Krik? Krak!

of my candle. The ripple in the stream where I wash my face. Yes. I will eat my tongue if ever I whisper that name, the name of that place across the river that took my mother from me.'

I knew then that she had been with us, for she knew all the answers to the questions I asked.

'I think you do know who I am,' she said, staring deeply into the pupils of my eyes. 'I know who you are. You are Josephine. And your mother knew how to make the Madonna cry.'

I let Jacqueline into the house. I offered her a seat in the rocking chair, gave her a piece of hard bread and a cup of cold coffee.

'Sister, I do not want to be the one to tell you,' she said, 'but your mother is dead. If she is not dead now, then she will be when we get to Port-au-Prince. Her blood calls to me from the ground. Will you go with me to see her? Let us go to see her.'

We took a mule for most of the trip. Jacqueline was not strong enough to make the whole journey on foot. I brought the Madonna with me, and Jacqueline took a small bundle with some black rags in it.

When we got to the city, we went directly to the prison gates. Jacqueline whispered Manman s name to a guard and waited for a response.

'She will be ready for burning this afternoon,' the guard said.

My blood froze inside me. I lowered my head as the news sank in.

'Surely, it is not that much a surprise,' Jacqueline said, stroking my shoulder. She had become rejuvenated, as though strengthened by the correctness of her prediction.

'We only want to visit her cell,' Jacqueline said to the guard. 'We hope to take her personal things away.'

The guard seemed too tired to argue, or perhaps he saw in Jacqueline's face traces of some long-dead female relative whom he had not done enough to please while she was still alive.

He took us to the cell where my mother had spent the last year. Jacqueline entered first, and then I fol-lowed. The room felt damp, the clay breaking into small muddy chunks under our feet.

I inhaled deeply to keep my lungs from aching. Jacqueline said nothing as she carefully walked around the women who sat like statues in different corners of the cell. There were six of them. They kept their arms close to their bodies, like angels hiding their wings. In the middle of the cell was an arrangement of sand and pebbles in the shape of a cross for my mother. Each woman was either wearing or holding something that had belonged to her.

One of them clutched a pillow as she stared at the Madonna. The woman was wearing my mother's dress, the large white dress that had become like a tent on Manman.

I walked over to her and asked, 'What happened?'

'Beaten down in the middle of the yard,' she whispered.

'Like a dog,' said another woman.

'Her skin, it was too loose,' said the woman wearing my mother's dress. 'They said prison could not cure her.'

The woman reached inside my mother's dress pock-et and pulled out a handful of chewed pork and handed it to me. I motioned her hand away.

'No no, I would rather not.'

She then gave me the pillow, my mother's pillow. It was open, half filled with my mother's hair. Each time they shaved her head, my mother had kept the hair for her pillow. I hugged the pillow against my chest, feeling some of the hair rising in clouds of dark dust into my nostrils.

Jacqueline took a long piece of black cloth out of her bundle and wrapped it around her belly.

'Sister,' she said, 'life is never lost, another one always comes up to replace the last. Will you come watch when they burn the body?'

'What would be the use?' I said.

'They will make these women watch, and we can keep them company.'

When Jacqueline took my hand, her fingers felt balmy and warm against the lifelines in my palm. For a brief second, I saw nothing but black. And then I saw the crystal glow of the river as we had seen it every year when my mother dipped my hand in it.

'I would go,' I said, 'if I knew the truth, whether a woman can fly.'

'Why did you not ever ask your mother,' Jacqueline said, 'if she knew how to fly?'

Then the story came back to me as my mother had often told it. On that day so long ago, in the year nine-teen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

In the prison yard, I held the Madonna tightly against my chest, so close that I could smell my mother's scent on the statue. When Jacqueline and I stepped out into the yard to wait for the burning, I raised my head toward the sun thinking, One day I may just see my mother there.

'Let her flight be joyful,' I said to Jacqueline. 'And mine and yours too.'

a wall of fire rising

'Listen to what happened today,' Guy said as he barged through the rattling door of his tiny shack.

His wife, Lili, was squatting in the middle of their one-room home, spreading cornmeal mush on banana leaves for their supper.

'Listen to what happened to me today!' Guy's seven-year-old son-Little Guy-dashed from a corner and grabbed his father's hand. The boy dropped his composition notebook as he leaped to his father, nearly step-ping into the corn mush and herring that his mother had set out in a trio of half gourds on the clay floor.

'Our boy is in a play' Lili quickly robbed Little Guy of the honor of telling his father the news.

'A play?' Guy affectionately stroked the boy's hair.

The boy had such tiny corkscrew curls that no amount of brushing could ever make them all look like a single entity. The other boys at the Lycee Jean-Jacques called him 'pepper head' because each separate kinky strand was coiled into a tight tiny ball that looked like small peppercorns.

'When is this play?' Guy asked both the boy and his wife. 'Are we going to have to buy new clothes for this?'

Lili got up from the floor and inclined her face towards her husband's in order to receive her nightly peck on the cheek.

'What role do you have in the play?' Guy asked, slowly rubbing the tip of his nails across the boy's scalp. His fingers made a soft grating noise with each invisible circle drawn around the perimeters of the boy's head. Guy's fingers finally landed inside the boy's ears, forcing the boy to giggle until he almost gave himself the hiccups.

'Tell me, what is your part in the play?' Guy asked again, pulling his fingers away from his son's ear.

'I am Boukman,' the boy huffed out, as though there was some laughter caught in his throat.

'Show Papy your lines,' Lili told the boy as she arranged the three open gourds on a piece of plywood raised like a table on two bricks, in the middle of the room. 'My love, Boukman is the hero of the play'

The boy went back to the corner where he had been studying and pulled out a thick book carefully covered in brown paper.

'You're going to spend a lifetime learning those.' Guy took the book from the boy's hand and flipped through the pages quickly. He had to strain his eyes to see the words by the light of an old kerosene lamp, which that night- like all others-flickered as though it was burning its very last wick.

'All these words seem so long and heavy,' Guy said. 'You think you can do this, son?'

'He has one very good speech,' Lili said. 'Page forty, remember, son?'

The boy took back the book from his father. His face was crimped in an of-course-I-remember look as he searched for page forty.

'Boukman,' Guy struggled with the letters of the slave revolutionary's name as he looked over his son's shoulders. 'I see some very hard words here, son.'

'He already knows his speech,' Lili told her husband.