Chapter 2

I am fourteen, standing in the kitchen.

I have never seen anyone wield a knife like my mother does. Deft but careful, her hands at ease, accustomed to the blade, as she removes the veins in the chicken thighs.

I have never seen a knife like this in another person’s home, its black handle mostly gone, having chipped off from a fall, yet continually sharpened and put to work, cutting limes and garlic, flesh and sinew, a relic and a witness to her command.

She’s never used a cutting board like I see them do on PBS. I don’t think our small kitchen would have had room for one, and I don’t think that’s something people did where she grew up. I tried one day, as I was learning the skill to slice an onion, to hold it and wield it like she does. I held the large leftover onion in the palm of my hand and tried to cut horizontally. Cut away from you, I had heard them say on TV. Well, I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I nearly sliced my palm, feeling the ridges of the steak knife bite my skin before I stopped. I didn’t draw blood, luckily.

I can see this knife in my mind’s eye, as I recount this, and my mother has a lot of knives now, but back then she only had two; it was this weathered and worn one on its last life, and a solitary steak knife, which I preferred. Both knives are long gone, finally thrown away, even after they survived entry into the house we bought. But she still scares me to death when I see her hold the shiny, full handled, freshly sharpened new one…  

But it’s here now as I reconstruct this memory. I am watching my mother prepare the chicken. She removes the skin and asks me to hold portions of it as she cuts.

I am brooding as I settle into my teenage years, occupying the kitchen with a quiet intensity, with raven black hair, deep brown eyes with black rimmed irises, and rich caramel skin. One and a half dimples nestle into my cheeks and a soft cleft marks a chin on a round face. Some people think I’m pretty, but I don’t know this yet.

Smart and artistic, my teachers designate me as a monitor, gift me art supplies, and let me take home new and unused books. My art and poetry have won prizes, and I am a full year ahead in my studies, with peers like me, who vary in their talents. My teachers shower me with praise, and in return, I defer to them like revered luminaries, comfortably smug in the warmth of their approval. My parents think I’m ordinary.

I read voraciously and bring my latest volume everywhere. Armed with a good record at the library and a full metro card to get there, no book is off limits. I read about the occult, the supernatural, and worlds beyond, and revel in the pages of the thickest volume I can find. I’ve recently gotten into vampires. Was it Anne Rice I was reading?

I’m only mildly annoyed that I have to be in the kitchen helping. Doesn’t she always just do this herself? Then consider my open book left on the bed, in a room I share with my brother, and wonder when I can get back to it. She hasn’t even sifted and sorted the rice yet. The plantains aren’t even in a pot. Is the spinach still in the freezer? This is going to take a while.

She moves to rubbing the meat with limes to remove the taste and smell of the supermarket package, and she recounts a dream from her past. She was fourteen.

One morning in Haiti in 1968, my mother dreams that she opens the wooden door out of her one-story cement home and walks out of the darkness and into the full moon. Beckoned from sleep with a soft voice that she recognizes as the Virgin Mary’s, she gets up from her mattress where she sleeps alongside her younger sister Marri and older sister Jet.

She then obediently tiptoes on the cement floor, and opens the front door. As a chilly mountain breeze hits her body, the Blessed Virgin says, “Go look outside under the tree in the yard and you’ll find something I’ve left for you.” Leaving her father Octavian and her sisters deaf with dreaming in the house behind her, she gathers up her night gown and walks barefoot outside on the cold red earth to the tree. During the short walk, her calves brush the coffee plants that she recently planted and she thinks of her mother, who had died a few months before: Julnise was gone forever, but entombed just next to the coffee plants in the yard, a constant reminder to what her husband and eight children had lost.

What my mother finds in the yard is not a thing, but the Virgin Mary herself in front of the tree, glowing, and smiling, and welcoming her into gentle arms. Within the next few days she would find out that the nuns would welcome her into their school, letting her escape hunger and poverty.

I don’t tell my mother that I’ve lost faith yet, but she already knows. That’s why I’m here, “helping.” It’s not until later that I would understand the deep significance of this memory and the deep hopelessness where she was, and the impossibility of how I came to be.

Never lose faith, she was saying. Wield the knife you’ve been given, even if the handle is gone.