'Ti Alice and the boy, they are bidding one another goodbye, for the night.'
My grandmother wrapped her arms around her body, rocking and cradling herself.
'What is happening now?' I asked.
'Her mother is waiting for her at the door of their hut. She is pulling her inside to test her.'
The word sent a chill through my body.
'She is going to test to see if young Alice is still a virgin,' my grandmother said. 'The mother, she will drag her inside the hut, take her last small finger and put it inside her to see if it goes in. You said the other night that your mother tested you. That is what is now happening to Ti Alice.'
I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers' obsession with keeping us pure and chaste. My mother always listened to the echo of my urine in the toilet, for if it was too loud it meant that I had been deflowered. I learned very early in life that virgins always took small steps when they walked. They never did acrobatic splits, never rode horses or bicycles. They always covered themselves well and, even if their lives depended on it, never parted with their panties.
The story goes that there was once an extremely rich man who married a poor black girl. He had chosen her out of hundreds of prettier girls because she was untouched. For the wedding night, he bought her the whitest sheets and nightgowns he could possibly find. For himself, he bought a can of thick goat milk in which he planned to sprinkle a drop of her hymen blood to drink.
Then came their wedding night. The girl did not bleed. The man had his honor and reputation to defend. He could not face the town if he did not have a blood-spotted sheet to hang in his courtyard the next morning. He did the best he could to make her bleed, but no matter how hard he tried, the girl did not bleed. So he took a knife and cut her between her legs to get some blood to show. He got enough blood for her wedding gown and sheets, an unusual amount to impress the neighbors. The blood kept flowing like water out of the girl. It flowed so much it wouldn't stop. Finally, drained of all her blood, the girl died.
Later, during her funeral procession, her blood-soaked sheets were paraded by her husband to show that she had been a virgin on her wedding night. At the grave site, her husband drank his blood-spotted goat milk and cried like a child.
I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fingernail.
Like Tante Atie, she had told me stories while she was doing it, weaving elaborate tales to keep my mind off the finger, which I knew one day would slip into me and condemn me. I had learned to double while being tested. I would close my eyes and imagine all the pleasant things that I had known. The lukewarm noon breeze through our bougainvillea. Tante Atie's gentle voice blowing over a field of daffodils.
There were many Cases in our history where our ancestors had doubled. Following in the vaudou tradition, most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives.
After my marriage, whenever Joseph and I were together, I doubled.
'The testing? Why do the mothers do that?' I asked my grandmother.
'If a child dies, you do not die. But if your child is disgraced, you are disgraced. And people, they think daughters will be raised trash with no man in the house.'
'Did your mother do this to you?'
'From the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me.'
'When you tested my mother and Tante Atie, couldn't you tell that they hated it?'
'I had to keep them clean until they had husbands.'
'But they don't have husbands.'
'The burden was not mine alone.'
'I hated the tests,' I said. 'It is the most horrible thing that ever happened to me. When my husband is with me now, it gives me such nightmares that I have to bite my tongue to do it again.'
'With patience, it goes away.'
'No Grandme Ife, it does not.'
'Ti Alice, she has passed her examination.'
The sky reddened with a sudden flash of lightning. 'Now you have a child of your own. You must know that everything a mother does, she does for her child's own good. You cannot always carry the pain. You must liberate yourself.'
We walked to my room and put my daughter down to sleep.
'I will go soon,' I told my grandmother, 'back to my husband.'
'It is better,' she said. 'It is hard for a woman to raise girls alone.'
She walked into her room, took her statue of Erzulie, and pressed it into my hand.
'My heart, it weeps like a river,' she said, 'for the pain we have caused you.'
I held the statue against my chest as I cried in the night. I thought I heard my grandmother crying too, but it was the rain slowing down to a mere drizzle, tapping on the roof.
The next morning, I went jogging, along the road, through the cemetery plot, and into the hills. The sun had already dried some of the puddles from the drizzle the night before.
Along the way, people stared at me with puzzled expressions on their faces. Is this what happens to our girls when they leave this place? They become such frightened creatures that they run like the wind, from nothing at all.
Chapter 24
Three days later, my mother came. When I first caught a glimpse of her, she was sitting on the back of a cart being pulled by two teenage boys.
Eliab raced to the yard, grabbed my grandmother's hand, and yanked her towards the road.
My mother was shielding her face from us, hiding behind a red umbrella.
My grandmother followed Eliab to the edge of the road.
'That lady,' Eliab said, pointing at the umbrella guarding my mother's face. 'That lady, she says she belongs to you.'
Tante Atie was in the yard boiling some water for our morning coffee. She got up quickly when my grandmother started screaming my mother's name.
'Min Martine!'
'Tololo. Tololo,' Eliab chimed in as though it was his long-lost mother who had come back.
My grandmother grabbed her broom and speared it in the ground to anchor herself.
My mother folded the red umbrella and laid it on top of a large suitcase on the cart next to her.
Some of the road vendors gathered around her to say hello.
My mother kissed them on the cheek and stroked their children's heads. They looked curiously at her cerise jumper, ballooned around her small frame.
My grandmother was trembling on the spot where she was standing. Tante Atie put her hands on her hips and stared ahead. She did not look the least bit surprised.
A plantain green scarf floated in the breeze behind my mother. She skipped through the dust and rushed across the yard. Eliab circled around her like a wingless butterfly.
My mother walked over and kissed my grandmother. Tante Atie moved slowly towards her, not particularly excited. My mother was glowing.
Tante Atie tapped her lips against my mother's cheeks, then went back to fanning the cooking sticks with my grandmother's hat.
'Sak pase, Atie?' asked my mother.
'You,' answered Tante Atie fanning the flames. 'You're what's new.'
