pressed it against my chest even as my uncle paid the seller. Unlike my first copy, which was brand-new and smelled of newly printed ink, this one smelled musty and ancient. My uncle didn’t have a chance to look at it long enough to see that he had bought it for me before, as a birthday gift when I was four years old. In my family, we did not have birthday parties and a gift on one’s birthday was not a given. Actually that first book was the only birthday gift I’d ever received from my uncle, who, perhaps knowing that that would be the last birthday I’d be spending with my mother for some time, had unceremoniously given it to her to pass on to me. The book had disappeared with my things when they’d been moved from our place to Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s. But, fearing that he would think me careless, I’d never said a thing. Now as we walked the short distance home, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed and have another visit with my old friend Madeleine, who, like me, now lived in an old house with other children. And though there were not twelve of us, there could have been, breaking our bread and brushing our teeth and going to bed smiling at the good and frowning at the bad and sometimes being very sad.
After his operation, so that things could run smoothly, my uncle hired a principal for the school and two associate pastors to manage his church. Still, there were times when it was painfully clear how much he missed the full participation his voice allowed him. This would be most obvious to me when he would skip an evening service and sit motionless in the darkest corner of the front gallery and while staring blankly ahead listen to Granme Melina telling her folktales.
Tante Denise’s mother, Granme Melina, was probably a centenarian when she came to live with us in 1979. Like many rural Haitians of her generation, she didn’t have a birth certificate and could only vaguely recall, as she’d been told by her parents, that she was born when a man named Canal Boisrond was president of Haiti. Boisrond’s three-year rule, from July 1876 to July 1879, put Granme Melina’s age at somewhere between ninety-seven and one hundred years.
Illness had brought Granme Melina from the mountains of Leogane, where she’d been living since her daughter had moved to Port-au-Prince with Uncle Joseph. Ravaged by arthritis, both her pale, liver-spotted hands were curled into clawlike grips, making it impossible for her to do anything for herself. She spent most of her days sitting on the front gallery watching people go by. But as soon as the sun went down, she would be at the center of things as she livened up and told stories. The neighborhood children rushed through their dinner and hastened to learn the next day’s lessons so they could sit on the steps beneath Granme Melina’s rocking chair and listen to her tales.
One of the stories she told most often was the Rapunzel-like tale of a beautiful young girl whose mother, fearful that she might be abducted by passersby, locked her inside a small but pretty little house by the side of the road while the mother worked in the fields until dusk. Every evening after a hard day’s work, the mother would stand outside the little house and sing a simple song, which would signal to the daughter to open the door and let her mother come inside. After observing this for many weeks, a huge, deadly serpent waited until the mother was at work in the fields and then, hoping to trick the girl into coming out, slithered to her doorstep and tried to imitate her mother’s song. But the serpent hissed too loudly, so the daughter could clearly tell that it was not her mother. She did not open the door, and the serpent went away and waited for another day. When the girl’s mother came home later that day from the fields, the mother sang the song and the girl joyfully opened the door to the little house, letting her mother in.
Granme Melina’s voice would grow shrill with excitement from the dangers that might lie ahead for this young girl, who was, after all, our representative in the story, the one from whose choices we were meant to extract our lesson.
The next day, after the mother left for her work in the fields, the serpent returned to the girl’s doorstep and once again tried to sing the mother’s song. This time the serpent hissed too softly, so the daughter knew not to open the door. So the serpent went away, to wait for another day.
Granme Melina’s stories didn’t always have happy endings. One day, it occurred to the serpent that he could simply kill the mother and force the girl to come outside. And so he killed her, leaving the girl all alone in the world. Still the girl never left her little house, preferring instead to die fresh and pure alone inside rather than risk facing the snake outside.
Those nights, sitting at Granme Melina’s feet with the other children and listening to her often frightening stories, I would close my eyes and imagine it was my mother, who never cared for such tales, telling me one of them. One night, after Granme Melina had received a group of children on the porch, she complained of achy joints and asked Tante Denise to massage her body with camphor and castor oil before bed. Propping her up against a mound of pillows, Tante Denise, who’d recently developed diabetes and was starting to look a bit sluggish and a lot less youthful herself, asked her niece Liline to slip Granme Melina’s nightgown over her head. Liline’s father, Tante Denise’s youngest brother, Linoir, had left Leogane the year before to work as a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic. Liline’s mother had six other children to look after and very little money with which to do it, so Linoir asked Tante Denise to look after Liline until he came back. Like Marie Micheline, Bob, Nick and me, Liline was yet another child that Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise had not been able to turn away.
Liline and I shared a metal bunk bed across the room from Granme Melina. Thankfully Granme Melina’s fragrant poultices and rubdowns would overpower the stench of urine rising from Liline’s bottom bunk. At ten, Liline was still wetting her bed, always explaining when she was scolded by Tante Denise that she had dreamed herself peeing in a latrine when she’d soaked her mattress. I don’t know how it was decided that Liline and I should share a room with Granme Melina, but we liked having her all to ourselves those nights when she’d send everyone home but still had more stories in her before she fell asleep.
That evening, while Tante Denise dabbed Granme Melina’s wrinkled forehead with camphor and wrapped a scarf around her plaited cotton-white hair, Granme Melina told us the story of the singing mother, the shut-in daughter and the snake, a story I thought was meant only to scare the neighborhood children. But I see now that the story was more about Granme Melina than anyone. She was the daughter, locked inside a cocoon of sickness and old age while death pleaded to be let in somehow. That night, Granme Melina didn’t finish the story, slipping into an abruptly sound sleep. Edging closer to the kerosene lamp that served as Granme Melina’s nightlight, I leafed through my
The next morning, a Saturday, my brother Bob came to wake me to go out and play with him. Bob was then nine and small for his age. A skinny, accident-prone little kid, he once had to be taken to the neighborhood clinic two times in one day, one for a tetanus shot after he stepped on a rusty nail walking barefoot outside and the other for sticking a wad of cotton too far up his nose. Bob was, as always, with Maxo’s son, Nick, who was ten, like Liline and me. Nick’s parents had separated soon after Nick was born, his mother leaving for Canada when his father moved to New York.
Nick was carrying a small tray with a piece of bread and a thermos full of coffee. Walking to his great-grandmother’s bed, he lowered the tray and placed it on a flat surface at her feet.
“She’s still sleeping?” Nick looked down at her face. It was paler than usual, wizened and pitted. Her lips were puckered and her jaws fastened tightly as though wired together. The sheet was raised over her chest in the same place Tante Denise had carefully tucked it the night before.
I checked beneath her cot. Her chamber pot was empty. She’d been unusually quiet throughout the night, I told the boys, never waking up to pee.
“I thought she asked for coffee,” Nick said. “Or did Manman [as he now called his grandmother] just send it?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that she might be dead. I had seen lots of dead bodies, not in their beds at home but at viewings and funerals at my uncle’s church.
Before my uncle’s operation, a big part of his job was to eulogize the dead. And even after his operation, he faithfully attended all church funerals, and believing that children shouldn’t be shielded from either the idea or the reality of death, he often brought Nick, Bob and me with him. So the sight of a corpse was not new to us. But the task of identifying one, recognizing the transition from the living to the dead, was.
“Let’s hold a mirror to her nose,” Bob suggested.
Had he heard about someone doing this? Had he seen it in one of the comic books he and Nick were always reading?
He ran out of the room and came back with one of Tante Denise’s
