As I write to you today, resting next to me is a packet of letters my mother gave to me a year or so ago. Some of the letters are written in her mother's hand. This is all I have by which to know her. They are the last letters penned by her my mother received. My mother had just left Haiti for graduate law study in Paris. Her mother intended to visit her there-it would be her own first journey off of the island. The letter paper is thin, the ink beginning to fade in places. The first letter, dated December 1, 1961, begins:
Les chants de Noel avaient commence a me jeter dans I'angoisse; tu sais ce n'est pas du sentiment-quand on les entonne Us me vont droit au coeur et me donnent un frisson de coeur qui agit sur tous mes membres est-ce pourquoi je ferai tous mes efforts pour realiser mon voyage. II parait que ce sera la ma guirison aussi j'ai commence sens m'illusioner a confectionner mes linges; il est encore tot mais cela uaut mieux.
[The Christmas carols had begun to throw me into a deep state of anguish; you know, it isn't nostalgia that I feel, when they are sung they go straight to my heart and send a chill through it that permeates all of my limbs. Thus, I have decided to do all in my power to bring about my voyage; it seems that it will be my cure and so I have begun, without giving in to disillusionment, to make my travel clothes; it is still early for such things, but it is preferable to do so.]
I read these lines and feel the deep emotions my grandmother must have felt at being separated from her youngest daughter. I see in her words also the heart of a poet. I see myself in these lines, knowing how sensitive I am to change of any kind, how deeply loyal to those I love, always missing those who are at a distance. Mama Fofo, as she was called, was an artist of a kind, a seamstress. She was, thus, literally planning to make her clothes for the voyage, in the same loving way that she had made her own daughters' dresses, the same way she had dutifully put fingers to needle, to thread, to cloth in the making of wardrobes for others, back curved over her Singer sewing machine, in order to make a living for herself and her family. She was a single mother raising four children in Haiti from the late 1920s through the 1930s.
Reading Mama Fofo's letters help me to restore some missing links in my own life; they help me to recapture a connection to a woman whom I never met but from whom I have inherited some personality traits: warmth, sensitivity, but also a tendency, at times, not to take best care of myself. Through these letters, I better understand both her and my own character.
Mama Fofo is preparing to go on this voyage which both lifts her spirit and creates great anxiety in her. She does not have the money to go and is trying to call in loans made to friends in need. Many of them refuse to return the money, sums at times as low as twenty dollars. They do not seem to think that the trip is so serious; they do not realize her true need. Mama Fofo's money is lost, so it seems, and in the midst of trying to realize this dream of crossing the Atlantic in order to see her daughter, she finds out that she has placed her trust in the wrong people. She writes: "reellement on ne doit compter quesursoi" [really, we can only count on ourselves]. The letters then detail, over the course of a few weeks, what money she has been able to put aside or reclaim. There are gifts from her other children and also from my mother. Mama Fofo was sixty-five at the time she wrote this letter. And I, some thirty years after her death, have just begun to learn such lessons, to be generous without expense to oneself.
I read a meditation today that speaks of this, a Taoist teaching on the theme of caring. It was written by Deng Ming Dao in his book, 365 Tao. Let me set it down for you here:
Those who follow Tao believe in using sixteen attributes on behalf of others: mercy, gentleness, patience, nonattachment, control, skill, joy, spiritual love, humility, reflection, restfulness, seriousness, effort, controlled emotion, magnanimity, and concentration. Whenever you need to help another, draw upon these qualities. Notice that self-sacrifice is not included in this list. You do not need to destroy yourself to help another. Your overall obligation is to complete your own journey along your personal Tao. As long as you can offer solace to others on your same path, you have done the best that you can.
I believe that Mama Fofo embodied most of the above but it was in the last moments of her life that she realized that she did not need to destroy herself in order to help others. Had she learned this lesson sooner, would she have made it to Paris? Would the last moments of her life have been less fraught with the fear of never seeing her daughter again? Or had she already realized that she was losing a battle against time, losing that battle to her penury, her lesson learned too late?
Her last letter is dated January 4, 1962, three days after Haitian independence is celebrated. Her first lines reveal that she has finally gathered nearly all the money necessary for the voyage. She is missing only eighty-five U.S. dollars. At this point, she hopes that the trip will take place in the coming summer. She writes of possibly selling her house as some businessmen have made her an offer for the property. She hesitates to sell her children's childhood home and is afraid that the affair "causera ma mort" [will cause my death]. There are three more letters in the packet, dated the eighth, ninth, and tenth of January 1962. Each recounts the final moments of Mama Fofo, who passed away on Epiphany, the sixth of January 1962, after some days of complaining that her heart was tight as a fist. Did she die of a broken heart? Of a heart attack? This is something only she knew. The letters written by other hands reveal how loved she was by her children and closest family friends, how much love she had during the course of her hard-working life, even though, in the end, she could not make her way to one, among the others, whom she loved greatly.
My mother received Mama Fofo's last letters along with the announcements of her death. How deep her shock, her loss-I cannot imagine. At this age, still reaching out toward my own dreams, I cannot imagine my life without my mother and father even though I see my own parents rarely, living as we do in different countries. I was born eight years after her death, but I am very much like her. My mother and I have had the opportunity to give life to aspects of a relationship that was taken away prematurely, in reverse. I can learn from my grandmother's errors and build on her legacy. Her generosity need not be forgotten. The fact that she passed away on Epiphany, the day on which Catholics celebrate the adoration of the Three Kings bearing gifts for Christ, impresses upon me the necessity of remembering that even within the most humble of beings and across racial, class, and gender lines-there can be a noble heart. It is that heart that I celebrate and want to nurture in myself. It is not lost upon me, too, that Independence Day had just been celebrated and that she could not, as a working-class, single, Haitian woman of a certain age, secure her own independence.