Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [28]
"My mother died while I was being born," I explained. "My grandmother was really mad at me for that."
"They should have given you your mother's name," she said, taking the pouch of needles, thread, and thimbles from me. "That is the way it should have been done."
She walked over to the table in the corner and picked up a pitcher of lemonade that my grandmother made for all her guests when they first arrived.
"Would you like some?" she said, already pouring the lemonade.
"Oui, Madame. Please."
She held a small carton box of butter cookies in front of me. I took one, only one, just as my grandmother would have done.
'Are you a journalist?" I asked her.
"Why do you ask that?"
"The people who stay here in this house usually are, journalists."
She lit a cigarette. The smoke breezed in and out of her mouth, just like her own breath.
"I am not a journalist," she said. "I have come here to pay a little visit."
"Who are you visiting?"
"Just people."
"Why don't you stay with the people you are visiting?"
"I didn't want to bother them."
'Are they old régime or new régime?"
"Who?"
"Your people?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because things you say, thoughts you have, will decide how people treat you."
"It seems to me, you are the journalist," she said.
"What do you believe in? Old régime or new régime?"
"Your grandmother told me to say to anyone who is interested, 'The only régime I believe in is God's régime.' I would wager that you are a very good source for the journalists. Do you have any schooling?"
"A little."
Once again, she held the box of cookies in front of me. I took another cookie, but she kept the box there, in the same place. I took yet another cookie, and another, until the whole box was empty.
"Can you read what it says there?" she asked, point-ing at a line of red letters.
"I cannot read American," I said. Though many of the journalists who came to stay at the yellow house had tried to teach me, I had not learned.
"It is not American," she said. "They are French cookies. That says Le Petit Ecolier."
I stuffed my mouth in shame.
"Intelligence is not only in reading and writing," I said.
"I did not mean to make you feel ashamed," she said, dropping her cigarette into the half glass of lemonade in her hand. "I want to ask you a question."
"I will answer if I can."
"My mother was old régime," she said. "She was a journalist. For a newspaper called Libèté in Port-au-Prince."
"She came to Ville Rose?"
"Maybe. Or some other town. I don't know. The people who worked with her in Port-au-Prince think she might be in this region. Do you remember any shootings the night of the coup?"
"There were many shootings," I said.
"Did you see any of the bodies?"
"My grandmother and me, we stayed inside."
"Did a woman come to your door? Did anyone ever say that a woman in a purple dress came to their door?"
"No."
"I hear there is a mass burial site," she said. "Do you know it?"
"Yes. I have taken journalists there."
"I would like to go there. Can you take me?"
"Now?"
"Yes."
She pulled some coins from her purse and placed them on the table.
"I have more," she said.
From the back pocket of her jeans, she took out an envelope full of pictures. I ran my fingers over the glossy paper that froze her mother into all kinds of smiling poses: a skinny brown woman with shiny black hair in short spiral curls.
"I have never seen her," I admitted.
"It is possible that she arrived in the evening, and then the coup took place in the middle of the night. Do you know if they found any dead women the day after the coup?"
"There were no bodies," I said. "That is to say no funerals."
I heard my grandmother's footsteps even before she reached the door to the yellow house.
"If you tell her that I'm here, I can't go with you," I said.
"Go into the next room and stay there until I come for you."
My grandmother knocked once and then a second time. I rushed to the next room and crouched in a corner.
The plain white sheets that we usually covered the bed with had been replaced by a large piece