Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [24]
Granmè Melina’s voice would grow shrill with excitement from the dangers that might lie ahead for this young girl, who was, after all, our representative in the story, the one from whose choices we were meant to extract our lesson.
The next day, after the mother left for her work in the fields, the serpent returned to the girl’s doorstep and once again tried to sing the mother’s song. This time the serpent hissed too softly, so the daughter knew not to open the door. So the serpent went away, to wait for another day.
Granmè Melina’s stories didn’t always have happy endings. One day, it occurred to the serpent that he could simply kill the mother and force the girl to come outside. And so he killed her, leaving the girl all alone in the world. Still the girl never left her little house, preferring instead to die fresh and pure alone inside rather than risk facing the snake outside.
Those nights, sitting at Granmè Melina’s feet with the other children and listening to her often frightening stories, I would close my eyes and imagine it was my mother, who never cared for such tales, telling me one of them. One night, after Granmè Melina had received a group of children on the porch, she complained of achy joints and asked Tante Denise to massage her body with camphor and castor oil before bed. Propping her up against a mound of pillows, Tante Denise, who’d recently developed diabetes and was starting to look a bit sluggish and a lot less youthful herself, asked her niece Liline to slip Granmè Melina’s nightgown over her head. Liline’s father, Tante Denise’s youngest brother, Linoir, had left Léogâne the year before to work as a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic. Liline’s mother had six other children to look after and very little money with which to do it, so Linoir asked Tante Denise to look after Liline until he came back. Like Marie Micheline, Bob, Nick and me, Liline was yet another child that Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise had not been able to turn away.
Liline and I shared a metal bunk bed across the room from Granmè Melina. Thankfully Granmè Melina’s fragrant poultices and rubdowns would overpower the stench of urine rising from Liline’s bottom bunk. At ten, Liline was still wetting her bed, always explaining when she was scolded by Tante Denise that she had dreamed herself peeing in a latrine when she’d soaked her mattress. I don’t know how it was decided that Liline and I should share a room with Granmè Melina, but we liked having her all to ourselves those nights when she’d send everyone home but still had more stories in her before she fell asleep.
That evening, while Tante Denise dabbed Granmè Melina’s wrinkled forehead with camphor and wrapped a scarf around her plaited cotton-white hair, Granmè Melina told us the story of the singing mother, the shut-in daughter and the snake, a story I thought was meant only to scare the neighborhood children. But I see now that the story was more about Granmè Melina than anyone. She was the daughter, locked inside a cocoon of sickness and old age while death pleaded to be let in somehow. That night, Granmè Melina didn’t finish the story, slipping into an abruptly sound sleep. Edging closer to the kerosene lamp that served as Granmè Melina’s nightlight, I leafed through my Madeleine, which managed to make even sickness—in Madeleine’s case it was appendicitis—seem like a lot of fun.
The next morning, a Saturday, my brother Bob came to wake me to go out and play with him. Bob was then nine and small for his age. A skinny, accident-prone little kid, he once had to be taken to the neighborhood clinic two times in one day, one for a tetanus shot after he stepped on a rusty nail walking barefoot outside and the other for sticking a wad of cotton too far up his nose. Bob was, as always, with Maxo’s son, Nick, who was ten, like Liline and me. Nick’s parents had separated soon after Nick was born, his mother leaving for Canada when his father moved