The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

the dirt my mother's boyfriend threw on my corpse as his nails kept on digging, digging-restless-until he reached my skeleton.

I was dead but no one realized it. People were too busy reviving the favorite Haitian pastime called political discussion. The ousting of Duvalier and the stories surrounding the event inevitably found their way into all community functions, baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals.

Maybe one day, I thought, there would be stories also told about me, the girl who was attacked by the bogeyman in her own mother's bedroom in broad daylight. There was no room for my own horrors in the midst of the political tales though. Mine was a story that could only be told through silences too horrific to disturb.

When family and friends assembled for gatherings, there was always a little girl there that I would recognize, a girl who would have her head down, her eyes lowered a certain way. I could always experience with her the pain of her bruised genitals hidden under immaculate petticoats that pressed her into her girlhood and kept her there so she would shut up. She was always so quiet, that girl, so confused, so egare, that people would joke that she was a zombie. A zombie, who in the midst of the endless political discussions on right and wrong was not allowed to disclose the bad things she swallowed.

In the mythical world, a zombie is someone who is buried alive while comatose and is then revived to serve others in whatever way they want, without questioning. A zombie is someone who has lost her soul, her will, her good angel, someone who can only regain her true self once she's been given a taste of salt. But outside this mythical world, zombies howled for their salt. Whether it was the political prisoners, the protagonists of all the political fables recounted, or the little girls whose secrets I knew too well, all these zombies were howling for their life back. Some of the political prisoners were finally beginning to be heard because of the pressure from a tenacious mass. The little girls I knew, however, were dumped deeper in their coffins by adults who were supposed to have been safeguarding them.

For the girl down the street, whose school principal demanded that she be taken away from her home for a reason none of us wanted to talk about, there was no salt. The principal said she was raped by her stepfather. But there was no mythical element to that story, nothing like the black crow spirit who had come to our house.

At least with Duvalier, we could pinpoint his kind of evil, for he smirked at the howling of the corpses under his feet. But this raped girl? Why did she need to be conquered? Why was she made a zombie? And the other girl I knew, who actually had a child by her uncle, why her? Why even talk about them, these zombie girls? Their tales were not mythical enough. Their zombification was harder to explain.

And me, without even a clear narrative, without a scar as obvious as those of the other girls, or of the political victims who could point to their burnt flesh or bullet wounds, what to make of my story? A man who had vowed to my mother and our family that he would protect us from the abandonment of my natural father, chose instead to impose his need for power on me. So, I became possessed by my fright and my shame. I had become the zombie at the dinner table, at the baptisms, the wedding receptions, the funerals. I had become the girl who sat quietly with her head lowered, her eyes on the ground, and her silence intact.

I was not alone though. We had a collective, we zombies. We began to know each other. At parties, in school, in our nightmares, we dreamt of saving each other. In some cases, this zombie state was even inherited. We were children of zombie women, a matriarchal line of silence. Whether it was 1957 or 1987, our situation had not changed. Our zombie dance began with a first outing, our first lace dress for church, our first communion, our first dance. It started with the immaculate way the white talcum powder around a girl's neck suppressed the heat and ended with a dress torn and soiled with a patch of blood. It ended with our mothers chanting softly, hoping a kinder, less lustful spirit would save us both. It ended with our mothers' careful sewing of undergarments and secretly scrubbing blood off panties long before we ever reached puberty. It ended with our mothers washing, bleaching, even boiling our panties in order to make their husbands, their cousins, their lovers, their town judges, their military officers, seem clean.

Did the zombie mothers fight? Indeed they did. They wrapped their hands around their bodies, and tightened their stomachs with layers of cloth in order to press the pain inside. They stuck wire hangers inside their young daughters and scraped the evil out. They fought with their heads lowered, their eyes fixed on the ground, using as weapons plaited hair, bright satin ribbons, dresses layered in taffeta and lace.

Our nightmares became our zombie calls. We told ourselves tales of little girls who were taken by evil spirits and never seen again until they returned as skeletons, walking, tiptoeing, dancing with their families' lies. 'Aba Duvalier!' they shouted even as the cries of so many little girls went unheard at night.

Now I know why I dreamt of covering the dead crow with my mother's dress after it died. Now I know why even my mother's large beautiful skirt could not contain the blood. Now I know why Gendarme Janeau could smirk and force me to hide. He knew then what I didn't know. There was no place to hide.

So now in my dreams, the dead crow killed by Gendarme Janeau resurrects itself over and over again as all spirits do. Roaming endlessly, it will not die, but will try to settle near yet another black oak, seeking peace.

MIGRATION

ANOTHER ODE TO SALT by Danielle Legros Georges

We navigate snow not ours

but grown used to, one cold foot

over another, adopt accoutrements:

a red scarf, wind-wrapped and tight,

boots, their soles teethed like sharks,

shackling our ebon ankles, the weight

of wool coats borrowed

from our ancestors, the Gauls.*

Masters at this now,

we circumvent ice

as we do time, reach home.

The salt you bend to cast

parts the snow around us.

I bend and think

of a primary sea,

harbors of danger and history,

passing through the middle

in boats a-sail in furious storms,

cargo heavy,

of mysteres, renamed,

submerged and sure,

riding dark waves,

floating long waves

to the other side of the water,

and the other side

and the next.

*Our ancestors, the Gauls (nos ancitres, les Gaulois)-a phrase from a French children's history text used widely, until recently, in Francophone primary schools.