Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [153]
I would sometimes go to the market on Saturdays with my black mother. She would make me sit beside the goods tray and I would help her set up the cheap cloth swatches, the Creole hoop earrings, the lace trim that I was learning to measure by the ell, the silver medals, and the calico scarves. She was proud of her big goods tray that she carried on her head as night fell. Around us, the servants and the beggar-cripples came and went, as did the beggar-thieves whom we watched out of the corner of our eye. Mama would say to me:
“Don’t let them leave your sight, they’re more cunning than cats.” But all I could pay attention to was Alcindor, an old drunk who would roll on the ground and get up again in a moldy old frock coat—a gift from the prefect—white with dust, and do a banda dance.18 His toothless mouth tied in a grin to his ears, he would sway his hips and we would clap to the rhythm to get him going. Bam bidim, bam bidim, bam bidim … bap! At noon, we would buy our meal from my mother’s cousin Justina, Aunt Justina as I called her, but whom others including my mother called strictly Mme Macius after her marriage in deference to the new wedding band on her finger.
When did I leave the common people behind? When we walked by, people used to say to my mother:
“How’s your mulatto boy Sister Angélie?” And my mother would reply:
“Praise God, he’s growing, my sister; he’s growing, my brother.”
“Oh, cousin!” Aunt Justina would cry out, squatting before her huge pot, “he’ll be a man soon!”
“God is good!” my mother would be quick to say, warding off bad luck.
For she feared the evil eye would fall on her mulatto boy like the plague. And especially because he was different from all the black boys. When did I abandon the people? She had hung around my neck the scapular medal Father Angelo had offered me at first communion. And the scapular hung near a large evil-eye bead on a red string that she wouldn’t have taken off me for anything in the world. I wore the scapular on the outside and the evil-eye bead underneath, and I could feel it bounce against my navel with every step. When did I lose my evil-eye bead? It was no ordinary evil-eye bead. Gromalin, the houngan my mother visited once in a while to make sure things went well for her, had endowed it with the miraculous power to keep all evil spirits away from me. When did I get rid of my evil-eye bead?
I grew up listening to the French writers talking in the books Brother Justinien lent me.
“You are very bright, René,” he would say to me. “I will keep pushing you in your studies.”
But he was seventy-three and died a short time before my mother did. And I cried, for I have a tender soul and all poets are tender-souled, sensitive types. I am talking about the true poets, not the false ones who write because it’s fashionable, to get attention. I wrote verse in French about Christophe, Dessalines, Toussaint and Pétion. I am clinging to the colonial legacy like a louse. Why not? Dessalines thought he had uprooted it when he yelled:
“Off with their heads, burn down their houses!”
His Declaration of Independence, did his secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre19 write it in Creole? What about Toussaint? What language did he learn to parry wits with Bonaparte?
“Do you want a séche?”20 our French friend Simon said recently offering me a cigarette.
I stared at him without understanding …
I can see the town’s houses dancing. They’re going around my shack. As they file past, I hear good Dr. Chanel’s piano and then Mme Fanfreluche’s radio. A Mozart concerto rises up from the former, a popular merengue from the latter. Mozart breaks the spell of the drum over me. Who taught me to love Mozart? One day, I had opened the door to Dr. Chanel’s living room without knocking and he caught me standing