Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [40]
"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I asked.
"Don't say that you will never dine with the devil if you have a daughter," she said. "You never know what she will bring. My mother and father, they knew that too."
"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I repeated.
"I probably would have married anyway," she said. "There is little others can do to keep us from our hearts' desires."
Caroline too was going to get married whether Ma wanted her to or not. That night, maybe for the first time, I saw a hint of this realization in Ma's face. As she raised her comforter and slipped under the sheets, she looked as if she were all alone in the world, as lonely as a woman with two grown daughters could be.
"We're not like birds," she said, her head sinking into the pillow. "We don't just kick our children out of our nests."
Caroline was still awake when I returned to our room.
"Is she ever going to get tired of telling that story?" she asked.
"You're talking about a woman who has had soup with cow bones in it for all sixty years of her life. She doesn't get tired of things. What are you going to do about it?"
"She'll come around. She has to," Caroline said.
We sat facing each other in the dark, playing a free-association game that Ma had taught us when we were girls.
"Who are you?" Caroline asked me.
"I am the lost child of the night."
"Where do you come from?"
"I come from the inside of the lost stone."
"Where are your eyes?"
"I have eyes lost behind my head, where they can best protect me."
"Who is your mother?"
"She who is the lost mother of all."
"Who is your father?"
"He who is the lost father of all."
Sometimes we would play half the night, coming up with endless possibilities for questions and answers, only repeating the key word in every sentence. Ma too had learned this game when she was a girl. Her mother belonged to a secret women's society in Ville Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another's houses. Many nights while her mother was hosting the late-night meetings, Ma would fall asleep listening to the women's voices.
"I just remembered. There is a Mass Sunday at Saint Agnes for a dead refugee woman." Ma was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. "Maybe you two will come with me."
"Nobody sleeps in this house," Caroline said.
I would go, but not her.
They all tend to be similar, farewell ceremonies to the dead. The church was nearly empty, with a few middle-aged women scattered in the pews.
I crossed myself as I faced the wooden life-size statue of a dying Christ, looking down on us from high above the altar. The chapel was dim except for a few high chandeliers and the permanent glow of the rich hues of the stained glass windows. Ma kneeled in one of the side pews. She clutched her rosary and recited her Hail Marys with her eyes tightly shut.
For a long time, services at Saint Agnes have been tailored to fit the needs of the Haitian community. A line of altar boys proceeded down the aisle, each carrying a long lit candle. Ma watched them as though she were a spectator at a parade. Behind us, a group of women was carrying on a conversation, criticizing a neighbor's wife who, upon leaving Haiti, had turned from a sweet Haitian wife into a self-willed tyrant.
"In New York, women give their eight hours to the white man," one of the worshipers said in the poor woman's defense. "No one has time to be cradling no other man."
There was a slow drumbeat playing like a death march from the altar. A priest in a black robe entered behind the last altar boy. He walked up to the altar and began to read from a small book.
Ma lowered her head so far down that I could see the dip in the back of her neck, where she had a port-wine mark shaped like Manhattan Island.
"We have come here this far, from the shackles of the old Africans," read the priest in Creole.