'
'Blasphemy!' spat my grandmother. 'Why can't the girl come here and teach you your letters?'
Tante Atie got up from the table and walked to the yard. She poured some juice over the cooking ashes as she came back to collect our plates.
She took the plates to the yard, scrubbed them with a soap-soaked palm leaf, then laid them out to dry.
'Before you go into the night, why don't you read to us from your reading book?'
My grandmother shut both her eyes as she twirled a rooster feather in her ear.
Tante Atie walked into the house and came back with a composition notebook wrapped in brown paper. She raised the notebook so it covered her face and slowly began to read. At first she stuttered but soon her voice took on an even flow.
