The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [22]
“He was too young,” she said, “and Kongo will not even let the others act in response to this.”
“What can be done?”
“An eye for an eye, as Mimi says.”
“No eye for no eye,” I said. “We cannot start a war here.”
“It would not be a war,” she said, “only something to teach them that our lives are precious too.”
“What will this do for Joel now?”
“Everything’s lost to Joel,” she said. “It’s too late for him. But we should do something to keep them from taking others.”
She pulled herself away from me, to stand on her own feet.
“We must leave it to Kongo,” I said. “It is his son who died. He will know best what to do.”
13
Every night Sebastien talks in his sleep.
“Do you know what I would like to do?” he asks one night.
“Tell me what you would like to do.” You feel masterful making a sleeping person respond while you, awake, question the person. In some ways it is a miracle, like being loved, or watching a parrot—such a small animal—repeat words that have just crossed human lips.
“I’d like to fly a kite,” Sebastien answers in his sleep when I ask what he would like to do.
“What manner of kite?”
“A piece of clear paper over a bamboo spine, a girl’s red satin ribbon for the tail.”
“If I offer you my red satin ribbon?”
He turns over and buries his head in the pillow.
If I offer him my red satin ribbon?
No retort.
14
Between the stream and Don Carlos’ mill were the houses of those Sebastien called the non-vwayajè Haitians, the ones who were better off than the cane cutters but not as wealthy as Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine and their friends, the rich Haitians.
The stable non-vwayajè Haitians lived in houses made of wood or cement. They had colorful galleries, zinc roofs, spacious gardens, cactus fences with green vines crawling between the cactus stems. Their yards were full of fruit trees—mangos and avocados especially—for shade, nourishment, and decoration. They were people whose families had been in Alegría for generations: landowners, farmers, metalworkers, stonemasons, dressmakers, shoemakers, a married schoolteaching couple and one Haitian priest, Father Romain. Some of them had Dominican spouses. Many had been born in Alegría. We regarded them all as people who had their destinies in hand.
That morning I thought of Sebastien’s decision to leave the cane fields after the harvest as I greeted those of them who were already outside, some sitting in cane back chairs while they had their morning meal of bread and coffee, corn mush, and mangú, others marching around their property like sentinels before rushing out to their day’s work. I saw Unèl, a dwarfish stonemason, and called out to him. He waved back with a wide toothy smile. Unèl had once rebuilt the workers’ latrines in Señora Valencia’s yard along with a group of friends he called his brigade.
Parents were walking their children to the one-room school started by Father Romain and a Dominican priest, Father Vargas. The flat cinder-block building was already too crowded, and the parents who were taking their young ones there complained as they did every morning about the limitations on their children’s education.
“I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrían Kreyol and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues. “My mother too pushed me out of her body here. Not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border. Still they won’t put our birth papers in our palms so my son can have knowledge placed into his head by a proper educator in a proper school.”
“To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmèmès’ granmèmès were born in this country,” a man responded in Kreyol, which we most often spoke—instead of Spanish—among ourselves. “This makes it easier for them to push us out when they want to.”
“You heard the rumors?” another woman asked, her perfect Kreyol embellished by elaborate gestures of her long fingers. “They say anyone not in one of those