Create Dangerously

go back in our family, vague tales that we’ve gathered from older family members. Like Tante Ilyana, both my great-grandparents lived in Beausejour their entire lives, never venturing farther than Dabonne, the first big market town off the mountain. When they married, together they owned twenty or so acres of land and thirty pigs. Of the twelve children to whom my great-grandmother gave birth, only four made it to adulthood. My great-grandparents spent their whole lives without electricity, telephones, medical doctors, or morgues. When their children died at varying ages in childhood, they buried them the same day or the next, for lack of said morgue.

As we cross an arch of rock that forms a slanted bridge on the side of the mountain, Nick and I lament the fact that there is not more to say of our progenitors’ lives beyond these indefinite segments, which could be true of almost anyone else who had lived here in these mountains.

As children, Nick and I had both come here, along with my brother Bob, to spend a week with Tante Ilyana, who is the last close family member still living in Beausejour. Everyone else, including my grandparents, had migrated, some to the Haitian capital and others to other parts of the world. I don’t remember the childhood climb up the mountain being so grueling. I remember skipping over what seemed like molehills then, compared to this endless series of cliffs and crags. I remember collecting dandelions as we passed the gardens of people who had known our fathers and grandfathers when they were our age, people who called us by the names of our aunts and uncles, people of whom there is no longer any trace. I remember plucking handfuls of vetiver and citronella, crushing them in my hand to inhale their fragrance. I don’t remember the domes of bare rock. I don’t remember my Aunt Ilyana’s house looking so isolated from up high. I don’t remember the pain in my calves, the agony of every step.

When I say this to Nick, he replies, “Perhaps it’s because you were lighter, because you were a little girl.”

We meet up with Uncle Joseph on the descent toward Tante Ilyana’s house as he stops for a rest of his own. He offers the borrowed mule to Nick, who barely escapes a kick in the groin as he tries to mount the animal.

“This is why I have never been on one of those,” I say.

“You’ve just never been tired enough,” replies Uncle Joseph, who, at seventy-six years old, has been coming to Beausejour from the capital a couple of times a year to visit Tante Ilyana and see after a small school that he has started here.

Uncle Joseph points out the one-room schoolhouse down below. It looks tiny and lopsided, no different from the small cemetery behind it, the cluster of marble-looking tombs where my great-grandparents are buried.

We reach Tante Ilyana’s house by midafternoon. It is a modest two-room home made of limestone walls and a tin roof. The house stands between a stream and a banana grove and has not changed very much since Nick, Bob, and I came here as children, except that the tin roof has been replaced a couple of times due to rust and hurricanes. Tante Ilyana lives alone now, but her ex-husband has his own place nearby and he visits often, as does her adult son, my cousin Renel, who is a dentist in Port-au-Prince. Unlike my father, his brothers and sisters, and Renel, who followed one another to the city, Tante Ilyana remained behind with her daughter, Jeanne, until, the year before our visit, Jeanne died at the age of thirty-eight, of some unnamed deadly infectious disease passed on to her by a philandering former husband. After Jeanne’s death, Tante Ilyana had entombed her oldest child and only daughter in a beautiful turquoise three-tiered mausoleum next to the house. In Jeanne’s mausoleum a place is reserved for Tante Ilyana, so mother and daughter can be together again in death as they had always been in life.

Tante Ilyana is not home when we arrive. Her grandsons, Jeanne’s two teenage boys, who are visiting from the capital for the summer, give us some water and a large sisal mat to collapse on as we wait for her to return. We immediately crash on the front porch, in a cool spot close to the wooden railing at the other end of which the boys are pouring dried corn kernels into a grinder, turning them into bright yellow cornmeal. The boys are surrounded by twelve of Tante Ilyana’s prized hens and roosters, which squawk loudly as handfuls of corn occasionally rain down on their heads.

Tante Ilyana arrives an hour or so later. She looks much younger than her seventy-five years. Her skin is an even mahogany hue and her body looks taut and lean, almost muscular. She is wearing a dark green dress and a black head wrap. She kisses Uncle Joseph and Cousin Nick hello, but, having not seen me in more than twenty-two years, does not recognize me. She lists the names of a few of my girl cousins, trying to guess who I am. Finally Uncle Joseph says, “It’s Mira’s daughter, Edwidge.”

“Ah, Edwidge,” Tante Ilyana takes my face in her firm, large hands. “Mira’s daughter.”

Tante Ilyana and Uncle Joseph exchange family news while Nick and I join in the corn grinding. Occasionally Tante Ilyana shouts questions to me about my parents and three brothers in New York. Has my father lost his hair? Has my mother lost weight, gained weight since my uncle showed her the last family photographs? Were any of my brothers married?

I show her a few pictures I brought for her, of my father and his receding hairline, of my plump mother, and of my three brothers, two of whom became fathers that year. With all the family news out of the way, there is nothing left to do but eat.

It is corn harvest season in the valley surrounding Tante Ilyana’s house. So over the next three days, we eat lots of corn. We grill ears of corn over charcoal and firewood sticks in the thatched cooking shack by the stream. We boil them smothered with banana leaves in an aluminum pot that seems to have no bottom. We eat the sweet baby ones raw, right off the cob. From an earlier harvest, we have cornmeal paste, mayi moulen, for breakfast and a sweet corn flour puree, labouyi, for supper.

Things get going quickly that afternoon, as Uncle Joseph and Nick, who are staying nearby at the house of the school’s headmistress, spend their time visiting with parents and meeting teachers, and I attach myself to Tante Ilyana.

That night over a bowl of labouyi, Uncle Joseph tries to convince Tante Ilyana to move to Port-au-Prince to be closer, in her old age, to him and his family.

“You’re an old woman,” he says. “Not that I’m wishing it, but if something happens to you, you won’t be able to see a proper doctor. People die from simple illnesses here. When Jeanne died, we were barely able to arrive in time for the funeral. If you die, not that I’m wishing it, it takes so long to get here that we may not be able to see you one last time. There is no chance that your brothers in New York, Edwidge, and the others will have time to come and say good-bye. You know yourself that a corpse can last only a day or two here.”

Uncle Joseph’s monologue is interrupted by two shots of gunfire from somewhere in the distance. Tante Ilyana explains that it is the village chief, the chef seksyon, the only legal authority in the surrounding area, signaling that he is back home from a day trip, in case anyone needs to come see him.

“Do you think life is easier for an old woman in the city?” Tante Ilyana continues. “Here I can watch over the land and over Jeanne’s grave and even if you don’t see me soon after I die, we’ll see one another after.”

Unlike Uncle Joseph, Tante Ilyana is not particularly religious. Every once in a while she had a pe savann, a lay mountain priest, come over to the cemetery to say a mass over her grandparents’ graves, but only because she thought they had worked hard their whole lives and would expect it as a sign of respect. No masses were said, however, for Jeanne, who was Baptist, like my uncle.

Glancing over at Jeanne’s mausoleum gleaming in the moonlight, I ask Tante Ilyana why she hadn’t buried Jeanne in the cemetery near her grandparents, my great-grandparents, who, like her and Jeanne, had chosen to remain in Beausejour.

“That cemetery belongs to a lot of people,” she says. “This place is just mine and hers. When I am gone, people are going to take over the family land that is left. They already want to take it from me because I’m the only one in the family here, but this place I built for Jeanne and me is big and heavy, so maybe they will leave us alone.”

The people Tante Ilyana is talking about are her few neighbors, friends and foes, who, she believes, figure that because she has so many family members in the city and abroad she doesn’t need the land to live.

Changing the subject, Tante Ilyana turns to me and says, “I forgot to ask you. How is Mira’s other daughter, the one who once came here as a girl? I hear that she is a jounalis. What was her name again, Edwidge?”

I hear a hint of pride in her voice, pride that this person, who she has momentarily forgotten is myself, has spent some time with her. A jounalis, or journalist, is the most common kind of writer in Haiti. A mix of usefulness-you are offering a service to others by providing information-and notoriety makes it an