SAVANNAH BALMIR
I give the mountain my sweat and breath, my sure feet and strong muscles. People stare as they fly past me in backless rubber slippers, while I trot like a mule strapped in supportive German sandals. When I see someone who looks sweet, a quiet man on a porch, a teenage girl with a sibling at her knees, I tell them who I am looking for. I ask: have I gone too far? They wave their arms past their heads saying higher. I roll up my pant legs before crossing the river that winds over the mountain like a green backed snake, grateful for the relief of cool water between my toes.
I notice a woman walking the same way as me with a pail of beets on her head. I know where you’re going, she says. She smiles, and I see a flicker of gold in her left canine tooth. Her skin looks smooth and supple, and I know she must be older than she seems. I try to keep up with her rhythm though I can tell she’s slowed her pace for me. We reach a steep diversion in the road, and I follow her when she turns.
Onè! we call, approaching the yard.
Respè! A voice calls back.
We find Gran Chantal, sitting on the porch of her pink house, smoking her pipe. The tabak grows in the yard, among other things I can identify, like koton, kafe, and kakao. The grounds are impressive, and I wonder if Gran tends to the yard on her own.
The woman with gold in her smile who introduces herself as Gran’s neighbor Anise, pulls up a chair for me, then disappears into the wooden kitchen next to Gran’s house.
It takes significant self-control for me to leave my camera in my backpack. Without it I feel a bit useless and vulnerable, as in a way the title “photographer” has become my main identity. I don’t mind staying in the background to shoot events for the Mission. But I want to talk to Gran Chantal, and I want her to know who I am, so I leave the camera in my bag and turn toward the old woman before me. She is as elegant as I remember her, poised on the top step of her front porch. Her hair is plaited in six grey ropes, and she’s wearing a gingham sundress, hatched with pink and loose at the collar. Her wrinkled brown skin is like a layer of silk over bone and her bare feet are crossed at the ankle, the left one cuffed with a black rubber bangle. Gran Chantal looks at me like she doesn’t much care who I am, as if it doesn’t matter and I’m a stranger she’s never shared a word with.
They told me you were coming, she says, holding her pipe at the corner of her lips.
Who? I say, confused.
The people who passed you on the road. They said a missionary was coming, asking where I lived.
I work for the Mission, but I’m not a missionary. And no, they didn’t send me… I’m here for myself, I say.
My sudden need to find purpose is as sharp as an ant biting its way up my foot. I am uncomfortable around grandmothers, always wanting to please them. Taking a deep breath I look again around the front yard which seems to vibrate with greenness.
It’s beautiful here. Can you tell me about this land? I ask, almost certain by the look in Gran Chantal’s eyes, that I have just said the wrong thing.
I already told the Mission about my land, she says. I brought them the deeds and all my papers.
I just want to know more about you. I say. This isn’t about the Mission.
Gran waves her hand as if to say, whatever.
Thankfully, Anise emerges from the kitchen just then with a tray of sweet, black coffee served in pretty blue rimmed cups. I am happy for the boost of sugar and something to do with my hands.
So, what do you need? Anise asks, taking a seat next to Gran on the porch.
I reach into my backpack to retrieve a picture of Gran, printed on cheap paper. Weeks ago, during a health fair at the Mission, I had watched mesmerised as Gran shuffled out of the doctor’s office into the dappled sunlight of the courtyard. She tucked some papers in her djakout, placed a straw hat over her pink headscarf, hooked a fist at her hip, and stared out into the crowd.
There she stood in all her glory, in that small flat image. Gran passes her thumb and forefinger over the glossy paper.
When did you take this? she asks. But I can tell she is pleased. She holds the picture up for Anise to see.
Look at the beautiful young woman I am.
***
Now I visit Gran Chantal every Wednesday after staff meetings at the Mission. On our first Wednesday, Gran walks me through her herb garden, which is full of ti bon, Mexican thyme, parsley, basil, and onions.
Gran reaches for an herb I have never seen before.
Don’t bend, I’ll get it, I say, pulling at the green bush. The leaves are plump and crenate, each one lined with a brown seam.
Fey lougawou, Gran says when I ask her about it. It’s good for you. Tension, sugar, headache, everything.
Lougawou? I say, thinking of Haitian witches transformed into birds and flying into the night.
It’s the plant of life. It makes its own roots, even when it falls from the branch.
She points to a leaf that has dropped into a patch of dirt. I pick it up, turn it over, and discover a dozen little white roots shooting out.
Now put it back, Gran says, and I return the leaf to do its work, though I want to keep it in my pocket forever. I feel kinship with this leaf, that somehow knows exactly what to do and how to keep growing even though it’s been dropped and left to figure everything out for itself.
Gran carries the fey lougawou in her skirt and I play with the cotton trees, collecting seeds. She points to patches of ground provisions, and calls Anise to dig up three heavy yams to send home with me that afternoon.
The next week I bring boiled labapen from town that Anise slices into smaller chunks for Gran to eat. The labapen launches Gran into a story about her first love who would bring gifts for her on his way home from school.
He went to Paris, before Duvalier père, Gran says. She hums us a song the boy used to sing her, an off-key rendition of something I can’t quite place.
I ask Gran about the black bangle on her foot.
For pain, she says. Anise raises the two bangles on each of her wrists. I don’t have pain, but I want one of these bracelets.
I like the way they look, I say. Anise takes one from her right arm and squeezes it over my hand.
The third Wednesday, Anise’s husband Joze and I walk to Gran’s together. Joze also works for the Mission, and he’s one of the few staff members there who likes taking pictures. His current WhatsApp profile photo is a shot I took of him standing in front of a red frangipani tree. Joze has papers for Gran to sign, a rental agreement to grow school lunch provisions on Gran’s empty plots of land. As we amble up the mountain, Joze points out at least five overgrown fields that Gran Chantal inherited from her late second husband.
She used to rent to young farmers, Joze says when we are nearly at Gran’s door. But now young men would rather work in the city.
Joze sits on the porch and explains the papers to Gran. She presses her thumb into an inked sponge and then again on the signature line.
At least now the fields will be put to good use, Joze says, tapping the pages together on his palm.
My husband and I used to plant those fields together, Gran says, and I hear sadness slipping out of her tired voice.
When Joze leaves, Gran gets her pipe and sits without speaking. Smoke coils around her head and dissipates into the sky.
***
I understand Gran’s quietness, in this way she is not so different from the grandmother I once had. My mother’s mother and I never spoke in words, and sometimes I wonder if I ever heard her voice at all. But I can still recall her rough long fingers rubbing my forearm and adjusting the leather strap around her neck. I remember the way she bathed me and the soft bristle brush she used to fix my hair.
In her kitchen there was a white gas stove, sable cabinets, and linoleum tile that sloped around the sink. There was also a small table, dressed in white lace linen where I sat to drink thick cornmeal porridge served in a scalloped bowl, with cinnamon bark and lemongrass hairs and a cloth napkin to wipe my lip.
After meals I played with a set of matryoshka dolls on a side table next to the plastic covered loveseat in the sitting room. There were seven dolls, all of them peach-skinned and hand painted. Each had black hair peeking out from a red and gold scarf, sleepy green eyes and exaggerated lashes, tiny dots for nostrils, pouty red lips. They were glossy, and I spent many afternoons studying them, running my fingers over the raised paint on their wooden bodies. The largest one had a bloom of magnificent pink zinnias. The smallest one, just a single golden rose.
I imagined myself as the smallest doll, nested safely in the hollow of her many mothers, protected from the fading effect of hours and dust. I was smaller than all the other women I knew, and my grandmother was the oldest person I loved, the largest figure in my life. I was nine when we lowered her body into the ground, into a soft dirt plot in Queens Village. Her silence has been trapped inside me ever since. It burrows behind my ribcage, eating into my gut.
Years after her death, I learned Kreyol, hoping language would release me. I listened to the radio, read poetry, followed Haitian influencers on Twitter. I took a contract with the Mission, because I had no family left on this island, but I still needed some way to be immersed in the language, the place, the people.
I know that nothing I do can bring my grandmother’s voice back. But something new is happening to me now that I have Gran Chantal.
***
This time going up the mountain, I carry my camera around my neck. I take photos of the views and vistas, discover purple flowers that look like clitorises and butterflies hanging upside down from a bitter gourd vine. At one of the riverbends, I snap photos of women bent over laundry, lathering clothes with detergent, and scrubbing the dirt out of them with hardened knuckles. A girlchild carries the clean clothes to a patch of boulders where she lays them to dry in the sun. I gaze into the boxy pupils of a baby goat tied to the trunk of a tree of heaven. I keep walking. It feels nice to know the way to somewhere. I have a favourite rock for resting and a favourite tree for shade. I know where the land slips, where to step, where to stop for a breathtaking view.
Gothic breadfruit by Edward Akintollah Hubbard
When I arrive at Gran Chantal’s house, Anise is sitting on the bed next to Gran, and Joze is kneeling beside them.
She won’t eat, Anise says to me.
Gran is crying, and her long fingers pull at her ears. Her head is bowed, her back curved like the dip of a spoon.
I’m going to die on this mountain, she says, over and over again. I’m going to die in this house all alone.
You’re not dying, Anise says. But Gran Chantal is almost ninety years old. She once told me that she keeps her coffin under her bed.
You can’t get like this. Anise adds. I have to see my sister today.
I’ve never seen Gran this way before. I sit next to her and run my hands over her long arms from shoulder to wrist. I hush her, mimicking wind, and the rustle of palms.
Gran, I’m here, I say. Remember me? I’m here to spend the day with you.
Her eyes are cloudy with age, but their gaze is still somehow fixed and urgent. I wonder if she is seeing me at all, or a vision of something beyond.
Okay? I say. I’m staying with you.
I won’t be back until tomorrow, Anise says.
I’ll stay, I say.
Anise nods, standing up.
Joze pats a hand of green plantains on the small chair beside Gran’s bed.
These are from her plots, he says. There’s a fresh gallon of water in the kitchen, too.
As they walk down the path to their house, I feel a thrumming anxiety, like what I imagine new parents feel leaving the hospital with their newborn. Gran starts whimpering again, and when she looks at me, I realize it’s my job to decide what will happen next.
Let’s braid your hair, I say.
Gran Chantal sits between my legs, lays her arms on my thighs and leans her light weight onto me. I unwrap the blue and red mouchwa from Gran’s head and commit to memory the smell of her sweat. I imagine now that I’m the baby, blindly searching for her mother.
I oil Gran’s matted plaits and detangle her thick grey hair from root to end. She sighs when I scratch her dry patches, and when I run my fingers over her scalp. I draw a part from her widow’s peak to the nape of her neck, and plait two silver braids, then pin the ends together to give her a crown.
I don’t trouble Gran with the camera today, though I want to take her picture, so that I can save this moment forever. Every second I spend with her is another attempt to remember the fingers that have loved me. The work of hands, slick with pomade, nimble, and exact. Hands that gathered each strand and laid it down like it was precious. Hands that knew the top of my head better than I ever could.
***
Around three o’clock Gran falls asleep, and while she is napping I am tempted to peek through the cracks in the door leading to the locked back room.
That’s her chanm mistik, Anise once told me with a wink.
I have never asked Gran Chantal to open it, and I doubt that she would. Instead, I imagine what’s behind the door. Pink frills and lace, bottles of honey and tranpe—kenep, karambola and piman soaked in rum. I imagine candles and fans of dried herbs and roses, oil lamps made with orange peels and wild cotton wicks. This is a room for blessings and sacrifices, things I will never know of.
In the front room three paintings hang on Gran Chantal’s wall, one of a couple in embrace, one of a white Jesus, and one of a dusky-skinned Madonna with a bright-eyed baby in her arms. There are various biblò around the room—wood carved figurines, cans filled with buttons and nails, a glass vase with fake red roses, and a cross above the door.
The concrete floor is pocked with age, and there are two wooden bed frames on either side of the room, one on cinder blocks, the other with thick wooden legs. The off-white sheets are worn, patterned with pink carnations. Under Gran’s bed, I can see the coffin she is always talking about. It is a brown box made to fit her small size.
From the outside, the building looks like a child’s drawing of a house, a rectangle with a triangle roof. There’s a concrete porch with two short steps, and a zinc awning held up by thin wooden posts. Gran’s house is a faux double barrel, with the right set of doors latched shut and the other drawn open, a lacy white curtain hanging from its mouth and tied at the end with a fat knot. My backpack and jacket drape over a tiny straw-seat chair on the porch. An overturned plastic crate holds Gran’s half-eaten bowl of porridge. I eat the rest of it, then carry the bowl with me to the wooden kitchen.
I haven’t forgotten the taste of my grandmother’s bouyon. The salty broth and beef chunks so tender they fell apart in the spoon. Green onion, pepper and parsley, carrot, potato, and finger-length dumplings. Everything slow cooked in a Dutch pot and ladled into a bowl. I imagine my grandmother with me in this dark kitchen. She kneels to check the coal fire and places a handful of kindling between the three stones that will hold the pot above the flame. She strikes a match, lights a piece of dried straw and begins to blow.
This is how you start a fire, I hear. It is a whisper in the smoke.
When I go to rinse the pot, its blackened bottom catches my knees and marks me. I find half a cabbage head, one onion, and a basket full of spices hanging from a nail on the wall. In the garden I pick some Mexican thyme, and a few stalks of spinach.
At the sight of Gran Chantal’s pilon I am back in my four-year-old body, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s kitchen, watching as her fingers wrapped around the base of the mortar, a light groove in the wooden pestle where her hand had gripped it for years.
I smash garlic, parsley, and green onions in the mortar with salt, and cloves. I drop the epis into a pool of oil and let it crackle. Gran’s only knife is less like a knife and more like a mini machete. I test the blade with a gentle stroke of my thumb, then slowly I slice the carrots and cabbage and plantain. There is no counter or cutting board in Gran Chantal’s kitchen and I understand now why my grandmother always sliced into her hands when she cooked.
I remember my grandmother’s kitchen dance, her eyes trained on her work, the flow of her body as it moved around the stove, two small gold earrings shaking to her rhythms. I cover the pot and hope I have not made too much, because whatever is left will spoil.
Gran is resting on her bed when I return with a small bowl of bouyon.
I made this for you, I say. But Gran pushes the air between us, waving the bowl away.
I’m not hungry, Gran says.
Are you sure? I ask, putting a hand on Gran’s shoulder.
Leave me alone, she says. And though her voice warbles, it is edged with repulsion. Her eyebrows pinch in annoyance, her lips purse and pleat into a wince. She crosses one arm over the other before leaning back against her pillows.
I remove myself, taking my bouyon with me. The bowl is hot in my palm, and the dainty spoon I had picked out for Gran slips precariously into the soup. I sit on the edge of the porch and eat quietly. The carrots are tasteless. The broth is missing salt and wanting in flavour.
***
I stand in the yard behind the house with a plastic cup and a bucket, my nightclothes draped over a chair. The sun is setting, drifting low behind the mountain peaks all around us. If I leave immediately, I might still find a taxi to take me home, to the small, hot apartment I’m renting in town. I don’t have to spend the night.
I want Gran to shrink to the size of my memory. I need a stent for my grief, some sort of salvation from this bright, stony pain that’s been lodged inside me for years. But Gran doesn’t need me back. I don’t belong to her and she owes me nothing.
I strip naked and surrender my skin to the air. Surrounded by mountains, I feel tiny. I want to feel even smaller. I want to be small enough to fit in a metal basin. To be washed with a cup of warm water. I want to be kissed across the face, inhaled at the neck. I want to be pressed into pilling bed sheets and weighted down with sleep. I want a hard knuckled hand to pass gently over my scalp, and a tired old voice to sing. I want a memory that never ends. But this memory betrays me, and my yearning makes me sick. I’ve already had what I want, however short-lived. I’m being greedy now. I want too much.
I wash my face and scrub between my legs. My shins are dirty, and the edges of my feet are tinged brown. I shiver and dry off in the air, then scurry back to the house to latch the door behind me.
Gran is already nestled in her bed, eyes closed. I am staring at her, at the tip of her brown nose, when she startles me with her voice.
Do you believe in the gospel? She asks. I think about my lapsed Catholicism, and the mystical vodou room on the other side of the wall.
I’m not very Christian, I say.
The gospel is good, child, she says. I laugh at myself. Of course, it is.
Gran prays before bed, thanking God for our bodies, our health, the roof above our heads. She blesses both of our families with words of protection.
Thank you for the life you’ve given us, she says.
Gran asks me to put out the lantern. With one breath, the day is over.
I wake to the pressure of my full bladder and reach under my pillow for the light of my cellphone .
Pipi kenbe m, I whisper to Gran.
She points under my bed to a bowl and I am so afraid to miss the pot, I almost retreat. But I’m already sitting upright and the urge to pee is now sharp as a knife point.
Relief comes and suddenly I remember my grandmother, in Queens Village waking me in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t wet the bed that we shared. I remember the clink and hiss of the radiator, a voice whispering psspsssspssss to encourage me while I peed in a plastic chamber pot. I never understood why she didn’t just take me to the bathroom, which was through the small kitchen only a few feet away.
There is no toilet paper, nowhere to throw it after it’s used. Gran Chantal takes the opportunity to pee as well. I hold her arm while she squats and lift her nightdress out of the way. I try to ignore the smell as the pot goes back under the bed. In the morning, I will dump the contents into a bush, rinse the pot, and return it to its place. For now, I rub my calves together and pull the covers to my neck.
