boat from splitting in two. Swiss isn't crying. They keep slapping her behind, but she is not crying.
of course the old president didn't come, they arrested a lot of people at the airport, shot a whole bunch of them down, i heard it on the radio, while we were eating tonight, i told papa that i love you. i don't know if it will make a difference, i just want him to know that i have loved somebody in my life, in case something happens to one of us, i think he should know this about me, that i have loved someone besides only my mother and father in my life, i know you would understand, you are the one for large noble gestures, i just wanted him to know that i was capable of loving somebody, he looked me straight in the eye and said nothing to me. i love you until my hair shivers at the thought of anything happening to you. papa just turned his face away like he was rejecting my very birth, i am writing you from under the banyan tree in the yard in our new house, there are only two rooms and a tin roof that makes music when it rains, especially when there is hail, which falls like angry tears from heaven, there is a stream down the hill from the house, a stream that is too shallow for me to drown myself, manman and i spend a lot of time talking under the banyan tree, she told me today that sometimes you have to choose between your father and the man you love, her whole family did not want her to marry papa because he was a gardener from ville rose and her family was from the city and some of them had even gone to university, she whispered everything under the banyan tree in the yard so as not to hurt his feelings, i saw him looking at us hard from the house, i heard him clearing his throat like he heard us anyway, like we hurt him very deeply somehow just by being together.
Celianne is lying with her head against the side of the boat. The baby still will not cry. They both look very peaceful in all this chaos. Celianne is holding her baby tight against her chest. She just cannot seem to let herself throw it in the ocean. I asked her about the baby's father. She keeps repeating the story now with her eyes closed, her lips barely moving.
She was home one night with her mother and brother Lionel when some ten or twelve soldiers burst into the house. The soldiers held a gun to Lionel's head and ordered him to lie down and become intimate with his mother. Lionel refused. Their mother told him to go ahead and obey the soldiers because she was afraid that they would kill Lionel on the spot if he put up more of a fight. Lionel did as his mother told him, crying as the soldiers laughed at him, pressing the gun barrels farther and farther into his neck.
Afterwards, the soldiers tied up Lionel and their mother, then they each took turns raping Celianne. When they were done, they arrested Lionel, accusing him of moral crimes. After that night, Celianne never heard from Lionel again.
The same night, Celianne cut her face with a razor so that no one would know who she was. Then as facial scars were healing, she started throwing up and getting rashes. Next thing she knew, she was getting big. She found out about the boat and got on. She is fifteen.
manman told me the whole story today under the banyan tree, the bastards were coming to get me. they were going to arrest me. they were going to peg me as a member of the youth federation and then take me away, papa heard about it. he went to the post and paid them money, all the money he had. our house in port-au- prince and all the land his father had left him, he gave it all away to save my life, this is why he was so mad. tonight manman told me this under the banyan tree, i have no words to thank him for this, i don't know how. you must love him for this, manman says, you must, it is something you can never forget, the sacrifice he has made, i cannot bring myself to say thank you. now he is more than my father, he is a man who gave everything he had to save my life, on the radio tonight, they read the list of names of people who passed the university exams, you passed.
We got some relief from the seawater coming in. The captain used the last of his tar, and most of the water is staying out for a while. Many people have volunteered to throw Celianne's baby overboard for her. She will not let them. They are waiting for her to go to sleep so they can do it, but she will not sleep. I never knew before that dead children looked purple. The lips are the most purple because the baby is so dark. Purple like the sea after the sun has set.
Celianne is slowly drifting off to sleep. She is very tired from the labor. I do not want to touch the child. If anybody is going to throw it in the ocean, I think it should be her. I keep thinking, they have thrown every piece of flesh that followed the child out of her body into the water. They are going to throw the dead baby in the water. Won't these things attract sharks?
Celianne's fingernails are buried deep in the child's naked back. The old man with the pipe just asked, 'Kompe, what are you writing?' I told him, 'My will.'
i am getting used to ville rose, there are butterflies here, tons of butterflies, so far none has landed on my hand, which means they have no news for me. i cannot always bathe in the stream near the house because the water is freezing cold, the only time it feels just right is at noon, and then there are a dozen eyes who might see me bathing, i solved that by getting a bucket of water in the morning and leaving it in the sun and then bathing myself once it is night under the banyan tree, the banyan now is my most trusted friend, they say banyans can last hundreds of years, even the branches that lean down from them become like trees themselves, a banyan could become a forest, manman says, if it were given a chance, from the spot where i stand under the banyan, i see the mountains, and behind those are more mountains still, so many mountains that are bare like rocks, i feel like all those mountains are pushing me farther and farther away from you.
She threw it overboard. I watched her face knot up like a thread, and then she let go. It fell in a splash, floated for a while, and then sank. And quickly after that she jumped in too. And just as the baby's head sank, so did hers. They went together like two bottles beneath a waterfall. The shock lasts only so long. There was no time to even try and save her. There was no question of it. The sea in that spot is like the sharks that live there. It has no mercy.
They say I have to throw my notebook out. The old man has to throw out his hat and his pipe. The water is rising again and they are scooping it out. I asked for a few seconds to write this last page and then promised that I would let it go. I know you will probably never see this, but it was nice imagining that I had you here to talk to.
I hope my parents are alive. I asked the old man to tell them what happened to me, if he makes it anywhere. He asked me to write his name in 'my book.' I asked him for his full name. It is Justin Moi'se Andre Nozius Joseph Frank Osnac Maximilien. He says it all with such an air that you would think him a king. The old man says, 'I know a Coast Guard ship is coming. It came to me in my dream.' He points to a spot far into the distance. I look where he is pointing. I see nothing. From here, ships must be like a mirage in the desert.
I must throw my book out now. It goes down to them, Celianne and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.
I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live.
Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwe at the bottom of the sea. Maybe this is why I dreamed of the starfish and the mermaids having the Catholic Mass under the sea. Maybe this was my invitation to go. In any case, I know that my memory of you will live even there as I too become a child of the sea.
today i said thank you. i said thank you, papa, because you saved my life, he groaned and just touched my shoulder, moving his hand quickly away like a butterfly, and then there it was, the black butterfly floating around us. i began to run and run so it wouldn't land on me, but it had already carried its news, i know what must have happened, tonight i listened to manman's transistor under the banyan tree, all i hear from the radio is more killing in port-au-prince. the pigs are refusing to let up. i don't know what's going to happen, but i cannot see staying here forever, i am writing to you from the bottom of the banyan tree, manman says that banyan trees are holy and sometimes if we call the gods from beneath them, they will hear our voices clearer, now there are always butterflies around me, black ones that i refuse to let find my hand, i throw big rocks at them, but they are always
