Mama Is in America

Russo mimicked the pimp walk he had always seen in American movies as he went around the table and gave his four siblings an extra spoonful of oatmeal.

“What time is Mama calling?” Jean, the youngest, asked, his eyes still crusted in the corners. He always asked the same question. It was like the questions he asked about his papa, to which Russo gave the same answer: he didn’t know. None of them knew their papa, but Jean was light-skinned and the rest of them were the color of coffee beans. Naturally, it brought questions.

“Five o’clock, like every month,” Russo said. “Make sure your dèyè is here by then. Come straight home after school.” In his striped polo, khaki shorts, and brown loafers, Russo sat and watched them sop up their oatmeal with the bread, bread he had gotten from trading his sandals the day before.

Mama had been in America for a year now. In New York. Somewhere called Greenwich Village. Since she left, Russo had gotten his hands on every bootlegged film set in Manhattan. They didn’t have a TV, so he would go to a hotel in neighboring Pétion-Ville to watch them. Mama’s third cousin Nadège, a maid there, would sometimes sneak him in. She also snuck all of them in every twelfth of the month, when Mama would call. It was the day Russo was born and Mama’s favorite number. He liked to think the two were linked.

The first month Mama sent money, she said to buy a cell phone. But Uncle John John needed the money for food. There was school too. He had to pay tuition for the others’ schooling. Russo being the oldest, Mama relied on him to keep everything afloat even though they lived with her brother. Five kids between the ages of six and fourteen were more than Uncle John John’s one eye and arm could handle. He’d lost both two decades before in the ’91 coup d’état. So Russo had left secondary school, but Mama didn’t know that—and she wouldn’t if Russo’s threat to whup the kids black-and-blue meant anything. Between supplies for Uncle John John’s fresco cart, Jean’s asthma inhaler, which Mama also didn’t know about, and food, the saved expense of Russo not being in school went to better use.

Good was coming today; Russo could sense it. And outside, on Morne l’Hôpital’s mountainside, nothing said otherwise. The morning sun rose and the thick air clung. The green mountains were bright and never-ending, and below, hugging the Gulf of Gonâve, Haiti’s Port-au-Prince was flat and roaring to life.

Doors down, there was life too. Babies, two or three years old, ran naked, kicking around a ball. They grunted like hogs as their stubbed legs met the ball. They were almost as loud as the truck driving uphill bringing fresh water. Off to the side, two others watched a man as he sucked on a mango, the orange syrup running down his hand to his elbows. Then, finished with the mango, the seed white and hairless, he tossed it to the skinny stray dog who dug through the trash brought down by the last mudslide. The two babies, with empty stomachs and low-hanging lips, moved on and joined the foutbòl game.

Russo continued down the rocky slope where his concrete home and hundreds of others pressed together like jagged blocks ready to topple, where people sat on their roofs and did each other’s hair, and where kids often gave the middle finger to white men and women who smiled as they snapped photos. “A shantytown,” Russo heard one once say, whatever that meant. Then he walked past rich Pétion-Ville, where the wealthy and foreign-aiders lived in walled-off homes guarded with gates, and down to the foot of the mountain: central Port-au-Prince.

On the busy street, Russo’s legs met flat ground. He smiled. The hour walk was always worth it. It was a different world below the mountain, one where he could make money and make his way to America.

A tap-tap truck whizzed by stuffed with passengers in its metal-covered cargo bed. The rainbow-on-wheels blew dust in the air, and Russo covered his eyes. Honk after honk, beat-up cars and motorbikes sped by, filled with drivers and riders, who, when they weren’t laughing or singing along to the blasting kompa music, were cursing out the drivers beside them: “You dirty pig!” Even the men who held on to the back of the tap-tap trucks joined in, not caring they were only one bumpy turn from flying off. He’d seen it happen. A man fall off. And when he was certain the man was dead, the man got right back up and, limping, chased the tap-tap—cursing all the way.

The sidewalk was just as crowded with bodies. Vendors made shop along the path, shaded under brightly colored umbrellas. Grapefruit, avocados, bananas lay piled in baskets. Green peas and beans in sacks. Onions in mud-stained buckets. What didn’t fit in baskets, sacks, or buckets lay on blankets on the ground.

“Pen! Pen!” the leathered-skin woman said, sitting on the pavement with her bread.

“Sandals! Pantalon! Chemiz!” the man said beside her. His clothes hung on a wall.

“Bonjour, ze, Garçon?” another said, eggs held out to Russo.

Russo smiled and shook his head, and the woman sucked her teeth and waved him away.

He would miss Haiti’s capital. He would miss the noisiness and the smell of car exhaust and sweat. He would miss the shouting one second and the laughing the next. He would miss all the color. He would miss the way a vendor gave you the evil eye for not buying their eggs. But America would be worth it, he thought. Plus, Mama said there were a lot of Haitians there too. Not where she lived, this Greenwich Village, but in other parts. And if that was the case, it would be like he never left.

He turned onto a quieter street, almost bumping into a woman who balanced a basket large enough to bathe in. “Sorry, Madame,” he said. She put to shame all the other women beside her with only bags of fruit on their heads. He crossed one more corner and stopped at his frequent stomping ground.

“Sak pase, gentlemen?” Russo said to the four men huddled around a game of poker. He knew the men would be out today. As long as they had two feet and a Haitian dollar to their name, they would be out.

“Go, Denzel,” a grown man no taller than five feet said. He shook his pointed head at Russo.

The men had taken to calling Russo Denzel, after that American actor, Denzel Washington. He was tall and dark and had a similar face- splitting smile. Russo liked it.

“Why?” Russo asked, smiling, earning his nickname.

The other men, counting their money, ignored the question.

“You win too much,” the man chirped up at Russo.

That wasn’t true. Russo lost as much as he won. It just so happened that he made sure to win when the money was good. There were quite a few bills on the table. Money was good today.

“Let him play,” the bald-headed man said as he passed cards around. “He can’t win three times in a row.”

The short man groaned, and Russo grinned, squeezing himself a space around the plastic green table. The bald-headed man dealt him in.

“Whose cards are these? They are falling apart,” Russo said. “Let’s use my cards.” He reached for his back pocket that held a deck of cards.

“No!” the short man said.

Russo raised his hands in surrender. “Okay.” They had used his deck of cards the last two times, and they had lost the last two times.

Russo began scratching his behind.

“Boy, stop scratching,” the man to his right said.

“Mosquito bites,” Russo replied, not letting up the scratching or his attempt to feel out his pocket where he stored a better hand for these exact moments. Then as the men reeled off all the bad President Préval was doing for the country, Russo switched the cards. Soon after, they all folded. Russo won.

“Hey, how’d you do that?” the short man said. His lips jutted out.

“I have luck on my side.”

“Oh, shut up and play again,” the short man said, eyeing him, and Russo was about to say Fine when there was shouting.

“Aye!” someone yelled from behind.

From the man’s wobbled walk and the clack of his sandals, Russo remembered him. He had fooled him the day before in a game of poker dice with weighted dice. And apparently, after a night’s sleep, the man had caught on.

“Get manman ou!” the man shouted.

“Fuck my mother? She’s in America.” Russo laughed, scooping up his winnings.

Then he ran.

“Your butt is mine tomorrow!” Russo heard in the distance.

The other men laughed and joined in calling him names.

“Idyot!” someone shouted, probably the short man.

“Enbesil!” another threw.

The man really shouldn’t have been so upset: Russo had let him win twice before he pulled the trick. Then again, the man had made fun of the small scar on Russo’s head, and Russo made fun of his bunioned feet.

Russo usually avoided fooling so many at once, but he was going to America soon. He could sense it.

And he wasn’t an idiot or imbecile, he said to himself as he kept running, even though the men didn’t bother to chase him. He had been saving money for the plane ticket. Five kids to America wouldn’t be cheap. Then there would be other costs. Clothes. He couldn’t wear Uncle John John’s hand-me-downs there. No. The kids in the American movies wore Nikes. And there were chains. Some of them wore chains around their necks, big ones and little ones. He liked the little ones, less flashy. And their hair, they got it done all the time.

And would an idiot or imbecile want to work at a bank when he got to America? he thought. He was good with money. He could stretch his daily earnings to buy corn, rice, and some meat. Uncle John John would spend all of that on bread.

So Russo was going to work at a bank when he got to America or be one of those men who wore blue suits to work. They had briefcases and coffees in their hands. Sometimes they had newspapers, and they would stick their hand out for a taxi, and one always came. That’s what he wanted to be, whatever they did. Those weren’t idiots or imbeciles.

He wouldn’t be like Mama. She was a maid in Haiti and now a maid in America. You could be anything you wanted in America. Why hadn’t she become a teacher or chef?

Thinking about Mama’s cooking made him hungry. So did the woman staring at him.

“Papitas!”

He stopped.

“Five gourdes,” said the woman selling fried plantains in a bag.

He paid the woman and scarfed down the overly salted snack, licking his fingers and the bag before tossing it. Then he headed to his next office.

Downtown Port-au-Prince was the place to make easy money, if you were patient and spoke English. With museums like Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, parks, monuments, and statues, it was a tourist spot.

The blond woman standing eye level with him had a small nose and yellow teeth. Her sun hat covered half her face. She was red and smelled like sunscreen. Russo had never worn sunscreen in his life, and good thing, he thought. It stunk. If she had just gotten here, she was in for a rude awakening, a Haitian hello. The sun was not going to let up.

“Madame, I’d love to take you around our beautiful Port-au-Prince,” he said, winking, ignoring her male companion. Women were easier to bait. They were always surprised by his decent English, which he’d learned from movies and an American friend of Mama’s.

“No thank—no mèsi,” she said with an American accent and a Haitian Creole translation book hooked under her arm.

“You know, Haiti is the first free Black republic. Independence from a slave revolt.”

The woman smiled and he continued.

“Jean-Jacques Dessalines was one of the revolutionary leaders. There’s a statue just a street away—”

“We are fine, thank you,” the man interrupted.

He still went on. “Haiti—Ayiti in Creole—means land of high mountains. I’d love to show you—”

Then what he hoped would happen did. They pulled out some bills and paid him to shut up and leave. That’s what usually occurred, and he was happy each time. He only ever had a few more minutes’ worth of fun facts. Once or twice, foreigners actually took him up on his offer, and he resorted to making things up. “This building is as old as Christopher Columbus.” “Christopher Columbus stood right here as he decided on his plans for this beautiful land.” “Every year, this street hosts a Christopher Columbus parade.” He mentioned Christopher Columbus a lot. He figured it gave legitimacy to his untruths. It did help that the nearby museum had the anchor from Christopher Columbus’s ship when he crashed on the island in 1492. And foreigners, especially Americans, loved Christopher Columbus, right?

When historical facts or lies didn’t open their pockets, he turned to jokes: “Why didn’t the Haitian cross the road?” When they would stare blankly: “Because he was too chicken.” He laughed at his own jokes, and they would smile and give him something. Today he didn’t have to resort to jokes, and he was thankful, because it was already past noon. He had somewhere to be soon.

Russo shoved the bills into his pocket and counted the money in his head. Between his card wins and the three American couples he’d bugged today, he had enough for chocolate, chicken, and a tap-tap ride, with money still left over.

He was headed for the Iron Market when three little boys started following him. They had been sitting on the sidewalk with their empty bucket watching Russo for the past couple of hours, and Russo knew.

“Russo,” the brothers called out together.

He turned around.

Barefoot, the boys wore tie-dye T-shirts, dirt-stained at the bottom, and ripped denim shorts. All wore shirts too big and shorts too small.

“Where are your shoes?” Russo asked them. The missionaries always gave shoes.

The boys looked at their feet and wiggled their ashy, calloused toes. Skin cut up and scarred, their ankles and shins looked like they scrubbed with rocks instead of soap.

“I told you before. Americans don’t want to see that.”

“How much you make?” said the boy with the sunspot-covered face. The other two ferociously scratched their hair. White flakes sprung up and dusted what was their hair or what could have easily been mistaken for tens of pill bugs.

“And brush your hair.”

“How much you make?” they whined.

“Tomorrow, if you clean yourselves up, I’ll tell you.”

“Tell us now. You might be going to America soon, why you need the money anyways?” one of them said.

Russo laughed, and when they began to cry, he left. He would give them money tomorrow. He always did, but they needed to do better. They made him—all of them—look bad. Besides, they weren’t even orphans. Their mother was a vodou priestess, and clearly not a good one, considering they lived in a wooden shack in the worst part of the city.

Russo sat on the bench where he always sat on Fridays, waiting for her. He could already smell her cocoa-buttered skin. See her almond eyes and corn-husk hair. She was beautiful. Perfect. He thought about their babies together and how they would take her dimples and his wide, flat nose. Her twig legs in their knee-high socks were what he loved

most. They were smooth, and he wanted to touch them, glide his hand from her ankles all the way under her skirt. What did it look like under there? Probably nothing like the other girls he had seen. It would be hairless and smell like flowers, he knew it.

On the bench he sang:

Her body was a wonder
This made me want to hunt her
The hills were oh so jealous
And all the men grew helpless
But tonight I will be sleeping
Dreaming about how she is a sweet thing
Those lumps—

“Don’t be nasty,” she said, walking out of the school gates in her Catholic uniform and twig legs, waving goodbye to her classmates.

“You look mighty beautiful today, Julie.”

She rolled her eyes at him and ran her hand along the back of her skirt, straightening it.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked.

“No.”

He smiled and continued to walk beside her.

“I said no.”

“I know. I’m just walking this way too.” They’d been doing this dance for six months now. He’d gotten it down to a science. If it rained, he had an umbrella for her. If it was exceptionally hot, he brought Mama’s old Chinese fan for her to cool herself. And some days, like today, he had chocolate. She always said no until she wanted what he had.

As usual, she didn’t start the conversation, and he liked that. All the other girls were easy, but she was tough and not interested in anything that would distract her from her studies. This included a boy who wasn’t in school and had nothing to offer except good looks and chocolate. He was also too skinny. She had made sure to tell him that before too.

“You know, my Mama is in America. She’s going to send for me soon. Then you’re going to miss me, but I’ll be busy with all those American girls.”

She knew Mama was in America. He had said it once or twice or three times before.

“I’ll pray for it to happen tomorrow,” she said.

He laughed. His future wife was funny, he thought. “Careful. I’m speaking to my Mama later today. It might.”

He pulled out the chocolates from the plastic bag, and peeking at his hand, she took one. He smiled and slid her bookbag off her shoulders, making sure his fingers grazed her skin, and slung it onto his.

She had moved from L’Asile, the countryside, to live with her grand- mother. It took him five walks to learn that and her name. Seven for her to say something besides “Stop staring.” And ten for her to let him carry her bookbag.

“Why do you want to carry it?” she had asked him on that tenth walk. “You going to steal it?”

“No. Fine, carry it. Break your back for all I care.” He kicked a rock, and it went farther than either one of them could see. “But I tell you this. You won’t be as attractive with a question mark for a back.”

She had groaned and rolled her eyes but, most importantly, gave him her bookbag. More accurately, threw it at him. He grinned and had carried the weight ever since.

When they reached her house in middle-class Delmas, the chocolates all eaten and her mouth spent from complaining about the bad marks she had gotten on her science test, he asked, “You really won’t miss me when I leave?”

She stared at her feet while he stared at her chest, and then she kissed him. First surprised, he stood still, then his hands did what he had been thinking the whole walk. What he thought about every walk but didn’t have the guts to do. He grabbed her butt.

“Hey!”

“What?” he said, smiling.

“You grabbed my—you’re trouble, Russo Claude,” she said.

“I’m going to marry you, Julie Joseph,” he said, walking backward. “I’ll see you next week.”

She rolled her eyes, but Russo caught the small curl of her lip. He smiled back, warm from his first kiss from Julie Joseph, and ran off.

Beyond Haiti, he had thought through their life together. As soon as he could, he would send for her. He would get that bank job in America and hire a lawyer and she would come. She would live with them, and as soon as they were old enough, they would get married. If she didn’t like the cold, they would move to Miami. He could picture her slender body sunburned, barking orders at him to apply more sunscreen to her honey skin.

A sack of chicken legs, a tap-tap ride, and a run up the mountain later, Russo was home.

“Hurry and wash up. We have to get to the hotel,” Russo shouted to his siblings as he hid his money in a crack in his cement-block wall.

“Why can’t I go like this? Mama won’t know,” Jean said, running into their bedroom with the others.

“Because you aren’t a vagabond. Are you going to act like that in America?”

They all smiled. They were going to America; Russo could sense it, and he wasn’t the only one.

A stray dog howled outside. It had been howling for minutes.

“What’s wrong with that thing?” Russo asked.

After changing, they ran thirty minutes downhill to the luxury El Rancho Hotel. All-white, it always amazed them that it was near the same mountain, in the same country. As usual, Nadège, in her maid uniform, snuck them into one of the vacant rooms where they plopped on the bed. She left them and went back to work.

Ten minutes to five, Jean and the others bounced on the two queen- size beds. Russo didn’t stop them and their giggling as they ruined the crisp white sheets. His rule was they could bounce all they wanted as long as they fixed the beds. He wouldn’t risk Nadège losing her job. He crossed the tile floor, past the colorful Haitian paintings and underneath the hanging ceiling light, to the large bay windows overlooking the pool he’d been allowed in only once. He preferred Port-au-Prince’s saltwater beaches anyhow. He would go tomorrow, he thought to himself.

Russo couldn’t wait until five, so at 4:53 p.m., he called her. He brought the phone to his ear, straightening the wiry cord as if it would make her feel closer.

“Mama? It’s Russo,” he said, grinning ear to ear when she answered. He looked at his siblings, who sat across from him, bunched up on the bed, waiting for their turn. He shot a thumbs-up.

“We’re good. School’s good.” He stood up from the bed, ready to hear her say they would be going to America. “Uncle John John’s good too. He’s at the port working,” he rushed out. The suspense killing him, he interrupted her usual series of questions. “When are we coming?” he asked, his smile wide.

The eight eyes staring at Russo leaned forward.

“Hello?” He stepped to the dial. His face dropped. “Mama?”

Then the silence was met with a violent jolt, and Russo fell to the ground, as did everything else. The paintings. The crystal ceiling light. His siblings. The sound piercing as everything shattered against tile. Russo struggled to push himself up on his hands and knees as the shaking grew. Then the jagged earth-tearing cracks. Above and below. Russo forced back down.

There hadn’t been an earthquake in almost twenty years. He hadn’t planned for it. He hadn’t said his goodbyes or put money aside or dressed for the occasion. He lay there, too skinny for Julie Joseph, fingers stretched toward the phone, siblings bunched under a fallen sky.

Read more from Issue 18.2.