For the uprooted ones
who shift the earth as they rise.
For days we walked. Almost a hundred of us at first. Not even in my grandmother’s time did they walk this far. She would travel by ferry or a small plane to get from her village near Jeremie to Port-au-Prince. But here and now, a mere promise of food and a future was enough to make us pack our only one most coveted possession and trade in the rest for a good pair of tennis shoes, clean water, and a small packet of dry salted meat.
My drum, the one I carved years ago out of a sickly flamboyant and covered with the skin of a precious goat, was strapped to my back. Marisol’s thin sweaty hand was held in mine. Hopeful tears twinkled in her eyes. Or maybe it was the empty gaze of hunger. Still, we were silent as we climbed the hills treading the rocky paths to this refuge. Visas to leave the country were a myth, so immigration was an excursion into the gated interior of the island where planes landed with important people and expensive equipment; where this secret of theirs born out of our Vodou was contained.
“How much did they offer you?” A young man who’d been walking alongside us asked. “Me, they paid one ripe avocado. I didn’t even know what to do with it. When I was a boy, I watched my mother shake one and listen for the soft rattling of the seed inside.” He laughed.
“Our house and all that was in it was swallowed by the winds of the last hurricane,” I said. “They did not have to offer us anything.”
Marisol squeezed my hand. She did not like when I spoke of such things. She smiled a polite smile. Beautiful, this daughter of Ezili. “Dr. Patel said that we will be free to dance. They have dances there. That was enough for me,” Marisol said.
I kissed my teeth at her and asked, “Mari, what in this shattered world would we be dancing for?”
Her smile diminished and she blinked back her tears. “To your drumming, Inno.”
There would be land and quality food, this doctor had told us. Armed men had escorted her to the curtained entryway of our bungalow from a huge truck. I hid my filthy, soil-caked hands from her. We had just buried four neighbors withered to just skin and bones. Marisol was courteous, even offering the doctor a tin cup of our precious clean water. The doctor handed Marisol a plastic bottle of clear liquid instead. Maybe this had been the payment the man had spoken of.
“That’s a beautiful name—Marisol,” Dr. Patel had said with her learned Creole, standing with her hands clasped and refusing to come into our home. She glanced at me then turned back to Marisol and asked, “Would you like to have children one day?”
Marisol gasped and her eyes lit up. “Doctor, they say it’s been twelve years since the birth of a child in this country.”
The two women exchanged quiet, secret smiles.
There is something in the foreigner’s science that will make food grow and wombs fertile again, they said. Marisol believed, so with the doctor’s bottled liquid tucked snug within the waistline of her skirt, she left me before the dawning sun, for the dances she’d said. And because I loved her so, I followed.
On the eighth day of our journey, we were able to see this Ayizan Valley. Its lush green landscape was a mirage betraying our doubting eyes. We stopped, rested, and gazed out at our future. This was where the trucks would meet us. I could barely read words on paper. But I can understand the symbolic language of the loa. I had signed my name on the line next to the X as best as I could; and gave them my thumb to press against one of their machines as my picture—a phantom me—appeared on a small screen.
I listened to every word the interpreter had said. We would be given a house, food to eat—well, the means in which to make our own food. And we would work a mile or so from our two room soft house—a shelter made of thick foam-like walls—to work acres of fertile land where at the center, stood an off-limits Greenhouse.
There were nearly two hundred Haitians already living in this new Ayizan Valley. Our small soft house was sparsely furnished and the single closet was stocked with plain green and brown pants. Our shoes were taken away and we were not given any new ones. The kitchen was a round table, two chairs, plates, utensils, a huge mortar and pestle, and a burlap sack of seeds with a fancy symbol in the front, the same symbol that was at the top of our signed contracts, on the truck that brought us here, and embroidered on all of our clothes—Ayizan’s vévé whose lines and swirls were changed to fit their language.
New friends showed us how to pound the seed grains into a fine powder to mix with water and become some sort of unbaked bread and dip it into warm seed oil to make it go down smoother. Everything we ate was from that one seed.
“So, you are telling me that Ayizan exists in the flesh? How is it, then, that she comes down to ride the bodies?” I asked when the men first told me the story of Ayizan-Freda.
“The ‘Festival of the Dirt’ we call it. And whatever ideas you have about what she looks like, you better get out of your mind instantly,” Marco said, flicking his hand in the air.
“But my mother,” I said. “She had a statue for her. I remember this Saint Clare.”
They laughed at me. They laughed at another newcomer who mentioned a Jesus and a devil and something about a heaven.
It was on the night of my first hour long walk past the cluster of soft houses to reach the half-mile deep pit where this Ayizan-Freda would emerge that I understood what Marco and the others were saying. To my surprise, the hougan was not a Haitian with generations’ worth of tradition and memory serving as the interpreter for the loa. It was one of the scientists, with salt-and-pepper thinning hair, computer chip-rimmed glasses, and sun-wrinkled skin wearing a long, wide, and white caftan, who rattled an asson in his hand, the sacred beaded gourd of an initiated priest, and orchestrated the ceremony. There was a group of nine mambos, priestesses, draped in dresses so white that they glowed against the backdrop of the near dusk sky. Marisol wanted to join them with their swaying arms, undulating torsos, and rolling hips, but their hardened gazes made her stay put with all the other onlookers.
I was summoned to drum. There were six other drummers with me, Marco included.
A glowing web of wires extending out from four poles crisscrossed above where we were gathered for the ceremony, adorning the already beautifully star-speckled night sky. I caught glimpses of cameras and little machines resting on the branches of the few palm trees that surrounded us.
The muddied red clay earth encircled an increasingly bright cavity in the ground. This hole was the new Poto Mitan—what used to be the center pole out of which the loa emerged from their underworld homes. The scientists had convinced us that no concrete pole was needed now. They could just dig a very deep hole with their machines—much deeper than what we used to dig on our own for our latrines. And this Vodou temple, our new peristyle, was like a science lab for their dissection of our spirits.
The scientist hougan had called forth the gatekeeper, Papa Legba. Nothing happened without the permission of Papa Legba who in our stories was an old limping man with the wisdom of the stars.
My wife Marisol, with her skin like the scorched barren earth of our country, short halo of kinky hair, and enough lips, nose, and cheeks for me to kiss for eternity, danced to my drumming. I drummed only for her.
There was a crackling from above like lightning against the thunderous sound of the drums. The web of wires became thin threads of sparkling white light out of which a single beam shone on Poto Mitan like a ladder—a beckoning for our beloved Ayizan-Freda to rise out of the earth.
“Papa Legba has opened the gates!” Marco called out.
I looked around for this Papa Legba the scientist hougan had conjured. I remembered the time when all we had to do was look into the hougan’s eyes and there Papa Legba would be looking out at us, and then at his name on the floor, a vévé made of cornmeal, straight and curved lines, stars, and swirls forming the crossroads along with his signature cane erected to the east. But the scientist hougan’s glasses had darkened. He and all the other scientists who watched from above shielded their eyes from the bright hole in the ground and white lights—the wires that, when I looked up, had become Papa Legba’s vévé. No cornmeal sifted through the closed hand of a hougan was needed now. Magical wires above our vulnerable heads sufficed to beckon our spirits.
Someone grabbed my hand. I felt the mambo’s sweaty fingers and looked up at her red-tinged eyes and glistening brown face.
“You can stop drumming now,” she said softly.
I looked around at Marco and the other drummers. Some had already stopped and others had joined in the dancing around the white beam of light and gaping hole in the ground.
But, still, the drumming continued. “What is this?” I asked Marco, whose head was tilted back in quiet bliss. He snapped out of his oncoming trance, kissed his teeth, and flicked his hand at me.
“Ah, Inno! Rest your thoughts and dubious questions for a while. Ayizan-Freda will soon make her appearance.”
He pointed with his bottom lip at the four tall posts erected around us, like streetlights. But instead of bulbs at the end of the posts, what looked like small television screens poked out toward us. Marco’s eyes moved about suspiciously. “They are the drummers now. They watch the movement of the bodies and know which rhythms to play.”
One of the scientists touched my shoulder and looked down at me with his darkly shielded eyes, out of which I saw my reflection for the first time in months—my hair had grown wild, my disheveled beard hid my sunken cheeks. He was smiling. Teeth straight and white. Clear-eyed. A healthy protrusion of his belly peeked out of his white lab coat.
“In my village,” I said, swallowing hard. “Everyone must dance to the drums. Everyone has a hand in calling down the loa.”
“Of course, Innocent. That is why we freed your hands.”
With those very words, the drumming reached a crescendo. The people were moving and swaying their bodies, bending and twisting matter to make an entryway for spirit. I looked up at the scientist who watched my thoughts play out like a movie within his computer glasses. He motioned toward the nucleus of the ceremony. “Ayizan-Freda begs to initiate someone tonight.”
I was suspicious of his words. There was some kind of magic within the flickering lights of his glasses that allowed him the ability to penetrate my memories. How else would this scientist know that my love of drumming began as a toddler with the beating of my small hands against hard-packed earth? Innocent, my mother named me, because she knew that this sunlight colored, curly-haired baby boy should not be blamed for another man’s wanton lust. And if he knew that much, he would be able to see how my earliest memories of my mother were of her crouched down over the ground, just as Marisol did now, digging with her bare hands the remains of her two children from one place and to bury again wherever she would find a free blue tarp tent for refuge from the broken and shattered Port-au-Prince. As soon as I was able to walk, I would help my mother. And within the burying of the bones and souls of my older brother and sister, I would find the music within the earth.
When cholera managed to wrap its bitter cold hands around my mother’s last breath, I made sure to use my drummer’s hands to dig as deep as I could into the dry ground to lay her body to rest. The hundreds of thousands of bodies fallen from the shaken city months before I was conceived were offered back to that which was responsible for their deaths, and still, the earth had reaped nothing but more death. And as I watched my fellow Haitians dance around the bright hole in the ground, like the sun shining up from the earth’s core, my mother’s voice rang in my ears as if she were sitting right next to me pounding maize in a mortar while I drummed in harmony against the bottom of an overturned plastic bucket. “What did they do with all those bodies, Inno?”
A mass of bodies draped in brown and green uniforms danced around the hole that became a solid beam of white light—Poto Mitan. There was to be a crescendo, a point where the height of the drumming coupled with the pitch of the singing and the movement of the bodies was to converge like a key unlocking a door for the loa.
She used to be the keeper of the marketplace, this new Ayizan. But the bedrock of our old economy has crumbled and become like fine silt tinged with the blood of the fallen ones. No food sprouted from the soil, no ships and planes landed on our shores with relief from the shortage that quickly became the famine. But here was our manna from the womb of Ayizan-Freda. This is what I knew when I dug both my hands into the red clay earth of this manmade valley. So hot it was, stinging my thin long fingers like the memory of spicy meat on my tongue. Just as satiating. This was not the hard-packed soil that I was accustomed to. This red dirt was something more.
I shook my shoulders to the drumbeat rhythm as I kneaded the soil, rolling it, patting it like a child in sand at the beach. Marisol had moved closer to me and she had already learned the words to the song. Her voice close to my ear sent chills throughout my body. This along with the spicy dirt on my hands was like a loa’s rapping on a door demanding to enter. At last, this Ayizan-Freda’s dirt had indeed become like my beloved conga drum.
That stinging sensation traveled from my hands, up my arms, and exploded throughout my body. Marisol felt it too because she grabbed my arm with her soiled hand. I turned to look into her deep set eyes and noticed instead the luminescent clear wall that had suddenly surrounded us. The shaft of light that formed Poto Mitan had expanded into a huge dome resembling the Greenhouse to shelter all of us, excluding the scientists who watched us with their shielded eyes. The ghosts’ drumming echoed throughout at a quickened pace—a warning that this was the moment. My heart raced along with it, but this was not fear. This was a knowing. And the words to the new song for Ayizan-Freda flowed from deep within my conscious. Though it was not from memory because this was something new. Ayizan-Freda, birth us a new world; from the womb of Kiskeya will this spirit unfurl.
So hot, it was. The uniforms made of synthetic fibers suffocated our skin, so we shed them like Dambalah the Great Serpent—obsolete now as well because the coiled flexibility of life had been stunted in Haiti. Maybe this was the bend out of which a new direction would present itself to us. Marisol’s now bare shoulder brushed mine and there was an electrical surge that shot up my spine causing me to arch backward and behold Papa Legba’s gateway vévé from above. And within the blink of my eyes, the threads of white light danced around each other just as some of us did below and morphed into another vévé—this one for Ayizan-Freda, the elaborately detailed diamond shape. The heart at its center was the newest addition.
“These stories, Inno, I want them to live on beyond us. What good is it if you are only telling me when I will one day die along with you?” She placed her hand on her belly and continued her dance.
The drumbeat rhythm maintained a high, upbeat, steady pace—slowly the scientists’ magic would merge with our reality. I watched my wife, whose body obeyed every tap, boom, bip of the drums.
It was like the sun whose rays had just been beaming up toward the vévé was now rising through the hole fully formed, round, bright yellow, and perfect. The higher the globe rose out of the ground, the more its golden color filled our bodies and our senses with this burning urge to touch it, sacrifice our whole selves to its splendor.
While the other worshippers merely danced, beheld her beauty, or bathed their bodies within the hot red dirt, it was my wife Marisol who obeyed her senses and jumped right into Ayizan-Freda’s hot, molten arms. I had not thought twice about it because of love. I went in after my wife.
And this was when, with the grace of my ancestors, my eyelids were pulled back so that I could truly see. Ayizan, the primordial mambo initiates those who have a duty in this world. And even with this melting of her original form buried deep beneath our feet, our version of her story still has precedence. I was given konnesance, the ultimate knowing, while my wife was implanted with the re-emergence of the loa Marassa—the primordial twins save for the third entity that binds the two to each other. Triplets. One for each of us.
“They have your eyes,” Marisol had said after ninety-six hours of labor. And they refused to cut her open. Twelve doctors around and all they did was stick tubes in my woman and watch.
“Congratulations, Innocent,” Dr. Weber said. “You’re like the new Adam for the new Haitians!”
Marisol asked me to name the boy. There was no way of telling the sexes at first. Only after hours of examinations by the doctors and scientists did Dr. Weber bring us one held in his arms claiming, “This is your son, Innocent.”
I tried my best to keep a straight face. Not since the waning days of the cholera epidemic did I remember ever vomiting. Except for the moment I laid eyes on my “son,” this Dr. Weber dared to call it. Its eyes and too-many limbs were wrongly placed and its body was the color of egg yolk.
Why hadn’t the scientists upon discovering what had become of the hundreds of thousands of bodies—flesh and bones melded together by the heat, the mourning, the desperation—used their own selves to test what the extent of harm would be once human contact was initiated? Within Ayizan-Freda, what the news people called the hot golden lava-like substance that was the greatest geological find in all of earth’s history, we danced with the bodies.
Some whispered their stories to me: How they’d been cooking in the yard, napping, changing a tire in the mechanic’s shop that day their world stood still, then crumbled above and beneath them. The comings and goings, dreams and fears, bones and flesh had materialized into this Ayizan-Freda—the fallen ones’ collective desire to appease the land. This gaping hole in the ground was the portal to Ginen’s marketplace—the fruits of the fallen ones’ labor. Had my poor mother been alive, I would’ve shown her what had become of all the bodies within Ayizan-Freda’s core.
“Who would’ve thought that some ectoplasmic hot tub in the middle of Haiti would be the world’s ultimate fertilizer,” one scientist laughed in my presence.
They’d been celebrating in the Greenhouse when Marisol gave birth in a white room furnished with beeping machines. A nurse had come in with something bulging out of the pocket of her lab coat. The nurse gave her a cup of clear, pure water. I swallowed hard and licked my lips as I watched my wife drink—it had been a couple of days since last I ate the seed meal. The nurse pulled out what looked like a large yellow seed. A mango. I could never forget the mangos my mother sold as a merchant. My heart raced with longing. Marisol’s breathing became heavy.
“Eat it, quick,” the nurse said.
And Marisol did, savagely, without even glancing my way to offer me any. The nurse was careful to hide any indication that anything beside the seeds had touched Marisol’s lips. She hadn’t offered me a taste, to lick the remnants from her fingers. She denied me, her husband who promised her the sea and sun beneath a decaying mango tree.
“Mango. I will call him Mango,” I told Dr. Weber as I stared directly at Marisol.
I was soon escorted out of the room and passed the entrance to the Greenhouse where I caught a glimpse of what was beyond its glass walls. A garden of mangos, bananas, pineapples, papayas, and vegetables grew on trees and on the ground. This was what Ayizan-Freda had bestowed upon us. This was what after all these decades of ceremonies—drumming, singing, dancing, and praying—the fallen ones had blessed us with.
Papa Ogu’s rage pumped in my veins. What could a poor, feeble drummer do? After years of praying for mercy, I now begged for vengeance. But the memory of my wife’s smile, holding the small, squirming things within the folds of her thin arms, made my knees buckle, and I fell to the ground and kissed the earth. This Ayizan-Freda.
On the days that followed, they allowed Marisol to be with her “babies,” but not allowing her to nurse them. I watched as she cursed the scientists for drawing too much blood in that one, prodding this one, and not allowing the other to sleep long enough. She’d become distant and sad. I was allowed to visit, but she rejected me, only asking for her “babies.”
“Marisol,” I told her one day. “Did you see what they looked like? Did you see their deformities? They glow a bright yellow, Mari. They each have one too many limbs and their eyes are nothing more than a hundred more eyes looking out at us. Those bodies wanted to be born again through you, cherie. Only three were able to make it and within those three, there are more.” I paused, held her hands and looked into her eyes. “Like cancer cells, Mari. The scientists will place one of them on Ayizan-Freda’s soil and they will replicate. They only needed a host and that was you.”
She was quiet for a bit. Then she smiled and said, “It was always my dream to reach the end of the rainbow—where the sun and sea meet—my name.”
She became Ayida-Wedo, the serpent rainbow wife of Dambalah and Haiti’s primordial mother. Long ago, we’d stop making offerings to her thinking that she’d abandoned us. Indeed, she’d been born again.
“She was a good host,” I heard the scientist say about my wife. “You think she can do it again? The others won’t be the same without her.”
“The closer to human form they are, the better. We don’t want this to get out of control. But they can’t stay here forever. We’re not trying to make this the Garden of Eden. This is Haiti, for chrissake. Not here.”
Weeks passed, and Marisol had gone into a rage after she’d been away from the triplets for days—the scientist urged her to go back to work on the farm because she was not capable of raising these seedlings. Of course not, I thought. They were not human. I dared not say this again to Marisol. She was Haiti’s first mother in twelve years, the envy of all the other women around. She needed something to show for this—the rearing, and coddling, and doting.
I drummed softly at night while the others slept under the protective gaze of a full moon. With my own quiet prayers and song, I summoned Papa Legba and Ogu. If the foreigners with their science had removed what was embedded in our souls, then I am nothing more than a gaunt casing of skin and bones much like the fallen ones. I would try nonetheless—with Legba’s permission and Ogu’s will.
Marco helped us escape during the night while cursing us for being foolish. Outside the gates of Ayizan Valley, Gédé was king—death, lust, intoxication, and the perpetual darkness of lost hope. After walking the few miles to the edge of the Valley where the land became increasingly barren, we discovered that the gates were barely guarded.
“I don’t understand how you can be so stupid, Innocent,” Marco said. “Don’t you know you are Ayizan-Freda’s favored one? She wanted you to live and now you’re running toward death’s door.”
I was Papa Legba’s favored one, too. He opened the gates for us. How else could we have been able to walk out of the Greenhouse with Mango in Marisol’s arms? It was the nurse who’d been sleepily guarding the seedlings who allowed Marisol to walk outside with her “baby.” We hid its naked yellow, slimy body beneath torn fabric from uniforms. Any sight of what was thought to be a baby outside the gates of Ayizan Valley would’ve ended our lives.
“We’ll come back later for Golden and Hope, right, Inno?” Marisol asked, looking up at me with weary eyes. She hadn’t slept well, always worrying about her “babies.”
I nodded. I lied.
For a week, we traveled along abandoned roads trading stolen fruits and vegetables in exchange for gas, a ride, a hiding place. I caught Marisol trying to breastfeed the seedling. She’d been longing to complete the cycle of mothering. She cried when it wouldn’t latch, cursing herself for not being a good mother. But I showed her how Mango only wanted to feed on dirt. She cried even more, pounding her fists on my bony chest, cursing the loa and the scientists.
“I am a mother, Inno. A mother!” she cried. “They came from my very womb. They are my flesh and blood, Inno!”
Fragile, my wife was. I consoled her, daring not to say anything that would break her.
A few times shielded by the night, I’d put Mango down on the ground and he would roll his little deformed and discolored body, sticking his warped hands and face in it, taking from it what he needed. And moments later, something would sprout from that very spot he fed from. A flower at first, then within an hour, berries would form. We’d never stay in one place long enough to see what would become of the blossoms.
Until we reached the village of my birth. Few of my mother’s relatives remained, mostly the elders and women caring for young children, doing their very best to survive. An old great-aunt, Tant Gertrude, who survived the diseases, learned to find the healing properties in the leaves and bushes around and always prayed over old Rosary beads, greeted us. She sniffed new life. She’d been a lay midwife and instinctively stared at Marisol’s milk-swollen breasts.
I made sure to tell Tant Gertrude the whole story, how the loas appeared to us at every point, before revealing Mango. She held her Rosary beads out at him and at us. We didn’t deny her claim to this Jesus, she called it.
When we placed the seedling on the parched soil, he writhed his little body around in the dirt. At long last, we were able to set our eyes on the harvest that sprouted before us: yams, plantains, cassava, spinach, herbs. The spontaneous garden had attracted the neighbors living in the looted and abandoned homes.
An old man wearing a tattered hat pointed his cane toward me. “Azaka,” he said in a dry raspy voice. “I knew you’d be back.”
I remembered this Azaka, the farmer loa, guardian of the harvest. The old man came over to me and placed the tattered hat on my head. When I picked up Mango from the ground, cooing and satiated, I noticed his little belly bulging out as if he’d had more than his fill. I looked over at Marisol who watched us with loving eyes. Mango was squirming in my arms and something shifted within his full belly. I sighed long and deep. I never claimed fatherhood like Marisol insisted on motherhood. I was the farmer to this son of mine—not the father.
More seedlings. There’d be enough, I thought. There will always be enough.