Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [14]
May these words bring wings to your feet,
Edwidge Danticat
Summer 1999
Our last two days in Beauséjour proceed like most reunions, with the awe of reconnecting with a loved one slowly being replaced by daily routine. Uncle Joseph and Nick lose themselves in the details of the school while Tante Ilyana and I talk less and less, to avoid, I suspect, speaking of separation. There are already so many separations in our family, constant departures and returns. We cannot afford to curse or avoid these exits and migrations, however, because they have earned us whatever type of advancement we have made. Tante Ilyana’s son Renel, for example, had to spend most of his life away from her in order to become a dentist, while her daughter Jeanne, who stayed behind with her, died an agonizing and prolonged death, showing Tante Ilyana that some departures are inevitable, which is why Jeanne’s children now live in the capital with their father’s relatives and visit Beauséjour only in the summer.
The night before we are to leave, I am lying on my back in the bed where Tante Ilyana’s husband used to sleep, listening to her chatter in her sleep. Mid-dream, she laughs and makes promises. “Listen,” she says. “Come back soon. I’ll send you coffee.”
In the dark, I imagine that from here she can talk to all of us across these long distances, to my father, her parents, my brothers, and their children. And while I am making this silent invocation, Tante Ilyana awakens herself from yet another dream and whispers from across the room, “Edwidge, are you sleeping?
I say, “No. But it is not you who is keeping me awake.”
It is the mountains maybe, it being so quiet here at night that you hear everything, the swing of every tree branch, the bubbling of the stream, the footsteps of night travelers and wandering animals. And I listen for everything because I know it won’t always be so. I listen too closely and sometimes the listening gets too loud.
The next morning as we are preparing to leave, Tante Ilyana presents me with a three-pound sack of coffee beans to bring to my father in Brooklyn.
“When he has a taste of this coffee,” she says, “it will bring him home.”
I marvel at the magic of this coffee of which Tante Ilyana is so certain. What if such a thing did exist, an elixir against fading memories, a panacea to evoke images of spaces lost to us, to instantly return us home. I thank Tante Ilyana for the coffee on my father’s behalf by telling her a story, something I knew about him and she didn’t. I tell her of going with my father to a Chinese herbalist in New York who was treating him for psoriasis and of the Chinese herbalist telling my father to stop drinking coffee or he would never be cured. And of my father saying, “Doctor, there must be another way,” because he would never give up coffee. And in one of those strange crossed-wire moments, my story gives Tante Ilyana pause, and she says that perhaps she shouldn’t send the coffee to my father if it means that he’d have psoriasis forever. I must convince her to give me the coffee again, and finally she does.
The next morning at five a.m., we start out, Uncle Joseph, Nick, and I, for our journey down the mountain. Our plan is to be halfway down by eleven a.m., before the sun gets too high in the sky, making it too hot to walk without fainting. We will stop briefly for lunch at the house of a friend of my uncle’s and then hike the rest of the afternoon, which would