Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [41]
We all answered back, "Welcome."
The altar boys stood in an arc around the priest as he recited a list of a hundred twenty-nine names, Haitian refugees who had drowned at sea that week. The list was endless and with each name my heart beat faster, for it seemed as though many of those listed might have been people that I had known at some point in my life.
Some of the names sent a wave of sighs and whispers through the crowd. Occasionally, there was a loud scream.
One woman near the front began to convulse after a man's name was called. It took four people to drag her out of the pew before she hurt herself.
"We make a special call today for a young woman whose name we don't know," the priest said after he had recited all the others. "A young woman who was pregnant when she took a boat from Haiti and then later gave birth to her child on that boat. A few hours after the child was born, its precious life went out, like a candle in a storm, and the mother with her infant in her arms dived into the sea."
There are people in Ville Rose, the village where my mother is from in Haiti, who believe that there are special spots in the sea where lost Africans who jumped off the slave ships still rest, that those who have died at sea have been chosen to make that journey in order to be reunited with their long-lost relations.
During the Mass, Ma tightened a leather belt around her belly, the way some old Haitian women tightened rags around their middles when grieving.
"Think to yourself of the people you have loved and lost," the priest said.
Piercing screams sounded throughout the congregation. Ma got up suddenly and began heading for the aisle. The screams pounded in my head as we left the church.
We walked home through the quiet early morning streets along Avenue D, saying nothing to one another.
Caroline was still in bed when we got back.
She wrapped a long black nightgown around her legs as she sat up on a pile of dirty sheets.
There was a stack of cards on a chair by her bed. She picked it up and went through the cards, sorting most of them with one hand and holding the rest in her mouth. She began a game of solitaire using her hand and her lips, flipping the cards back and forth with great agility.
"How was Mass?" she asked.
Often after Mass ended, I would feel as though I had taken a very long walk with the dead.
"Did Ma cry?" she asked.
"We left before she could."
"It's not like she knows these people," Caroline said. Some of the cards slipped from between her lips.
"Ma says all Haitians know each other."
Caroline stacked the cards and dropped them in one of the three large open boxes that were kept lined up behind her bed. She was packing up her things slowly so as to not traumatize Ma.
She and Eric were not going to have a big formal wed-ding. They were going to have a civil ceremony and then they would take some pictures in the wedding grove at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Their honey-moon would be a brief trip to the Bahamas, after which Caroline would move into Eric's apartment.
Ma wanted Eric to officially come and ask her per-mission to marry her daughter. She wanted him to bring his family to our house and have his father ask her blessing. She wanted Eric to kiss up to her, escort her around, buy her gifts, and shower her with compliments. Ma wanted a full-blown church wedding. She wanted Eric to be Haitian.
"You will never guess what I dreamt last night," Caroline said, dropping her used sheets into one of the moving boxes she was packing. "I dreamt about Papa."
It had been almost ten years since Papa had died of untreated prostrate cancer. After he died, Ma made us wear mourning clothes, nothing but black dresses, for eighteen months. Caroline and I were both in high school at the time, and we quickly found ways to make wearing black a fashion statement. Underneath our black clothes we were supposed to wear red panties. In Ma's family, the widows often wore