You turn to books to lose yourself. You read stories about people from other places. You read stories about people from here. You read stories about people from other places who now live here. You decide you will become a writer. Through your writing they will see you, dyaspora child, the connections and disconnections that have made you the mosaic that you are. They will see where you are from and the worlds that have made you. They will see you.
RESTAVEK by Jean-Robert Cadet
"A blan (white person) is coming to visit today. He's your papa, but when you see him, don't call him papa. Say 'Bonjour, monsieur' and disappear. If the neighbors ask who he was, you tell them that you don't know. He is such a good man, we have to protect his reputation. That's what happens when men of good character have children with dogs," said Florence to me in Kreyol when I was about seven or eight years old. Before noon, a small black car pulled into the driveway and a white man got out of it. As I made eye contact with him, he waved at me and quickly stepped up to the front door before I had a chance to say "Bonjour, monsieur." Florence let him into the house and I disappeared into the backyard. Almost immediately I heard him leaving.
At the age of five I had begun to hate Florence. "I wish your manman was my manman too," I told Eric, a little boy my age who lived next door. One day while we played together, Eric's mother pulled a handkerchief from her bra, wet its corner on her tongue, knelt down on one knee, and wiped off a dirty spot on her son's face. Eric pushed her hand away.
"Ah, Manman, stop it," he said.
I looked at her with bright eyes. "Do it to me instead," I said.
She stared at my face for a moment and replied with an affectionate smile, "But your face is not dirty."
To which I answered, "I don't care. Do it to me anyway." She gently wiped at a spot on my face, as I grinned from ear to ear.
My biological mother had died before her image was ever etched in my mind. I cannot remember the time when I was brought to Florence, the woman I called Manman. She was a beautiful Negress with a dark-brown complexion and a majestic presence. She had no job, but earned a small income from tenants who leased her inherited farmland. She also entertained high government officials as a means to supplement her income. Her teenage son, Denis, was living with his paternal grandmother and attending private school. Florence claimed that her husband had died when her son was ten years old, but I never saw her wedding pictures.
I came into Florence's life one day when Philippe, her white former lover, paid her a surprise visit. He was a successful exporter of coffee and chocolate to the United States and Europe. Philippe lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with his parents, two brothers, and a niece. He arrived in his Jeep at Florence's two-story French country-style house in an upper-class section of the city. A bright-eyed, fat-cheeked, light-skinned black baby boy was in the backseat. Philippe parked the car, reached into the back seat, and took the baby out. He stood him on the ground and the baby toddled off. I was that toddler.
Philippe greeted Florence with a kiss on each cheek while she stared at the toddler. "Whose baby is this?" she asked, knowing the answer to her question.
"His mother died and I can't take him home to my parents. I'd like you to have him," said Philippe, handing Florence an envelope containing money.
"I understand," she said, taking the envelope. He embraced her again and drove off, leaving me behind. Philippe's problem was solved.
My mother had been a worker in one of Philippe's coffee factories below the Cahos mountains of the Artibonite Valley. Like the grand blans of the distant past who acknowledged their blood in the veins of their slave children by emancipating and educating them, Philippe was following tradition. Perhaps he thought that Florence would give me a better life.
"Angela," yelled Florence.
"Oui, Madame," answered the cook, approaching her.
"Take care of this little boy, will you? Find him something to eat," she instructed. Angela picked me up.
"What's his name?" she asked.
Florence thought for a moment and said, "Bobby." Florence did not want another child, but the financial arrangement she had with Philippe was too attractive for her to turn down. Every night I slept on a pile of rags in a corner of Florence's bedroom, like a house cat, until I was six years old. Then she made me sleep under the kitchen table.
Florence did not take care of me. From the time I entered the household, various cooks met my basic needs, which freed Florence from having to deal with me. I was never greatly attached to any of the cooks, since none of them ever lasted for more than a year. Florence would fire them for burning a meal or for short-changing her when they returned from the market.
As I got older, I learned what kind of day I was going to have based on Florence's mood and tone of voice. When she was cheerful, the four-strip leather whip, called a matinet, would stay hung on its hook against the kitchen wall.
I knew of two groups of children in Port-au-Prince: the elite, and the very poor, the restaveks, or slave children.
Children of the elite are often recognized by their light skin and the fine quality of their clothes. They are encouraged by their parents to speak proper French instead of Kreyol, the language of the masses. They live in comfortable homes with detached servants' quarters and tropical gardens. Their weekly spending allowance far exceeds the monthly salary of their maids. They are addressed by the maids as "Monsieur" or "Mademoiselle" before their first names. They are chauffeured to the best private schools and people call them "ti (petit) bourgeois."
Children of the poor often have dark skin. They appear dusty and malnourished. In their one-room homes covered with rusted sheet metal there is no running water or electricity. Their meals of red beans, cornmeal, and yams are cooked under clouds of smoke spewed out by stoves made of three coconut-size stones and fueled by dry twigs and wood. They eat from calabash bowls with their fingers and drink from tin cans with sharp edges, sitting on logs while being bothered by flies. They squat in the underbrush and wipe themselves with rocks or leaves. At night, they sleep on straw mats or cardboard spread over dirty floors while bloodsucking bedbugs feast on their sweaty flesh. They walk several miles to ill-equipped public schools, where they depend on lunches of powdered milk donated by foreign countries that once depended on the slave labor of their ancestors. After school, they rush home to recite their lessons loudly in cadence before the Caribbean daylight fades away, or they walk a few miles to Champ-de-Mars, the park, and sit under street lamps to do their homework while moths zigzag above their heads.
Restaveks are slave children who belong to well-to-do families. They receive no pay and are kept out of school. Since the emancipation and independence of 1804, affluent blacks and mulattoes have reintroduced slavery by using children of the very poor as house servants. They promise poor families in faraway villages who have too many mouths to feed a better life for their children. Once acquired, these children lose all contact with their families and, like the slaves of the past, are sometimes given new names for the sake of convenience. The affluent disguise their evil deed with the label restavek, a term that means "staying with." Other children taunt them with the term because they are often seen in the streets running errands barefoot and dressed in dirty rags.