dirty laundry and wallowing in the salt of their tears, the red of their blood, the stickiness of their seed. And sniffing around, celebrating the odor of misfortune. Ermancia told her that Orvil had trouble getting up that morning because of the pain in his back. Madame Yvenot, pleased by this display of confidence, reminded her that she would wind up killing her old man of a husband: “You are going to finish him off, Ermancia!” They both laughed out loud. Ermancia started to tell the story of a woman whom she knew in her hometown and who, one day… She whispered the rest into Madame Yvenot’s ear. And, when they laughed again, Olmène laughed with them, not because of their words, which had been muffled and which she didn’t fully hear, but because of Madame Yvenot’s enormous breasts, which shook all around like two wild horses each time she burst out laughing. That didn’t make her forget Ermancia’s lie, and it only further sharpened her curiosity for this older man who emerged from the fog and who had the power to make her mother lie.
At the market in Baudelet, they sat in their usual spot, under the leaves of one of the rare acacias that stood in the vast space where they exchanged what the lands gave them: mangos, avocados, bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, greens, millet, and corn—with what the city offered—matches, thick blue cotton, soap, enameled utensils. This corner where she sat with her daughter, Ermancia had won it at the end of a fierce fight. She took hold of it the day after Grann Méphise, an elderly vendor who had taken her under her wing, died without leaving behind a daughter or a niece or a goddaughter to pass it down to. Another crass woman set up her stakes just after her death, while everyone was still in mourning. Ermancia stood before her, hands on hips, her skirt slightly hiked up on one side, and challenged her: “You stay in this place one second longer and I can no longer be held responsible for my actions!” After the usual cursing, the two women were held back from coming to blows, and the dispute was resolved by an improvised tribunal that immediately recognized Ermancia’s right to the spot.
Olmène liked this stubbornness in her mother, who stood up to everything: the day, the night, the chrétiens-vivants, and the animals. The land could burst into the flames, the waters could dry up, she wouldn’t relent. She kept going. She went as far as she could. Every market day, she took a little bit more space. After three months she spread out her goods in peace in one of the most coveted corners of the Baudelet market.
But Ermancia didn’t stop at the market. She managed to win over Madame Frétillon, too, by offering her the most beautiful eggplants, yams, beans, not to mention her tobacco leaves as long as a man’s arm. Very quickly, she became the main supplier for Madame Frétillon, who even went as far as saving her a cup of coffee on market days.
Lucien, one of Albert Frétillon’s sons, unlike his sister Eglantine, who remained in France, or his brother, François, who lived in Port-au-Prince, loved the greed of this trading post in the province where his family had made its fortune. He had married Fatme Békri, a Syro-Lebanese woman. It was a break from convention in those times, for a bourgeois, even in the provinces, to marry a Syro-Lebanese. But Lucien knew that she would have no match in turning goods into cash. He had Fatme Békri Frétillon stand below a caricature of a thin man in rags facing a pot-bellied man in rich clothes. Under the first image, it read: I sold on credit, and under the second: I sold for cash. At every demand for a rebate or credit, Madame Frétillon, the sweet hypocrite, pointed to the caricature and translated it, with big gestures for the peasants, into a sweet Creole tinted with Arabic: “Ti chérrrie, mafifrouz, I cannot, mwen pa kapab.”
Olmène, standing behind her mother, enjoyed, as her grandfather Bonal Lafleur had some forty years earlier, watching the men sitting on the Frétillons’ porch. Always the same: the director of the high school, jet-black; the chief of police, a mulatto from Jacmel; the town judge, a quadroon from Jérémie. She watched everything, listened to everything, and remembered the rare occasions when she had seen Tertulion Mésidor meet with these men to discuss questions that were beyond her comprehension. Just as they had been beyond the comprehension of her grandfather Bonal Lafleur. It was 1960 and Olmène knew almost nothing, no more than we did, that they were talking about a powerful man, a doctor from the countryside who spoke, head down, with the nasally voice of a zombi and wore a black hat and thick glasses. Because he had taken care of peasants in the countryside and treated the yaws, some men, like the director of the high-school, believed in his humility, in his charity, in his infinite compassion. Others, like the police chief and the judge, feeling that their old-world, light-skin caste was under threat, were suspicious of this black peasant who said nothing worthwhile. No, really, nothing worthwhile! “Bakoulou, charlatan,” they repeated as often as they could. Tertulien, he kicked himself for having been convinced by the judge and the police chief to back the rival of the man in the black hat and thick glasses. Others, just how many we’ll never know, were right to believe that it would be difficult from there on out on this island to stand tall as decent men and women.
Like all of us, Olmène often wondered if God, the Grand Maître, in his great wisdom, had created them, she and hers, with the same clay as the rest. And if he had put as much care into his creation of hers as of theirs. Equally into those who loved the man in the black hat and thick glasses as those who didn’t. She looked at her naked feet, the august assembly of these men, then at Madame Frétillon’s light skin and her husband’s new car. It seemed to her that he hadn’t. To us, too.
Olmène thought of it again in the first shadows of the sunset, after washing her face several times, letting the droplets make her skin glisten like mother of pearl. And again just after scrubbing herself, scrubbing her feet of any trace of mud. She thought of it again at night fall, on the veranda next to the market, when the women, face and feet clean, met around the lampes bobèches* and Man Nosélia’s only stove to sip some tisanes and to talk. To talk as though wresting from the night these words that belonged to it alone. Words that they drew from the light of the day, as though a little darkness was needed to seize them. Olmène loved these voices that seemed to come out of a single great body of shadow. From a sole mouth. The flames danced over these burning, bare words of the night. Olmène could distinguish a profile eaten away by the darkness whenever one of the women bent over to rekindle the fire or pour more of the cinnamon or anise or ginger tisane in her enameled mug. Or when one of their faces rose out of the plumes, nearly blue, from the smoke of a pipe.
They took turns without tiring, stringing together one story after the other. Those of tax collectors and soldiers, always ready to extort them for something. The escapades of concubines, the impertinence of matelotes,* the troubles of children. Those of the jardins, where they would wear themselves out growing vegetables, millet, and corn. The stories of the most precious garden, that they, the women, kept, coiled up between their hips, that belonged only to them. And the men who had stopped there to rekindle their embers and light their fires. Words of women who spoke by the grace of God, the force of the Mysteries, the tribulations and the satisfactions of the chrétiens-vivants. She could have listened for hours to this speech pulled from the thickness of the days. Because the time spent talking like this isn’t time, it’s light. The time spent talking like this, it’s water washing the soul, the bon ange.
Man Nosélia put down her pipe only when she felt the first burning in her mouth and the stinging in her eyes. She laughed one last time before soothing the sores on her tongue, the insides of her cheeks, and her palate with a concoction of lettuce and honey. She did so loudly and then spat out a big stream of saliva, scratched her feet, crotch, and armpits in the manner of a cockroach, and fell asleep, a smile forgotten across her lips.
Ermancia arranged the rags on which slept with her daughter. They went over the sales of the day one last time and reviewed the projects for the future: once fattened, the larger of the two pigs would be sold to allow the purchase of two other younger ones who would be fattened in turn, and the new lands of the State would be opened for cultivation.
“Even if, just between you and me, Olmène, the new cultivation land won’t give much, and if I listened to myself, I would go all the way up there. Where, in great mercy,
