Elodie Saint-Louis
A mother and daughter sit across from me on the train. I’d avoided looking at them at first, shifting my gaze to the ground or to other passengers, trying my best to stave off
thoughts of my own mother. The mother points to her phone screen and laughs, her manicure glinting like rubies in the light.
I think of my mother’s hands. They’d looked so weak in the hospital bed, lifeless and limp in her lap. So unlike the hands I remembered. Hands that braided my hair into two plaits each night when I was a child, neat and tightly done. Hands that fed and carried, that bathed and drew blood. Sometimes I feel like I know her hands better than I know her, and that all their gestures reveal more than words ever could.
I get off the train and walk the last few blocks, wanting to relish the fresh spring air. My skin prickles as soon as I approach the hospital. I pause before entering, a moment of peace before the onslaught of sounds and smells. But the waiting room is strangely empty, so quiet that I can hear the vending machines humming in the corner. I check in with the attending nurse and wait.
After a few minutes Jenny, my mother’s nurse, appears. She welcomes me with a big smile. She looks brighter today, her skin more cherubic than usual. Her optimism and springy demeanor grated me at first, her curls bobbing in a way I found cartoonish. I decide, right then and there, to like her. She has the kind of attitude necessary to surviving a place like this, has verve where I have none.
I follow Jenny down a hallway. “I’m so glad we were able to push the scan to today.
Hopefully we’ll have a better sense of what’s going on in your mother’s chest.” My heart quickens at the thought of my mother. Even now, bedridden and feeble, I feel her ability to hurt me.
Jenny escorts me through a series of doors. “Here we are,” she says before turning to look at me. “I’m glad it’s you who’ll be in there with her.”
****
Florence returns to me each morning after the first round of treatments and IV swaps and the agonizing hour of the day during which I try to eat. Sometimes she tries to sneak me griot and bannan fri, food I cannot stomach and that the doctor says I shouldn’t eat. No fried food, he’d insisted. But I couldn’t help myself; the goat was crisped to perfection, almost as good as my own.
I wonder where she gets it from. Despite the years I tried to teach her how to cook, she never managed to learn how to make a decent meal, not even diri kole ak pwa. Maybe she buys it from that place on Crown Street she took me years ago, where they called pikliz relish and the chairs were upholstered in bright tribal prints. A young white couple sat next to us, both of them wearing silver rings in their noses. I thought they looked ridiculous, like bulls. Gone was the laundromat and Irie’s, where you could get a beef patty for 50¢. Replaced by a luxury condo and boutique. Gone were the automats, the lines of vendors on Canal St. I saw white people everywhere—jogging with dogs, drinking beers on the sidewalk, pushing massive strollers.
A thin white curtain separates me from the patient next to me, a woman who is dying. Every evening she weeps after her son—her one and only son, she likes to remind me time and time again—leaves when visiting hours are over. She is a woman who relishes in the public expression of her pain. As for me, I’m not one to beg for pity. I keep my troubles to myself.
Yesterday my daughter looked tired. I noticed deep creases in her eyes, half-moons that revealed a string of sleepless nights. I watched her, remembered her as a little girl before she became defiant, too stubborn to tell me things. I’m always doing that, forgetting she’s much older than she is. Always seeing her as she once was. She was so beautiful when she was born. I couldn’t believe I had created something so perfect. The midwife called down so everyone could see her. “You must cherish her,” she said. I look at Florence and see her at six, eleven, seventeen. The first and only time she broke a bone – her right elbow, the time she told me she wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut, the agonizing period of time when nothing I did, nothing I ever said, was right. She thinks I don’t understand, but I do.
For three days now I’ve had these dreams. I usually wake up the next morning in a fog of amnesia, my reality distinctly altered but left unknown to me. I wake with the odd feeling that I’ve left my body behind. The line between my dreaming and waking life is not as firm as it once seemed.
Last night’s dream was stranger than usual. I found myself in deep and murky waters, which surrounded me on all sides. The water felt as great and broad as the open sky, glorious in its plainness, expanding from me. Great big waves of sky burst from my belly. I swelled and shivered, the weight of it almost too much, threatening to crush me. My mouth took on the taste of salt. My teeth slipped out of my jaw. I tried to swallow but my tongue got lost inside my gums, a useless worm darting frantically in my mouth. I struggled as more salt filled my lungs.
Then, as quickly as it came, the water vanished. My body took on a weightlessness. I saw manman. I saw my Florence.
****
The two lab technicians eat sandwiches as the great whirring machine scans my mother’s body. I can smell the vinegar in the meat from the seat I’m allowed to be in only because it is far away from the waves of light and heat penetrating my mother’s body. My mother is no longer herself, just a geography of lines and various curves.
I watch each breath leave my mother’s body, the swell of her chest. I’ve never paid such close attention to that necessary rise and fall, the tick of machinery that keeps her and all of us going. My mother’s skin is the palest I’ve ever seen it. Yet I feel some life force within her moving like an animal burrowing itself in order to keep warm.
When the scan’s over I help Jenny guide my mother out of the machine. She gently removes the thick black apron covering my mother’s torso. “How are you feeling, Murielle?” she asks, her voice gentle. “The medication’s wearing off now so you might be disoriented.” I hold my mother steady as Jenny slips a hospital gown over my mother’s shoulders. My mother wheezes but says nothing. She blinks at me slowly before shutting her eyes.
“I like your birds,” Jenny says, noticing the trio of sparrows on my right forearm. It’d been so hot with the machine running that I’d started to feel faint and had taken my sweater off. I see the sweater on the chair, balled up in the corner where I’d left it. I’d even thought ahead this time, remembering to bring a protective layer with me. I’d kept my coat on during my first visit to the hospital so she wouldn’t see my arms. I didn’t want to give her any more reasons to be angry with me. She didn’t talk to me for a month after she found out about my first tattoo, a star on my ankle. I’d gotten more as soon as I’d left home, at first in places where they wouldn’t be easily seen. My mother’s gaze followed me everywhere. Looking into the mirror was like looking over my shoulder. I’d peer at my reflection only to see her staring back at me.
“I have a little hummingbird on my back.” Jenny turns away from me and heads towards a wheelchair near the door. “Birds are good luck, don’t you think?”
My mother opens her eyes. She looks at me, her mouth a hard line, barbed wire I cannot cross. “I don’t want to see that,” she says, her voice cracking through the air like a whip. Old words flash in front of me. This is not my daughter. I did not raise you to be like this. Once again I am seven, and eleven, and seventeen, and shame, red-hot, strikes my heart.
Jenny looks at me with sorrowful eyes when I say I need a second, a bit of time alone. “I’ll let her get some rest,” I say before leaving.
I watch a couple in the cafeteria as they twist their hands together over and over again, a cat’s cradle motion that reminds me of the hand game my mother would play when I was a child. One of us would place our hands palms-down while the other placed them palms-up. The object of the game was to slap the top of the other’s palm as quickly as possible. A game of hesitation and expectation. It paid off to take one’s time, to move the hand when the other least expected it.
My mother always won. She knew the lesson of patience, while I was always too eager. She’d shake her head every time. “I have to teach you how to know when to strike.”
I imagine the relationship Jenny has with her mother. Did Jenny, Sunny Jenny, have reservations about her mother too, or did they call each other best friends? Did Jenny tell her about losing her virginity, or having her first drink, or the first person who broke her heart? Did Jenny’s mother stroke her hair when she cried and pack perfect American lunches: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in half with the crusts cut off, chocolate chip cookies still warm from the oven? Did Jenny’s mother let her host sleepovers whenever she wanted? Did Jenny’s mother show up at parties in the middle of the night with her bonnet on, dragging Jenny home because she didn’t tell her boys would be involved? Jenny’s mother doesn’t tell her to be careful, to always look over her shoulder, to watch out for white vans, to keep her mouth shut, so many words stuck inside her throat. Jenny’s free. Jenny doesn’t know shame.
Was Jenny given instructions on how to be a good daughter? Stand tall with your back erect, a straight pattern in which no fault line can be found. Use the fork and knife properly, the knife always in your right. Unravel the cloth napkin and place it on your lap. Chew slowly with your mouth shut tight. The hem of your skirt should be no higher than two inches above the knee. Watch me so you know how not to suffer. You will see what you could not come close to touching. Learn from what you cannot imagine. Learn from my mistakes, the ways in which I did not correct my body in time. Life can slip at the smallest moment, a pull on a loose thread that unravels the entire fabric. You may ask for nothing less than excellence. Nothing less than perfection.
My mother is asleep when I return to her room. There’s no sight of Jenny or my mother’s roommate. I wonder if she’s been discharged. The room’s stark plainness and lack of beauty exhausts me. Nowhere to look but my mother. Nowhere to escape to. I try to read but my eyes scan over the same paragraph again and again. I give up after the sixth time.
I wake to a strange static in my ears, a rustling that sounds like many whispers at once.
The room is completely dark besides dozens of pinpricks of light coming from the various machines scattered around the room. It’s so dim I can hardly make anything out. The lines delineating each object blurred, everything one fuzzy outline.
The air starts to shimmer. Three figures blow into the room one by one, a trio of fluttering doves. They move about the room like wind. The air quivers in their wake. I can’t tell if they’re wearing clothes or if the clothing is really their skin, which swishes like silk and emits a soft glow.
“Who are you?” I call out. For some reason I’m more curious than frightened. The figures huddle together. The rustling noise picks up. I hear them speak even though their lips never move. The sound of their voices is somewhere between an echo and a song, a consciousness, a channel I tune into.
The rustling stops. “Not another hospital,” I hear a shrill voice complain. “Hush.” This second voice sounds gentle, more patient than the first. “Who are you?” I ask again, this time with more force.
“See. She doesn’t even know who we are,” hisses the first voice. “Can’t you recognize us?,” replies the third, the tallest.
“Let’s go. She’ll be dead soon,” says the first.
I look at them, trying to remember where we could have met. But their features are unstable, shifting and dancing beneath my gaze. Despite having never seen them before, I can’t help but feel as though I know them, that they are both strangers and intimates.
“Give it a moment,” says the second. “We musn’t fight against the inevitable.” “What do you mean, she’ll be dead soon?” I say.
“She won’t believe you unless you show her,” says the harsh voice.
The lights flicker on and suddenly one of the machines starts going crazy. A tall, heavyset man, introduced to me yesterday as my mother’s doctor, appears. He consults the machine as Jenny and a few aids rush in. “Patient is unresponsive,” says the doctor.
“Jenny? What’s going on?” I ask but she ignores me; she points to one of the machines and says something to the doctor.
“Excuse me?” I say, raising my voice. “Can someone tell me what’s happening? Who are you?”
“We are your ancestors. And she can’t hear you,” the stern voice replies again. “Why do you have to be so hard on her?” chimes one ancestor. “She’s just a child.” “I buried three children by the time I was her age,” retorts the third.
Only then do I notice what’s happening to my body. All of a sudden I’m floating, just like the ancestors. I rise up and see myself below, still asleep and curled into the chair like a comma.
Jenny turns to look at me, the me still sleeping. She putters towards me and places her hand on my arm. I see her give it a squeeze. I feel a faint tingling in my arm. “Flo? Can you hear me?” Jenny gives me a second nudge, this time on my shoulder. The tingling sensation happens again, but the other me doesn’t move or respond.
“She won’t wake,” I hear Jenny tell the doctor. It’s the first time I’ve heard her sound unsure. Frightened, even.
****
I watch you watch the ancestors. I am not surprised by their arrival; I have always been sensitive to envizib la, the invisible spirits we Haitians know intimately. I have not seen my home country for more than twenty years; but we dyaspora are scattered across the world and so theancestors must follow, to Paris and Brooklyn and Miami, Boston, Kingston, and Montreal. Their love deepened the further we travelled.
I have disappointed the lwas. Why else would they be here? I have tried my best to keep the past hidden from Florence. How do I explain the things I’ve seen? How do I tell her that this country is more than I asked for and not enough, endlessly disappointing and inevitable in its cruelty? And how do I tell her that there is always something worse, something you cannot even imagine until the face of it is before you, mean and unforgiving, threatening to destroy you in its wake?
I relish surrendering my body, which has felt foreign to me for some time now. All that poking and prodding and nipping. All those IVs and measurements and crouching over plastic cups. How strange, to live inside the same container for fifty-four years. It feels wonderful to abandon it, to cast it aside like a heavy coat.
****
The ancestors and I fly through space and time. How wondrous this shimmering, the way my body glides. My mother trails behind. She goes slowly, her movements stiff and jittery. It’s like her body is resisting, jutting up against the current that’s pushing us along. Slowly, the universe stops spinning. The ancestors scatter as my eyes adjust to the light.
Ayiti. The word pulses through me. How is it that my body remembers, recognizing itself in the banana groves and mountainsides, the faces that resemble mine? Home. Off in the distance I make out what looks like a house surrounded by acres and acres of lush land. A group of schoolchildren rush past towards it, skipping, singing, and shouting, their voices fizzy and buoyant. I follow them, leaving you and the ancestors behind. The children and I split along a fork in the road. They take the left, I the right.
A woman steps out as I approach the house. “Is that you, Florence?” she calls out. She spreads her arms out wide to embrace me. I don’t realize how much I’ve missed her until I see her. Grann mwen. She’s been dead for twenty years. And yet here she is before me, just how I remember her. She takes my hand and draws me close. I collapse into her. She is strong despite her small stature. Her scent, sweet and musky, washes over me. She smells like the earth, like life itself.
****
I watch you take in the land and your people. Look. We are beautiful, aren’t we? You step forth, wandering as I wait. You eat the world with your eyes, feasting on the air and light and sky, the men, women, and children. I was the same way when I returned for you. I had not seen Ayiti for three years. My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I got sick from remembering.
I wait for you underneath an almond tree. Something keeps me away from the house and the field, these dirt roads I could traverse with my eyes closed. The ancestors gossip, telling rehashed tales I’ve heard before. They talk shit about the villagers that pass by. “Look at how that one walks, with her hips swaying. Who is she showing off for?” “That one’s sleeping with the coffin maker’s wife.” How lucky for them that they can’t be heard or seen.
One of the villagers walking by looks like Jean. He has high cheekbones. Big ears, too.
But it’s the smile that does it, his teeth gleaming in his mouth like fine china. The man whistles as he passes by, a folk tune I haven’t heard in years. It reminds me of my childhood. Images long forgotten appear—Manman burying the umbilical cord, bathing you, playing with you in the garden.
Sometimes love skips a generation. She almost beat me to death when she found out about you. They had already bought my ticket for America. “All that sacrifice,” she wailed. “All that promise. All for the gardener’s son.” Father stopped her, said to have mercy on me. I had always been naive.
Why do thoughts of Jean return to me now? A memory of Jean and I in the dark, our sounds incomplete, frantic. We crawl as low as possible so our heads aren’t reflected in the moonlight. It is full and so the town will not quiet until sunrise. Papa Jacques will bring the cart and the lanterns, selling dous makos. Kremas will be poured, thickening the throats of men and women. I tell Jean they’ll be too drunk to notice us. The night is cool but I can feel Jean’s palm sweating against mine. I squeeze it. It was my idea so I guide us onwards towards the sea. Our bodies part the grass, which makes a smooth sound as it brushes against our sides.
We hold our breath whenever we see the grass part. I can tell who is coming by the size and shape of their feet, the make of their socks and shoes. Jean laughs to himself and I shush him as Ton Ton passes by, recognizable because of the missing toe on his right foot. “I heard Ton Ton promise his wife he wouldn’t sneak off tonight,” says Jean. We’ll hear her shouts of anger all tomorrow morning, her cries of delight after the inevitable reunion in the evening.
I recognize manman by the shape of her feet. They are incredibly small, the feet of a child. So close I swear she must sense I am there. She pauses. “Murielle,” she calls, and the sound makes my heart jump into my throat. But eventually she moves on and my name disappears into the night.
Jean and I have made it to the sea. I am shivering. He wraps his arms tightly around me.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long. We’ve snuck away every night now for the past month. In that time I have been reborn, a stranger to my old self. We undress slowly. We take our time with each other. We study the lines on our palms, our difference in shape and size. I can’t stop looking at him, this boy I’ve known since childhood who is turning into a man before me. It is a kind of madness, this wanting, a fawning that takes over.
When we are finished we let the sea air cool our bodies. I try not to think of what manman will ask in the morning and the answer that will be written all over my face. I will not lie, I tell Jean. I will not twist something good and beautiful into something that must be silenced.
****
Time bends and I watch this stranger who is my father, this young man with strong, wiry arms and hands. Hands for tending and breaking the soil, for tenderness and brutality in equal measure. I watch you follow him into the grove. I drink in the softness of your face, the way you haven’t learned yet how to hide, the way I can read you. I see your love, which is nothing more than a seedling, but love nonetheless.
I follow you and Jean back to the village where you separate, slinking away into separate corners of the night. You to your bed, Jean to the mat he sleeps on. I want to stay but the current keeps pushing me, the ancestors telling me we can’t stay for long. The earth pulses, one large drum our feet dance upon.
****
It is 1982. I am sixteen in Reagan’s New York, where I hear of a ceaseless war on crime and a strange rock I know nothing about until my arrival but that ravages the streets around me. I thought I came to a land that was clean and whole and bereft of any scarring. I have already witnessed another kind of war, ordered by our head of state and waged on our people. In photographs this head of state appears, like all men who commit such crimes, immaculate and dignified. His cheeks are plump and rosy when he smiles next to his beautiful wife, plump from the blood of his people. I hate Brooklyn when I arrive. I struggle to breathe. I crave fresh air. In the street people call us names. “Fucking Haitians,” they say, venom on their tongues.
I walk the halls with my cousin Betty, my sister Claude at our side. Betty is always nervous; her English comes out as one long shudder. Here we are poor, crammed in tiny apartments, without maids and servants, groundskeepers and gardeners. But at least we have class, Claude says. I wear little kitten heels I squeeze my pink toes into and a long string of pearls that bounces elegantly from my chest as I walk.
A peach-colored compact sits in my purse. I pile on the blush thickly; I am terrified but this is my defense, this beauty I have brought with me from more than a thousand miles away, the color of my skin a light coffee after two splashes of milk, my teeth dialed up the brightest shade of white.
I pore over the dictionary each night after school. Every letter has a little slot I can slide the pad of my thumb into. I flip over A through L and begin with the letter M for my name, Murielle. M. Macerate. To soften or separate into parts by steeping in a liquid. I let each word ooze in my mouth. To soften. Or separate. Into. Parts. Sep-ER-ate. Not sep-AH-rate. This is how I learn and soon my teachers congratulate me on how quickly my English has improved. My sister Claude reads from the New American Bible three times a day but the word of God is not enough here. I have to let the language of the people fill me up, the bad words too, the ones I hear in the halls and on the streets but never bring myself to say.
And now this soft enveloping, a folding within a folding. I am churned and released, churned and released. When it stops it’s just you and I. We drift in the beyond, thousands of ancestors swirling around us. You don’t speak but I hear you, a million nerve endings flaming so my body vibrates with knowing. Without speaking I tell you the secrets I’ve kept hidden all these years. Two breaths become one, our bodies moving in and out of time. I see the valley and the roads of my youth. A field of mist beckons. Behind it lies Death, waiting.
****
The ancestors come closer. Their current reverberates through me. I resist but your body starts to ripple. I watch as you expand in slow motion, your body diffusing itself into particles of light and air. I think of the lines spread like rivers across your forehead, the constellation of moles scattered across your shoulders, chest, and arms. The flashes of lightning that stretch across your belly, the aftermath of my exit.
“It’s time,” the tallest ancestor says.
I wake to the rising sun, fat slabs of light coming in through the blinds. I get up. I know without looking that you are dead.
I emerge from the hospital into the streets. I look for my face in every window, each time unsure what I will find. All of New York rushes by. I am swept up in a swarm of bodies and faces. Executives carrying briefcases, their ties flapping over their shoulders. Anxious looking women in heels dodging metal catch basins with expertise. Dazed tourists stopping every third or fourth second to take a photo, enraptured by the city’s colors and textures, their selfie sticks attached to them like extra appendages. Students moving in packs, their tender faces betraying their youth. One by one the ancestors fly past, sparkling in the air like confetti, laughing as they pass me by. I know that in laughing they are saying good luck; we’ll see you when we see you.
—
Elodie Saint‑Louis is a Haitian‑American writer and cultural storyteller. A Harvard graduate, she is the recipient of the Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize and a 2021 Periplus Fellow. Her writing spans film, fiction, and nonfiction. On screen she’s credited as a Contributing Writer for BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025. You can find her on Substack via Permanent Daydream, a dispatch that offers cultural commentary and explores how imagination and the arts are vital to human life.