In our house, dreams are mail
Hollywood taught a lot of people that anything involving Vodou and dreams must be frightening. In my family it's the opposite. Dreams are mail. Grann would ask us at breakfast, 'Who visited?' the way other grandmothers ask whether you slept well.
Last week I dreamt of her lakou in Jacmel: the yard swept so clean you could see the broom lines, the mango tree, her voice calling my name from the kitchen in the tone that meant food was ready and I was late.
I told my manbo, because that's what you do. What she said back stays between us. But I wanted to share the swept yard and the mango tree, because that's what Vodou looks like most days. Family, memory, and somebody calling you in to eat.
My grandmother's lakou, rebuilt on the fourth floor
Growing up, summers meant my grandmother's lakou outside Jacmel. A lakou is a family compound, a yard shared by generations: houses around the edge, a big tree in the middle, and the spirits of the family woven into all of it. My grann knew which corner the old ones liked, which tree you didn't lean on, which songs went with which work.
She passed when I was twenty-two, and I thought the lakou died with her. My mother sold the land. I was in Brooklyn, in a fourth-floor walk-up with radiators that clank like a drum line.
It took me years to understand the lakou was never only the land. It's the people, the remembering, the feeding of each other.
Now, every few weeks, my aunties climb those four flights with foil trays of diri ak djon djon and pikliz strong enough to wake the dead (respectfully). My cousin's kids run up and down the hallway. Somebody starts a song my grann used to sing at the washbasin and we all join in, off key. There's a small table by the window with her photo, a glass of water, and a white candle in a hurricane glass, up where little hands can't reach.
With Fèt Gede coming at the start of November, I've been thinking about her more. The Gede are lwa of the dead, and they love a good laugh. So did she. When the aunties are loud and the pikliz is too spicy and somebody is crying from laughing, I feel her in the room.
The lakou survived. It just moved up four flights.