'I wish I could help you do one of your jobs,' I said.
'But I want you to go to school. I want you to get a doctorate, or even higher than that.'
'I am sorry you work so hard,' I said. 'I never realized you did so much.'
'That's how it is. Life is no vacation. If you get your education, there are things you won't have to do.'
She turned over on her back and stared direcdy into my face, something she did not do very often.
It had been a month since I had seen Marc. I wondered if he had gone away, but I didn't want to ask her in case he had and in case it was because of me.
'Am I the mother you imagined?' she asked, with her eyes half-closed.
As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. She never had to work for anything because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her. Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn.
'Was I the mother you imagined? You don't have to answer me,' she said. 'After you've seen me, I know the answer.'
'For now I couldn't ask for better,' I said.
'What do you think of Marc?' she asked, quickly changing the subject.
'I think he is smart.'
'He helped me a lot in getting you here,' she said, 'even though he did not like the way I went about it. In Haiti, it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man.'
She began the story of how she met him. She talked without stopping, as though she were talking on one of our cassettes.
She got her green card through an amnesty program. When she was going through her amnesty proceedings, she had to get a lawyer. She found him listed in a Haitian newspaper and called his office. She was extremely worried that she would not be eligible for the program. It took him a long time to convince her that this was not the case and, over that period of time, they became friends. He started taking her to restaurants, always Haitian restaurants, sometimes ones as far away as Philadelphia. They even went to Canada once to eat at a Haitian, restaurant in Montreal. Marc was old-fashioned about a lot of things and had some of the old ways. He had never married and didn't have any children back home-that he knew of-and she admired that. She was going to stay with him as long as he didn't make any demands that she couldn't fulfill.
'Are you going to marry?' I asked.
'Jesus Marie Joseph, I don't know,' she said. 'He is the first man I have been with in a long time.'
She asked if there was a boy in Haiti that I had liked.
I said no and she smiled.
'You need to concentrate when school starts, you have to give that all your attention. You're a good girl, aren't you?'
By that she meant if I had ever been touched, if I had ever held hands, or kissed a boy.
'Yes,' I said. 'I have been good.'
'You understand my right to ask as your mother, don't you?'
I nodded.
'When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie hated it. She used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure.'
She rubbed her palm against her eyelids, as if to keep the sleep away.
'My mother stopped testing me early' she said. 'Do you know why?'
I said no.
'Did Atie tell you how you were born?'
From the sadness in her voice, I knew that her story was sadder than the chunk of the sky and flower petals story that Tante Atie liked to tell.
'The details are too much,' she said. 'But it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you.'
I did not press to find out more. Part of me did not understand. Most of me did not want to.
'I thought Atie would have told you. I did not know this man. I never saw his face. He had it covered when he did this to me. But now when I look at your face I think it is true what they say. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father.'
She did not sound hurt or angry, just like someone who was stating a fact. Like naming a color or calling a name. Something that already existed and could not be changed. It took me twelve years to piece together my mother's entire story. By then, it was already too late.
Two
Chapter 9
I was eighteen and going to start college in the fall. My mother continued working her two jobs, but she put in even longer hours. And we moved to a one-family house in a tree-lined neighborhood near where Marc lived.
In the new place, my mother had a patch of land in the back where she started growing hibiscus. Daffodils would need more care and she had grown tired of them.
We decorated our new living room in red, everything from the carpet to the plastic roses on the coffee table. I had my very own large bedroom with a new squeaky bed. My mother's room was even bigger, with a closet that you could have entertained some friends in. In some places in Haiti, her closet would have been a room on its own, and the clothes would not have bothered the fortunate child who would sleep in it.
Before the move, I had been going to a Haitian Adventist school that went from elementary right to high school. They had guaranteed my mother that they would get me into college and they had lived up to their pledge. Now my first classes at college were a few months away and my mother couldn't have been happier. Her sacrifices had paid off.
I never said this to my mother, but I hated the Maranatha Bilingual Institution. It was as if I had never left Haiti. All the lessons were in French, except for English composition and literature classes. Outside the school, we were 'the Frenchies,' cringing in our mock-Catholic-school uniforms as the students from the public school across the street called us 'boat people' and 'stinking Haitians.'
When my mother was home, she made me read out loud from the English Composition textbooks. The first English words I read sounded like rocks falling in a stream. Then very slowly things began to take on some meaning. There were words that I heard often. Words that jump out of New York Creole conversations, like the last kernel in a cooling popcorn machine. Words, among others, like TV, building, feeling, which Marc and my mother used even when they were in the middle of a heated political discussion in Creole. Mwin gin yon feeling. I have a feeling Haiti will get back on its feet one day, but I'll be dead before it happens. My mother, always the pessimist.
There were other words that helped too, words that looked almost the same in French, but were pronounced differently in English: nationality, alien, race, enemy, date, present. These and other words gave me a context for the rest that I did not understand.
Eventually, I began to hear myself that I read better. I answered swiftly when my mother asked me a question in English. Not that I ever had a chance to show it off at school, but I became an English speaker.
'There is great responsibility that comes with knowledge,' my mother would say. My great responsibility was to
