THE FUNERAL SINGER
WEEK 1
Rezia, the owner of Ambiance Creole, the sole Haitian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, recites a long speech from the class manual:
“Four scones and seven tears ago, our fathers blew up this condiment…”
Odd, but Rezia doesn’t have a lisp when she attempts to speak English. Everything just gets mixed up in her mouth, like a birdcall in a storm.
Rezia always carries a white muslin handkerchief. As it flaps back and forth, ever so abruptly, it releases more and more of its vetiver fragrance, all the while looking like a kite that she’s using to send messages far away.
In spite of Rezia’s vetiver, the air in the classroom is scorching and it stings. The air conditioner has stopped humming as if to listen to us talk.
Mariselle, who’s shaped like a pencil even in her heavy French suit, stands up in a perfectly straight line and, in her deep voice that sounds like two people, simply states her name. She says it so quickly that it sounds shorter, as though she’s given herself a nickname, solely for the purposes of the class.
She’s asked to repeat her name. After a third time, she announces each syllable and they merge into two beautiful words, Mari Sel, Salt Mary or Solitary Mary. You’re tempted to add “Pray for us” and I do, under my breath. I can’t stop watching the way she tugs at her thick, curly hair each time she opens her mouth, and I can see her scalp rise and fall as she pulls and releases, pulls and releases.
I wish I could sing to introduce myself. Perhaps everyone would be listening too hard to look at me.
I would sing “Brother Timonie.” It’s a song my father, a fisherman, used to sing whenever he thought a storm was coming.
I’d begin by asking everyone to pretend they were rowing with me, and I’d sing,
This is not the first time I’ve called on Brother Timonie. At least it’s not the first time I’ve tried.
I asked my father once, Who was Brother Timonie?
He didn’t know. Maybe a fisherman who died at sea. Most of the songs he knew were about people who’d died at sea.
When I stand to speak, tapping my feet against my chair, the teacher decides to turn my introduction into an inquisition.
“And what do you do?” Her voice hisses, but is flat, never rising or falling.
I do nothing, I want to say. Not yet. I have been expelled from my country. That’s why I’m in this class at twenty-two years old.
Once we’re all done, the teacher presents herself, saying, “I’m June. You can call me June. If you pay attention and study hard, the test will be a piece of cake and you’ll all be considered high school graduates in no time.” She looks young and beefy and flat-chested and sits on the desk with her bare cream legs dangling in front of us. She doesn’t know what an enormous vow she’s made. A diploma in no time? It’s like those lawyers who promise green cards in a few weeks.
Rezia nicknames her “Flat Tit” when she notices how like little dandelion buds her breasts look in her pleated strapless sundress. Mariselle is Mother Mary and I’m “the baby funeral singer.” I am one of the few professional funeral singers of my generation. At least I was.
WEEK 2
When I was a girl in Leogane, some days my mother and I would play telephone. We’d tie two empty condensed-milk cans to the ends of a long rope and sing to each other from far away. Sometimes I’d hide inside the house, under our cedar table, and she’d remain outside, but we could still hear each other, without shouting.
During carnival, we’d use our telephone rope for a maypole dance. We’d skip around each other and duck under the ropes, taking turns at being the maypole and the dancer. We always thought, or she always thought, we were weaving the wind, plaiting it into a braid as thick as the rainbows that were sometimes above our heads.
Whenever she got tired of playing, my mother would look up at the clouds and say, “Look, Freda, Papa’s listening to us up there. He’s eating coconut with God and he’s making a cloud for us with coconut meat.”
I thought her mind was gone whenever she said things like that. She also embroidered clouds on pieces of cloth, tiny crimson cirrus threads.
My father used to look at the way the sunset outshone the clouds to decide what the sea would be like the next day. A ruby twilight would mean a calm sea, but a blood-red dawn might spoil everything.
WEEK 3
Blue is the only color I was able to see whenever I was at sea with my father. For a while we forgot there were other colors. Oh, I remembered yellow too, yellow like the sun almost going down.
“Yellow as in sunflowers and marigolds,” Rezia observes, fanning herself with her handkerchief and smothering us with vetiver.
“Marigolds, the flower of a thousand lives,” Mariselle adds. She puffs on her long, thin Gauloises, covering the filtered tips with her mandarin-red lipstick.
“Yellow like my boyfriend,” Rezia says, “the man of a thousand lies.”
The teacher shows us a picture of a painting full of sunflowers and says, “Look how there are no dead spots in this painting.”
Life is full of dead spots.
I used to wear only new black dresses so I could blend in at the funerals where I sang. Now I wear used clothes, “Kennedys,” in rainbow colors, and a red headband around my head, to brighten my dead spots.
WEEK 4
It was Rezia’s idea that she, Mariselle, and I go to her restaurant after class. We didn’t always understand what was going on in the classroom and, being the only Haitians, we thought we might be able to explain certain lessons to one another, like the grammatical rules for present perfect, which at first I thought meant perfect presents or matchless gifts.
Flowered plastic sheaths were draped over the tables in the dining room, but Rezia would uncover one table so we could drink on the new-looking wooden surface. The walls around us were covered with bright little paintings, portraits of young boys playing with tops and marbles and flying kites, old men casting nets in the ocean, women walking barefoot to the market with large baskets on their heads. There was a dusty fan overhead that Rezia said was only turned on when the cook burned the food and she needed to air out the place. We put on the fan and sat with our knees touching because the table was so small. Only Mariselle would pull her chair away, putting a few inches between us and herself.
I was the one who started it one night over a bottle of urine-colored rum from Rezia’s pantry. Mariselle would have only red wine, small bottles of Pinot Noir, which she brought herself.
“I used to play telephone with my mother… I forgot all colors except blue when I went fishing with my father… I was asked to sing at the national palace…”
