paraded the American Negro through the streets of town like a king. Gideon even got one of his friends to give them a free taxi ride to the outskirts of town, and then they had to walk and walk and walk up into the hills to Place de Vent before they reached the powder pink house where he lived with Therese and, sometimes, Alma Estee.
Therese was in ecstasy and kept moving her head about the better to see him out of her broken eyes. As soon as they had got ashore she let it be known to every island Black she saw that they had a guest, a visitor from the States, and that he was going to spend the night. Her pride and her message ran all over the streets and up the hillside, and at various times during the evening, heads poked in her doorway, and neighbors dropped by on some pretense or other. Therese sent Alma Estee flying back down the hill to the market for a packet of brown sugar, and she went into the bag that hung by her side under her dress for money for goat meat and two onions. Then she brewed black thick coffee while she listened to the men talk and waited her turn. Gideon told her stories on Isle des Chevaliers, but here at home he did not socialize with her—he kept to himself or spent his free time with old cronies. Only at work on the island of the rich Americans did he entertain her. Now she was to be privy to the talk between them, and in her house at that. She would also have a chance to ask the American Black herself whether it was really so that American women killed their babies with their fingernails. She waited until Gideon had cut his hair with clippers he’d borrowed from the man who sold rum. Waited until great clouds of glittering graphite hair fell to the floor and on the bedspread they had wrapped around the man’s neck and the front of his whole body. Waited until Gideon was through with his boasts about when he was in the States, boasts about the nurse he had married, the hospital he had worked in, the hatefulness of that nurse and all American women. Waited until Gideon had lied about all the money he made there and why he returned home. Waited until the stranger who ate chocolate and drank bottled water was properly shorn and his neck dusted with baking soda, and Alma Estee was back and the meat was frying on the two-burner stove. Waited till they ate it and drank coffee loaded with sugar. Waited till they opened the bottle of rum and the chocolate eater had coughed like a juvenile with his first taste of it. Therese served the two men but did not eat with them. Instead she stood at the portable stove burning the hair she had swept up from the floor, burning it carefully and methodically with many glances at the chocolate eater to show him she meant him no evil. When they had eaten and Therese had grown accustomed to the rhythm of their guest’s English, she joined them at the table. Alma Estee sat on the cot by the window.
Son smoked Gideon’s cigarettes and poured the rest of the rum into his coffee. He stretched his legs and permitted himself a hearthside feeling, comfortable and free of postures and phony accents. The tough goat meat, the smoked fish, the pepper-hot gravy over the rice settled in him. It had been served all on one plate and he knew what the delicacies had cost them: the sweet, thick cookies, the canned milk and especially the rum. The nakedness of his face and head made him vulnerable, but his hosts gave him adoration to cover it. Alma Estee had taken off her short print dress and returned in her best clothes—a school uniform—but Son knew right away that she had not had school tuition for a long time now. The uniform was soiled and frayed. He could feel her waves of desire washing over him and for the first time in years he felt like a well-heeled man. Therese urged him on into a feast of plantain and fried avocado, then leaned toward him in the lamplight, her broken eyes cheerful, and asked him, “Is it true? American women reach into their wombs and kill their babies with their fingernails?”
“Close down your mouth,” Gideon said to her, and then to Son, “She’s gone stupid as well as blind.” He explained to Son that he used to tell her what working in an American hospital was like. About free abortions and D & C’s. The scraping of the womb. But that Therese had her own views of understanding that had nothing to do with the world’s views. That however he tried to explain a blood bank to her, or an eye bank, she always twisted it. The word “bank,” he thought, confused her. And it was true. Therese said America was where doctors took the stomachs, eyes, umbilical cords, the backs of the neck where the hair grew, blood, sperm, hearts and fingers of the poor and froze them in plastic packages to be sold later to the rich. Where children as well as grown people slept with dogs in their beds. Where women took their children behind trees in the park and sold them to strangers. Where everybody on the television set was naked and that even the priests were women. Where for a bar of gold a doctor could put you into a machine and, in a matter of minutes, would change you from a man to a woman or a woman to a man. Where it was not uncommon or strange to see people with both penises and breasts.
“Both,” she said, “a man’s parts and a woman’s on the same person, yes?”
“Yes,” said Son.
“And they grow food in pots to decorate their houses? Avocado and banana and potato and limes?”
Son was laughing. “Right,” he said. “Right.”
“Don’t encourage her, man,” said Gideon. “She’s a mean one and one of the blind race. You can’t tell them nothing. They love lies.”
Therese said she was not of that race. That the blind race lost their sight around forty and she was into her fifties and her vision had not gone dark until a few years ago.
Gideon started to tease her about being “into her fifties.” Sixties, more like, he said, and she had faked sight so long she didn’t remember herself when she started to go blind.
Son asked who were the blind race so Gideon told him a story about a race of blind people descended from some slaves who went blind the minute they saw Dominique. A fishermen’s tale, he said. The island where the rich Americans lived is named for them, he said. Their ship foundered and sank with Frenchmen, horses and slaves aboard. The blinded slaves could not see how or where to swim so they were at the mercy of the current and the tide. They floated and trod water and ended up on that island along with the horses that had swum ashore. Some of them were only partially blinded and were rescued later by the French, and returned to Queen of France and indenture. The others, totally blind, hid. The ones who came back had children who, as they got on into middle age, went blind too. What they saw, they saw with the eye of the mind, and that, of course, was not to be trusted. Therese, he said, was one such. He himself was not, since his mother and Therese had different fathers.
Son felt dizzy. The cheap rum and the story together made his head light.
“What happened to the ones who hid on the island? Were they ever caught?”
“No, man, still there,” said Gideon. “They ride those horses all over the hills. They learned to ride through the rain forest avoiding all sorts of trees and things. They race each other, and for sport they sleep with the swamp women in Sein de Veilles. Just before a storm you can hear them screwing way over here. Sounds like thunder,” he said, and burst into derisive laughter.
Son laughed too, then asked, “Seriously, did anybody ever see one of them?”
“No, and they can’t stand for sighted people to look at them without their permission. No telling what they’ll do if they know you saw them.”
“We thought you was one,” said Therese.
“She thought,” said Gideon. “Not me. Personally I think the blindness comes from second-degree syphilis.”
Therese ignored this remark. “I was the one made him leave the window that way. So you could get the food,” said Therese.
