Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [156]
I am unsteady on my legs. Bones crackle in my head and two more stars come out of my eyes and stay there whirling round the room with no intention of leaving …
“What’s going on?” André asks me.
“Nothing. It’s the rain. I swear, go back to sleep.”
“You haven’t seen them?” Jacques asks me.
“Who?”
“The devils.”
“No. Lie down and go to sleep.”
“I need to be alone …”
At the age of twelve I became very sick. And my black mother Angélie, who believed as much in the loas as she did in God, as much in the houngan as in the doctor, got all mixed up in her panic and called the priest, the doctor and the houngan at the same time. Dr. Chanel was such a crafty old peasant that he energetically shook Gromalin’s hand, saying to him:
“We’ll save him, my colleague.”
But Father Angelo absolutely refused to shake the hand of the voodoo priest.
“Angélie, my daughter,” he reproached my mother, “why have you called me to your house to see a houngan?”
But she was weeping at my bedside.
“Ah, my father,” she wailed, “you come from a white country where people are good to each other. Here, in Haiti, the devils are everywhere. They take the shape of honest people. They greet you and say, ‘So long, my friend, good health to you and yours, sister’; they look at you with innocent eyes and settle the score with you in an underhanded way. As for me, I am sure my little René doesn’t have a natural illness, an illness that good Dr. Chanel can cure. Only the houngan can fight the spirits of the dead that some of my neighbors have set upon my child.”
“Angélie! Angélie!” Father Angelo protested. “Voodoo is making you lose your head! You have nothing but good neighbors! Good people who have known you since childhood and who have never hurt a fly. Don’t you know it is wrong to be on terms with the devil?”
“Evil exists, my father, evil exists. I am afraid of them, I am afraid of them all, even of my cousin Madame Macius.”
“Justina!” the priest cried out. “But you are crazy, my poor Angélie. Never accuse your fellow man if you don’t want God to judge you harshly, and follow Dr. Chanel’s advice if you want to save your child.”
But my poor black mother, who could neither read nor write and who piously served her loas, also followed the advice of Gromalin. She bought the medicine prescribed by the doctor and, secretly, received a simple from the houngan, which she put under my pillow and for which he asked a lot more than the disciple of Ascelpius who had actually saved my life. For my mother, my recovery was a miracle and she dedicated me to the Holy Virgin Mary whose colors I then wore exclusively. When did I stop wearing these colors?
Memories come and go in my exploding head. My dear black mama!
“No more red beans and potatoes for him,” cried Dr. Chanel, pinching her ear. “He’s growing. He needs meat and vegetables.”
“Look at me, Doctor,” she laughed. “Look at what beans and potatoes did for me.”
“That’s right,” Dr. Chanel said, “and you should lose some weight! You look just like a fat potato covered in black beans.”
“Lose weight!” my mother cried out. “You want people to pity me and laugh! Leave my fat alone. No such thing as a skinny black woman that’s beautiful.”
Her fat killed her. “It’s her heart!” Dr. Chanel diagnosed when he rushed to her bedside. I was twenty and was ashamed of my tears.
Oh dear black Mama! The weight of your head dead in my hands! Your stiff heavy body that Simon,