Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [7]
The van from Croix-des-Rosets let us off in the marketplace in Dame Marie. The roads to my grandmother's house were too rough for anything but wheelbarrows, mules, or feet.
Tante Atie and I decided to go on foot. We walked by a line of thatched huts where a group of women were pounding millet in a large mortar with a pestle. Others were cooking large cassava cakes in flat pans over charcoal pits.
In the cane fields, the men chopped cane stalks as they sang back and forth to one another. A crammed wheelbarrow rolled towards us. We stepped aside and allowed the boys to pass. They were bare-chested and soaked with sweat, with no protection from the sun except old straw hats.
We passed a farm with a bamboo fence around it. The owner was Man Grace, a tall woman who had hair patches growing out of her chin. Man Grace and her daughter were working in the yard, throwing handfuls of purple corn at a flock of guinea fowls.
My mother had sent money for the reconstruction of her old home. The house stood out from all the others in Dame Marie. It was a flat red brick house with wide windows and a shingled roof. A barbed wire fence bordered my grandmother's pumpkin vines and tuberose stems.
I raced up to the front of the house to stand under the rooster-shaped weather vanes spinning on my grandmother's porch. My grandmother was in the yard, pulling a rope out of her stone well.
"Old woman, I brought your child," Tante Atie said.
The rope slipped out of my grandmother's hands, the bucket crashing with an echoing splash. I leaped into her arms, nearly knocking her down.
"It does my heart a lot of good to see you," she said.
Tante Atie kissed my grandmother on the cheek and then went inside the house.
Grandmè Ifé wrapped her arms around my body. Her head came up to my chin, her mop of shrubby white hair tickling my lips.
"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I am going to cook only the things you like."
. . .
At night, the huts on the hills looked like a crowd of candles. We ate supper on the back porch. My grandmother cooked rice and Congo beans with sun-dried mushrooms. She was wearing a long black dress, as part of her devil, to mourn my grandfather.
"Tell me, what good things have you been doing?" asked my grandmother.
"She has been getting all the highest marks in school," said Tante Atie. "Her mother will be very proud."
"You must never forget this," said my grandmother. "Your mother is your first friend."
I slept alone in the third room in the house. It had a large four-poster bed and a mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mattress sank as I slipped under the sheets in the bed. It was nice to have a bed of my own every so often.
I lay in bed, waiting for the nightmare where my mother would finally get to take me away.
We left the next day to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Tante Atie had to go back to work. Besides, my grandmother said that it was best that we leave before she got too used to us and suffered a sudden attack of chagrin.
To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
We each gave my grandmother two kisses as she urged us to go before she kept us for good.
"Can one really die of chagrin?" I asked Tante Atie in the van on the way back.
She said it was not a sudden illness, but something that could kill you slowly, taking a small piece of you every day until one day it finally takes all of you away.
"How can we keep it from happening to us?" I asked.
"We don't choose it," she said, "it chooses us. A horse has four legs, but it can fall anyway."
She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life,