Breath, Eyes, Memory (16 page)

Chapter 31

T
here were three of us in my sexual phobia group. We gave it that name because that's what Rena—the therapist who introduced us—liked to call it.

Buki, an Ethiopian college student, had her clitoris cut and her labia sewn up when she was a girl. Davina, a middle-aged Chicana, had been raped by her grandfather for ten years.

We met at Davina's house. She was the only one of us with a place to herself. Buki lived in a college dorm and, of course, I lived with Joseph.

Davina had a whole room in her house set aside for our meetings. When we came in, we changed into long white dresses that Buki had sewn for us. We wrapped our hair in white scarves that I had bought. As we changed in the front room, I showed them the statue of Erzulie that my grandmother had given me. Davina told me to take it into the room myself, as I pondered what it meant in terms of my family.

The air in our room smelled like candles and incense. We sat on green heart-shaped pillows that Davina had made. The color green stood for life and growth.

We bowed our heads and recited a serenity prayer.

God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."

I laid the Erzulie next to our other keepsakes, the pine cones and seashells we collected on our solitary journeys.

"I am a beautiful woman with a strong body." Davina led the affirmations.

"We are beautiful women with strong bodies." We echoed her uncertain voice.

"Because of my distress, I am able to understand when others are in deep pain."

"Because of our distress, we are able to understand when others are in deep pain."

I heard my voice rise above the others.

"Since I have survived this, I can survive anything."

Buki read us a letter she was going to send to the dead grandmother who had cut off all her sexual organs and sewn her up, in a female rite of passage.

There were tears rolling down her face as she read the letter.

"Dear Taiwo. You sliced open my soul and then you told me I can't show it to anyone else. You took a great deal away from me. Because of you, I now carry with me an untouchable wound."

Sobbing, she handed me the piece of paper. I continued reading the letter for her.

"Because of you, I feel like a helpless cripple. I sometimes want to kill myself. All because of what you did to me, a child who could not say no, a child who could not defend herself. It would be easy to hate you, but I can't because you are part of me. You are me."

We each wrote the name of our abusers in a piece of paper, raised it over a candle, and watched as the flames consumed it. Buki blew up a green balloon. We went to Davina's backyard and watched as she released it in the dark. It was hard to see where the balloon went, but at least it had floated out of our hands.

I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free. I didn't feel guilty about burning my mother's name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too.

It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames.

When I came home from the meeting, I found Joseph sitting in the living room with Brigitte on his lap.

"Listen to this." He grabbed her and jumped up. "Say it again, pumpkin."

"Say what again?" I asked.

"She said Dada."

At his prodding, Brigitte said something that sounded like Dada.

"Say it again." We were both cheering.

Her eyes lit up as she watched us.

"Sweetie, say it again, please," I said, secretly rooting for "Mama."

She clapped her hands, keeping up with our excitement.

"Oh please, honey, say it again. Dada. Dada."

"Mama. Mama. Manman."

She said Dada and laughed.

Joseph jumped up in the air and simulated a high five.

"She's saving Mama for when she can really talk," I said. "Dada is such a random sound."

"You're green with envy and you know it."

I went to the kitchen to make myself some tea.

"How was the meeting?" he asked.

"Good."

"Your mother called. She says she urgently needs to talk to you."

The baby was saying Dada over and over, trying to capture all his attention.

"Your therapist called too," he said. "She wanted to know if you'd be coming for your visit tomorrow. I said yes."

I let him play with the baby while I went in to call my mother.

"Marc is downstairs making me some eggs," she said.

"Are you all right?" I asked. "Joseph said it was urgent."

"It was an urgent feeling. I just wanted to hear your voice."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"You think it's unhealthy, don't you? My sudden dependence on you."

"As long as you're all right."

"How is my granddaughter?"

"Fine. How about you? How is your situation?"

"I can't sleep. Are you coming this weekend?"

"On Saturday," I said.

"I am really happy we have this time again."

"Me too."

"I got a telegram from Manman today. She said everything is ready now for her funeral. She's glad about that."

"Did you tell her that you're pregnant?"

"I'll tell her when I'm further along. I don't want her to worry about me going crazy again."

"You sure you're feeling all right?"

"Better. Maybe this child, she's getting used to me. Man-man tells me she's worried Atie will die from chagrin. Louise left a big hole in her. It's sad."

"She loved her."

"Atie will live. She always has."

I heard Marc's voice offering her some scrambled eggs.

"I'll wait for you on Saturday," she said.

"Bye, Mama."

"Bye, my star."

I sat up and wrote Tante Atie a letter. Now that she was reading, I wanted to send her something that only her eyes could see, something that she didn't have to have other people listen to. I imagined her standing there next to me, as we reminisced about the konbit potlucks, the lotteries we almost never won, and our dead relatives who we had such a kinship to, as though they were our restless spirits, shadows wandering in the darkness as our bodies slipped into bed.

Chapter 32

M
y therapist was a gorgeous black woman who was an initiated Santeria priestess. She had done two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, which showed in the brightly colored prints, noisy bangles, and open sandals she wore.

Her clinic was in a penthouse overlooking the Seekonk River. "You pulled a sudden disappearing act last week," she said as I looked over the collection of Brazilian paintings and ceremonial African masks on her walls.

She put out a cigarette while looking through my file. "Let's go for a stroll so you can tell me all about it."

We usually had our sessions in the woods by the river.

"So what is happening in your life?" she asked, waving a stick towards a stray dog behind us.

I told her about my sudden trip to Haiti, the trip that had caused me to miss my appointment the week before. I told her about my mother coming for me and my finding out that my grandmother, and her mother before her, had all been tested.

"I thought we were going to do some more work before you could actually try confrontational therapy," she said.

"I wasn't thinking about it as confrontational therapy. I just felt like going. And since Joseph was away I took advantage and went."

"I know a woman who went back to Brazil and took a jar full of dust from her mother's grave so she would always have her mother line with her. Did you have a chance to reclaim your mother line?"

"My mother line was always with me," I said. "No matter what happens. Blood made us one."

"You're telling me you never hated your mother."

"I felt a lot of pain."

"Did you hate her?" she asked.

"Maybe hate is not the right word."

"We all hate people at one time or another. If we can hate ourselves, why can't we hate other people?"

"I can't say I hated her."

"You don't want to say it. Why not?" she asked.

"Because it wouldn't be right, and maybe because it wouldn't be true."

"Maybe? You hesitate—"

"She wants to be good to me now," I said, "and I want to accept it."

"That's good."

"I want to forget the hidden things, the conflicts you always want me to deal with. I want to look at her as someone I am meeting again for the first time. An acquaintance who I am hoping will become a friend. I grew up believing that people could be in two places at once. Meeting for the first time again is not such a hard concept."

We watched a crew team paddling across the river.

"Did you ask your grandmother why they test their daughters?" she asked.

"To preserve their honor."

"Did you express your anger?"

"I tried, but it was very hard to be angry at my grandmother. After all she was only doing something that made her feel like a good mother. My mother too."

"And how was it, seeing your mother?"

"She is pregnant now."

"So she is in a relationship."

"It's the same man she was involved with when I was there."

"Are they married?"

No.

"They sleep together?"

"Obviously."

"Did she sleep with him when you were home?" she asked.

"She would never have a man in the house when I was home. It would be a bad example."

"How does it make you feel knowing that she slept with someone? Don't you feel betrayed that after all these years, she does the very thing that she didn't want you to do?"

"I can't feel mad anymore."

A jogging couple bumped my shoulders as they raced by.

"Why aren't you mad anymore?" she asked.

"I feel sorry for her."

"Why?"

"The baby, it's roused up a lot of old emotions in my mother."

"What kinds of emotions?"

"Maybe emotions is not the word. It's brought back images of the rape."

"Like you did."

"Yes," I said. "Like I did."

"What about your father? Have you given him more thought?"

"I would rather not call him my father."

"We will have to address him soon. When we do address him, I'll have to ask you to confront your feelings about him in some way, give him a face."

"It's hard enough to deal with, without giving him a face."

"Your mother never gave him a face. That's why he's a shadow. That's why he can control her. I'm not surprised she's having nightmares. This pregnancy is bringing feelings to the surface that she had never completely dealt with.

You will never be able to connect with your husband until you say good-bye to your father."

"I am seeing my mother this weekend," I said.

"You are establishing relations again."

"Joseph and I are going to visit her so we can get to know her friend."

"You mean her lover, the father of her child."

"Yes."

"Is it hard for you to imagine your mother sexually?"

"I've never really tried."

"Do it now."

"Do what?"

"Imagine her in the sexual act," she said.

I tried to imagine my mother, wincing and clenching her teeth as the large shadow of a man mounted her. She didn't like it. She even looked like she was crying, even though her lips were saying things that made him think otherwise.

"Do you imagine that it's the same for her as it is for you?"

"I imagine that she tries to be brave."

"Like you."

"Maybe."

"Do you think you'll ever stop thinking of what you and Joseph do as being brave?"

"I am his wife. There are certain things I need to do to keep him."

"The fear of abandonment. You always have that in the back of your mind, don't you?"

"I feel like my daughter is the only person in the world who won't leave me."

"Do you understand now why your mother was so adamantly against your being with a man, a much older man at that? It is only natural, dear heart. She also felt that you were the only person who would never leave her."

We stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Two swans were floating along trying to catch up with one another. The crew team was rowing towards the edge of the river.

"During your visit, did you go to the spot where your mother was raped?" Rena asked. "In the thick of the cane field. Did you go to the spot?"

"No, not really."

"What does that mean?"

"I ran past it."

"You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you'll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts."

Chapter 33

M
y mother met us on the stoop outside the house. She was wearing a large tent dress with long puffy sleeves. She looked calmer, rested. Her skin was evened out with a powdered mahogany glow.

Joseph had driven in our station wagon, while I brought Brigitte in my mother's car.

"Ca va byen?" My mother kissed Joseph four times on the cheek. "I brought your wife and daughter back in one piece."

She took the baby from my arms and shoved Marc forward to introduce himself.

Marc was a bit fatter than I remembered. He was squeezed into a small gray jacket and a large pair of pants held up by suspenders.

Marc recited his full name as he shook Joseph's hand.

"Marc has a lot of the old ways," my mother said to Joseph.

The kitchen smelled like fried fish, boiled cabbage, and mayonnaise.

"What have you been up to?" my mother said, curling Brigitte up in her arms. Brigitte reached up to grab my mother's very short hair.

"She said Dada," Joseph announced proudly.

"Even when she grows up and gets a doctorate," Marc said, "it will not count as much."

Marc wrapped an apron around his waist and turned over the fish in the skillet.

My mother took Joseph on a tour of the house, the tour he had never gotten. He followed her obediently, beaming.

She moved us into the backyard where she had placed her picnic table near her hibiscus patch. She stood over Joseph's shoulder, to show him how to sprinkle chopped pickled peppers on his plantains.

"What kind of music do you do?" Marc asked Joseph as we sat down to eat.

"I try to do all kinds of music," Joseph said. "I think music should speak not only to the ear, but mostly to the soul."

"That's a very vague answer," my mother said.

"I think they want to know if you get paid," I said.

"We're not being as graceless as that," Marc said. "I was thinking more in terms of merengue, calypso, soka, samba?"

"Is there money in it?" asked my mother.

"I do okay," Joseph said. "I play with friends when they need someone, but trust me, I have a little nest egg saved up."

My mother winked for only my eyes to see. She had prepared for this, was set to make Joseph love her. "I have something to tell you," she said to me. "I have made a decision."

Turning back to Joseph, my mother asked, "Is that how you bought your place in Providence?"

"Sure is," Joseph said.

"I really was asking more about your opinion of music," Marc insisted.

"We hear you," said my mother.

"He has much of the old ways," she whispered again in my ear.

Marc pretended not to hear.

"Where are your roots?" my mother asked Joseph as she fed plantain chunks to the baby.

"I was born in the South," he said. "Louisiana."

"They speak some kind of Creole there," she said.

"I know it," he said. "Sometimes I try to talk the little I know with my wife, your daughter."

"I feel like I could have been Southern," my mother said.

"We're all African," said Marc.

"Non non, me in particular," said my mother. "I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?" she said turning to Marc.

Marc shrugged.

"I try to get him to church," my mother said, "just to listen to them, but he won't go. You tell him, Joseph. Tell this old Haitian, with his old ways, about a Negro spiritual."

"They're like prayers," Joseph said, "hymns that the slaves used to sing. Some were happy, some sad, but most had to do with freedom, going to another world. Sometimes that other world meant home, Africa. Other times, it meant Heaven, like it says in the Bible. More often it meant freedom."

Joseph began to hum a spiritual.

Oh Mary, don't you weep!

"That's a Negro spiritual," said my mother.

"It sounds like vaudou song," said Marc. "He just described a vaudou song. Erzulie, don't you weep," he sang playfully.

"I told you I could have been Southern." My mother laughed.

"Do you have a favorite Negro spiritual?" Joseph asked my mother.

"I sure do."

"Give us a rendition," urged Marc.

"You'll regret asking," said my mother.

"All of you will help me if I stumble." She rocked Brigitte's body to the solemn lift of her voice.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

A long ways from home.

We all clapped when she was done. Brigitte, too.

"I want that sung at my funeral," my mother said. "My mother's got me thinking this way; you've got to plan for everything."

The day ended too soon for my mother. We never got a moment alone for her to tell me what she had decided. That night as we said good-bye, she wrapped her arms around my body and would not let go.

"She will come back," Marc said, separating us.

"Us Caco women," she said, "when we're happy, we're very happy, but when we're sad, the sadness is deep."

On the ride back to Providence, Joseph kept singing my mother's spiritual, adding some bebop to the melody, as though to reverse the sad tone.

"Your mother's good folk," he said. "I always understood why she didn't like me. She didn't want to give up a gem like you."

My mother had left two messages on our machine by the time we got home.

"We had a nice day, pa vrè?" she said when I called back. "Did Joseph enjoy himself? The two of you, you go very well together. Marc thought he was old for you, but he liked meeting him anyway."

She stopped to catch her breath.

"Are you really okay?" I asked.

"It was wonderful to see you."

"The nightmares, have they stopped?"

"I didn't tell you what I had decided. I am going to get it out of me."

"When did you decide?"

"Last night when I heard it speak to me."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I am sure, it spoke to me. It has a man's voice, so now I know it's not a girl. I am going to get it out of me. I am going to get it out of me, as the stars are my witness."

"Don't do anything rash."

"Everywhere I go, I hear it. I hear him saying things to me. You tintin, malpròp. He calls me a filthy whore. I never want to see this child's face. Your child looks like
Manman.
This child, I will never look into its face."

"But it's Marc's child."

"What if there is something left in me and when the child comes out it has that other face?"

"You mean what if it looks like me?"

"No, that is not what I mean."

"Marc has no children; he must want some."

"If he wants some badly enough, he can have some."

I heard Marc asking who she was talking to.

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said before hanging up. "Pray to the Virgin Mother for me."