“What’s wrong with me, then? Why am I so restless, if I should already know to do nothing like you?”
Ti Me had begun chopping up the cassava for dinner. She did not stop as she said to me, “You’ve been claimed by the spirit. By Erzulie. And you will be unsatisfied and miserable till you devote yourself to her.”
“Have you told this to Monsieur Emmanuel?”
“I told him the first night I saw you. I said, ‘Monsieur, a woman like that doesn’t know herself. You should never marry a woman so lost she does not recognize herself. Can’t even place her own reflection in a mirror. Can’t even see her own face on top of still water.’ He said you were a clever girl, you would make do. But … here you are.” She looked up from her work to where I lay, belly-up to the soot-stained ceiling of the cookhouse.
“If you wanted to,” Ti Me said while looking at the large bowl of rice, “you could change it.”
“What do you mean?”
She shifted the rice—once, twice. The husking sound seemed to mock me.
“It is Monsieur Emmanuel who believes in all that,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Wi, mamselle,” Ti Me said.
“Well,” I said after a moment. “What would I do? If I believed the things you did.”
Ti Me finally looked me full in the face. “You would have to kouche.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot, and I looked down, embarrassed. I could hear the word in Emmanuel’s voice, when he’d whispered it to me in the dark, describing how we lay and died and were born together.
Ti Me laughed at my expression. “No, not like that. It means that, too, but also it means other things. You will kouche …” Here, she gestured to my stomach under the smock. “Give birth. But what I mean is that when you kouche, you would dedicate yourself to yon lwa. You would go to the initiation and you would kouche—it would be like you are dying. We would cry for you and grieve for you, because we would know you are passing over to another side. We would kiss you goodbye, Emmanuel and I.”
I shivered.
“You would cover your eyes, and you would be made to dance in circles. Over and over. When that was done, you would be led to a small dark room, and that is where you kouche again. You would stay there. You would be reborn. You would be as a baby in a womb. You would be brought food and rubbed down, as a new baby is. You would be raised back up to become a woman again. But you would be new. When you leave the room, when you are finished, you would keep your head covered for forty days. Because you would still be like a newborn baby, and your head is soft, and the spirits within your head, even though they have finally been fed, would still be growing strong each day.
“But”—Ti Me sighed—“even though you should kouche and it would solve a lot of your restlessness, it does not matter. You will not stay here long enough to right it.”
I began to sweat. “I don’t understand.”
“You sent me to the telegraph office. You make me send a message. You will not stay here.”
“I did not ever ask to leave.”
“You can leave a place in more ways than one.”
The mail boat came only on Tuesdays. The telegraph office was only open in the afternoon. Because of this, everyone knew everyone else’s communications. There were the back-and-forths of the American Negro colony and the comings and goings of the white French and American merchants who stayed in the city. And then there was the continuous flow of gossip from the countryside to the market street, which wound over the mountains from Port-au-Prince. It was hard to escape this web of foreknowledge. It had already told the town that I was with child, that I had spurned my husband, that I slept among vegetable peelings.
An uppity woman, to turn a good man into a beggar in his own home.
A woman too sure of herself.
A woman that dark can’t play like that.
Dr. Chase will be ruined.
Bishop Chase will, too.
I wished for any other sound to drown it out. Sometimes, I drummed my fingers on the shed’s table, just to break the rhythms around me. If only, my index finger tapped. If only. It did not seem fair that my deficiencies in womanhood, in wifeliness, in Negro life, should follow me all the way to this new world, where I was supposed to be washed clean, left out of those old songs, harbinger of a different one altogether.
So it felt like a kind of dream when all this changed and began to din around the fact that we would soon all be visited by a troupe of Negro performers. They were making a tour of the Caribbean, had come from Florida to Cuba and then to us, in Jacmel. This news was received with great excitement—even Bishop Chase seemed pleased.
The only time I saw Ti Me genuinely smile in that house was when she came to the shed and told me that Bishop Chase had given a special dispensation to everyone in the colony, allowing them to attend the performance, even though theatrics were generally considered sinful.
She shyly pulled, from under her own cot, her better shawl, all white, the one she only wore at holiday time and kept folded over, with care, in an old burlap rice sack. As I touched the gleaming white linen, I realized my dilemma. I wanted to hear something besides the sound of our alley, the sound of our animals, and Ti Me’s occasional voice. I was bored in the shed by then. It was comfortable as I grew bigger and my hips grew soft, but it had lost its charm.
To leave it, though, would mean some sort of a concession. I
