The Cane Burners
– by Jamie McGhee
Pitit mwen chèri. My dear daughter. You are doomed.
&
The black on her skin wouldn’t come off.
“Do you want to die here?” Celine dunked her hands into the boiling river, once, twice, scrubbed her palms and wrists and fingertips with a corn husk full of gravel. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
Pink light spread across the cane fields. “Diyab!” She snatched her satchel and ran — then spun back around and attacked her hands with new fervor. Celine couldn’t face her like this. The blasphemy of staining those milky white pages with soot and furnace oil…
Somewhere behind her, shrieks tore through the sucrerie — a fire must have leaped from cauldron to skin. She stiffened. You don’t have time. She scrubbed harder. The driver would wait for her. Right? No. She scrubbed until the stones tore up tiny flecks of her palms and leaked red into the hissing waters. She raised her hands to see if she could still smell charcoal and animal fat. Yes. Of course.
Darkness.
She gritted her teeth. “Bonjou, Madame la Prophétesse.”
Leathery palms pressed harder against Celine’s eyes. “Don’t run to that woman.”
“I — ” Celine jerked away, but the prophétesse pushed her head down, forced her to bow to the mad old lady eclipsing the sun.
“If you run while we’re still fighting for freedom, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Celine stiffened beneath the weight of her hand. “You won already, Madame la Prophétesse. Twenty years ago, Madame la Prophétesse. Remember?”
A blood-crusted saber glinted on her waist. “Libète se yon chan batay.” Freedom is a battlefield.
So many things Celine wanted to say: It sounds like you received another mystical message from the Virgin Mary, Madame la Prophétesse? And: I’ll miss the papery folds around your eyes.
Instead, she twisted away and clasped the satchel across her chest. “I have to go.”
The prophétesse sucked her remaining teeth. “You know, Marie-Jeanne never ran. And she — ”
“Please don’t.”
“Your mother died free and proud.”
Celine broke into a sprint.
“Do you think that other woman won’t throw you away?” the prophétesse called across the plantation. “She’ll torch you like an old book!”
The distance between them yawned wider. Her words echoed out but vanished once Celine passed the sucrerie, where the moulin à canne’s clanking and rolling iron teeth gnashed raw sugarcane into juice. Burned workers slathered lalwé across their blistering cheeks. Others fed more cane to the moulin. Most were missing fingers, hands. Sacrifices to the beast.
“Free?” Celine muttered. “You think my mother died proud?”
The watchtower clanged: The sound vibrated down the hill and expanded into the soles of her feet. She fled past the boilers that belched smoke, flame and flesh into sticky September air. Her throat seared with thirst as one-armed men labored machetes through mazes of sugarcane; her muscles spasmed as children dislocated their shoulders reining wild ox carts. For this, revolutionaries like Toussaint, and Dessalines, and the prophétesse, and her mother Marie-Jeanne had sliced Haiti’s veins and spilled the blood of 200,000 people. Called it victory.
The workers weren’t chained here. Not anymore. But the new revolutionary government made sure they had nowhere else to go.
Twenty years after alleged victory, when everyone was dead or forced back to the fields, her mother spent catatonic nights slumped in their moonlit barracks. Unblinking. Body wrung dry. She wouldn’t move until Celine cracked open her Bible and said, “Let me read you what the missionnaires taught me.” Stories brought her mother freedom. Revolution didn’t. Bloodshed didn’t. Onion-skin pages and tales of Persia did. And when stories weren’t enough, her mother — who had once marched the ramparts of Crête-à-Pierrot with a rifle and a rapier — died on the same plantation she’d twice razed.
Celine would never admit her mother’s sadness to Madame la Prophetess, would never ruin the older woman’s image of her; everyone needed stories to believe in, especially when they’d lost their own children in the flames. One day, Celine would return to give the prophétesse a proper goodbye, and she would bring books.
“Move!”
Celine locked eyes with an ox.
It hurtled toward her, hooves clopping and clattering, kicking up a hurricane of dust. The driver yanked the reins. The cart careened. Sugarcane bundles toppled off the back. She hit the dirt and rolled, flinging her arms above her head.
“I’m so sorry!” The driver clambered down. A child. “Mwen dezole. I’m so sorry.”
In front of her eyes, ink blots burst into spinning stars. Her heart pounded in her throat, her fist, her mouth. Her ankle wouldn’t let her stand. It throbbed. Her satchel tore open: Paper littered the ground. She tried to stand again. Fell on her back. Could only stare up at the sky as it bloomed tangerine and she realized she was going to be late, desperately late.
It was too easy to die here. Just like her mother.
&
Ti cheri Celine, I cannot write this letter down, because I don’t know how to write.
And I can never say these things to you, because I am not strong enough.
You see the world with such hope. You are nine now. When the prophétesse speaks of liberation, you thrust a stick into the air like a saber and declare that you will fight until every shackle is shattered. Once we get off the plantation, you swear you will eat sugar for every meal.
You aren’t yet old enough to ask yourself, Slavery is over. So why are we chained to the same fields?
For now, I will repeat this letter in my head until I am strong enough to break your heart with the truth: Freedom is not a straight line. You will never reach it.
&
“I’m here! I’m here!” Celine limped through the market and flagged down the vegetable stall. “Where’s Tonton?”
A marchand polished the soil off a corkscrewed manioc. “You must be that girl.”
“Did he leave?”
“You’re lucky,” he said.
She exhaled. In books, the heroine always arrived in the nick of time. “Where is he?”
The marchand fished four coins out of his pocket. “You’re lucky he offered a refund.”
He dropped them into her hands like rocks into water. Heavy. Final. Suddenly, they weighed so much that she couldn’t lift them. She couldn’t lift her body anymore, either. She sat in the dust and stuck her head between her legs and let the sun whip stripes down the back of her exposed neck.
So she would die here. No. No. Think like a heroine. “Could you — ”
“Does it look like I can take you?”
Wind blew guava leaves through the empty square.
“…Business will pick up anytime now,” he said.
On Sundays, Croix-des-Champs swelled with the aroma of bananes frites, pikliz and tasso, of fried plantains, pickled vegetables and marinated beef. But when all their customers were chopping cane, buildings sat shuttered. Goats chewed bagasse and a mule dozed in front of the cabaret.
Wait. A mule.
Beside it, two men huddled over a bottle, cursing the sun. She curtsied while gripping a beam for support. “Excusez-moi, Mons — ”
“That snake sold us anyway!” The cabaretier made the sign of the cross and flung it into the air. “I knew from the moment Boyer put on that tricorne, you know, and the prophétesse warned me, warned us all.”
“Monsieur, are you going to Jacmel?” she asked.
“Don’t blame the president,” said his compatriot. “Blame France.”
“I blame both! Let France try to steal us back. We fought to the death once. Let’s do it again.” The cabaretier slammed down his cup. It missed the table and sloshed down his leg.
As he swore and shook his boot dry, Celine swiped his bottle. “Koute’m!”
The cabaretier jerked around. His eyes zig-zagged up her body, appraised her from muddy knees to torn satchel.
“Jacmel?” she asked again.
He flicked dirt from the rim of his cup. Whistled. “Today?”
She rolled four gourdes across the table.
He rolled them back. “Have you seen what the president’s charging in taxes?”
“I’ll take war over inflation,” his friend muttered into his drink.
Celine gaped. “You’re asking five?”
“More-o-ver, you try getting through those mountains. Our tax money isn’t going to roads, that’s for sure.” He patted the mule. When she hesitated, he lifted five fingers, then one more.
She counted, recounted, counted, recounted. This wasn’t the scene she’d written in her head. But soon she’d be tracing her fingers over velvet book covers and inhaling the mahogany smell of ink. This town, like the plantation, would be a distant memory, as remote as Persia and Biblical kings.
“D’accord. Afè.” She started to count — until metal thunder crashed in the hills. She jumped. The coins skittered.
A carriage charged toward the town. When it shot between two peaks, the scarlet emblème d’Haïti, the insignia of the government, caught the light: Heaven itself was racing to rescue her.
Celine shifted the satchel to cover her dirty dress. “She came for me.”
The cabaretier chucked his cap down. “Them again! Ale kote ou sòti!” His friend palmed a knife.
Townsfolk leaned out of windows and trickled into the streets, calling:
“Poukisa ou isit?”
Why are you here?
“Ou vini ak lòt manti?”
So you’ve brought more lies?
The marchand seized a papaye. “Every time the bicornes arrive, life gets worse.”
Don’t worry, Celine wanted to tell them. It’s not what you think.
The horses clattered to a stop beneath the church. The carriage’s scarlet curtains rustled: She was in there right now, making room for Celine. Celine paced forward. “Hélène!”
A man emerged instead, an official. Celine paced backward. Who was he?
Even though the official walked through the same dirt as everyone else, nothing seemed to stick to his polished boots. His bicorne balanced delicately atop his head like a scale. Was this…? She groped in her satchel for one of Hélène’s letters:
The sous-préfet? He takes his poisson frit without salt. If he could, he’d take it without the poisson. He treats the Song of Solomon like a Marquis de Sade.
Celine didn’t know who the Marquis de Sade was, but she’d written back, The sous-préfet sounds like a terribly dull character.
Monsieur le Sous-Préfet Leclerc halted. Turned. What was he waiting for?
Enter the horses. Two, eight, twenty-four galloped forth in sterile columns, an entire cavalry of glinting bayonets. The crowd braced: “Troops! Sòlda? Are you planning to attack?” Parents hid their children. “Kisa ou vle ak nou?” and “What do you want with us?”
Only now did the sous-préfet crook his arm, and a small woman with parchment pale skin took it as she descended from the carriage. A woman who was curious and bright, who knew a thousand worlds and a million words and loved listening to stories by the stream.
“Traitor!” The marchand hurled the papaye straight at her.
Sous-Préfet Leclerc blocked it like a bullet, spinning Hélène against his chest. It exploded into fleshy orange pulp on the back of his frock coat.
His voice lilted softly. “If you mock me, you mock Haiti.”
The first soldiers barreled into the square.Without dismounting, one blunted the marchand in the temple with a bayonet. He fell.
“But if you harm my wife, I will have you killed.”
“Son of a — who does he think he is?” the cabaretier demanded. The crowd swarmed to the marchand’s aid.
Celine shook her head. No, no! This was going all wrong. She looked to Hélène, but Hélène was no longer watching the scene, massaging the bridge of her nose. Pain, Celine realized, was detonating across her forehead again, and her knuckles turned white as she clutched Sous-Préfet Leclerc’s hand. How much longer did Hélène have left by now? Don’t hold his hand.
“Girl? Girl?” The cabaretier shook Celine, who’d forgotten to breathe. She tried to wipe her face of all emotion, to make herself blank as a sheet of paper. The cabaretier’s voice folded gently at the edges. “Mademoiselle, are you okay?”
Celine heard herself say, “Of course.”
&
I used to have your hope.
When we started the Revolution, the world was clear and easy. The black of our skin was as strong as iron. The French soldiers glowed like demons in the moonlight.
When we burned the plantations, the orange flames were passionate and just, while the masters’ pale eyes were empty and cold.
We fought to the death because we believed that freedom was waiting on the other side. None of us would ever have to work a plantation again. We were certain.
&
Celine huddled in the cabaret storage room. Authentique Tafia Haïtien – Saveur Naturelle. She set down one bottle, lifted another. Mélasse du Pays – Gout Authentique. As light slithered through the thatched roof, she read every cask (Gingembre du Jardin – Boisson Locale) and crate (Tabac Haïtien Fin – Sec & Prêt) and jar (Poivre, Curcuma, Cannelle). She needed to lose herself in words.
The cabaretier extended a cup. White fibers floated in seasick green pulp.
She reached for it, then let her hand drop. “I can’t afford this.”
“You need it.”
She gave a small smile by way of thanks. There were no tables so she clutched it in her lap. Jiggled her good leg and tried not to spill.
A triangle of orange-silver light broke through the darkness: The door creaked open, clanged closed. The cabaretier hovered over Hélène as she arranged herself on a wooden crate, and as Celine’s eyes adjusted once again his jaw tightened.
Hélène leaned forward. “Mwen ta renmen yon kabann nan ròm, souple?” The creole stood stiff on her tongue, and Celine’s cheeks burned.
He grunted. “Kenz sous.” Triple the posted price.
Hélène gave him one gourde, which was twenty. He didn’t offer change and she didn’t ask.
“Ah, before you leave, Monsieur! Céline, is that smell bothering you?” She rubbed her temples. “Could we light a candle?”
The cabaretier shot Celine a look: The building is full of alcohol and made of wood. Do you want to burn me to the ground?
Hélène undid her pursestrings. “My husband would be much obliged.” He grunted again and shuffled to prepare the drinks on a slab in the corner.
Celine sipped her jus de canne. “What smell?”
“No smell.” Hélène pressed kisses to her cheeks. They prickled. “But it’s so dark. I want to be able to see you.”
In the low light, she searched Hélène’s eyes, tried to gauge how much cloudier they’d become since their last meeting, and folded her hands to hide the soot stains. Hélène stroked the back of Celine’s wrists. “Céline.” She always wrote Celine’s name with an accent mark, so perhaps she said it that way too.
Shouts erupted outside. Through the closed door, Celine couldn’t tell whether they were from soldiers or from townsfolk. She didn’t know how to ask.
When the drink arrived, it wasn’t rum, but clairin — a faint grassy odor wafted from the calebasse cup — but Hélène sipped and smiled as if it was exactly what she wanted.
“Can you tell me, Hélène… ” Celine’s eyes drifted to the cabaretier, who was resting the candle on a cask. “Madame la Sous-Préfète. Why are you here?”
Hélène pushed a leatherbound book to Celine’s chest. It smelled the way she imagined autumn, and she read aloud, “La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Marquis de Sade.” Celine opened it — and snapped it shut. “Maybe we should, ah, save this for your library.”
Hélène pinched her own arm. “Stupid. Stupid, stupid.” Celine bit the inside of her cheek until she clarified, “I’m talking about myself.” The leaping orange candlelight cast shadows on the foggy glass of her eyes.
The cabaretier stumped outside. He left the door ajar and, through the crack, Celine saw Sous-Préfet Leclerc standing above a crowd.
Celine wanted to ask, “What aren’t you telling me?” Instead, she rooted through the letters in her satchel. “If you’d like me to read to you now, I’ll start with my favorite. Ma tendre Céline, I’m counting the hours until I hear your voice again, until you read me into les rêves les plus doux, the sweetest dreams, every night.” She pretended to read the words she’d already memorized.
“You’ve just got to let it happen,” Hélène said. “It will be better if you don’t fight.”
“What?”
“It’s not his choice or my choice, it’s the President’s, with the debt — ”
“What are you talking about?”
Outside, a man’s voice rumbled. “By the President of the Republic of Haiti…”
Jeering. Celine leaped up so fast that she hit the candle. Hélène snatched it before it fell.
“…His Excellency Jean-Pierre Boyer…”
Celine threw the door open, but Hélène slammed it back and grabbed her arm. “It’s not our fault,” she said. Celine studied the lines of her forehead before she shook her off to join the crowd.
The sous-préfet extended the scroll further.
Agriculture is the foundation of natural prosperity!
The words rolled cold through her. The revolutionaries who’d forced people like her mother to surrender their guns and return to the fields had said the same thing.
In order to increase productivity and make our nation prosperous, the honorable President Boyer is enacting the Code Rural!
“Prosperous?” someone shouted. “He got us into debt!”
“Ou pa byenveni isit!”
“Take your laws and leave!”
From today forth, everyone in the rural areas, except soldiers, civil servants, professionals, artisans and domestic servants, must work the soil.
“What?” The cabaretier charged forward. “You want me to give up my business to slave away on a plantation?”
“Ou pa konnen anyen sou lavi n!” a woman shouted. “What do you even know about our lives here?”
Anyone who lives in the rural areas cannot engage in retail trade. They, too, must work the soil.
Fury rippled through the crowd. A boy hurled a rock. The nearest soldier trained a gun directly between his eyes. Someone else threw a manioc. The soldier spun and shot in one motion. The bullet blasted through a wooden stall. Screams erupted.
On the plantations, labor will begin at dawn on Monday and must not stop until sunset on Friday, although if the Master decides it’s necessary, it can extend through Saturday. The military will inspect each plantation at least twice a week.
Exploding glass drowned him out. Townsfolk hurled tafia bottles and terracotta roof tiles and warped horseshoes and splintered stools.
“Ne tirez pas. Don’t shoot,” the Sous-Préfet said with a dismissive wave, so the troops spun their bayonets to the blunt side and clubbed everyone in their path. The crowd surged forward anyway. They swung rusty shovels and dented hammers. Metal cracked against metal. Metal cracked against skulls. Celine grabbed Hélène. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hélène didn’t budge. Celine followed her gaze, followed it, followed it, until she was looking Monsieur le Sous-Préfet Leclerc straight in the eye. His lip curled, or she imagined it. He glared straight through the crowd at the woman standing beside his wife, that strange woman his wife had been babbling about for so long, that strange woman who sent his wife letters and would suddenly be moving into their home — or Celine imagined that too. As soldiers roared around him, he kept his gaze steady.
And anyone who lives in the rural areas is forbidden from moving to the city. Effective immediately.
No.
No.
Celine yanked Hélène out of the crowd. Pinned her against the cabaret wall by her ruffled collar. “Hélène, you’re not serious. You’re not…”
Hélène busied herself tending to the candle’s little flame, shielding it from a breeze, and didn’t answer. The light flickering across her lips reminded Celine of the first time they’d met, when the sky had dappled Hélène with sunlight. But the woman had looked so innocent, then.
Celine ran.
&
When did I lose hope, cherie Celine?
Was it in 1800, when Toussaint forced us back onto the plantations we had once burned? When he said that Haiti had to make money and sent soldiers to make sure we worked hard?
Was it a few years later, when Dessalines put the light-skinned gens de couleur into his government, but kept the rest of us chained to fields?
Was it when you were born on the same plantation I swore I’d never return to?
Yes.
&
Two years earlier.
Intruder.
Celine tightened her grip on her Bible as she tiptoed closer to the stream. Prepared to swing if necessary.
The intruder braided loranyens into a flower bracelet as she sunned herself. Without turning her head: “My grandmother worked on this very plantation. Whenever she told me stories about it, it sounded so far away, like a fairytale. Are you a storyteller too?”
Who? Celine scanned the horizon for more intruders, but they were alone. Mwen — are you talking to me? Her voice stuck in her chest, rarely used.
“Well?” asked the intruder.
“No,” she said. The intruder’s bottom lip buckled in disappointment. Celine heard herself adding, “But I do read.”
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
— 1 Samuel 18:1
The intruder lowered the flowers and turned for the first time. Celine was suddenly aware of the soot stains on her own skirts, of the furnace smoke clinging to her wrapped hair, but she held the woman’s gaze until the intruder asked, “Are you trying to tell me something?”
Celine didn’t know what she could possibly be trying to tell her, so she settled on, “Perhaps I am.”
Light ran like ink down the woman’s delicate face. Celine realized that, despite her matronly square collar and lace-trimmed bonnet, they must have been around the same age, yet this woman clearly had the money to travel the world. Perhaps she even owned a library. Her eyes were already starting to cloud, but Celine didn’t know what it meant; she thought they were blurred with daydreams.
“Read to me.”
The woman hugged Celine’s knees while she continued the chapter. When she’d read to her mother, it felt like they were fleeing. With the woman, with Hélène, they were traveling.
The next time she ventured to Croix-des-Champs, the facteur at the bureau de poste shoved a twined bundle into her arms. “Pick up your mail more often. Someone’s been writing you every week for the last two months.”
Celine pressed the letters to her nose. The ink smelled like spices from the other side of the world.
“Oh, and this.” He handed Celine a book. Robinson Crusoe.
&
And yet.
I know in my heart that you will never be truly free. Yes, on paper you are free to come and go from the plantation as you please. But you will never have enough education, enough money or enough opportunity to do whatever you really want to do. And neither will your children.
And yet. And yet.
Here is the impossible part. You have to fight anyway. You have to, because you’re not fighting for yourself. You’re fighting for the generations who come later, and later than later. And you keep hoping that every day is a little bit freer than the last, although this will rarely be true.
You must work the plantation. But you must also learn to hold a knife. You must plant sugarcane, but don’t forget to practice burning it down.
&
“Don’t you want to be free?” Celine wrestled with the rope, but the donkey fought back; it kicked and brayed, bucked and snorted. The more it struggled, the more pain swelled her ankle. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Céline?” Hélène emerged from the shadows, balancing the candle in one hand and her cup of clairin in the other. “Doesn’t that donkey belong to the église?”
“I have to get to Jacmel before Boyer blocks the roads.”
“The soldiers would just send you back.”
Celine struggled against the knot as the donkey chomped at furious air. “Why didn’t you warn me about the Code?”
In the distance, the first gunshots split the air.
“Do you think I knew?” Hélène asked. “Do you think Monsieur le Sous-Préfet Parfait let me read the order? I overheard him arguing with a subordinate, and I raised hell until he let me come this far.”
Celine spun. “I can be your domestic worker. Take me as your maid instead of your reader, and tell people I’ve always lived in Jacmel.”
Hélène gripped the clairin with both hands; the Marquis de Sade book had been lost or sacrificed. “Fernand swears he won’t allow it.”
“He won’t allow it, or you won’t push for it?”
“He says the nation couldn’t bear it.”
“But what do you say?”
“Of course I want it.” She waved the words into a puff of smoke. “But how would it look for a public official to illegally import girls from the countryside?”
“What girls? It’s me.”
“It’s not forever — ”
“When? Until the debts are paid? They’ll never be paid!”
Hélène drained the calebasse. “Mon ange, don’t get political. I get enough of that from Fernand.”
“I…” Celine tried to form words around her anger, but they failed her. The most she could do was stand up straighter, to be a little taller than Hélène.
Hélène touched her shoulder. She didn’t try to push her back down, just held her. “I’ll still bring you books.”
“And you?”
She knelt to examine Celine’s ankle. “You’re hurt.”
Celine extracted two of Hélène’s letters from the satchel: the first, inked and curved in precise cursive. The last, scratched and scrawled in wobbly, childlike print. “How much time do you have left?”
“Shall I carry you? You shouldn’t walk on this.”
“Fernand won’t read to you,” Celine said. “What will you do stuck in a world without stories?”
“Don’t be so theatrical,” Hélène said, but her voice was gentle and Celine wasn’t sure how to interpret it. “Do you want to know something? Every single night, I used to pray to wake up as Robinson Crusoe, up until my wedding night. Then I stopped praying. There’s a time for stories, mon ange, and a time for real life.”
The donkey kicked dangerously close to Hélène’s head. Without thinking, Celine swung her fist to strike it across the eyes, not to hurt it but to make it see. She stopped herself in time. Hélène hurried her away. Celine’s body was trembling, and she hated that she couldn’t control it.
“Endure the plantation for a little while longer, and when the Code Rural proves effective, I’ll convince Fernand to let you come.”
Celine imagined herself in Hélène’s library: She turned a page and heard the click of a rifle. She dropped a book and it shattered like a fist through glass. Why didn’t it feel like an escape anymore?
“You’re lost in your thoughts again. Come back to me.” Hélène was cupping Celine’s hands, stroking her fingers. Celine shifted away — the woman clamped her wrists.
“Please let me go.”
“I’m so sorry for all of this.”
In the light, Celine realized the soot stains weren’t as visible as she thought, but the tiny cuts where the gravel had shredded her palms were. She felt a damp shame: for how hard she’d tried to get clean.
“Where are you going?”
In a daze, Celine lifted the candle and drifted to the main square.
Thunderclouds of gunpowder and sulfur blocked the sun.
Her mother had rarely told her stories of the Revolution. When she did, she talked of the French invaders so pale they glowed. But now, the soldiers charging their horses forward looked just like the people they trampled. The marchand struggled to repel bayonet blows with a shovel. The cabaretier lay unconscious. A soldier kicked down the door to the storage room. Stalls lay in smithereens. Horses whinnied and reared onto their rear legs. The screams of the wounded rose like a national anthem. Blood rolled down her tongue, and it wasn’t hers.
Celine saw herself raise the candle and launch it into the carriage. She saw the light catch the crimson curtains and spread, spread, until the carriage itself became a ball of apologetic flame; she saw the fire race from the carriage to the soldiers to the sugarcane fields. She felt her mother’s breath warm her neck and her mother’s voice warm her ears, Pitit mwen chèri, my dear daughter, watch the cane burn itself into an ocean of scarlet.
When Celine opened her eyes, the candle was still in her hands, and Hélène was gripping her tight.
&
Pitit mwen chèri, I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you the life that I dreamed of. But I can give you this: When the time comes, burn and don’t stop burning.
Freedom is a battlefield.
Pou toujou,
Manman ou.
Forever,
your mother.
Image: Tessa Mars, A Vision of Peace, Harmony and Good Intelligence I, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 190 x 190 cm. Photo by Takeshi Fujimura