by Janelle Hyppolite
This is part of an ongoing series. Click here to read Chapter One.
Lolita
I had a rich uncle, Tonton Ti Jo. He was the one who always sent me the extravagant gifts. He was some big shot doctor who had his own practice. He had a big house and he was married to a Filipino woman. We were staying at his place. It was nice, he had a pool too. He lived with white people and since I was terrified of them when they were in numbers, I stayed inside and studied some more English. And then my uncle thought it would be a good idea to send me summer school. Summer school is something American kids had apparently when they were on the verge of failing. It was a second chance type of thing. There was no such thing in Haiti, it’s either you pass or you fail, and if you fail, you get left back. My uncle said summer school would help me get used to the school system and I wouldn’t have to be lost and helpless in September. Very thoughtful of him.
When I got to St. Paul High School, I was speechless. Not a good speechless. I was used to the lush spaced out buildings of my elementary and secondary schools, not this box built in length. I like my buildings built in width and thickness. Who wants to be on the first floor of a building with six floors on top of you? Earthquake anyone? I survived one unscratched; I don’t think being in St Paul for eight hours five days a week would afford me that luxury again.
My father walked me into the building. We were greeted at the door by a young man who called himself Mr. Young. How adequate. He gave me a tour of the school then led us to the principal’s office. I was seeing her for the first time since talking to her on the phone. She was a sweet lady with graying blond hair. She might be nice but she was direct. Three hours later I was officially registered. Summer school started the next day and I was beyond scared straight. What if I got bullied? What scared me most was the white kids. In Haiti, I went to school with white Haitians my whole life but they weren’t different from the rest of us black Haitians; we were the same people, the same nation, we had the same history, the same pride. But somehow I knew, that white Americans would be different from white Haitians and not just because of the different nationalities.
The next day I made myself brave and went to school with my head high. I remembered the classroom from yesterday’s tour. I walked in the class and greeted the teacher; she smiled. I sat down in the middle. I got stares from everyone-I was thirty minutes late. The teacher carried on with the lesson and I stared at her with my notebook closed. Before lunch break, she asked “Does anyone not understand?” I raised my hand. “Why don’t you understand?”
“I don’t speak English.”
Over the course of summer school, I understood spoken English better and better. I became better and better at the subjects-I was a quick learner. I made some friends, Tanisha, who was Haitian American, Steve, who was a descendent of the first settlers (I had no idea what that was) and Shirley who was a daughter of Earth (my nickname for her since she was from so many places). I had never been in such a diverse place before. I had never seen an Asian person or Hispanic person with my own eyes until I came to America. During summer school, I learned that American students had no respect for teachers and spoke back to them like they were mere servants-not that you were supposed to disrespect your servants either. One day, during lunch, Mrs. Norman sat next to me and sparked a friendly conversation. It was always a thing of mine to have a good relationship with my teachers so that was my chance. Everything was going great until:
“Where do you live, Lolita?”
“Dumbo.”
“Oh.”
Rico
I lost my virginity that summer. It wasn’t all that. I don’t know what I expected but that wasn’t it. I regretted it afterwards. I should have waited for marriage like my mother had advised. I did the opposite. Like every time, once I’m on a bad path, I keep going. I was the storm who ravaged all the pretty flowers. I was quite ashamed of myself. I really was. And then I got depressed. I thought about the damage I caused. I thought of the parents whose daughters were angels until El Diablo came for them. I thought of all the times I could have been a father due to carelessness, all the times I could have gotten something due to carelessness. I was getting more and more depressed. I turned to alcohol. My father caught me sneaking a bottle of rum one night and beat the living daylights out of me.
I cried that night. I cried until my 71 percent water body was 26 percent water. I cried for the girls I shamed, I cried for the abortions I caused because I knew some of my wild nights resulted in pregnancies, I cried for the diseases God spared me from, I cried asking Him to cure me, save me from this curse that was dooming me. I cried for my mother who I made cry, for the arguments I caused between her and my father. I cried because I was ruining my life and I knew it.
My father came to my room that night. He gave me a book, Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas.
“You’re not eating anything until you’re halfway through that book, Rico”
He kissed my forehead and left. I was surprised by the gesture. Papi was such a macho man. That kiss meant the world to me.
I started reading.
I didn’t sleep that night, I sat up reading. Papi highlighted something for me “It was all part of becoming hombre, of wanting to have a beard to shave, a driver’s license, a draft card, a “stoneness” which enabled you to go into a bar like a man. Nobody really digs a kid.” Is that why I was doing all that for? To become hombre? Was there an outside pressure, an invisible force that was making me want to be hombre too fast? Or was I just trying to prove myself to my father in the worst possible way? I fell asleep in the third part, when Piri was already in jail. I think that’s what Papi wanted me to see, the life that I did not want, the place that I never wanted to be, the situations that I never wanted to be in. I was like Piri, a royal idiot who wanted to be hombre and badass, look at where it got him, it could get me in the same place too.
Papi woke me up the next day with a tray in his hand. He gave it to me. “Your breakfast”. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I ate and went back to reading. At the end of the book, I threw it hard against the wall.
“That’s some bullshit!” I marched to my father’s office and slammed the door open. “So you’re telling me that Trina and Piri have been together for years and he spends seven years in jail and she marries another cabrón after three? Where is the loyalty?”
He looked up from his papers. “I’ll let you know you don’t pay bills around here, so don’t slam my damn door!”
“Sorry.”
“What do you mean ‘loyalty’? Piri spent their whole relationship cheating on Trina with other women-
“She was a virgin.”
“So if your girlfriend is a virgin, you’ll go cheat on her because you’re not getting any? Why not just get a girlfriend who will be intimate with you then?”
“He was crazy about Trina, Papi.”
“Maybe he was crazy about her color.”
“What?”
“Did you not read this book? All of this happened because his confliction with his identity. He was Puerto Rican, like us, and Cuban and if you know anything about history you’ll know that many of the Hispanics in the Caribbean are descendants of Europeans, Natives, and Africans. Piri’s family was light-skinned except for his African American dad who wanted to be anything but and Piri who was dark like his father. His father, Poppa, married Momma, not because he loved her but because she was very light. He wanted to dilute his blackness in her. To him, being married to a white woman made him less black, his lighter skinned children made him less black but Piri was the painful reminder of who he really was: a black man. Piri grew up with his family denying his blackness, so he followed his father’s footsteps and got a white woman- simply because she was white.”
“What if he truly loved her?” I was not giving up, Trina and Piri deserved to be together.
“Then that was some really cheap love. He treated her like a doormat and expected her to wait for him. See this, a good woman is a good woman. Once you find her, you take her and marry her, ‘cause if you don’t someone else will.”
“Sí”
“And remember, son, you’re not chele, so if you get arrested, you will be punished harsher. Get your shit together before I send you to Puerto Rico for proper education.”
I left his room.
I didn’t want to be chele nor hombre.
Lolita
Apparently Americans give their students books to read over the summer. In America, you’re never truly on vacation. I learned that over the years when I had four or five projects to do on a two week “vacation.”. I had to read The Outsiders by S.E Hinton and Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat and answer questions about these books. In my elementary school, you had to go to the library every two weeks and choose a book to read and the crazy thing is, we actually read them. No reports or anything, just reading. Nothing in the United States is ever a “just.” For example, this morning I was waiting for the bus and when it came, I was shoved in all directions. In Haiti people are not that rude, they actually let school children get on the tap-taps or camionettes first. No shoving them or cursing at them but caring for them because more educated children means a better future.
My future right now was depending on these grades. I feel I did a good enough job on these reports. Breath, Eyes, Memory was harder though. The story of Sophie hit too close to home. I might not have been poor and an orphan girl who got shipped to the U.S. to her mentally disturbed and traumatized mother and was not allowed to have friends and couldn’t date but I was still a Haitian girl. I couldn’t date either. Just like Sophie, I had troubles adapting. I didn’t want to assimilate to American life. I did not want to change who I was to seem “more American.” My accent was ridiculed in summer school, though most did say it was cute. Like Sophie, I was on a tight watch, not by my parents but by my uncle’s wife. I feel like she didn’t like me and had to know where I was every second of the day. Why was she so obsessed with me?
I was a Haitian immigrant in the middle of America and according to the immigrant hierarchy I was at the bottom. I had people tell me I was “pretty for a Haitian girl” or I had “good hair for a Haitian girl.”. These comments were like stabs to my soul. How did my people get such a bad representation? My situation was not as bad as Sophie’s. She came to New York in the worst time in history of Haitian Immigration, I came in the days where things were improving in terms of tolerance of our persons. Everyone wanted to be Haitian, everyone wanted to party with us, everyone was “Haitian-by-Association.”. I was not Sophie but I could relate to her. And even though she found her husband in the worst conditions, I wanted a man as loving as Joseph. I hope to God that I find him.
On September 4th, at 7:57, I walked in to St. Paul High School, hand in hand with Shirley. We went to our lockers which were luckily next to each other. We hugged then she went to homeroom. As I walked to homeroom, I waved to the few people I knew and-
I stopped in my tracks.
Across from me was the most handsome boy I had ever seen standing against the wall, his bag across one shoulder with a pen loosely between his lips. He stood there with his friends smiling as they talked. He slowly turned his head and saw me. I smiled. He smiled.
I found him. My Joseph.
Rico
I found my Trina. And unlike Piri, I’m never letting her go.
I walked to her and took one soft hand in mine and kissed it. “Hello, I’m Rico.”
“Hi, I’m Lolita.”
