What Christopher Columbus Taught Me About Discovery

The memories of my ninth year are swaddled in cotton gauze and shoved onto the very highest reaches of the darkest corners in my mind.  It was the year my best friend called me a refugee (before Wyclef Jean made it cool), and my first love Miguel Parkins promised to love me in return if I would renounce my "Haitianess".  It was the year I transitioned to B-cup breasts without ever needing a training bra.  And it was the year my grandmother became gravely ill, but my mother died instead.

It was a very bad year.

The faint tendrils of memory that lead me back to that time do not come from those packed-off remembrances.  I am drawn back by the snippets of a poem some now long-forgotten girl wrote in my sixth grade graduation yearbook:

Columbus discovered America in 1492
But I discovered a good friend when I discovered you.

For reasons I don't quite understand, Columbus was a popular figure in my elementary school.  We learned about him in Mr. Branch's social studies class, then we sang about him while jumping double dutch and playing hopscotch on the playground:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.

I have a confession to make:  There was something about the Columbus we learned about and sang about in those early days that really drew me.  You have to remember, this was a time well before I learned about the small-pox infested blankets that were Columbus' gift to the natives. This was before I understood Columbus was on a divine mission to find the gold that would fuel the aspirations of a belligerent Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand--and the lives of the indigenous Arawak and Taino natives were as meaningful to him as the flies that swarm around a field of cow dung.  This was before I learned of all those things.  

Columbus sailed to find some gold
To bring back home as he'd been told.
He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.

All I knew was this:  Columbus traveled beyond the known world to prove the earth was round (although the Vikings beat him by 500 years, I wouldn't learn this until college).  I was drawn to his sense of adventure and his need to move past the expectations of family and community. I had those feelings too. 
I used to sit on the firescape in that mean little apartment in Brooklyn staring up at the sky and imagining what Columbus must have encountered when he first discovered Haiti.  Did he know those lush, green mountains like I knew them? Did he love the sound of crickets and the tinkling lights of fireflies after a long, gusty rain?  When he found himself back in Europe's cold embrace, did he long for Haiti like I longed for Haiti?

I missed my home so much that when my father told us one day if my mother died, we would bury her body in Haiti, I prayed for death.  Death meant nothing to me, but a trip to Haiti . . . was a trip to Haiti.

Just eight days later, my terrible prayer was answered and I found myself on a bird of flight back to Haiti.  While my siblings and I were bouncing in our seats, craning our necks to watch the in-flight movie, and demanding the stewardess bring more of the once-forbidden Coca Cola,  my mother's spiritless corpse lay several feet below in the bowels of the plane.

I felt a hint of smugness because I knew something the others apparently did not:  The woman who lay with hands stiffly at her sides and lips pursed in studied disapproval of death was not my mother.  I had caught a glimpse of the Dead Woman the night before at my mother's wake, and as soon as I peaked into the open coffin I knew the truth.  This bloated, sallow woman clad in a long pink gown with a mile-wide streak of white hair traveling from the center of her forehead down to eternity was not my mother. 

"That's not my mother," I whispered to my uncle who had accompanyed me on the trip from my front row seat to the coffin.

"She looks so different because of the disease," my uncle tried to explain. 
"It destroyed her liver.  That's why she looks so yellow."

But my mother was yellow.  She was the yellow of sunkissed Haitian mangos and bright, happy kitchens.  She was the high-yella of the Haitian middle class, the kind of yellow that meant we were closer to our colonizing, rapist white ancestors than most.  And in the upside-down world of Haitian social class, that was actually a good thing.

The Dead Woman was not the good kind of yellow, she was the diseased kind.  She was yellow in the un-natural way the final stages of hepatitis makes you yellow.  She was not my mother.  But I could not explain all of this to my uncle, so I merely shook my head and kept shaking it until he and my cousins led me away.

The day of my mother's funeral was the kind of sunny, blue-sky filled Caribbean day that tourists love so much.  As our procession walked the streets of St. Marc following the long black hearse, I felt the wind pick up and begin swirling the red clay dust around and around at our feet as we marched up the unpaved road to the cemetry.  Ashes to ashes.  Dust to dust.

My mother's funeral was a typical Haitian affair with lots of fainting, lots of food, and lots of stories.  My favorite was about the time my nine year old mother—for reasons that were never explained—found herself on a dark road home late one night.  It was one of those nights out of which Haitian legends are born, the air heavy with the scent of sugar cane and a deep sense of foreboding.

Around a bend in the road, my mother came upon a zombie master, clad in white, trailing a line of freshly-minted zombies behind him. Each was attached to the other by a long, thin cord nestled in the hands of the Zombie Master—who looked for all the world like a fisherman on his way home with the day’s catch. 

“Ça wap fait la?” demanded the Zombie Master.  What are you doing here?  It was past midnight, time for all little girls and boys to be safely tucked in their beds.  The night was his.

Hands on hips, my mother looked the Zombie Master straight in the eye, “Old man,” she said, “you walk your path, and I’ll walk mine.  The donkey doesn’t ask the farmer where it is going.”  Then she spat on the floor and walked away.

The women laughed and laughed as they endlessly retold the tale.  “Immacula!  That woman was something!  Imagine saying that to a hougan?”

I thought then my mother was like Columbus: bold, unafraid, adventurous.

In 1492,
In 1492,
Columbus sailed across the sea,
In 1492.

For 70 days he sailed,
For 70 days he sailed,
Columbus sailed across the sea,
For 70 days he sailed.

He came to a new land,
He came to a new land,
Columbus sailed across the sea,
And came to a new land.

Exploring he did go,
Exploring he did go,
Columbus sailed across the sea,
Exploring he did go.