The Caribbean Book of the Dead

In Haiti, the shadowy line between the living and the dead is both soft and permeable.   The dead ride on the dreams of the living to bring back tales of the afterlife, to announce the birth or death of a beloved, even to reveal the winning numbers in the local lottery.  The living, in turn, seek advice on how to keep a lover from straying, and how to neutralize a neighbor's powerful magic, which could as easily kill livestock as a newborn baby. 

But that very permeability is also cause for alarm because it means the dead are never truly dead at all.  In the underworld, the undead are often called upon by dark forces to serve a zombie master in perpetual slavery.  Although their souls are beyond the control of the darkworkers—for that is the province of God—their bodies can be made to do things and be things they would never have contemplated when fully alive.  The living, therefore, must be protected—even from those who were once loving and nurturing in the Top-side World.

In the days and months after my mother's death, I remember just these three things:  the rituals, the sense of my absolute invisibility, and libraries.

As a nine year old with a dead mother surrounded by people who did not have dead mothers, I became unique--sort of like the way a giraffe in the midst of a pride of ravenous lions is unique.  I learned to walk as the giraffe does, carefully, warily, gingerly, around the known pockets of obvious danger.

When school friends asked why my sisters and I (but not my brother) wore black all the time, I dared not answer that Haitian mourning rites called for a two year display of public sorrow.  They might think I was strange.  When I went to Saturday afternoon confession at Our Lady of Refuge, I knew better than to tell the priests of our bedtime rituals—the red t-shirts, the spoons, and the holy water that served as shields against unnamed forces—because those rituals would surely be dismissed as primitive and even sinful.  But I could truthfully confess that I never went to bed without reciting the solemn promise of Psalm 23-4:

Yea though I walk through the valley
Of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil
For thou art with me
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life

Traversing the open pit between my public and my private self was not nearly as difficult as the withholding silence of the adults in my life.  I now know they were silent because my loss reminded them too keenly of their own mortality, but at the time I thought my mother's death had extinguished a special flame inside of me, which  allowed others to see into my heart.  Without that flame, I was as empty and invisible as the undead vassals who served their zombie master overlords.

I found solace in books and in libraries.  I would sneak off alone to our local library when my father was gone and my sisters refused to take me.  I would cover the fifteen blocks in record time, skipping over cracks, dodging shattered glass, running past the young guys on their bikes riding aimlessly up and down the street, and the old men on their stoops drinking from their covered bottles, smoking weed and talking shit.  Brooklyn-style.  I would race past the students coming out of the Orthodox Jewish high school—the girls in their long skirts and their headscarves, the boys in their yarmulkes.  My legs would carry me past Ms. Han's corner grocery where Old Mr. Ferguson held his one-man protest march one day when she had placed his change on the counter and not in his outstretched hand.  He stood in front of her shop yelling, “No Justice? No Peace!” while Ms. Han stood behind bulletproof glass and shouted back, “I don’t want no trouble!”  I would stop for a moment at the train station underpass to chat with Bob, the crazy homeless guy who slept in one corner of the station and pissed in the other with fastidious precision. 

I would arrive at the library breathless and overwhelmed at the sight of all those books.  I loved books: I loved the weight of them, the feel of them, and especially the smell of them.  To me, they smelled of adventure, and of unknown and forbidden places.  I eschewed "age-appropriate" stories in favor of romance novels featuring Indian warriors mounted on horseback holding windswept, buxom blonde seductresses in their arms; or Indian maidens struggling against their White captors looking a bit scared, a bit lost, but so much in love you knew it would all work out (it had to work because romance novels always ended with a happily-ever-after). 

On a day of no particular importance, when I had once again snuck out of my apartment in search of more romance novels, I walked out of the library and into the fuming orbit of my father.

“Tonnère de diable! Who gave you permission to go out?” my father shouted, his Creole mixing with his broken, borrowed English.

I froze as a giraffe does in the midst of a pride of ravenous lions ready to pounce.

"Answer me!" my father demanded, his accent growing thicker as the rage traveled up from deep within him.  "What were you doing in there?  You went to see some damn boy?"

I shook my head because that was all I could do.

"Don’t lie to me, you little pig!  Bouzen!  I am not raising any sluts in my house.  I’ll kill you first!”

I barely understood his words--either in English or Creole--but I knew enough to deny them if only I could get my throat, my tongue, my mouth to work.  But I could not, so I shook my head once again.

My father grabbed my arm and pulled me along, even as one of his hands went to his belt.  He screamed a few more things I could not hear as my attention remained transfixed on his belt hand.  I watched as he pulled off his belt and grasped it by the flat side rather than the buckle.  I watched as he swung at me, and I watched as the buckle landed again and again.

There is a moment of initial stillness that comes when one is in great pain.  It is as if some outside force draws you momentarily away from your own body holding you still and safe and silent.  When the pain comes—in great gulping waves—it is something of a surprise.  The buckle lands on flesh . . . my flesh.  And the prong springs free and hits bone, or maybe it is just a particularly knotted patch of muscle.  In any case, I bleed.  I bleed as though something had ruptured inside of me and I was going to die.  I bleed an endless flow of blood.

He beat me in front of everyone: Bob and Mr. Ferguson, Ms Han, the Jewish students, the old men on their stoops, and the young boys on the street.  He beat me in front of my best friend, Gina Figuiero, who stood on the sidewalk with her mother, her mouth forming a perfect oh as a thin stream of sweet vanilla ice cream trickled slowly down her arm.  

I told that story to a friend once who, although White, did not appreciate the taboo of her words:  "He beat you like a slave," she said.  I recoiled at first, as much from the messenger as from the message.  But when I considered the claim, I could not help but conclude that she was right.  He beat me like a slave.  How could it be otherwise given our history?

The Haiti that exists today came into being on December 6, 1492.  On that day, the towering sails of Christopher Columbus' scouting ships first appeared off the coast of an island he would rename "Hispaniola"--Little Spain--in honor of his royal benefactors.  It is said that when the triumvirate of The Niña, The Pinta and The Santa Maria traveled into history, their crisp, majestic sails snapping loudly in the strong winds of the Caribbean Sea, the natives standing on shore were momentarily blinded by the sight.  The vision of progress and achievement these ships represented was so far beyond their experience that their reticular processing systems—their brains—could not transform what stood before them into a comprehensible image.

Like most stories about Columbus, that too is apocryphal.

In fact, when Columbus first crossed paths with my Haitian Taíno ancestors--ancestors in toil if not in blood--there was nothing particularly majestic about him.  If you can still imagine that pomp and circumstance surrounds sailors living in close confinement for over six weeks with their livestock while sleeping on wet, rotting straw, consider the fact that Columbus was the one in need at the time of First Encounter.  The Santa Maria, the flagship under Columbus' command, had run aground at the mouth of what would become Mole St. Nicolas.  If not for the assistance of the Taíno leader Guancanagari, one of five caciques who commanded the region, the history of European expansion and dominance in the New World might have been otherwise.

For his trouble, and for his refusal to expel the Spanish from the island, Guancanagari would one day be forced to flee the wrath of the other caciques to seek solace in the mountains.  There he would die an ignominious death.  But on that historic Thursday in December, Guacanagari could not have known of his fate, and thus he acted to save the lives of the strangers who appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

History has little to tell us about the thoughts, words, and deeds of the people who became Columbus' Indians.  It is perhaps not surprising under the circumstances--as the old African proverb goes:  "Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter."  But until such time as the lion may speak, how are we to see the world through his eyes?  Only in the imagination.

History does reveal that Columbus returned to Spain to proclaim the good news of vast new lands, immeasurable wealth, and a pliant and friendly people awaiting Spanish domination and control.  By the time of Columbus' second voyage in 1493, Pope Alexander VI would issue the Inter caetera, the Papal Bull that divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese.  All lands 100 leagues west of the Azores, from the North Pole to the South, were ceded to Spain to bring forth "the exaltation and expansion of the Catholic Faith . . . to subject these lands and islands and their inhabitants, and with the help of God's mercy, bring them to the Catholic Faith."*

Thus began a time of great sorrow for the Taíno of the Caribbean.