“Get in here, Fab!” Chantal calls out.
The kitchen is almost clean and completely empty. Matant Jo says that the stove and cabinets and even the leather couches will be a gift to the neighborhood. Even if we bolt lock the doors, they will know that we have left for good and will not return.
I start to roll up my sleeves to finish the last bit of cleaning when I hear Matant Jo wail. All of us rush to her bedroom door.
She is standing there, all dressed in white, with boxes and bags on the floor around her. Her fists are clenched; her face is tight and wet from tears. She finally breaks. Her whole body looks as if she is fighting—fighting us, herself, the air around her, this house, this city, this country, maybe. Finally, she rests her head on Pri’s shoulder and sobs. “What a life, eh. This is my whole life.”
Her daughters surround her. She cries in their arms. And I watch these girls, my blood, my family, and wonder if there is room for me.
Donna extends her arm out and I slowly walk over. They pull me in. Matant Jo’s warmth and pain is the magnet that pulls us all together.
Still, someone is missing. My mother.
We spend the next couple of hours cleaning the rest of the house and bringing out bags of garbage onto the sidewalk. Pri is the last one to walk away after Chantal locks the front door. Matant Jo is the first one in the car. She brings a box of pictures with her and sits in the front seat next to Chantal. She places two photos on the dashboard. One is of her and my mother when they were teenage girls. They are both smiling, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, and their hair is in thick plaits. The other is of my aunt, my uncle Phillip, and my cousins when they were babies, standing in front of 8800 American Street. Uncle Phillip is holding one baby—Princess or Primadonna, I can’t tell—while Matant Jo holds the other baby. Chantal wraps her small arms around her mother’s leg as if she is afraid of whoever is taking that picture. Then I see something in the background.
I ask for the picture and bring it up close to get a better look. There, in the photo, in the background, is Bad Leg—Papa Legba—watching over the family since the very first day they moved in.
When the car pulls away from the curb of the house on American Street and drives down Joy Road, I turn to see Papa Legba leaning against the lamppost with a cigar in his hand and his cane by his side. He turns to me with his white glistening eyes and tips his hat.
I smile and nod and mouth mesi. Thank you. He has brought my mother to the other side.
I stare out the window as we drive out of Michigan. I press my forehead and fingertips against the glass. On the other side is the wide, free road. Unlike in Haiti, which means “land of many mountains,” the ground is level here and stretches as far as I can see—as if there are no limits to dreams here.
But then I realize that everyone is climbing their own mountain here in America. They are tall and mighty and they live in the hearts and everyday lives of the people.
And I am not a pebble in the valley.
I am a mountain.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The first seeds of American Street were planted in me when I read the New York Times article “Last Stop on the L Train: Detroit.” The article was about the far-reaching gentrification of Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York, and the migration of its priced-out residents to Detroit, Michigan.
This resonated with me because Bushwick was my first home in America. I was four years old when my mother and I left Haiti to move there. I didn’t know it then, but 1980s Bushwick was described as a war zone. While our house on Hancock Street was fairly intact, other blocks were lined with burned-out buildings and open lots littered with torn mattresses and old tires. When I read that New York Times article, I kept thinking about the parallels between present-day Detroit and the Bushwick I grew up in. I thought about writing a book that rides the train from Bushwick to Detroit and tells the story of an immigrant girl who, like me, found her way to the other side, out of poverty and chaos.