Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [30]
"Old woman, I brought your children," Tante Atie said.
"Age and wedlock tames the beast," said my grandmother. "Am I looking at Sophie?"
I moved closer, pressing her fingers against my cheeks.
"Did you even have breasts the last time I saw you?" asked my grandmother.
"It has not been that long," Tante Atie said.
My grandmother's eyes were filled with tears. She buried her face in my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist.
"I called my daughter Brigitte Ife," I said. "The Ife is after you."
She stretched her neck to get a closer look.
"Do you see my granddaughter?" she asked, tracing her thumb across Brigitte's chin. "The tree has not split one mite. Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?"
Chapter 15
The lights on a distant hill glowed like a candle light vigil. We ate supper at the small table on the back porch, A New York skyline was emblazoned in sequins across Tante Atie's chest. I had hurriedly bought a matching pair of i LOVE NEW YORK sweatshirts for her and my grandmother, forgetting about the lifelong deuil, which kept my grandmother from wearing anything but black, to mourn my grandfather.
My grandmother chewed endlessly on the same piece of meat, as her eyes travelled back and forth between my face and Tante Atie's chest. I swallowed a mouthful of soursop juice, savoring the heavy screen of brown sugar lingering on my tongue.
"Does your mother still cook Haitian?" asked Tante Atie with a full mouth.
"I am not sure," I said.
My grandmother lowered her eyelids, sheltered her displeasure, and continued chewing.
"And you? Can you make some dishes?" Tante Atie asked.
"You will have to let me cook a meal," I said.
A small draft blew the cooking embers through the yard. My daughter eagerly clawed my neck as I slipped her bottle into her mouth.
"Do you go there again tonight?" my grandmother asked Tante Atie.
"The reading, it takes a lot of time," Tante Atie said.
"Why do you not go to the reading classes?"
"You want me to go the whole distance at night?"
"If you had your lessons elsewhere," said my grandmother, "they would be during the day. The way you go about free in the night, one would think you a devil."
"The night is already in my face, it is. Why should I be afraid of it?"
"I would like it better if you were learning elsewhere."
"I like where I am."
"Can you read only by moonlight?"
"Knowledge, you do not catch it in the air, old woman. I have to labor at it. Is that not right, Sophie?"
My grandmother did not give me a chance to answer.
"You can only labor in the night?"
"Reading, it is not like the gifts you have. I was not born with it."
"Most people are born with what they need," said my grandmother.
"I was born short of my share."
"You say that to your Makers when you see them in Guinea."
"Do not send me off to my Makers, old woman. Besides, my Makers should hear me from this place." My aunt raised her head to the star-filled sky. "Hear me! Great gods that made the moon and the stars. You see what you have done to me. You were stingy with the clay when you made this creature."
"Blasphemy!" spat my grandmother. "Why can't the girl come here and teach you your letters?"
Tante Atie got up from the table and walked to the yard. She poured some juice over the cooking ashes as she came back to collect our plates.
She took the plates to the yard, scrubbed them with a soap-soaked palm leaf, then laid them out to dry.
"Before you go into the night, why don't you read to us from your reading book?"
My grandmother shut both her eyes as she twirled a rooster feather in her ear.
Tante Atie walked into the house and came back with a composition notebook wrapped in brown paper. She raised the notebook so it covered her face and slowly began to read. At first she stuttered but soon her voice took on an even flow.
She read the very same words as those I'd written on the card that I had made for her so long ago, on Mother's Day.
My mother is a daffodil, limber