Samdi / Saturday, June 26, 1999

Good news from Haiti! Marie-Ange had the baby on Tuesday, a boy, healthy and loud, and they named him Jacques after Papa. Frantz called from the neighbor's phone, shouting. Then Papa got on and said, "Fabiola, mwen se granpapa ankò," I am a grandfather again, like he did it himself.

School's out. Third grade is finished. Naïka read forty-one books this year and got a certificate. Manno won "Most Improved in Math," which he says means he used to be bad. Summer camp at church starts Monday.

The mango tree is heavy again. The neighbor's boys are climbing it at night again. It is the same summer as last year and completely different. I am different. There is a form at the INS with my name on it.

Samdi / Saturday, June 5, 1999

It is done! Two hundred fifty dollars in the can on Wednesday, plus a little more for the photos at the drugstore (two photos; I look like a woman who is surprised by a camera, which I was). Mèt Bazile checked every page of my form at the Saturday class with his red pen and found one mistake, a date I wrote the Haitian way, day first. Then Jean-Robert drove me to the post office and I sent it, with the money order, certified mail, and I held the envelope a little too long before I let go. The lady at the post office said, "Honey, it won't bite."

Now I wait. Mèt Bazile says the fingerprints will come first, maybe in some months, and the interview maybe next year. The INS is very slow, he says; there are a million people in line. I have waited fourteen years. I can wait one more.

The twins and I celebrated with ice cream at the park. Naïka ordered for all of us in English and then said to me in Kreyòl, "Manman, now you're almost American." I said, "Almost." And Manno, with chocolate on his face, said, "Almost is the best part," which I think he heard on TV. But it is true.

Madi / Tuesday, May 18, 1999

Haitian Flag Day. At the twins' school the Haitian kids wore red and blue, and there was a program in the cafeteria, and Manno carried the flag in, with the palm tree and the cannons and the words L'Union fait la force, unity is strength. He held it so straight his arms shook. He practiced in the living room all week with a broom.

Mr. H. Something happened. For months it is the same: he fights, he yells, he throws things. I keep saying, "Good morning, Captain." This week he has been quieter. The doctor changed a medicine. Today at lunch I was helping him with his soup, and he put his hand on top of my hand and held it, and he said, "Ruth." Ruth was his wife. She died five years ago, his son told the nurse. He held my hand and called me Ruth and told me the fish were running off Marathon and we should take the boat out Sunday.

I said, "Okay, Captain. Sunday."

I don't know if that was right. Maybe I should have said I am Fabiola. But he smiled, and he ate all the soup. In the car after work I sat a long time before I drove.

Dimanch / Sunday, April 18, 1999

The twins are nine. The party was small this year, just family and some church kids, because the can is for citizenship now and the twins know it. Naïka said, "We can have a big party when you're American, Manman." I said I am already American in my heart. She said, "That doesn't count for the test."

On TV every night now are the refugees from Kosovo, the long lines of people walking with their bags, old ladies pushed in wheelbarrows, the babies. Naïka asked me why they are leaving. I tried to explain war. She asked, "Did people leave Haiti like that?" I said yes. Most went on the water. Her cousin Ti-Paul went on a boat in 1991 with forty people, and the Coast Guard picked them up, and he was many months in a tent at Guantánamo before they let him come to Miami. She knows Ti-Paul all her life. She didn't know that.

She looked at him differently at the party today. He gave her five dollars and she hugged him for a long time, and he didn't know why.

One hundred sixty-one dollars in the can.

Dimanch / Sunday, March 7, 1999

Today our church is twenty years old. Twenty years ago it was eleven people in a garage off 60th Street. Now it is a real building, a store we bought, with a steeple that Frère Lucien built from plywood and painted white, and three hundred people on Sunday, and a choir with new robes, blue with gold, which we paid for with two years of plate sales.

The service was four hours. Nobody complained. Well, Manno complained, but softly. A pastor came from Port-au-Prince to preach, the same one who baptized Pastor Désir when they were young men. The choir sang three songs, and I had a solo, eight bars in the middle of "Great Is Thy Faithfulness," in Kreyòl, and my knees were shaking so hard I held the rail. Jean-Robert says you couldn't hear the knees.

Then the meal. The ladies cooked for three days. Griyo, rice and beans, legim, macaroni, fried plantains, the big cake. The children ran between the tables in their Sunday clothes until the clothes were not Sunday anymore. Men anpil, chay pa lou.

At the end I stood at the back of the hall and looked at everybody. People from Jacmel and Cap-Haïtien and Gonaïves and Port-de-Paix, people who came by plane and people who came by boat, and all our children, who came by being born here. Twenty years. Bondye bon.

Jedi / Thursday, February 11, 1999

A hard patient. I will call him Mr. H. He came to us three weeks ago, eighty-two years old, a fishing boat captain all his life, from the Keys. His mind is going. His body is still strong, which is the hard combination.

He does not want to be here. He does not want to be washed or turned or fed. He does not want me. He says things to me that I will not write here, about where I come from and what I am. Yesterday he threw his tray, the eggs, the juice, everything, on the floor and on my uniform.

The nurse said I can ask for a different assignment. I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe because nobody else wants him either. Maybe because in the afternoon, when the light comes in low from the window, he looks out at the parking lot like it is the ocean, and his hands move like they are holding a wheel.

Dèyè mòn, gen mòn. Behind the mountains, more mountains. My grandmother said that about everything.

I changed my uniform and cleaned the floor and came back in and said, "Good morning, Captain." He looked at me a long time. He said, "It's afternoon." It was. That was our first conversation.

Samdi / Saturday, January 23, 1999

Citizenship class started today, Saturday mornings in the church hall, nine to eleven. Mèt Bazile teaches it. (Mèt is what we call a lawyer.) He was a lawyer in Haiti for thirty years, and here he was a security guard for ten, and now he is retired and teaches us for free, in his suit, with his reading glasses on the end of his nose. There are eighteen of us.

He gave us the list of one hundred questions. What are the colors of our flag? Red, white and blue. (Easy. Almost like Haiti, they only added white.) How many stars? Fifty. Who was the first president? George Washington. What is the Constitution? The supreme law of the land. How many senators? One hundred.

At dinner the twins ask me questions from the list. Naïka is very strict. If I say "the supreme law of the country," she says, "Wrong! Land!" Manno asks only the easy ones and gives me points for everything. Between the two of them I will be a very confused citizen.

Twenty-eight dollars in the can.

Vandredi / Friday, January 1, 1999

Bòn Ane 1999! One year of this journal. Soup joumou again this morning, the big pot, the neighbors with their bowls.

New look for the page: red and blue like the flag, which Mr. Rolle helped me with at the last computer class. And now I put the days in Kreyòl too, for the kids, who are supposed to learn them: Lendi, Madi, Mèkredi, Jedi, Vandredi, Samdi, Dimanch. Manno says Samdi is the best day because there is no school and no church.

My resolution this year: citizenship. I have had my green card nine years. Jean-Robert became a citizen in 1996 and he has been bragging ever since. He got called for jury duty last spring and he was so proud he wore a tie. Every year I say next year. The English was not good enough, the money was not there, I was afraid of the test. Now the English is good enough. The test I will study. The money is the problem. The fee for the application, with the fingerprints, is almost a week of my pay.

So I took the big coffee can from the kitchen, the Bustelo one, and washed it and wrote on the top in marker CITIZENSHIP, and put in twenty dollars. Piti piti zwazo fè nich li. Little by little the bird builds its nest.