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

My claim to Haitianness was about to be tested. As the airplane touched down on Haiti's cracked soil, the hyphen that held me together started to feel more like the fulcrum of a seesaw whose plank was about to tip on one end or the other.

Haiti, from the window of American Airlines flight 1291, is white sun, blue ocean, brown mountains. Even from this high, the color of the soil is barren and unkind. Since the last time I had this view, much of Haiti's land has been deforested.

Inside, a flight attendant goes into an unusually long explanation about customs forms. She walks through the aisles, where some Haitians flag her down with raised hands. The fact that she is helping them fill out forms they can't read won't come to me until days later.

Outside the airport, the parking lot is a dusty chaos of barbed wire, begging crowds, and obliquely parked cars. The boy begging for money by our car is too young to be a hustler. His fingers hang inside my window; the nails are blunt and crusted with coal-colored dirt. As the car begins to pull away, he doesn't let go. He hangs on and runs with the car, pleading. That is when I make my choice. I stop asking myself how old he is, where his parents are, and when his last meal was. I block him out; I make him disappear. It will be the hardest choice of the entire journey, but it's so easy compared with the life this boy must live.

Beth Bergman, a white American photographer who works for the newspaper, is also here. For Beth, who has never been to Haiti and understands little of its ways, I am an interpreter, a buffer, and a bridge. But to a passerby who eyes us as we make our first forays into the street, I am a traitor. I am the one who has 'brought whites to photograph our trash and ask us how much it smells.'

To a homeless woman washing off her plate with sewage water, I am an opportunity, for money, for food, for water. Here in this isolated country, where electricity and phone lines are chancy, some of the most media-sawy people I have ever met work their spin of survival on the foreign press.

'I have no money,' she says, coming toward us. 'I built a house and they tore it down. I have to take my son to the hospital and I can't afford it. What are you going to do for me?'

Without knowing why, I start listing my Haitian credentials: my relatives who live here, my trips here as a child. But this woman is too smart and too poor to care. To her, I am still a stranger. An American stranger.

Beside her, her son, no older than five, looks up into the lens of the camera. Across his face comes the slow realization that he is no longer the same person he was a second ago. He is a commodity now. He's the face of poverty that we will capture and bring back with us to sell newspapers. So he acts accordingly: The liquid brown eyes grow wider, the small hand tugs at mother's skirt, the head tilts with innocence.

I have no right to be surprised at this. As a reporter, I want them to tell me their story; I don't want them to implicate me in it. But how can I fault them? This mother knows already what I am afraid to admit to myself: A one-year anniversary story about Haiti that enlightens Hampton Roads readers won't do anything for her or her baby.

II

It's 7:10 a.m. Sunday. Beth and I stand outside Saint Gerard Church in the cool breeze before the day's punishing heat sets in. It took hours to pick out the one nice blouse I knew I would need to bring for church. Dressing up is part of Sunday worship, no matter how rich or how poor one is. Etched in my mind are black-and- white images of my mother as a young girl in a ruffled white dress bordered with lace, her cotton socks perfectly folded over.

Today, women file in through the church doors in long, cotton dresses and checkered skirts; the men wear paisley ties and leather shoes.

Just before I take my seat inside, a woman next to me points to my sleeveless silk shirt and whispers, 'They're not going to give you communion dressed like that. You didn't cover your arms enough. You need sleeves.'

But later as we wound our way of the capital's main cemetery, where Catholic rites merge with Vodou rituals in sacred beauty, I realize that I would need far more than a pair of sleeves to belong.

III

For many Haitian immigrants and their children, Vodou is a loaded word. Nine years ago, I watched an episode of Miami Vice through what I thought were Haitian eyes. I hated it. In my mind, it invoked pretty much every stereotype of Vodou and the Haitians who practice it. By the third commercial break, Vodou serum had turned Detective Tubbs into a zombie. Dazed by the pounding chants of crazed Haitian worshippers, the rogue cop became possessed. He twitched miserably with fever. Even his partner, Crockett, couldn't snap him out of it. From the TV in the basement of my parents' house, I smoldered in anger. No one watching this would understand the complexity of this African-based religion that meant so much to Haitians, nor the symbolism of the gods that made up its hierarchy.

At the entrance to the main cemetery in Port-au-Prince, a sign in black letters reads, YOU ARE NOTHING BUT DUST. On any given day here, solemn processions of mourners draped in rosaries prop each other up as they walk beside caskets. But today, what we find is an angry woman determined to curse an enemy.

It's the first Vodou ceremony I've ever seen, and I can't make sense of it. The woman splashes clear moonshine and dark rum around a charred stone cross. On a straw chair in front of the cross, a flame burns inside a metal bowl. Her thin, tough arms tie a rope around the cross into a tight knot. Later, she will toss salt and crack eggs around the cross to ward off any bad spirits that could interfere with her mission.

'She's calling on the god Baron,' Faubert, our driver, tells me. 'Baron is a Vodou god. When she ties the rope around the cross, it's like she's tying it around a person. And from now on, when that person tries to do anything, he won't do it right. He can do nothing good anymore because Baron has that person tied up.'

Beside me, Beth is crouched down, snapping pictures. I hear the opening and closing of the shutter in slow motion, and my thoughts split off in all directions. How is what comes through my lens any different than the view from Hollywood cameras that once enraged me? I try to unravel the symbols and chants, but I keep hitting a cultural wall. I don't have the knowledge.

IV

In the warped recesses of my mind, I ask myself this question: If I were ever put on trial by a Committee for Haitian Authenticity, how would I defend myself? How would I explain what has led me and my friend to this place, scribbling and shooting furiously for an American audience?

At the end of my workday, a battery of questions awaited me at my grandmother's house in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. Was I doing well in my career? How is my older brother, her godson? Did I have a boyfriend? Would I ever bear her great-grandchildren? And why did I cut my hair so short?

'You've accomplished too much in your young life to be walking around with a head like that,' she says, inspecting my closely cropped cut. 'You've got to think about getting married.'

When I used to come to Haiti with my family, this is where we would stay. Each step through the house brings back another memory: the blue-green bathroom tiles where I nursed mosquito bites with Caladryl and cotton