Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [95]
They didn’t talk much about Vodou either, since we were raised as Catholics (although my father only went to church on Christmas Eve and Easter). My mother did tell me some stories, but just as I’d get all caught up in it and suspend my disbelief, she’d let me down with: “Of course, it’s all nonsense.” For months before our family trip to Haiti, I’d been begging my parents to let us attend a Vodou ceremony because I thought it would be a cool thing to tell my friends. So they finally relented. I’d been looking forward to that night for a long time. We all went together, with Philippe on one side of me and my mother on the other.
The Vodou priest, Monsieur Duval, began by explaining that this was a real ceremony, and that we should forget most of what we’d heard or seen in the movies.
“I will not stick any pins into any dolls,” he said smiling, “and if you behave, I won’t turn anyone into a zombie.”
I rolled my eyes when the crowd laughed. The drummers began slowly. From the left of the amphitheater came a single file of men and women dressed in white, doing a two-step meringue shuffle to the beat of the drum. Duval picked up a bottle from his altar. He took a swig and sprayed it out into the air.
“Do you think it’s rum?” Philippe’s eyes were bright with excitement.
“I think it’s gross.”
Monsieur Duval was tall, with the broad-muscled shoulders of an athlete and smooth caramel skin. He would have looked just as good in a designer suit as in the white robe of the ougan. He probably still had some business suits from his days as a chemical engineer, before his father summoned him back to Haiti to assume the mantle. My parents knew him as a student in Paris, where he was a real bon vivant, popular with the French girls he took dancing to all the best jazz clubs.
The believers were now in the middle of the room, chanting and clapping between the drumbeats. Their luminous faces seemed even darker in the candlelight. Duval pointed to one of the complicated line drawings on the dirt floor. To me it looked like a cross standing on a coffin. “These are vèvès, which we draw with cornmeal and wood ash. Each lwa has his or her own.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Duval set fire to a small pile of twigs near the vèvès. The smoke snaked along the poto mitan, the middle post holding up the temple. Grandmère Lucille would always say women were the poto mitan of the world. Then one day I asked her why all the priests at our church were men. Her face lit up and she hugged me tight, like she was proud of me.
Duval closed his eyes and muttered a few words while the believers circled him, still doing that two-step. The hypnotic chanting became a call-and-response, lulling me to the edge of sleep. I rubbed my eyes and opened them wide.
“Look at that!” I cried out, and my mother hushed me.
A woman had stopped right in front of us. She had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a kind of midnight-blue, and her arms and legs were trembling in spasms. She threw back her head and screamed. I grabbed my brother’s arm. No way would I let my mother see me get scared.
“What’s happening?” I whispered to Philippe.
“She’s possessed, in a trance.”
I glanced at my mother and her expression of calm bemusement.
Now the woman was bent over, still shaking, lunging toward Duval. She grabbed his bottle from the floor and drank from it. We all gasped when we heard the sound of glass breaking and saw her chewing.
“No way,” said Philippe. My mouth hung open in disbelief.
The candles glowed brighter, as if fueled with gasoline. The possessed woman picked up a piece of wood from the fire and put it in her mouth. I flinched but didn’t turn away. A stream of black and red trickled from her lips, inching its way to the white of her collar.
Please don’t let her come over here. I should never have insisted on sitting