My mother gives this child the soda that she bought from the vendor on the street corner. The child's face lights up as she puts in a straw in the can for him. This seems to be a conspiracy just between the two of them.
My mother and the child sit and watch the other children play in the sandbox. The child pulls out a comic book from a knapsack with Big Bird on the back. My mother peers into his comic book. My mother, who taught herself to read as a little girl in Haiti from the books that her brothers brought home from school.
My mother, who has now lost six of her seven sisters in Ville Rose and has never had the strength to return for their funerals.
Many graves to kiss when I go back. Many graves to kiss.
She throws away the empty soda can when the child is done with it. I wait and watch from a corner until the woman in the leotard and biker's shorts returns, sweaty and breathless, an hour later. My mother gives the woman back her child and strolls farther into the park.
I turn around and start to walk out of the park before my mother can see me. My lunch hour is long since gone. I have to hurry back to work. I walk through a cluster of joggers, then race to a
I quickly jump into a cab heading back to the office. Would Ma have said hello had she been the one to see me first?
As the cab races away from the park, it occurs to me that perhaps one day I would chase an old woman down a street by mistake and that old woman would be somebody else's mother, who I would have mistaken for mine.
Day women come out when nobody expects them.
Tonight on the subway, I will get up and give my seat to a pregnant woman or a lady about Ma's age.
My mother, who stuffs thimbles in her mouth and then blows up her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie while sewing yet another Raggedy Ann doll that she names Suzette after me.
I will have all these little Suzettes in case you never have any babies, which looks more and more like it is going to happen.
My mother who had me when she was thirty-three-
That's a blessing, believe you me, even if American doc-tors say by that time you can make retarded babies.
My mother, who sews lace collars on my company soft-ball T-shirts when she does my laundry.
Why, you can't you look like a lady playing softball?
My mother, who never went to any of my Parent-Teacher Association meetings when I was in school.
You're so good anyway. What are they going to tell me? I don't want to make you ashamed of this day woman. Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.
caroline's wedding
It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate. As I stood on the courthouse steps, I wanted to run back to my mother's house waving the paper like the head of an enemy rightfully conquered in battle.
I stopped at the McDonald's in Fulton Mall to call ahead and share the news.
There was a soap opera playing in the background when she picked up the phone.
'I am a citizen, Ma,' I said.
I heard her clapping with both her hands, the way she had applauded our good deeds when Caroline and I were little girls.
'The paper they gave me, it looks nice,' I said. 'It's wide like a diploma and has a gold seal with an official- looking signature at the bottom. Maybe I will frame it.'
'The passport, weren't you going to bring it to the. post office to get a passport right away?' she asked in Creole.
'But I want you to see it, Ma.'
'Go ahead and get the passport. I can see it when you get it back,' she said. 'A passport is truly what's American. May it serve you well.'
At the post office on Flatbush Avenue, I had to temporarily trade in my naturalization certificate for a pass-port application. Without the certificate, I suddenly felt like unclaimed property. When my mother was three months pregnant with my younger sister, Caroline, she was arrested in a sweatshop raid and spent three days in an immigration jail. In my family, we have always been very anxious about our papers.
I raced down the block from where the number eight bus dropped me off, around the corner from our house. The fall was slowly settling into the trees on our block, some of them had already turned slightly brown.
I could barely contain my excitement as I walked up the steps to the house, sprinting across the living room to the kitchen.
Ma was leaning over the stove, the pots clanking as she hummed a song to herself.
'My passport should come in a month or so,' I said, unfolding a photocopy of the application for her to see.
She looked at it as though it contained boundless possibilities.
'We can celebrate with some strong bone soup,' she said. 'I am making some right now.'
In the pot on the stove were scraps of cow bones stewing in hot bubbling broth.
Ma believed that her bone soup could cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped that it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiance. Since Caroline had announced that she was engaged, we'd had bone soup with our supper every single night.
'Have you had some soup?' I asked, teasing Caroline when she came out of the bedroom.
'This soup is really getting on my nerves,' Caroline whispered in my ear as she walked by the stove to get some water from the kitchen faucet.
Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling as I squeezed it hello. After my mother was arrested in the sweatshop immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused Caroline's condition. Caroline was lucky to have come out missing only one forearm. She might not have been born at all.
'Soup is ready,' Ma announced.
'If she keeps making this soup,' Caroline whispered, 'I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there's no magic in it.'
It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us, knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.
'Ma, if we keep on with this soup,' Caroline said, 'we'll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these
