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

grandfather had a better knack for business, but I could not help thinking, as a child, that his skin color put him on the Grande Rue whereas his half-brother conducted his business on a back street near the market. My grandmother's brother, too, had his business on the main street. He was light-skinned and his wife was a woman whose veins showed through her white skin. The Europeans, mostly the clergy, and the Canadians, who exploited a copper mine in the area, patronized my grandfather's and his brother-in-law's businesses.

I had not been a 'Caribbean' either before leaving Haiti. I knew a few of the other islands by name but had not met anyone from there. My mother and her sister had gone to Cuba for their trousseaus. They spoke of Havana City being like Paris, but they spoke of it in the past tense. It had lost its glamour after Fidel Castro took over. When I was six years old, my mother took me on a trip to Miami to see the Seminoles on their reservation and the dolphins in the Seaquarium. There was a stopover in Montego Bay, Jamaica. I was allowed to stand by the plane door before the Jamaican passengers boarded. Rows and rows of people stood away from the tarmac behind a wire fence, none black, all Chinese. I ran inside to inform my mother we had landed in China. Little did I know that thirty years after this incident I would be taken for a Caribbean person of Chinese ancestry by a group of Jamaicans.

On the island of my birth, my life of privilege was constructed with great conviction. There were many invisible lines marking off paths from which I could not swerve. I remember one October, on the first day of school, dressed in my starched blue uniform, waiting for my father and the oyster man. A huge mango gropo tree grew in our backyard by the pool side, a green-and-white-leaf vine coiled around its trunk. My father sat underneath that tree to have his shoes cleaned by the shoeshine man at his feet. At the same time, the oyster man arrived and cracked open the oysters, which we slurped down with a dash of lemon. My father drove to work. The yardman took me to school on his bicycle. Sometimes we took the hospital road where we passed men carrying sick children on their backs in the bright morning sun. This is the image the word poverty evokes in my mind, a father traveling on foot to a faraway hospital, his sick child on his back.

Walking back from school, I stopped first at my great uncle's store, where he and his wife interrupted their activities to hug and kiss me and give me presents in the form of candies or, if I had received my report card that day, perfumes, jewelry, or pieces of fabric from England or France. Broderie anglaise was my favorite. Then I proceeded to my grandfather's shop. At lunchtime, my grandfather drove me to the two-story house with the balcony skirting the top floor where my grandmother sat on her rocking chair. Lunch was always our favorite food. My grandfather and I both liked food that was considered too ordinary for people with means: tchaka, akra, crabs, fish stew and cornmeal, salted fish and boiled bananas. After lunch, while my grandparents napped, I went down to the ground floor. The back door opened onto the yard where the numerous household workers lived: the cook, the two housemaids with their children, the woman who ironed, the boy who cleaned the yard, the boy who did errands. This was another world, a life of chatter, of blue indigo, thick white com starch, scallions, hot peppers, coffee beans roasting on a wood fire, a world where many things were done at once. The women hulled peas, ironed clothes, sang, plaited hair, reprimanded the children, and laughed. For me it was the place where I could eat with a spoon instead of a fork, even with my hands, a place where I spoke Kreyol instead of French and learned riddles and songs. I preferred staying there to spending time upstairs or at my parents' house, where I had no playmates.

My parents' house stood away from the center of town. Our property was surrounded by almond, mango, and palm trees, a barrier before the vast extension of sugarcane fields. Our closest neighbors were the poor farmers of the area. This was my brothers' realm. My brothers played with the boys their age, climbing trees, carving bows from branches, chasing birds with slingshots, making kites. As a girl I was seldom allowed to play with them. My only playmate and friend was Yanyan, a young restavek girl who lived at my grand- mother's house. She was older than me, old enough to be in charge of me and my cousins when they visited, but young enough to play with us. She came on car rides, Sunday outings to the river; we jumped rope and picked mangoes from trees together. Yanyan and I were always together except when I was called for lunch or dinner. I went upstairs, she stayed downstairs in the yard in the maids' quarters. Church was yet another moment of social separation for Yanyan and me. She went to the four o'clock Sunday Mass, the one the priests said at the cathedral for house servants who started their day's work at six in the morning, grinding or brewing coffee to be brought to their employers' bedside by seven. I went to ten o'clock Mass and sat in the front-row pew, paid for by my family and reserved for us. Yanyan's brother and mother visited my grandmother's yard, most often to eat. If my parents were not there, my grandmother would give me permission to join Yanyan and the maids and their families in the evening. If my parents were present, I had to tiptoe my way down the wooden stairs to the back of the house where everyone sat on low chairs and told riddles and stories. The cook was the best narrator. Her stories were all interspersed with songs. All the tales ended with 'someone kicked me and that's how I got here to tell you this story.' With me, Yanyan spoke a mixture of Kreyol and French, with the adults, she only spoke Kreyol, fearing their scorn. At the dinner table in my family no one was allowed to speak Kreyol and no child could address an adult in the family in Kreyol. Our command of French reaffirmed our social status.

One day in March 1963 my father, a factory owner, had to leave the island. A few weeks earlier, he had been arrested by Francois Duva-lier's henchmen while we were attending Sunday Mass. My father and his friends would usually stand in the back of the church and step out right after communion. Before the priest pronounced 'he Missa est,' they would already be chatting on the church steps. We noticed my father's absence when the service was over. It was not clear to me why he was arrested. Was it because he had attended the military academy in his youth? The other four taken to the police station that day were men who were loved by everyone, men who'd had no connections to the military. What my father and those men all had in common was that they were light-skinned Haitians, members of the so-called 'elite.' The next morning all five were freed. Their arrest was a rehearsal for what would follow-Duvalier's reign of terror.

A few weeks after my father's brief detention, he closed his factory in Port-au-Prince and left for New York. My mother, my brothers and sister, and I were to join him there at the end of the school year. In the months in which we were separated, many of our neighbors' houses were burned down and schools often stayed closed. At the end of June our exile began.

New York held no welcome signs for us. We lived in one of the many peripheral cities within the City, in a world made of Cuban and South American exiles, surrounded by white Americans. We moved into a building in Elmhurst, Queens, where two Haitian families, the very first victims of Duvalier's purge, had settled. They had taken refuge in foreign embassies and then found their way to New York. One of them was my mother's cousin. Through him we were able to rent an apartment in an attractive eight-story building with two elevators. Unlike the wide-open spaces we had left on the island where kites had risen into the infinite sky, the apartment building called for hushed voices and quietness. We did not speak in the hallways or in the elevator. When we encountered our white American neighbors, they could not help but stare at us. Their silence was ominous like their stares. I did not associate this with racism until much later. Our very presence, it seemed, disturbed the world they had created for themselves. To them we had no right to these surroundings, to settle on their street. From one day to the next they were all gone, as if they had boarded the same ship. The clean-shaven superintendent-thanks to whom the fountain surrounded with ferns in the lobby hissed all day-left in their wake. The new super wore dirty, sleeveless undershirts and spoke unintelligible English. He did not clean the lobby; the fountain stopped spouting water.

While my brothers, sister, and I were forced to gain quick familiarity with things American, our parents remained suspended between New York and Haiti, the past and the present. Puzzled by events such as semiformals and proms, inviting boys to dance, and wearing corsages on wrists, I received no help at home. I remember writing notes to my teachers and my brothers' teachers for my mother to sign. I became her substitute, speaking to the teachers, buying my younger siblings school uniforms. In the daytime the male adults in our little group were dispersed throughout the city, each busy with his own survival. They traveled huge distances in subway cars while the women, still refusing to eat off of paper plates or bring food home in Styrofoam containers, wept for the loss of home. My mother became a housewife, which meant doing the work the numerous household help had done for her in Haiti. There was very little talking within our apartment walls, as if each one of us was pondering alone on his or her lot in the new spaces we'd come to inhabit. Communication with home was costly and difficult. No direct phone lines to Haiti. No traveling back and forth. We lived with the desire to return.