Seth and Samona Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the sides of her face. Granmè was sitting very quiet and looking at the coffin in concentration. She didn’t take her eyes off of it even when I leaned down to kiss her. But she felt for my hands, so I could tell she knew I was there. Way inthe back of the room I noticed Jerome sitting in a corner. He’d dressed up in a suit too and was looking straight at Chantal. I hoped Jean-Claude didn’t see him or this wake would get even louder.
    I moved down the rows of chairs to sit next to Enrie. He was wearing a new gray suit and a blue and black tie. He was sitting way back in his chair and watching everything with round eyes. We looked at each other and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: If this wake didn’t get Matant Margaret up, nothing would. We sat back to wait.
    All of a sudden, it got real quiet and still except for some low singing and the quiet stomping. One by one, people began to go up to the coffin and spend a few minutes looking at Matant Margaret. Some of the people had sad looks on their faces; some of them had tears dripping off their chins. Other people looked like they didn’t know what to do, and didn’t look straight in her face. It made me feel strange watching all of them. At the same time it made me feel peaceful, too. All those people really knew Matant Margaret. They had talked to her and played with her when they were as small as me. I didn’t know her at all except from the stories about her. Granmè would tell us that Matant Margaret was the one who would suck the mango seeds dry and ran the fastest and told the funniest stories. If she wore her hair in three braids, the other girls would want to do the same. If she decided to play
kache kache li byen
, the rock-hiding game, everybodywould want to play with her. It was Matant Margaret who went to America first. She saved all her money from working in the casinos and took a plane—not a boat, Granmè would make sure to tell us—to New York. Then she saved all her money working as a maid to bring Manmi and Tant Cherise. Then they all saved money to bring Monnonk Roddie, who was still little, and Granmè and Tant Renee. Granmè said the first thing Matant Margaret did when all of the family was in New York was quit her job as a maid and go to City College cause she figured it was time she did a little something for herself and let everyone else support
her
now. She was forty-eight years old when she got her nursing degree. Manmi always says that if it wasn’t for Matant Margaret, she would never have met Papi in New York and they would never have gotten married and we would never have been born.
    But I most remember the story that Granmè told me about Matant Margaret and their own grandfather—my gran-gran-granpapa. He was old and yellow when they were just little girls, Granmè had said. Everybody was saying he was losing his mind ’cause he took to mumbling to himself all the time and was making mistakes. He would go out fishing and come back with a goat or a chicken and swear until he cried that he had caught it in the sea. He would talk to the chairs and listen like they were going to talk back to him. He would get up and walk out of the house in the middle of dinner, thinking he had to go to work. Everybody except MatantMargaret would start laughing and talk about the old people’s disease. It was Matant Margaret who would always go after Gran-gran-granpapa. She would catch up with him at the end of the road, take his hand and walk with him wherever he wanted to go. They would stop on the street and buy some
akara
, which is fried beans, or burnt plantain to eat from whoever was selling it on the side of the road. Then they would walk and walk and not go back home until it was dark and dinner was over. Granmè said that Matant Margaret was the only one who didn’t cry when Gran-gran-granpapa finally died.
    Thinking about that story, I knew I wasn’t gonna be scared when it was my turn to look at Matant Margaret. I