Krik? Krak!

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Edwidge Danticat

The following stories have been previously published, some of them in a slightly different form: "Children of the Sea" appeared under the title "From the Ocean Floor" in
Short Fiction by Women
(October 1993); "A Wall of Fire Rising" appeared under the title
"A
Wall of Fire" in
Cymbals: The National Student Literary
Magazine
(Summer 1991); "The Missing Peace"
in Just a Moment
(Pine Grove Press, Fall 1992) and in
The Caribbean Writer
(July 1994); "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" in
The Caribbean Writer
(Summer 1993) and in Best
of the Small
Presses
(Pushcart Press 1994) (winner of the Pushcart Prize) and also in
Monologues
By Women
(Heinemann 1994) and "Night Women" appeared under the title "Voices in a Dream" in
The Caribbean Writer
(Summer 1993) as well as in Brown University's
Clerestory
(July 1994).

All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-
Krik? Krak! / Edwidge Danticat.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56947-025-1
1. Haitian Americans—Social life and customs—Fiction.
2. Haiti—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554-A58I5K75 1995

8138.54—dc20

94-41999

CIP

Book design and composition by The Sarabande Press
Manufactured in the United States
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Krik? Krak! Somewhere by the seacoast I feel a breath
of warm sea air and hear the laughter of children.
An old granny smokes her pipe,
surrounded by the village children . . .
"We tell the stories so that the young ones
will know what came before them.
They ask Krik? we say Krak!
Our stories are kept in our hearts."
— SAL SCALORA,
"White Darkness/Black Dreamings"
Haiti: Feeding The Spirit

contents

1. Children of the Sea

2. Nineteen Thirty-Seven

3. A Wall of Fire Rising

4. Night Women

5. Between the Pool and the Gardenias

6. The Missing Peace

7. Seeing Things Simply

8. New York Day Women

9. Caroline's Wedding

Epilogue: Women Like Us

children of
the sea

They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it's true. I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth. Yes, I did love you then. Somehow when I looked at you, I thought of fiery red ants. I wanted you to dig your fingernails into my skin and drain out all my blood.

I don't know how long we'll be at sea. There are thirty-six other deserting souls on this little boat with me. White sheets with bright red spots float as our sail.

When I got on board I thought I could still smell the semen and the innocence lost to those sheets. I look up there and I think of you and all those times you resisted. Sometimes I felt like you wanted to, but I knew you wanted me to respect you. You thought I was testing your will, but all I wanted was to be near you. Maybe it's like you've always said. I imagine too much. I am afraid I am going to start having nightmares once we get deep at sea. I really hate having the sun in my face all day long. If you see me again, I'll be so dark.

Your father will probably marry you off now, since I am gone. Whatever you do, please don't marry a soldier. They're almost not human.

haiti est comme tu l'as laissé. yes, just the way you left it.
bullets day and night, same hole, same everything, i'm
tired of the whole mess, i get so cross and irritable, i pass
the time by chasing roaches around the house, i pound my
heel on their heads, they make me so mad. everything
makes me mad. i am cramped inside all day. they've closed
the schools since the army took over, no one is mentioning
the old president's name, papa burnt all his campaign
posters and old buttons, manman buried her buttons in a
hole behind the house, she thinks he might come back,
she says she will unearth them when he does, no one
comes out of their house, not a single person, papa wants
me to throw out those tapes of your radio shows, i
destroyed some music tapes, but i still have your voice, i
thank god you got out when you did. all the other youth
federation members have disappeared, no one has heard
from them, i think they might all be in prison, maybe
they're all dead, papa worries a little about you. he doesn't
hate you as much as you think, the other day i heard him
asking manman, do you think the boy is dead? manman
said she didn't know, i think he regrets being so mean to
you. i don't sketch my butterflies anymore because i don't
even like seeing the sun. besides, manman says that butterflies
can bring news, the bright ones bring happy news
and the black ones warn us of deaths, we have our whole
lives ahead of us. you used to say that, remember? but then
again things were so very different then.

There is a pregnant girl on board. She looks like she might be our age. Nineteen or twenty. Her face is covered with scars that look like razor marks. She is short and speaks in a singsong that reminds me of the villagers in the north. Most of the other people on the boat are much older than I am. I have heard that a lot of these boats have young children on board. I am glad this one does not. I think it would break my heart watching some little boy or girl every single day on this sea, looking into their empty faces to remind me of the hopelessness of the future in our country. It's hard enough with the adults. It's hard enough with me.

I used to read a lot about America before I had to study so much for the university exams. I am trying to think, to see if I read anything more about Miami. It is sunny. It doesn't snow there like it does in other parts of America. I can t tell exactly how far we are from there. We might be barely out of our own shores. There are no borderlines on the sea. The whole thing looks like one. I cannot even tell if we are about to drop off the face of the earth. Maybe the world is flat and we are going to find out, like the navigators of old. As you know, I am not very religious. Still I pray every night that we won't hit a storm. When I do manage to sleep, I dream that we are caught in one hurricane after another. I dream that the winds come of the sky and claim us for the sea. We go under and no one hears from us again.

I am more comfortable now with the idea of dying. Not that I have completely accepted it, but I know that it might happen. Don't be mistaken. I really do not want to be a martyr. I know I am no good to anybody dead, but if that is what's coming, I know I cannot just scream at it and tell it to go away.

I hope another group of young people can do the radio show. For a long time that radio show was my whole life. It was nice to have radio like that for a while, where we could talk about what we wanted from government, what we wanted for the future of our country.

There are a lot of Protestants on this boat. A lot of them see themselves as Job or the Children of Israel. I think some of them are hoping something will plunge down from the sky and part the sea for us. They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

if only i could kill, if i knew some good
wanga
magic, i would wipe them off the face of the earth, a group of students got shot in front of fort dimanche prison today, they were demonstrating for the bodies of the radio six. that is what they are calling you all. the radio six. you have a name, you have a reputation, a lot of people think you are dead like the others, they want the bodies turned over to the families, this afternoon, the army finally did give some bodies back, they told the families to go collect them at the rooms for indigents at the morgue, our neighbor madan roger came home with her son's head and not much else, honest to god, it was just his head, at the morgue, they say a car ran over him and took the head off his body, when madan roger went to the morgue, they gave her the head, by the time we saw her, she had been carrying the head all over port-au-prince. just to show what's been done to her son. the macoutes by the house were laughing at her. they asked her if that was her dinner, it took ten people to hold her back from jumping on them, they would have killed her, the dogs, i will never go outside again, not even in the yard to breathe the air. they are always watching you, like vultures, at night i can't sleep, i count the bullets in the dark, i keep wondering if it is true, did you really get out? i wish there was some way i could be sure that you really went away, yes, i will, i will keep writing like we promised to do. i hate it, but i will keep writing, you keep writing too, okay? and when we see each other again, it will seem like we lost no time.

Today was our first real day at sea. Everyone was vomiting with each small rocking of the boat. The faces around me are showing their first charcoal layer of sun-burn. "Now we will never be mistaken for Cubans," one man said. Even though some of the Cubans are black too. The man said he was once on a boat with a group of Cubans. His boat had stopped to pick up the Cubans on an island off the Bahamas. When the Coast Guard came for them, they took the Cubans to Miami and sent him back to Haiti. Now he was back on the boat with some papers and documents to show that the police in Haiti were after him. He had a broken leg too, in case there was any doubt.

One old lady fainted from sunstroke. I helped revive her by rubbing some of the salt water on her lips. During the day it can be so hot. At night, it is so cold. Since there are no mirrors, we look at each others faces to see just how frail and sick we are starting to look.

Some of the women sing and tell stories to each other to appease the vomiting. Still, I watch the sea. At night, the sky and the sea are one. The stars look so huge and so close. They make for very bright reflections in the sea. At times I feel like I can just reach out and pull a star down from the sky as though it is a breadfruit or a calabash or something that could be of use to us on this journey.

When we sing,
Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you.
I had to leave you before I could understand you,
some of the women start crying. At times, I just want to stop in the middle of the song and cry myself. To hide my tears, I pretend like I am getting another attack of nausea, from the sea smell. I no longer join in the singing.

You probably do not know much about this, because you have always been so closely watched by your father in that well-guarded house with your genteel mother. No, I am not making fun of you for this. If anything, I am jealous. If I was a girl, maybe I would have been at home and not out politicking and getting myself into something like this. Once you have been at sea for a couple of days, it smells like every fish you have ever eaten, every crab you have ever caught, every jellyfish that has ever bitten your leg. I am so tired of the smell. I am also tired of the way the people on this boat are starting to stink. The pregnant girl, Célianne, I don't know how she takes it. She stares into space all the time and rubs her stomach.

I have never seen her eat. Sometimes the other women offer her a piece of bread and she takes it, but she has no food of her own. I cannot help feeling like she will have this child as soon as she gets hungry enough.

She woke up screaming the other night. I thought she had a stomach ache. Some water started coming into the boat in the spot where she was sleeping. There is a crack at the bottom of the boat that looks as though, if it gets any bigger, it will split the boat in two. The captain cleared us aside and used some tar to clog up the hole. Everyone started asking him if it was okay, if they were going to be okay. He said he hoped the Coast Guard would find us soon.

You can't really go to sleep after that. So we all stared at the tar by the moonlight. We did this until dawn. I cannot help but wonder how long this tar will hold out.