she began speaking Creole to the driver. She smiled and told me she was Haitian. I’m trying to tell her story, as if it might account for my discomfiture in the world of humans. And yet as time eats away at the picture, I’m not sure it matters. She was a mimic. She was false. She may not be knowable. The story may be lost.
I always felt that I was not right in my skin. Everything, in my youth, had to do with race. What mattered most was the quality of hair, the color of skin. My hair was too frizzy and my lips too thick. She said I had murky skin and called me “Ubangi.” Only years later did I take in all that the name implied: not simply a black, but rather one of those saucer-lipped women of the Congo or Chad, so distended around the mouth by a disk of clay that they looked freakish.
I did not look like her friends’ daughters. She did not like me to touch her.
But who was she? As I write this, I remember how she hated to be referred to as “she” or “her.” “I have a name,” she would say. But even that was a changeable thing. Her real name was Sophie. She never uttered it, occasionally using “Sophia,” but most often going by the name her friends gave her when she arrived in Atlanta, still speaking French. They called her “Frenchie.” Like her appearance, her name was mutable, adapted to whatever role she wanted to play, no matter how fantastic. Appearance was everything. Sham was the core, the truth, and I tried in vain to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
In 1936, the year my mother left Haiti, Swing Time with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire was released. It promised romance in the pain of the Depression: whiteness, a décor of stale purity, amidst snow and ivory staircases, ladies kicking up their legs and singing “Bojangles of Harlem.” Fred Astaire in blackface imitates Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Long and black, a pair of legs comes out of his crotch. Dancing ladies surround him. These legs spread out from him and over the stage, black and all-enveloping. Suddenly, women take hold of the black legs, pick them up and carry them away.
Then Astaire’s white legs, his small and elegant real legs, begin to dance. No more Bojangles, no more black legs, no more mystery, and no more threat. Instead, Astaire became himself: the urbane man in love with the lovely lady in white.
After the dances for the vodou spirits, the yanvalou and crabignan legba, the drums in the hills around Port-au-Prince lulled my mother to sleep. And then a few years after digging in the Haitian dirt for lizards she called “zandolites,” there she was, a teenager on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. She went to movies and watched the thin white dancer in blackface on a white marble linoleum floor.
My mother left Haiti two years after the American occupation ended, moving with her family to Brooklyn, where she met my father and soon married him. When the US marines finally departed in 1934, Haitians sang words in praise of President Sténio Vincent, words that my mother later sang to me — but only after my father died. “If there’s anyone who loves the people, it’s President Vincent,” the song goes, and she sang it to me in Creole: Papa Vincent, mesi. Si gen youn moun ki renmen pèp la, se President Vincent. In a deep and rapturous voice, she gave thanks for all he, “a mulatto,” did for the blacks of Haiti, while ruthlessly punishing light-skinned elites. With this one song, she let me in on her secret: she harbored a confounding infidelity to her class and color.
Identifying with the black majority, this light-skinned woman, daughter of a Syrian merchant, used to belt out these couple of lines from “Papa Vincent, mesi,” the popular merengue recorded by Alan Lomax after he heard it at the elite Club Toland in Port-au-Prince on Christmas Eve, 1936: “This is a guy who loves the people. This is the guy who gives us the right to sell in the streets. He gives us that because he kicked out the Syrians. So, we’re crying out, thank you Papa Vincent.” The self-proclaimed “Second Liberator” allowed the masses to sell goods wherever they could, and curbed the Syrian takeover of retail, shuttering their stores and driving them out.
Once in Brooklyn, my mother must have wondered about the sea, where it was hidden, and what to do when the snows came down. Nothing can have seemed right after she left Port-au-Prince, after the dirt, the drums in the night, and the mangoes she loved to eat right down to the pit, juice dripping over her hands. Things were so alive in Haiti, the stones that killed lizards, the fires that burned Jews in effigy, the gourds that held the gods. Then, three years after leaving, at just 17 years old, during her last year in high school, she was introduced to the most eligible man around. “On our first date I ran out of the car,” she recalled. He was 20 years older. She did not love him, but she was the oldest of four daughters, her mother wanted to get her out of the house. My father took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels. I don’t know what she thought about the circus, but she could not ride and, until her dying day, hated anything that looked slippery and lived in shells.
That same year, my mother traveled from Brooklyn to a honeymoon in Mexico. They traveled around for two years, then to Nashville and, finally, to Atlanta. The South must have seemed to her like a cross between Haiti and New York. “I would have been an actress,” she told me. “Then I met your father.” But she never stopped acting. She lived to be looked at.
After leaving Haiti at the age of 13, my mother never knew beauty or hope again. Everything that followed her departure and her marriage four years later to a 37-year-old husband seemed useless or dead. When she moved with my father to the Jim Crow South, she exchanged her complex racial origins for the empty costume of whitewashed glamour. I didn’t realize until recently just how deluded she was about her real attachments, and just how casually — without really ever knowing the loss — she surrendered her origins to a mask of whiteness.
But in moments of privacy, when not seen by the eyes of others, she used to say things that sounded like incantations. “Arab manje koulèv,” which in Creole means “Arabs eat snakes.” I never knew what to make of this, but she was never clear about her family or her childhood, didn’t know her own family history: her father never told her his origins, and told her not to worry. “It’s no good to be too strange in a country you love,” he sighed. She remembered feeling not “normal” in Haiti, that she did not look right to people shouting at her: “gadé kochon pwal,” which she translated as “Look at her hairy pig legs.” I heard her say this, but it didn’t mean anything to me as a child — I made no sense of those words, either, in the dark of my bedroom.
Years later, I learned they were pieces of the life she had left behind, not just rapt conjuring. Besides “Mesi, Papa Vincent,” she repeated, “Desalin pas vle oue blanc,” which means “Dessalines doesn’t like whites.” Late at night when she came into my room, she returned to the pleasure of her life in Haiti. Her longing was consecrated most often in this homage to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who proclaimed Haitian independence in 1804.
She praised only the fierce Dessalines — called “barbaric” by most historians — not the urbane Toussaint l’Ouverture, and not Henri Christophe. Turned into a god or spirit by the Haitian people, Dessalines is still invoked as a lwa in vodou ceremonies in the countryside. Rejecting things French and unconcerned about social graces, he fought to give land to ex-slaves, only recently considered property themselves; and when he drafted his constitution for the new republic in 1805, he took the most crucial racial configuration of Saint-Domingue and annihilated it. Instead of the three-part division of whites, people of color (or mixed-bloods), and blacks, he created one category for Haitian identity that absorbed all distinctions: Haitians, no matter their color, would henceforth be referred to “only by the generic word ‘black.’”
In the South, my mother concealed her past. She remained estranged from the whites around her, even though she immediately recognized that she’d better become as white as possible. A gilded white lady of the South, that’s what my father wanted. Confined by the role she assumed, she performed it, flawlessly. Hiding herself beneath a false smile and pale skin, she wrapped her discomfort and later her sorrow in silks and jewels. This denial of her history was not anything like a grab for
