By dawn, Vanise and her infant and the boy are within sight of the inland village of Kew. Though they do not know the name of the place yet, they do know that this is still not America. There are goats here, tethered in the gutters alongside the road, and roosters crowing, and tin-roofed cabins the same as in Allanche, set off the road a ways, with tiny outhouses and laundry lines in back, patchy vegetable gardens, pole beans, yams, spindly corn stalks. A scrawny brown dog yips at them as they pass, and Vanise hurries the boy along ahead of her, looking back over her shoulder.
What are we going to do? Claude asks his aunt. Where are we?
Don’t worry! she snaps. We’ll find out soon what we’re to do. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as if to scold the boy.
The sky is turning pearly white, like the belly of a fish, and the palm fronds, the glittery leaves of nmhoe trees and the pebbled sides of cabins stand sharply forward from the shadows. It’s a familiar light to Vanise,’falling at the same crisp angles with the same clear intensity as at this hour and season in Haiti. But the soil is different, pale gray here instead of blood red, and the houses seem more scattered, less clustered against one another, with narrow, unpaved roads instead of footpaths leading from one house to another.
The roosters arch their short backs and cut the still air with harsh calls from the edge of town down to the square in the middle and back out to the opposite side, and soon the dry, clean smell of new woodsmoke reaches Vanise and the boy, and they realize at once that they are hungry.
The boy speaks of it first. Should we stop to eat? he asks. We have the ham. And the yams, he reminds her, and the rose apples and guavas they picked on the walk from Allanche to Le Mô1e — when was it? Only yesterday morning? Is the last dawn they saw yesterday’s, and that on Haiti? Has it all happened so quickly? How did they move so soon from a known world to an unknown one, and why aren’t they more frightened than they are? The boy cannot understand this. He can ask the questions, but he cannot answer them, and that frightens him more than any answers might. He feels like a boy in a dream, not quite responsible for his actions. If something appears in the dream that can kill him, he knows he will just fly up and over it.
At the center of the town there is a crossroads and a low wall encircling a Cottonwood tree. Here Vanise stops and sits. The boy stands before her, looking around him at the four roads that seem to come from above to this low place in the middle, there to cross and rise up on the opposite side. A half-dozen houses, mostly un-painted masonry buildings tacked onto smaller, older, daub-and-wattle cabins, face the several roads, with overgrown yards in front and here and there an old American car, dented and rusting, parked beside the house. Doors open now and then, and a person, usually a child, appears, runs to the outhouse and returns slowly, languidly, walking barefoot across wet grass, opens the door and disappears into the warm darkness inside. Little girls in short cotton smocks march out and back, little boys in white saggy underpants, lean shirtless men wearing jeans or gym shorts, fat women in sleeveless, baglike dresses.
It’s as if no one sees the young Haitian woman in the red headscarf and blue-gray skirt and blouse, her baby in her arms, and the boy, a lad slightly taller than she, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants and black sneakers. Their baskets lie at their feet next to the low marl wall, and while the woman sits on the wall and nurses her infant, the boy gropes through the baskets in search of breakfast — fruit, a pair of egg-shaped, pale green
