Marie had seen her mother’s body many times before. Maman had always told her to be proud of herself, her natural beauty, proud enough to keep it covered from others’ eyes. To see her mother’s nakedness in front of such a large group shook the girl. Having this man who might or might not be her father dancing closer and closer to Maman unnerved Marie, and she closed her eyes, paralyzed about what to do.
When she opened her eyes again, Maman’s shirt was back on as she gracefully dipped her bare arm into the fire, kept it there until Marie could clearly see the wrist gripped in flame, until she had to turn her eyes away. Now a large knife appeared in the man’s hand, and a scrawny, trussed chicken was brought from the crowd. As the head was cut off, Marie vomited into the bushes, then turned and ran home.
* * *
The next morning, Maman cut mango and laid out French bread for breakfast, mild as could be. Marie looked hard at the purple of the skin around her bandaged wrist.
“It’s nothing, doudou. A burn from the stove.”
“You’re lying.”
Maman’s face sharpened. “Watch yourself!”
“I saw you. You said that such was devil. To stay away.”
“You know that Grand-Maman taught me the old ways.”
“But—”
“We abandoned the old ways. I didn’t know better. The vodou healed me. It is about my relationship to god, to the villagers, to you, to nature. Remember our days under the trees? What did I tell you?”
“They are sacred.”
“They will save you when nothing else will.”
Marie lowered her voice although they were alone in the one-room house. “Was that Papa?”
“Where?”
“Dancing.”
“That was just a man. Vodou brings your father close to me. He is watching over us. Remember that.”
* * *
The first time Marie saw Jean-Alexi, she was a girl of ten. The village was celebrating, a wedding or a new car; any excuse was welcome. She was playing with the other children on the beach, and some boys stole the coins Maman gave her to go buy fresco, ices with her friends. As she cried, Jean-Alexi, teenaged with lean muscle, walked along smoking a joint, and looking at the pretty tifis, making loud noises to his gang. He swaggered, his pants riding provocatively low. His hair was done in dreads, which one hardly ever saw in the village. He was tall and thin, loose-jointed, so that he was all arms and legs and head coming toward you, like a fighting rooster. His skin was light almond yellow, his face small-featured, with a pointy chin that bobbed as he chewed — gum, tobacco? When he came by them, he saw her tears and bent down. “Ou byen? You okay? What make this little face go down, mwen petit fi?”
“They took my coins.”
In short order, the boys had their arms pinned back painfully, one of them had his finger broken, the coins urgently handed over to Jean-Alexi. “Okay, little Erzulie, what you want happen to des boys?”
“Kill them,” Marie screamed. She recognized the name Erzulie — the vodou goddess of love, always beautiful — from her maman, and his calling her that made her feel for the first time grown up.
He chuckled. “Oh, my Erzulie, she has a hot blood, moun.”
The boys cried like babies.
“Okay, tell you what. You crawl to her, and you kiss her feet, and maybe we let you live.”
“Non!” Marie screamed, jumping up and down on the sand, drunk on the new idea that she could inflict pain on those who hurt her. “That’s not what I said. Touye them, kill them.”
“Enouf this. You one spoiled girl child.” Marie pushed her chest out and tied her shirt up under her ribs. “Ou, titty too jenn, too baby. Maybe in couple years.” Jean-Alexi winked and threw her a piece of candy as he took off after an older girl who wagged her hips at him. The boys scattered free. Only later did Marie figure out that Jean-Alexi did not give back her coins.
Chapter 2
The pink house was built forty years ago for an English bride whose curls by then had turned white. Maman had been cooking in the pink house for five years when the old, white-curled lady, a schoolteacher way back, said to her, “Bring me someone ignorant to teach the Queen’s English to, someone to convert into God’s lamb,” and so Maman brought her own Marie each day. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Marie was taught that everything in England was heaven, and they on the island could not be helped for their ugliness, their sin that showed skin-deep.
The old lady told the young girl this even though she had lived on the island all forty years of her married life, lived there so long England was as much a fantasy as heaven, all her relatives long buried, she herself long forgotten, and the girl believed her. Marie was so good at English, she read out loud the silly Brontë and Austen stories (full of young women holding hankies and waiting to marry rich) the old woman loved so much that she lay back in her bed with a smile, as if she were already dead and in heaven.
* * *
Maman was such a fine chef because she knew the best dishes used both the sweet and the salt since that was the way of life. She told Marie of the time when she was a young girl, and the light in the deepest forest was gold, burning like a necklace around a rich woman’s neck, and the country was full of hope, but how after, it turned the dark of iron. In Maman’s mind, the country’s happiness and her own were the same, and the Troubles that came destroyed both. Some think bad luck comes like lightning, once in a lifetime, but Maman knew it was more like a rock slide, one thing setting off another until the end of one’s days, and so it was for them.
One of the village women grew jealous of Maman, her schooled ways and her healing, how she kept back from the rest as if she were slightly better, how even though she hid her pretty shape under sackcloth, it was still visible. That woman did some talking back in the capital and informed the Macoutes that Marcel’s widow was agitating in the countryside.
Ten years after she had come there, the men, on the way to somewhere else, decided to stop in the little village and settle old scores. They followed Maman into the forest, and as she gathered healing leaves, they gathered her. Because they were simple, brutal men, and she was defiant and unafraid, they killed her quickly, afraid of the rumors that she had magical powers.
That was how the men caught her in that black-bitter iron forest, the despair-filled dark jungle. After, just in case she might recognize them in the afterlife, they carved away her face. Marie thought maybe that was better — God had mercy and did not make her look back at the despair of her life.