The father is long gone to the other side
but the raspy edge of his laughing
echoes through the tunnels of her brain.
She is the daughter who can’t sleep without dreaming
him knocking at the door of her quiet
with the story he told.
He told it again and again
laughing as he told it.
She remembers the child she was
sitting at the grandma’s kitchen table
grown-ups all around-
the aunts and uncles, seven of them,
the youngest boy gone from sick
doctor couldn’t say what
but everybody knew he played too much
woman put something in he food.

They recall this lost one
laughing and talking about home-
not this America but back on the island.
Then, because the big house in the Bronx is old and creaking
her father tells the story again-
when he was a boy
taking the short cut at night
crossing the cemetary behind the church
with only the moonlight
and whispers of ghosts carried on tradewinds.
There was a veve at the crossroads
and shadows raising question:
Which way to go?
Everybody knows duppies can’t hurt you
unless they’re alive with your fear.
Her father always said:
Without learning to swim
there’s no leaving the island.

At the grandma’s table
there is always fish and rice and peas
and okra and heavy bread-
bitter mauby or spicey ginger beer
comes ladled from a big ceramic crock.
Her small voice says: I swallowed a bone.
The point of it is lodged in her throat
but before there is choking and blood
Aunt Lorna wisks her off to the bathroom
forcing fingers in the girl’s mouth
making her gag and throw up-
the bone of a dead fish
swirling down the toilet whirlpool-
the ghosts in the shadows had followed
the father and the aunts and uncles-
followed them from the island to this new land-
ghosts hovering near the water tank above the toilet-
ghosts waiting to return her soul to the island-

tgis girl who had not yet learned to swim.

–Anna Altman

published in the P.S.1 Newspaper, Fall 2008 edition, in conjunction with the P.S.1 exhibition NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Franklin Sirmans. 

http://www.ps1.org/exhibitions/view/205/