The Dew Breaker

WEEK 1

Rézia, the owner of Ambiance Créole, the sole Haitian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, recites a long speech from the class manual:

“Four scones and seven tears ago, our fathers blew up this condiment…”

Odd, but Rézia doesn’t have a lisp when she attempts to speak English. Everything just gets mixed up in her mouth, like a birdcall in a storm.

Rézia always carries a white muslin handkerchief. As it flaps back and forth, ever so abruptly, it releases more and more of its vetiver fragrance, all the while looking like a kite that she’s using to send messages far away.

In spite of Rézia’s vetiver, the air in the classroom is scorching and it stings. The air conditioner has stopped humming as if to listen to us talk.

Mariselle, who’s shaped like a pencil even in her heavy French suit, stands up in a perfectly straight line and, in her deep voice that sounds like two people, simply states her name. She says it so quickly that it sounds shorter, as though she’s given herself a nickname, solely for the purposes of the class.

She’s asked to repeat her name. After a third time, she announces each syllable and they merge into two beautiful words, Mari Sèl, Salt Mary or Solitary Mary. You’re tempted to add “Pray for us” and I do, under my breath. I can’t stop watching the way she tugs at her thick, curly hair each time she opens her mouth, and I can see her scalp rise and fall as she pulls and releases, pulls and releases.

I wish I could sing to introduce myself. Perhaps everyone would be listening too hard to look at me.

I would sing “Brother Timonie.” It’s a song my father, a fisherman, used to sing whenever he thought a storm was coming.

I’d begin by asking everyone to pretend they were rowing with me, and I’d sing, Brother Timonie, row well, my friend. Don’t you see we’re in trouble? Brother Timonie, the wind’s blowing hard. And we must make it back to land.

This is not the first time I’ve called on Brother Timonie. At least it’s not the first time I’ve tried.

I asked my father once, Who was Brother Timonie?

He didn’t know. Maybe a fisherman who died at sea. Most of the songs he knew were about people who’d died at sea.

When I stand to speak, tapping my feet against my chair, the teacher decides to turn my introduction into an inquisition.

“And what do you do?” Her voice hisses, but is flat, never rising or falling.

I do nothing, I want to say. Not yet. I have been expelled from my country. That’s why I’m in this class at twenty-two years old.

Once we’re all done, the teacher presents herself, saying, “I’m June. You can call me June. If you pay attention and study hard, the test will be a piece of cake and you’ll all be considered high school graduates in no time.” She looks young and beefy and flat-chested and sits on the desk with her bare cream legs dangling in front of us. She doesn’t know what an enormous vow she’s made. A diploma in no time? It’s like those lawyers who promise green cards in a few weeks.

Rézia nicknames her “Flat Tit” when she notices how like little dandelion buds her breasts look in her pleated strapless sundress. Mariselle is Mother Mary and I’m “the baby funeral singer.” I am one of the few professional funeral singers of my generation. At least I was.

WEEK 2

When I was a girl in Léogâne, some days my mother and I would play telephone. We’d tie two empty condensed-milk cans to the ends of a long rope and sing to each other from far away. Sometimes I’d hide inside the house, under our cedar table, and she’d remain outside, but we could still hear each other, without shouting.

During carnival, we’d use our telephone rope for a maypole dance. We’d skip around each other and duck under the ropes, taking turns at being the maypole and the dancer. We always thought, or she always thought, we were weaving the wind, plaiting it into a braid as thick as the rainbows that were sometimes above our heads.

Whenever she got tired of playing, my mother would look up at the clouds and say, “Look, Freda, Papa’s listening to us up there. He’s eating coconut with God and he’s making a cloud for us with coconut meat.”

I thought her mind was gone whenever she said things like that. She also embroidered clouds on pieces of cloth, tiny crimson cirrus threads.

My father used to look at the way the sunset outshone the clouds to decide what the sea would be like the next day. A ruby twilight would mean a calm sea, but a blood-red dawn might spoil everything.

WEEK 3

Blue is the only color I was able to see whenever I was at sea with my father. For a while we forgot there were other colors. Oh, I remembered yellow too, yellow like the sun almost going down.

“Yellow as in sunflowers and marigolds,” Rézia observes, fanning herself with her handkerchief and smothering us with vetiver.

“Marigolds, the flower of a thousand lives,” Mariselle adds. She puffs on her long, thin Gauloises, covering the filtered tips with her mandarin-red lipstick.

“Yellow like my boyfriend,” Rézia says, “the man of a thousand lies.”

The teacher shows us a picture of a painting full of sunflowers and says, “Look how there are no dead spots in this painting.”

Life is full of dead spots.

I used to wear only new black dresses so I could blend in at the funerals where I sang. Now I wear used clothes, “Kennedys,” in rainbow colors, and a red headband around my head, to brighten my dead spots.

WEEK 4

It was Rézia’s idea that she, Mariselle, and I go to her restaurant after class. We didn’t always understand what was going on in the classroom and, being the only Haitians, we thought we might be able to explain certain lessons to one another, like the grammatical rules for present perfect, which at first I thought meant perfect presents or matchless gifts.

Flowered plastic sheaths were draped over the tables in the dining room, but Rézia would uncover one table so we could drink on the new-looking wooden surface. The walls around us were covered with bright little paintings, portraits of young boys playing with tops and marbles and flying kites, old men casting nets in the ocean, women walking barefoot to the market with large baskets on their heads. There was a dusty fan overhead that Rézia said was only turned on when the cook burned the food and she needed to air out the place. We put on the fan and sat with our knees touching because the table was so small. Only Mariselle would pull her chair away, putting a few inches between us and herself.

I was the one who started it one night over a bottle of urine-colored rum from Rézia’s pantry. Mariselle would have only red wine, small bottles of Pinot Noir, which she brought herself.

“I used to play telephone with my mother… I forgot all colors except blue when I went fishing with my father… I was asked to sing at the national palace…”

I thought exposing a few details of my life would inspire them to do the same and slowly we’d parcel out our sorrows, each walking out with fewer than we’d carried in.

WEEK 5

Before my father was arrested, the president of the republic would drive through my town on New Year’s Eve and throw money from the window of his big shiny black car. Sun rays would wrap themselves around the brand-new coins, making them glow like glass. When we heard that the president was coming, we would clean our entire house, dust our cedar table, and my father would stay home from the sea in case the president chose to get out of the car and walk into our house, to offer us something extra, a bag of rice, a pound of beans, a gallon of corn oil, a promise of future entrance to the medical school or the agricultural school in Damien, something that would have bought our loyalty forever, so that twenty, thirty, forty years after he was long dead, we might still be saying, “Things were hard, but we once had a president who gave me a sack of rice, some beans, and a gallon of cooking oil. It was the first and last time anyone in power gave me anything.” As if this sack of rice, this pound of beans, this gallon of cooking oil were the gold, silver, and bronze medals in the poverty Olympics.

WEEK 6

Two trees, 10 feet apart.

The teacher writes this on the board, turning around to look at our baffled faces. We’ve all grown accustomed to the suffocating heat in the classroom. All of us except her. She wears as few pieces of clothing as possible, yet still sweats so much that she must cover her hands in chalk dust to reduce her prints on the board.

Two trees, 10 feet apart. Taller tree, 50 feet tall, casts a 20-foot shadow. Shorter tree casts a 15-foot shadow. The sun’s shining on each tree from the same angle. How tall is the shorter tree?

It sounds like a riddle that could take a lifetime to solve. We have too much on our minds to unravel these types of mysteries. M’bwè pwa.

“We’re not God,” Rézia says, lowering her head onto the restaurant table. The bottoms of our glasses have begun to stain the exposed wood, circles touching and overlapping. “Who are we to know how tall a tree should be?”

WEEK 7

Tonight we cook an entire meal together. Mariselle fries the plantains and ends up with a hot-oil burn on the knuckle of her middle finger. Rézia makes the meat, stewed goat. I cook the rice with pigeon peas.

We talk about what brought us here.

Mariselle left because her husband, a painter, had painted an unflattering portrait of the president, which was displayed in a gallery show. He was shot leaving the show.

I was asked to leave the country by my mother because I wouldn’t accept an invitation to sing at the national palace. But I also left because long ago my father had disappeared. He’d had a fish stall at the market. One day, one macoute came to take it over and another one took my father away. When my father returned, he didn’t have a tooth left in his mouth. In one night, they’d turned him into an old, ugly man. The next night he took his boat out to sea and, with a mouth full of blood, vanished forever.

I remember the exact moment I learned about my father’s disappearance. I was lying in bed when I felt the thin cotton sheet covering my body rise. My mother hadn’t brought any light into the room, but I could see her clearly, a splinter of moonlight reflected in the tears falling down her face.

“Your papa’s across the waters, lòt bò dlo,” she had whispered. And in my head had sprouted images of my father lost at sea, rowing farther and farther away until he became as small as a leaf bobbing on the crest of the most distant wave. This is when I began to sing. So he could hear me singing his songs from the crest of that wave.

This is Rézia’s story: When she was a girl, her parents couldn’t afford to keep her, so they sent her to live with an aunt who ran a brothel. They lived in three rooms behind the brothel and that’s where Rézia spent most of her time. One night when she was sleeping, a uniformed man walked in. She dug herself into the bed, but it did no good, so she passed out.

“I can always make myself faint when I’m afraid,” Rézia says, fanning the smoke from the pots away from her face. “When I woke up in the morning, my panties were gone. My aunt and I never spoke about it. But on her deathbed she asked for my forgiveness. She said this man had threatened to put her in prison if she didn’t let him have me that night.”

WEEK 8

Mariselle brings in newspapers that we scour for news from home. She reads one report about a group of armed exiles, a New York-based militia, planning an invasion. Another about a radio reporter in Port-au-Prince being arrested and taken to the Casernes Dessalines barracks for “questioning.” Mariselle reads all this to us in a deep, well-paced voice that sounds like it should be on the radio. When she comes across a name she recognizes, she puts the paper down, closes her eyes, and wipes her lipstick off with the back of her hand.

“I went to school with his brother,” she says. “His father and mine were friends.”

WEEK 9

We fail our practice tests, except Rézia, who gets seventy percent, enough to pass.

“It’s not normal,” I complain. “We studied as much as you.”

“Listen to the baby funeral singer,” Mariselle says, wrapping her manicured hands around the neck of her dark green wine bottle. “You have so much time ahead to redo these things, retake these tests, reshape your whole life.”

WEEK 10

We drink too much and stay too long at the restaurant. Mariselle and I have grown used to the idea that we may never get diplomas out of the class.

Mariselle uncorks her second Pinot Noir of the evening. Rézia and I stick to the rum. We like the fiery, bitter taste and the way it makes us foggy right away. I know I’m ruining my voice, but who cares?

The people inside the little paintings are beginning to sway back and forth for the first time. Or is it my head that’s dancing? They walk past the borders and merge with our shadows on the wall.

“Let’s talk about something cheerful,” Rézia says. Her voice is slurred and she sounds sleepy. She’s the most drunk of the three of us, consuming more spirits in celebration for passing yet another practice test that Mariselle and I have failed.

“How does a person become a funeral singer, anyway?” Mariselle asks. She throws her hands across my shoulders. Cigarette ashes rain on my orange Salvation Army dress.

The first time I ever sang in public was at my father’s memorial Mass. I sang “Brother Timonie,” a song whose cadence rises and falls, like the waves of the ocean. I sang it through my tears, and later people would tell me that my sobs reminded them of the incoming tide. From that moment on I became a funeral singer.

Every time there was a funeral in Léogâne, I was asked to sing. I would sing my father’s fishing songs and sometimes improvise my own, right there, next to the coffin, in front of the family, at the funeral home or at the church. At other times, I would sing “Ave Maria” or “Amazing Grace,” if the family requested them. But I was always appreciated and well compensated.

“Tell me something cheerful,” Rézia objects with a mouth full of rice. “Enough about funerals. Enough!”

“Jackie Kennedy came to Haiti last year.” Mariselle perks up. She drops her empty glass on the table, breaking off a chunk at the bottom.

“Who’s she?” Rézia picks up the piece of glass and tosses it behind her.

“The wife of President Kennedy,” Mariselle explains. “The President Kennedy that all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after.”

“Oh,” Rézia says, now taking swigs directly from the rum bottle. “He was so handsome.”

“She’s pretty too,” Mariselle says. “She spoke French. She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful.”

Pushing the damaged glass aside, Mariselle describes her encounter with Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy’s first husband, the president whom all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after, had been dead for more than a decade when she came to Haiti. Her new husband was a Greek billionaire who’d had some business with our president. Mariselle’s first sighting of Jackie Kennedy was on the pier at the Port-au-Prince harbor when Jackie Kennedy walked off an enormous yacht, wearing pink Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, a massive straw hat, and wide-rimmed sunglasses to guard her well-chiseled face. The wind almost blew her hat away. Almost blew her tiny body away, Mariselle recalled, but she held herself up and disembarked.

“My husband went to the pier to paint her portrait,” Mariselle says, wiping the wet glass and bottle rings off the table with her palms. “He asked her what she wanted in her painting. She said in that whispery baby voice that she wanted the harbor behind her, the cargo ships and fishing boats and a few Haitian faces on the pier. So my husband painted her on the pier and put me in the background. If you ever come across that painting, somewhere between the Port-au-Prince harbor and Jackie Kennedy, you will see me.”

WEEK 11

My mother used to say that we’ll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all. I sometimes hear a dog bark and I’m startled that it sounds a little like the dogs that roamed around me that day as I sat on the beach, watching my father’s fishing boat being hauled ashore without him in it.

My father used to love cockfights. He enjoyed the way the men would gather in a circle and pass a bottle of rum from hand to hand as they watched. This showed that animals were much smarter than men, he used to say, the way so many of us would congregate to watch two small birds.

He went to dogfights too, but he never enjoyed them as much. He could never get the howl of a dying dog out of his head. At least cocks were small, he said; we eat them, after all.

WEEK 12

When I was a girl, I had a small notebook made of a few folded sheets held together by my mother’s embroidering thread. There I sketched some figures, which were drawn so close together that they looked like they were fighting one another on the page.

My mother was the one who first thought they were fighting. She also thought they were frightening, so she made me a rag doll because she believed I was seeing these little shadows at night and was afraid of them.

Night after night, I clung to this rag doll, whose crooked eyes my mother had drawn over the white cloth with a piece of charcoal. After my father was gone, I twisted the doll’s neck night after night. During the day, I crowded the pages in my notebook with more tiny faces, to keep me company in case my mother also disappeared.

WEEK 13

Even though I’ve sung at a lot of funerals, I’m not necessarily a religious person. But I agree to Rézia’s idea to light candles so we can pass the real test.

Mariselle says we should pray to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. We add in there a prayer too, for our country.

“It’s not a lost cause yet,” Mariselle says, “because it made us.”

To that we toast, forsaking our rum for Mariselle’s Pinot Noir.

It feels like I’m drinking blood, not the symbolic blood of the sacraments, but real blood, velvet blood, our own blood.

I give them as keepsakes a few swatches of my mother’s embroidery. Threads of red clouds, omens for good luck.

Then Rézia asks me, “Why didn’t you go when you were asked to sing at the national palace?”

“Ordered,” I correct her. “I was ordered to go sing there.”

“Why didn’t you go?” Rézia persists. “If you had gone, maybe you’d still be home.”

I made a choice that I’d rather stop singing altogether than sing for the type of people who’d killed my father.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Rézia says. “Jackie Kennedy can go to Haiti anytime she wants, but we can’t.”

WEEK 14

We won’t know for some time if we passed. Yet Rézia’s still shaking with post-test anxiety when we sit down, each of us with a bowl of leftover stew from the day’s menu.

Mariselle is wearing a set of gold bangles that, when she moves her arms, sound like the type of miniature gourd rattles you might put on a child’s grave.

“I finally unpacked my suitcases,” she says, “to celebrate.”

She’s gotten a job at a gallery not far from Rézia’s restaurant and will be selling paintings, some of them her husband’s.

We celebrate with her by holding hands and twisting our way through the narrow spaces between the tables.

“And you, Freda, what are you going to do now?” an out-of-breath Mariselle asks when we stop.

“I’m going back,” I say, sinking into a chair. “I’m going to join a militia and return to fight.”

Both Mariselle and Rézia laugh so loud that it’s all I can hear for some time. Not the fan twirling overhead or the trickle of rum and wine from bottle to glass.

“Look, it’s the seventies,” I protest. “Look at Fidel Castro. He had women with him.”

They’re still laughing, but also drinking. Laughing and drinking.

“It’s not that.” Mariselle is doubled over, clinging to her belly, chortling. “It’s just that if you join a militia, we’ll soon be reading about you.”

“If you join a militia, you’ll die.” Rézia stops to wipe her damp forehead with her vetiver-scented hankie that now looks like a surrender flag. “Then who will sing at your funeral?”

The room is quiet now, except for the fan spinning overhead and a car horn blaring outside. Mariselle throws her head back, empties her entire glass in her mouth, then flings it across the room. We watch it fly, then land on the wall, breaking into a torrent of little pieces.

“Hey!” Rézia shuffles over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards. “Don’t wreck my place. If I didn’t have this place, I’d be as crazy as the two of you.”

“We’re not crazy.” Mariselle tries to get up, but her knees buckle under her and she falls back in her chair.

“Freda, why don’t you do it now?” Mariselle says. “Why don’t you sing your own funeral song?”

“We’ll help you,” Rézia chimes in from where she’s sweeping up glass across the room.

I clear my throat to show them that I can do it, am willing to do it, sing my own funeral song. Why not?

And that’s how I begin my final performance as a funeral singer, or any kind of singer at all.

I sing “Brother Timonie.” Brother Timonie, Brother Timonie, we row on without you. But I’ll know we’ll meet again.

Rézia and Mariselle catch on quickly and join in. We sing until our voices grow hoarse, sometimes making Brother Timonie a sister.

When we’ve exhausted poor Timonie, we move on to a few more songs, happier songs. And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.