Intriguing Passages

"This is the Haiti of my childhood—my father building toy boats and pointed hats for us from palm fronds. He taught us how to eat sugarcane, how we had to peel the thin bark and suck on the fibrous core. He took us to an old woman’s house and bought does, a sugary fudge, wrapped in wax paper. We ate so much of it our moths wrinkled. Back in the States, he was always serious, always wearing suits and shiny shoes, rarely laughing, rarely home because he had to build and outwork and outthink the white men he worked with. In Haiti, my father was a man who eagerly removed his shoes and role up his slacks to climb a palm tree to gather coconuts. One by one he would throw the coconuts down. My mother held the fruit high over her head and slammed them down on a sharp rock and when the hard shell cracked open, she would pull the coconut apart and peel the coconut meat from the shell, handing each of us large pieces. We hated coconut but we ate it anyway. This is the Haiti of my childhood—my mother sitting with her sisters, gossiping about everyone they ever knew, their childhood friends and neighbors, former lovers, the people they worked with, their husbands, their fathers. My mother always glowed, her fair skin tanned, eyes bright, hair hanging down past her shoulders. Only in Haiti do I remember her laughing nakedly, talking openly, easily, in a way that was so foreign to us. Mona and I always hid nearby trying to hear every word of the adult conversation. Listening to my mother and aunts talking made us feel like we knew her…We loved haiti. We hated Haiti. We did not understand or know Haiti. Years later, I still did not understand Haiti but I longed for the Haiti of my childhood. When I was kidnapped, I knew I would never find that ever again (Gay 53-55).”

“When I was young my father taught me to never cry. He first told me this while I was upset about something trivial but of great importance to a young girl—a classmate who I thought was my friend but who I caight making fun of me, my wild hair, calling me Don King with a group of popular girls. I lay on my bed, hearing their taunts for hours. My father came into my room, said we needed to be strong because as haitians in America we would always be fighting; Americans wouldn’t unseen us as slaves so we had to work harder, we had to be better, we had to be strong. He gave me a history lesson when I only needed him to commit some small act of kindness” (Gay 155).

“I made myself forget everything I could no longer bear to remember—love, my husband’s sleeping body, his smile, my child’s fingers, how our baby laughed, how much it called me to poke his chubby cheeks while he nursed, feel his sweet, warm breath on my skin…I forgot my mother an hiding in her skirt as a little girl and the grip of her hand as we walked together and my father lying in bed next to me, reading while I was sick, and my friends, the parties we had, the dancing, the wine, falling asleep in our backyards and waking up beneath a canopy of palm fronds, cooking with Michael, him standing behind me, his hands covering mine, his nose buried in my neck, as we chopped onions and carrots and red peppers and leeks. I made myself forget for as longs as I could and then, alone in my cage, as the heat of the day rose and filled my room, it suddenly all came back to me, who I was and who I loved and who I needed. The memory of my life, the weight of it, threatened to break my body more than any man could. I needed to be no one so I might survive. I needed to hear the voice of someone who loved me but I could not as for such a thing. I waited” (Gay 170-171).

“When I was a little girl, my mother also told me the story of a little girl and a magic orange tree. This little girl’s mother died when she was born and as fathers often do, her father remarried a woman, who, as stepmothers are won’t to be, was cruel and quite evil. The stepmother rarely fed the little girl. One day, after she got in trouble with her stepmother, the little girl ran to her mother’s grace and cried and cried, her tears soaking the ground covering her mother’s body as she fell asleep. When she awoke in the morning, an orange seed fell from her dress into the tear-soaked soil and immediately a perfect green leaf appeared. The little girl started singing to this leaf and it blossomed into a tree. The more she sang, the higher the tree grew. She sand telling the tree how to grow. She ate oranges, delicious oranges from the tree. She knew the tree was her mother. When she brought some of her perfect oranges home, her stepmother demanded to know where the little girl had gotten the oranges. The little girl was a good girl so she took her stepmother to the tree and the greedy stepmother tried to take all the oranges for herself. Again the little girl sand and the tree swept the evil stepmother into its branches and killed her because the tree was that little girl’s mother and a mother will do anything to protect and provide for her child” (Gay 175).

“I ran down an unfamiliar street, my bare feet slapping against the pavement. I was free even if I did not know it yet or my body was free and my mind was in the cage. It was hot, early evening, the hush of a day ending. I ran over shards of broken glass, felt my skin come neatly apart. I bled. My feet were slick. I did not stop running. The Commander told me to run until I could not run anymore so that’s what I did. My thighs burned. It was strange to be able to move so freely, to breathe fresher air. I wanted someone to find me. I wanted to stop. I kept running. When I passed people standing in their doorways or ambling down the street, I stiffened, knew they could not be trusted. I ran. I saw a cross rising into the sky, reaching up. A church would be a safe place. I hoped.” (211).

(Excerpts from Roxane Gay's An Untamed State)