surprised she's having nightmares. This pregnancy is bringing feelings to the surface that she had never completely dealt with.
You will never be able to connect with your husband until you say good-bye to your father.'
'I am seeing my mother this weekend,' I said.
'You are establishing relations again.'
'Joseph and I are going to visit her so we can get to know her friend.'
'You mean her lover, the father of her child.'
'Yes.'
'Is it hard for you to imagine your mother sexually?'
'I've never really tried.'
'Do it now.'
'Do what?'
'Imagine her in the sexual act,' she said.
I tried to imagine my mother, wincing and clenching her teeth as the large shadow of a man mounted her. She didn't like it. She even looked like she was crying, even though her lips were saying things that made him think otherwise.
'Do you imagine that it's the same for her as it is for you?'
'I imagine that she tries to be brave.'
'Like you.'
'Maybe.'
'Do you think you'll ever stop thinking of what you and Joseph do as being brave?'
'I am his wife. There are certain things I need to do to keep him.'
'The fear of abandonment. You always have that in the back of your mind, don't you?'
'I feel like my daughter is the only person in the world who won't leave me.'
'Do you understand now why your mother was so adamantly against your being with a man, a much older man at that? It is only natural, dear heart. She also felt that you were the only person who would never leave her.'
We stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Two swans were floating along trying to catch up with one another. The crew team was rowing towards the edge of the river.
'During your visit, did you go to the spot where your mother was raped?' Rena asked. 'In the thick of the cane field. Did you go to the spot?'
'No, not really.'
'What does that mean?'
'I ran past it.'
'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.'
Chapter 33
My mother met us on the stoop outside the house. She was wearing a large tent dress with long puffy sleeves. She looked calmer, rested. Her skin was evened out with a powdered mahogany glow.
Joseph had driven in our station wagon, while I brought Brigitte in my mother's car.
'Ca va byen?' My mother kissed Joseph four times on the cheek. 'I brought your wife and daughter back in one piece.'
She took the baby from my arms and shoved Marc forward to introduce himself.
Marc was a bit fatter than I remembered. He was squeezed into a small gray jacket and a large pair of pants held up by suspenders.
Marc recited his full name as he shook Joseph's hand.
'Marc has a lot of the old ways,' my mother said to Joseph.
The kitchen smelled like fried fish, boiled cabbage, and mayonnaise.
'What have you been up to?' my mother said, curling Brigitte up in her arms. Brigitte reached up to grab my mother's very short hair.
'She said Dada,' Joseph announced proudly.
'Even when she grows up and gets a doctorate,' Marc said, 'it will not count as much.'
Marc wrapped an apron around his waist and turned over the fish in the skillet.
My mother took Joseph on a tour of the house, the tour he had never gotten. He followed her obediently, beaming.
She moved us into the backyard where she had placed her picnic table near her hibiscus patch. She stood over Joseph's shoulder, to show him how to sprinkle chopped pickled peppers on his plantains.
'What kind of music do you do?' Marc asked Joseph as we sat down to eat.
'I try to do all kinds of music,' Joseph said. 'I think music should speak not only to the ear, but mostly to the soul.'
'That's a very vague answer,' my mother said.
'I think they want to know if you get paid,' I said.
'We're not being as graceless as that,' Marc said. 'I was thinking more in terms of merengue, calypso, soka, samba?'
'Is there money in it?' asked my mother.
'I do okay,' Joseph said. 'I play with friends when they need someone, but trust me, I have a little nest egg saved up.'
My mother winked for only my eyes to see. She had prepared for this, was set to make Joseph love her. 'I have something to tell you,' she said to me. 'I have made a decision.'
Turning back to Joseph, my mother asked, 'Is that how you bought your place in Providence?'
'Sure is,' Joseph said.
'I really was asking more about your opinion of music,' Marc insisted.
'We hear you,' said my mother.
'He has much of the old ways,' she whispered again in my ear.
Marc pretended not to hear.
'Where are your roots?' my mother asked Joseph as she fed plantain chunks to the baby.
'I was born in the South,' he said. 'Louisiana.'
'They speak some kind of Creole there,' she said.
'I know it,' he said. 'Sometimes I try to talk the little I know with my wife, your daughter.'
'I feel like I could have been Southern,' my mother said.
'We're all African,' said Marc.
'Non non, me in particular,' said my mother. 'I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?' she said turning to Marc.
Marc shrugged.
'I try to get him to church,' my mother said, 'just to listen to them, but he won't go. You tell him, Joseph. Tell this old Haitian, with his old ways, about a Negro spiritual.'
'They're like prayers,' Joseph said, 'hymns that the slaves used to sing. Some were happy, some sad, but most had to do with freedom, going to another world. Sometimes that other world meant home, Africa. Other times, it meant Heaven, like it says in the Bible. More often it meant freedom.'
Joseph began to hum a spiritual.
Oh Mary, don't you weep!
'That's a Negro spiritual,' said my mother.
'It sounds like vaudou song,' said Marc. 'He just described a vaudou song. Erzulie, don't you weep,' he sang
