Racine stirred the pot, then tested the liquid on her wrist, like a mother testing the temperature of her baby’s milk. She nodded, then lifted the child’s chin, tilting her head back, and ladled the steaming water over her head.
Solange showed no reaction to what was happening. I looked around the room. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I noticed for the first time that there were other observers leaning against the walls. I couldn’t make out the features of a tall man on the far side of the room, dressed all in black, but closer to me, slouching and sucking on three fingers, was a girl not much older than Solange. When she turned to look at me, I recognized her. It was Juliette, the girl from Martine Gohin’s house. She pulled her fingers out of her mouth and pointed first to her lips and then to me.
Did she want to talk to me? I pointed at her and then at myself and lifted my hands and shoulders as if to ask “What?”
She ignored me, walked around the head-washing ceremony, and slipped out the door.
I assumed she wanted me to follow her. I looked back at Solange and was surprised to see her smiling. Racine was saying something in Creole that I could not understand, but the child seemed quite safe. I would step outside for just a minute.
It wasn’t until I opened the door that I realized how well soundproofed the room had been. The noise of the drums hit me, and I could feel each beat pounding in my body. The dancing in the yard had grown more frantic. Nearly everyone was involved now. Some of the dancers were writhing on the ground, and others were jumping around in bizarre contortions that made them look double-jointed. One woman fell to the ground, flopping around like a snake that had just been run over by a car. Three people surrounded her and helped her to her feet, but she seemed to struggle against them. They dragged her from the dance area toward the building that looked like an Indian chickee hut.
“Pssst.” Juliette’s head poked out, then disappeared into the shrubs at the side of the building I’d just left. I started in her direction.
“Seychelle Sullivan? Is that you?”
When I turned around, a short woman in a bright blue- and-yellow dress was coming toward me from the center of the yard. Like all the other women, she wore a colorful headscarf. I used my hand to shield my eyes from the spotlight behind her and attempted to make out the features of her face. She wore heavy, dark-tinted glasses.
“Martine?”
“Mais oui. Seychelle, what are you doing here?”
I pointed to the door. “I brought Solange. You know, the little girl? The Earth Angel? She’s sick. It’s a long story. I found this card on board the Miss Agnes—it had Racine Toussaint’s name and address. They’re washing her hair in there.”
“Ah, the lave tete. Yes, that will help.”
“You practice Voodoo?”
She shrugged. “I am Haitian, non? Come, follow me.”
I glanced over my shoulder. There was no sign of Juliette. Martine led me closer to the dancers. She motioned for me to bend down, so that she could talk over the drums and into my ear.
“Some of these dancers have been mounted by the lwa."
“What does that mean?”
“The lwa are spirits who can enter the body of a living person and possess him in order to communicate. We call that mounting, just like a rider mounts a horse. You see the tree in the middle of the peristil?” She pointed to the strangler fig trunk. “That is called the poto mitan, or center post. It is hollow, and that is how the spirits pass the Crossroads and travel from their world to ours. Usually it is truly a pole, but Mambo Racine has chosen a tree. It seems to work well enough.” She shrugged again.
At that moment the door to the chickee hut opened, and the woman who had been taken from the dance area emerged wearing a bright red dress. It was difficult to recognize her as the same woman who had been writhing on the ground. Her face was made up, her lips bright red, her hair combed loose, and now she was leading the people who just moments before had been dragging her. She strode onto the dance floor, commanding the attention of all the men, and began a slow, seductive dance. Although she was more than fifty feet away from me on the far side of the yard, I was sure I could smell her perfume.
“That’s Erzulie. She is the spirit of love.”
“You said ‘Erzulie’?”
“Yes, she manifests herself in several different forms— from the gentle seductress to the fierce protective mother. This is Erzulie Danto, the mother. She may have come because of the child. You see that man with the cane? That is Legba.”
Martine continued to talk about many of the other lwa who had possessed the people who were dancing before us, but I ceased to hear as I tried to sort out what all this meant. Why had that woman in the boat told Solange she was Erzulie? Was that her real name? Did Solange think the woman on the boat was a spirit or possessed by one? I had told Racine I would keep an open mind, but it was growing more and more difficult.
My attention was jerked away from the dancers when the door opened and Racine Toussaint marched out and crossed the yard to the thatched hut. Who was with Solange?
“Martine, excuse me,” I interrupted her. “I have to get back to see how Solange is doing. I get worried when I can’t see her.”
“She’ll be fine. In fact, she will be very much better after this. You will see. There are not many children like her who get a lave tete." She took hold of my arm and held it fast.
I jerked out of her grasp. “What do you mean?”
She exhaled a puff of air. “Seychelle, she is a street child. A restavek. There are thousands of them in Haiti.” There was something about the way she said the word restavek, spitting it out, as though she despised even the word.
“So what? Is that supposed to make her less human?” Martine pursed her lips and turned to watch the dancers. “Martine, I’m going back inside.”
“Okay,” she said, and blew out air through her mouth in disgust. “Go on. And if you see that empty-headed niece of mine—Juliette—tell her to get out to the car and wait for me.”
For such a stocky woman, she was fast. She took off and disappeared into the dancing crowd, leaving me certain that I had offended her somehow.
Just as I reached the door with the black cross, I saw Juliette frantically waving me over.
“Juliette, your aunt wants you to go to the car.” I felt like an idiot talking to the ficus hedge.
“Please, come.”
I dropped my head and sighed. After a quick check to see if anyone was watching, I plunged into the bushes.
On the other side of the hedge, a chain-link fence bordered on an alley. We were standing next to Racine and Max’s plastic garbage cans, and it didn’t smell like Erzulie’s perfume anymore. “Okay, what is it, Juliette?”
“The boat Miss Agnes."
With that, she had my total attention. “What about it? Do you know someone who was on that boat?”
The girl appeared frightened. She kept tugging at her dress and glancing at the building next to us as though she were afraid she might see someone peering around one of the corners. “I know a girl,” she said in a stage whisper. “She is now restavek with friend of Madame.”
“She’s a restavek here? In the U.S.? But I thought that was only in Haiti?”
Juliette lowered her eyes and breathed deeply, her nostrils flaring. “Non.” She said it so softly I almost could not hear her over the drums. “Restaveks are here, too.”
As the realization settled in, I began to feel nauseated.
“Juliette, how can I find this girl? I must talk to her. Can you arrange for us to meet?”