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Authors: Russell Banks
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Hattie or Allen, spins slowly north from the coast of Guyana, gathers force and moisture from the warm waters off Trinidad and Tobago, crosses the Lesser Antilles, destroys everything in its path and chews its way toward us, here, in the Greater Antilles, let’s say, for this we
can see, this we can
feel: the skies in the southeast darken slowly as ten-mile-high towers of cumulonimbus clouds cross the horizon, the air pressure drops so rapidly our heads ache, seabirds fly inland and disappear behind dark green jungle-covered hills, and the onshore breeze replaces the offshore breeze as if rushing from the island to greet the approaching wall of gray clouds: and it’s because we can see the hurricane with our eyes and feel it with our bodies (though it’s caused by something no more concerned with us and our individual and paltry fates than is the rotation of the earth) that we nevertheless take it personally. We make it “our” hurricane,and when we talk with tourists from America, we speak of “our” weather, just as the New Englanders among them speak with wry pride of blizzards and Californians brag about sunshine.
If, however, we are a poor, middle-aged woman with five children living in a daub-and-wattle cabin in the hill country of Haiti a few kilometers west of Port-de-Paix on the north coast, we know the hurricane comes because the loas have not been properly fed. It’s not that we have been bad; it’s that the quality of our attention has waned. We’ve forgotten the dead,
les Morts
, and
les Mystères
, we’ve neglected to feed them, and it’s not we alone who have been neglectful, this poor, solitary woman, let’s say, a woman with a husband gone off to America in a boat, not we alone, but all
les serviteurs
, all of us who serve the loas. It’s true, for a long time now we have not fed the loas, so today the hurricane comes to remind us that it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.
In early August our side of the island was struck by a hurricane. We learned too late that it was coming—not that we would have done anything differently had we known about it sooner, for it was too late to stop it, the waters had already been stirred. We would deal with the loas later, we said, for that is how it has been done in the past. There have been other hurricanes, and after they have passed over us, even before we have patched up our houses and repaired our gardens, we have fed the loas. This year, however, when the hurricane came, it was different, for things got confused. And though we did not think we were a part of the confusion, we watched it and slowly got drawn into it and soon began to behave as if we, too, were confused. Here is how it happened:
Our settlement is called Allanche and it is located behind the first line of hills on the northwest coast a few kilometers off the road from Port-de-Paix to Saint Louis du Nord, which, because Allanche is too small to be a market town, is fortunate, for the women can carry their baskets of yams, mangoes and breadfruit, their apricot mameys and jamelacs, over the ridge on narrow pathways down to the coast road early on the morning of market day, and if they cannot hail a truck orcar or wagon for a ride into Port-de-Paix, it is still not too late to walk the other way to the smaller market town of Saint Louis du Nord and arrive there in time to sell most of their goods.
First it rained for several days, a breezy, late summer rain, warm and various, turning the leaves of the trees, like wet, silver-palmed hands, this way and that, as the breeze off the sea tumbled against the hills. All the wood got soaked through, and when their cookfires went out, the people slept long and late inside their houses and shops, waking to talk in low voices and to peer out the door again and again at the red ground still riddled and puddled from the stoop to the lane, dribbling down the lane and down the hillside in new streams that ran red as blood all the
can see, this we can
feel: the skies in the southeast darken slowly as ten-mile-high towers of cumulonimbus clouds cross the horizon, the air pressure drops so rapidly our heads ache, seabirds fly inland and disappear behind dark green jungle-covered hills, and the onshore breeze replaces the offshore breeze as if rushing from the island to greet the approaching wall of gray clouds: and it’s because we can see the hurricane with our eyes and feel it with our bodies (though it’s caused by something no more concerned with us and our individual and paltry fates than is the rotation of the earth) that we nevertheless take it personally. We make it “our” hurricane,and when we talk with tourists from America, we speak of “our” weather, just as the New Englanders among them speak with wry pride of blizzards and Californians brag about sunshine.
If, however, we are a poor, middle-aged woman with five children living in a daub-and-wattle cabin in the hill country of Haiti a few kilometers west of Port-de-Paix on the north coast, we know the hurricane comes because the loas have not been properly fed. It’s not that we have been bad; it’s that the quality of our attention has waned. We’ve forgotten the dead,
les Morts
, and
les Mystères
, we’ve neglected to feed them, and it’s not we alone who have been neglectful, this poor, solitary woman, let’s say, a woman with a husband gone off to America in a boat, not we alone, but all
les serviteurs
, all of us who serve the loas. It’s true, for a long time now we have not fed the loas, so today the hurricane comes to remind us that it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.
In early August our side of the island was struck by a hurricane. We learned too late that it was coming—not that we would have done anything differently had we known about it sooner, for it was too late to stop it, the waters had already been stirred. We would deal with the loas later, we said, for that is how it has been done in the past. There have been other hurricanes, and after they have passed over us, even before we have patched up our houses and repaired our gardens, we have fed the loas. This year, however, when the hurricane came, it was different, for things got confused. And though we did not think we were a part of the confusion, we watched it and slowly got drawn into it and soon began to behave as if we, too, were confused. Here is how it happened:
Our settlement is called Allanche and it is located behind the first line of hills on the northwest coast a few kilometers off the road from Port-de-Paix to Saint Louis du Nord, which, because Allanche is too small to be a market town, is fortunate, for the women can carry their baskets of yams, mangoes and breadfruit, their apricot mameys and jamelacs, over the ridge on narrow pathways down to the coast road early on the morning of market day, and if they cannot hail a truck orcar or wagon for a ride into Port-de-Paix, it is still not too late to walk the other way to the smaller market town of Saint Louis du Nord and arrive there in time to sell most of their goods.
First it rained for several days, a breezy, late summer rain, warm and various, turning the leaves of the trees, like wet, silver-palmed hands, this way and that, as the breeze off the sea tumbled against the hills. All the wood got soaked through, and when their cookfires went out, the people slept long and late inside their houses and shops, waking to talk in low voices and to peer out the door again and again at the red ground still riddled and puddled from the stoop to the lane, dribbling down the lane and down the hillside in new streams that ran red as blood all the
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