Everything Inside: Stories by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat [Danticat, Edwidge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Cultural Heritage, Family Life, General
ISBN: 9780525521280
Google: -OV8DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0525521275
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2019-08-26T23:00:00+00:00

Neah learned about Leve, the women’s organization, from me. My twenty-hour-a-week work-study job was in Career/Volunteer Services, and one of the first things I saw there on a bulletin board was a flyer with the Leve logo, a silhouette of a woman and a young girl staring up at a dark sky with a single star in it. On the flyer were color photographs of undernourished Haitian women who looked like my mother, some carrying heavy buckets of water on their heads while walking narrow dirt paths in the countryside, others sitting on riverbanks washing clothes, a few selling fly-covered meat in an open market. At the bottom of the flyer, near the pitch to join Leve on the Thanksgiving-week trip, was a picture of a teenage girl lying in a hospital bed, her face bruised, her eyes swollen shut.

I waited until no one was looking and yanked the flyer off the bulletin board, in part because I was afraid that people would link that girl’s bruised face to mine, as someone who, though I was not born there, considered myself “left side of the hyphen” Haitian. Where were the idyllic beaches with fine white sand that my parents were always dreaming and talking about, and that I had also seen online? Where were the dewy mountaintops, Haiti being the land of mountains and all? Where was the Citadelle Laferrière, one of the world’s greatest forts? Where were the caves and grottoes, the waterfalls, the cathedrals, churches, Vodou temples, museums, and art galleries college students could be visiting?

That night, I had described both the flyer and my indignation to Neah. She was so quiet I thought she had fallen asleep. After a long pause, she said in her late-night-whisper voice, “It sounds really interesting. I think I’d like to go.”

“I would not want to go,” I said. I meant without my parents, but I never managed to say that.

It didn’t surprise me that Neah would want to go on the Leve trip, though. She had traveled all over the world with her parents, even after their divorce.

I had grown up differently than Neah. My parents met while traveling between orange, berries, lettuce, tomatoes, and corn harvests along the Georgia and Florida coasts. For as far back as I could remember, I had slept in grower-owned housing, which was basically bunk beds and sometimes cots behind barns and stables, where only thin wooden slats and planks separated my parents and me from the animals. We’d also lived in field barracks with beaten-dirt floors, in “dorms” that looked like they’d been built for criminals doing hard labor, and in overpriced motel rooms with cracked windows, filthy carpets, and peeling paint on the walls.

Every time we moved to a new place, my parents would enroll me in a new school. I would spend a few weeks settling in, make a friend or two, then have to move again. Many of the older kids who were in school with me would eventually drop out and start working in the fields with their parents to make money, but my parents wouldn’t let me.

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