Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [16]
My mother held my hand as we walked through those quiet streets, where the houses had large yards and little children danced around sprinklers on the grass. We stopped in front of a building where the breeze was shaking a sign: MARC CHEVALIER, ESQUIRE.
When my mother rang the bell, a stocky Haitian man came to the door. He was a deep bronze color and very well dressed.
My mother kissed him on the cheek and followed him down a long hallway. On either side of us were bookshelves stacked with large books. My mother let go of my hand as we walked down the corridor. He spoke to her in Creole as he opened the door and let us into his office.
He leaned over and shook my hand.
"Marc Jolibois Francis Legrand Moravien Chevalier."
"Enchanté," I said.
I took a deep breath and looked around. On his desk was a picture of him and my mother, posed against a blue background.
"Are you working late?" my mother asked him.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"We are just walking around," my mother said. "I am showing her what is where."
"Later, we'll go someplace," he said, patting a folder on his desk.
My mother and I took a bus back to our house. We were crowded and pressed against complete strangers. When we got home, we went through my suitcase and picked out a loose-fitting, high-collared dress Tante Atie had bought me for Sunday Masses. She held it out for me to wear to dinner.
"This is what a proper young lady should wear," she said.
That night, Marc drove us to a restaurant called Miracin's in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The restaurant was at the back of an alley, squeezed between a motel and a dry cleaner.
"Miracin's has the best Haitian food in America," Marc told me as we parked under the motel sign.
"Marc is one of those men who will never recover from not eating his monman's cooking," said my mother. "If he could get her out of her grave to make him dinner, he would do it."
"My mother was the best," Marc said as he opened the car door for us.
There was a tiny lace curtain on the inside of the door. A bell rang as we entered. My mother and I squeezed ourselves between the wall and the table, our bodies wiping the greasy wallpaper clean.
Marc waved to a group of men sitting in a corner loudly talking politics. The room was packed with other customers who shouted back and forth adding their views to the discussion.
"Never the Americans in Haiti again," shouted one man. "Remember what they did in the twenties. They treated our people like animals. They abused the konbit system and they made us work like slaves."
"Roads, we need roads," said another man. "At least they gave us roads. My mother was killed in a ferry accident. If we had roads, we would not need to put crowded boats into the sea, just to go from one small village to another. A lot of you, when you go home, you have to walk from the village to your house, because there are no roads for cars."
"What about the boat people?" added a man from a table near the door. "Because of them, people can't respect us in this country. They lump us all with them."
"All the brains leave the country," Marc said, adding his voice to the mêlée.
"You are insulting the people back home by saying there's no brains there," replied a woman from a table near the back. "There are brains who stay."
"But they are crooks," Marc said, adding some spice to the argument.
"My sister is a nurse there with the Red Cross," said the woman, standing up. "You call that a crook? What have you done for your people?"
For some of us, arguing is a sport. In the marketplace in Haiti, whenever people were arguing, others would gather around them to watch and laugh at the colorful language. People rarely hit each other. They didn't need to. They could wound just as brutally by cursing your mother, calling you a sexual misfit, or accusing you of being from the hills. If you couldn't match them with even stronger accusations, then you would concede the argument by keeping your mouth shut.
Marc decided to stay out of the discussion. The woman continued attacking him, shouting