First Marcel was fired from the position he had been promoted to, Court of Appeals. A week later arrested at his house during dinner. The Tonton Macoutes waited patiently while he pushed his chair back and laid down his napkin, kissing his young wife on the forehead before he left. One of the Tontons grabbed a chicken leg on his way out. They would not let Marcel go to the bedroom to kiss his baby girl good-bye.
Alone, having nothing else to do (electricity out as usual at night, phones not working), Leta cleared the dishes. In her vanished Marcel’s place, she found a puddle of urine soaking the chair cushion and the floor beneath.
The next day, the mother superior called Leta in. Mother had a big, round Irish face and innocent blue eyes that refused to acknowledge the horrors in front of them. An accommodationist’s salvation. Dechoukaj.
“You must fire me,” Leta said.
“Otherwise they said they would take the girls. They will burn down the church.”
“I’ll be gone in five minutes.” Leta went for a last time into the empty classroom and cried the way it is only possible when you are sure what you have lost is gone forever. She stole a blackboard eraser and put it into her purse. She did not care if mother superior forgave her.
That night her husband’s family home was burned to the ground. Marcel’s body was found macheted and set on fire on the Grande Rue.
Leta borrowed money from her parents and boarded a tap tap with little Marie bundled in her arms. She headed north since that was the direction of the first available bus. She was going to the pevi andeyò, the outside country, an exile into a country she did not know. Wherever she ended up, it could never again be in the capital.
* * *
Marie grew up in a small, rickety house by the sea, with a corrugated-tin roof. She was not saddened by the way Maman now was because she didn’t remember her any other way. What she was told when she was older was that upon coming to the poor village of her great-grand-maman, Leta handed over the baby and refused to care for her again. What had brought her such joy before now only reminded her of no longer, as in she was no longer a schoolteacher, no longer a wife. Her bright future gone, never to reappear. But Grand-Maman would not give up. She forced Leta to attend the ceremonies, and for the first time in her young life Leta experienced what her parents had tried so hard to keep from her — the wild, irrational strength in powerlessness.
Leta saw women who begged or worked all day long in rags come to the ceremonies in the middle of the night freshly bathed, dressed in immaculate white. They beat their drums, they sang, they danced, with a freedom and dignity she had not imagined for them. The first time a goat was sacrificed, the blood drained into a bucket, she was horrified, but then she remembered the horrors she had fled, and she understood that this was nothing worse than the truth that had been kept from her before.
Now she wore the loose dresses of the peasant women, kerchiefs over her head. No one would ever guess what Leta had been before, and that was as she wanted it, because as the saying went, revenge has long arms, and a widow was considered vengeful. After a year of dancing and spirits and magic powders, Leta came one day to Grand-Maman’s house and took back her baby girl. Then she began instruction in the old ways.
* * *
During the years of the drought, food was scarce, and Maman would boil up yam, next day boil the peelings from the yam, then, if they still didn’t get lucky, sugarcane, or bitter plantain. She convinced Marie the jellied, sweetened water was the most wonderful food in the world, manna from the gods, and she was the luckiest of girls to have it. Marie was ashamed to admit her stomach still stabbed with hunger because that would be a breach of faith to Maman. Instead she wrapped the hunger belt tighter around her waist. On the darkest days Maman would bake dirt cookies, mixing a pat of butter and bit of sugar with clay that tasted like the ghost of food. Only a cook as good as Maman could make starvation taste good.
* * *
Their luck seemed to change when the blans in the pink house were looking for a new cook. They despaired of hiring another French, one who wouldn’t endure being out in the hinterlands. A friend of Maman’s knew her skill and suggested her. After that, at least there was no more hunger. Growing up, Marie always saw Maman working, either cooking at the pink house or healing as medsen fey, leaf doctor. After Grand-Maman passed five years later, maman also served as a priestess. She had become another kind of teacher, knew all the people of the village, and helped them through her new abilities. Understood it was always the choice of the gods, the béké, if a ceremony worked or not.
* * *
Marie’s happiest memories as a young girl were watching her mother painting sacred figures on walls, doors, or drapos, flags. Often the two of them went off for the day into what remained of the ancient forests to search for the ingredients in her remèd, her powders and elixirs. They would walk single file, hiking the steep trails for hours, stopping only for a simple meal of fruit and bread. At those times, resting under a tree and holding Marie in her arms, Leta could recall what happiness felt like.
“The trees are sacred,” she said.
On Marie’s eighth birthday, Maman took her to a sacred mapou tree. “This is the forgetting tree,” she said. “Like the ones in Africa but different. When anything bad happens, I want you to come here. The tree is where you leave the bad memory behind so that it doesn’t poison your life.”
Marie fidgeted, wanting to go home, but Leta shook her.
“Listen to my words. My words are all you will have someday.”
* * *
Marie was forbidden to go to the ceremonies deep in the forest. She lay nights in her bed, falling asleep to the soft drumbeats, which comforted like a mother’s heartbeat. In the daytime, no one acknowledged the ceremonies happened because the military had banned them, and this was how the young Marie discovered what a secret, hidden, or even double life meant. Finally one night, Marie, unable to resist any longer, snuck out of bed and followed the sounds past the sacred mapou tree, past the trails that she knew so well from their gathering trips, deeper into the forest than she had ever before been.
The drums grew so close she felt their vibration in her body. She hid behind a bush and watched her maman in the middle of a crowd of people. In white, she was dancing provocatively back and forth around a large fire, flames nightmarish in the fierce heat, encouraging the drummers to beat even more wildly. Her face, strange and distorted, was unfamiliar: lips pulled back, eyes rolled up into her head, whites visible, head canted as if listening to words instructing her from the open night sky. Marie broke out into a sweat, her eight-year-old’s heart beating madly like a small animal’s. She was about to run into the crowd to rescue Maman when a man joined the dancing. Back and forth they moved, snaking their bodies around each other, and Marie had the frightening thought that this stranger might be her father, that maybe it was he she was being kept away from. Again, she rose from her place of hiding, ready to run to her now reunited parents, when Maman ripped off her shirt.