Sosia

            There is a woman who comes to the parish every day, strolling up the driveways with a box of odds and ends on her head, looking for a place to be. She’s old, the oldest person I’ve seen here, and probably not even four and a half feet tall. Her feet look like a child’s, except for the stiffness in her ankles. She’s chatty and animated, with an urgent, assertive tone. And she loves music and dancing. She'll bounce her shoulders and wiggle her hips when the kids play music in the rec center next door, and she frequently sings little wordless songs to herself.

In an American city, she would read as a homeless person--elderly, barefoot, in a well-worn dress, and conversing loudly and incomprehensibly with anyone or no one. For this reason she can be be disconcerting when you first meet her, coming up the stairs of the rectory porch talking at an almost-shout. But after a beat of awkward eye contact, she'll flash you a toothless smile and put you at ease.

She’ll come up when I’m reading a book on the porch and try to talk me. “Blan!” she calls me, using the Creole word for foreigner (technically it means “white,” but in this context it covers all non-Haitians. Asians are blans, Latinos are blans, African-Americans are ­blans…though I’m guessing the latter get called out on their blanness less frequently). “Blan…” and then she’ll start asking me questions or rattle off a whole spiel. The best I can do is smile and shake my head and tell her I don’t understand Creole. It will usually stop her for a minute or two before she tries again.  It doesn’t seem to bother her that I can’t respond. She still laughs and smiles and gives me playful chucks on the arm, and keeps talking.

The closest I’ve come to understanding her was on a particularly mango-y day. She bustled around the churchyard collecting the fruit and bringing it up to a bag on the porch. Before she put them away she would hold them out to me, three or four at a time in her tiny hands, and say something that clearly meant, “Blan, look at these mangoes. These are beautiful mangoes.”

She does a very old-school thing when she comes up to the yard—she calls out “Oné! Oné!” which means “honor.” Traditionally, someone would say this as they approached a house or a lakou (a courtyard shared by a cluster of houses and families). Someone inside the house or lakou would respond with “Respé!” meaning “respect,” to let them know they were welcome to enter.  The “honor-respect” salutation is very uncommon now, used only by older rural people who remember different days.

One day Father Gaby and I could hear her in the yard one day while we were having lunch and he started telling me about her. Her name is Sosia, a beautiful and, I think, uncommon name for Haiti. She’s in her mid-80s. She had eight children, all of whom have died, which Father Gaby says is the reason that she's a bit unhinged. She blames their deaths on voodoo practices. This has given her a bad feeling about her neighbors, though she seems to be generally well treated. The people joke that she must have an office here at the rectory, since she’s here every day.

She lives now with a few cousins in the area, but she has apparently set her sights on New York. Gaby says that is mostly what she talks about—that the people here are not good or nice, and this is her last day in Haiti before she leaves for New York, where the people are nicer (I’m not sure she knows the New Yorker stereotypes all that well).

These past two weeks, the rectory has been full of blans. A group of veterinary students from the US are here doing clinics for the livestock. I came home from work one day to find her holding court on the rectory porch with the vets all around her. She was laughing and dancing and keeping everyone entertained, most of all herself. Gaby says this is why she thinks she loves New York—because she has it in her head that white visitors are all from there, and we are friendly to her.

She's an enlivening presence to have around the rectory, and I'm glad she has somewhere to come and keep her "office hours" every day. I don't know if she'll ever get to New York, but I hope she finds some peace.