Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer from Orlando, Florida currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in spirit, in Blackness, in Florida suburbia. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Tin House, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She is well at work on her first novel, Fight in the Night.
Banana Trees / Sunflower Seeds
I’d seen her after Baby Bio at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks, you know, that’s where the baddies be, contemplating cake pops. She was brown-skinned and big-haired, everything pierced, everywhere a tattoo, tall and skinny as the devil’s trident and I got that stomach clutch, like: I gotta pee. And she looked at me and I’m a coward, so I studied someone’s strawberry refresher, but she was still locking eyes with me when I looked up so I turned, stumbled into Young Adult. She was in my peripherals, started circling me in Science Fiction so I just let her catch me and she said, “I know how this sounds, but see, I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful, so kinky-curly, so damn thick, Jesus have mercy.”
I said, “Sierra. Saint-Fleur.”
She said, “Betty, Jean Baptiste. And on top of it all, you’re Haitian too?”
I nodded. I said, “Kiss me.”
She said, “Fuck me.”
I sat next to her, nervous, on the city bus, got took to her apartment and she did, I did. On a boxspringless mattress next to stacks of used and yellowed books under all her trinkets and twinkle lights. She laid next to me, naked and heavy-breathed and said, “I might could like you, but you’re gonna have to learn to fuck me better.” And me, anxious always, flop sweat, stomach always doing some goddamn thing, I said, “I should’ve said this, but I’ve never fucked anybody.” She put a hand on my shoulder, forehead on mine, breathed her breath into my nostrils and since then, she’s never stopped touching me soft.
Back home after the bus, I culled peas and plinked them into a cast pot while Mummy curled four fingers of one hand into the handle of a milk-jug-made-watering-can and held the other to her muumuu’d midsection. We were in the makings of a meal for us and for the spirits, so they could gift us everything we’d wished for, like for me final exam answers and for her our slumlord dead and buried. Mummy smiled, gap-toothed, into the ceiling, rolled her hips to konpa. I bit my teeth ’cause I couldn’t tell her that I knew then exactly what gouyad and grinding was all about. She poured water into the base of her banana tree, planted straight from the seed into one of the blue plastic barrels she usually used to steal my shit to send to Haiti. She picked yesterday’s offering up off the altar cloth that laid at the base, brushed the dirt off the shoulders of an unopened Barbancourt, then got back to bragging about how beautiful she’d been back in the day.
“Hey hey!” she shouted into the beat. “You know, I’m the reason every man is in search of a Jacmelienne, cherie, they’ve been searching for me since 1983.”
I smirked, plinked peas, said, “But your man left you?”
She lifted her arms and hands way up like she was praising the Lord and not le monde. She said, “He left you, cherie, not me. Because you came out bald and blinding light skinned.”
I sucked my teeth, popped her with a pea.
She opened her eyes finally, leaned in to cup my face, she said, “But now, you’ve been blessed to look just like your Mummy.” Her thumb was wet and wrinkled. “And your man will be in search of you soon.”
Betty and I started doing shit like going on walks and sitting forever on park benches. She’d graze her fingers over my arm hair or my inner thigh and I would go nuts at the chills she made in me. She started talking like, “Can you believe that once we were strangers?” And I’d twist, tilt, say, “I think I’d like to never stop knowing you.”
She said, “I like how you’re looking to eat up life, even though you’re nervous.”
I said, “I like how big you do it, belligerent, baby you’re a supernova.”
“You’re corny.” “Isn’t that how I got you?”
She said, “Sometimes, I feel afraid, like I’m going to lose you. Like I’ll do it wrong, do too much, I’ll fuck it up, I won’t know how to love you right, and you’ll leave me.”
“Sometimes, me too.” I said, “What if I can’t be enough for you, don’t have enough to give? What if my loving is too tiny, too tepid for you to feel?”
“Kiss me.”
“Fuck me.”
I got better, got good, gave her orgasms, learned to stop loving lightly, because she needed pressure.
That’s how come it came to be that Madame Claude and Claude himself seen me and her at the Magic Mall. Because we’re Black and romantic, they seen me buying her bamboo earrings, gold plated, said Betty on the inside of the hoops. They seen her get me a nameplate necklace for me to never take off, wear always, it said Sierra. And by the time Claude and Madame Claude see me pull Betty in by the mid-rise belt loop, kiss her nape, call her baby—I’d seen them too.
I rush to lip-kiss Betty goodbye and swipe a box of the almost-sweet carrot cake that Mummy craves but doesn’t ever buy herself, pray to the patron saint of city buses to make it home quick because I know those two will call her to snitch on me like it’s their day job, like I’m not grown, like … okay I still live with my mom but I’m a degree-seeking daughter. But when I key open the pastel pink door, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, papers fanned out on top of it: she’s making up numbers for her taxes, home phone pressed to her ear. I slide the cake onto the table and duck into the living room to tap into the other line like it’s the early aughts. I hear Claude and Madame Claude suck their teeth like it’s a ritual required before talking shit, start with, Pitit: We seen your daughter with some slut, she was nose pierced and ankleted, she’s a lesbian.
Mummy, who used to take care and take her time to give me a zig zag part down the middle, braided my hair and put the boul gogo at the base, my mom, who Haitian-remedied me through juvenile fucking arthritis, who fed me fried eggs and coffee sweet but strong as liquor—she listens to her sister and her sister’s cheating-ass, dusty-ass man say that dick won’t ever be enough for girls like me. I hear Mummy not say shit, not defend me when they say it’d be best to let in a gang to, one after the other, fuck me, force me. That’s the only way I’d ever be satisfied. She only sighs when they say that maybe men wouldn’t be enough. A pack of horses ought to do it for the madivine.
After they click off, I make sure she sees my silhouette in the kitchen doorway.
I say, “So?”
She sucks her teeth, she never looks up. “I don’t know what would cause someone to say something so sick.”
“They’re sick,” I say, a bubble in my throat, “but it’s true.”
Her barely-there eyebrows meet in the middle. Jeez, you can almost see her beating heart come up through her bird chest and into the blue veins of her neck. But she is great at knowing nothing so disappointing could ever happen to her. She says, “Remove your lips from that lie.”
“It is true,” I say, “I’ve been gay.” And I have been, sweet since the babysitter, Beatrice. She’d ring the doorbell and I’d act a damn fool, be writhing when I saw her, the origin of the gotta pee feeling. She was busty and nice to me. She wore her hair relaxed and her face dimpled and once I asked: How do I know this is real life? She squinted, looked at me nearly to neckbreak. She said: Don’t ever stop asking questions like that.
Mummy says, “Are you trying to ruin my life?”
“What?”
She stares only at the banana tree. She’s forever said I’d better show it some respect—it’d been growing since before I was, more hers than mine. She says, “We can get rid of this. I swear it to you, cherie, this spirit can leave your body.”
She looks at me, everywhere, the nose ring, the nameplate, the anklet. She puts her palms to her cheeks, like she sees now: all the gay signs were there. I shrug, I say, bleary-eyed, “I don’t want this spirit to leave me.”
She says, “Then I won’t have any part in it. In this, in you.”
I creakily nod. I turn, a whirlwind into my room. I get on the ground, feel old rice grains and kinky hairballs in my kneecaps, head fog, ears plugged, a siren. I shove clothes, unwashed, into my pink and dirty old Barbie duffel bag. I pass my mom, both of us stone-faced, on my way to the bathroom. I steal the toilet paper because I bought it, steal her dusting powder forged in Haiti because I used to flour myself in it because I used to want to smell her everywhere. I rush back into the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, orbiting the table. I catch side glimpses of her, slumped, face seems set to drip off her skull. I plop the duffel onto the table and take back the cake, crush the flimsy plastic container into the cartoon carrot drawn in icing, shove it on top of my tennis shoes and zip it away. I stand, waiting to catch her eyes just once, once more. I muss up all her documents, send them fluttering onto the carpet. She only takes a breath, pushes herself from the table, and turns to thumb a sun-spotted leaf of her banana tree.
By the time I get to Betty’s I realize I’m breathing again, heavy and hot and a heartbeat. In the doorway, Betty puts one lanky arm over my shoulder, she’s warm. She’s got a blunt between her ringed fingers and holds it to my lips. I shut my eyes. I breathe in. She kisses me before I can blow out the smoke.
I wake up to her big spoon and her arm feels heavy on my waist. I lift it and drop it off me. She wriggles and wakes, lets out her little morning moan, rubs a big toe over my ankles. I shift to lie on my back. She puts her arm around me, again.
“How do you feel?” she asks. I look at her a little, her eyes big and her eyebrows bigger. I look up at the ceiling lamp: a teardrop on a chain, gray with dust.
I close one eye, worm an arm out from under hers to pinch the picture of the lamp out from my sight. “Just like that,” I say.
Betty’s clutching fistfuls of comforter and I’m hands full of thighs, face to face with her labia, where I’ve grown to love to be. “Is everything okay?” she whispers, craning her neck down to catch a peek of the crown of my head.
I muffle, “Mm-hm.” But when I bring my head back down it’s like pushing together the south poles of magnets. I try to inch forward but still spring back. I stare into her clit, I spiral, I … I can’t lick it, I can’t, I can’t, can’t like it.
“Hey.” She crawls her fingernails in between my box braids, into my scalp. “Come up here.”
I climb up over her spindly limbs to lay beside her, look into her adorned face.
“Let’s buy a house and have a bunch of kids, name them all Betty and Sierra Jr.,” she says.
“Plant sunflower seeds in the backyard and then get married in it,” I say. “Where should we honeymoon?”
“Haiti, the motherland, have a threesome with La Sirenn.”
“Do you think it’ll be the same,” I croak, “you know, without a mother, and everything?”
She grabs my hands to interlace in hers, kisses each of my fingers, “You were born of Ayiti, cherie, nothing can steal you from her.”
I walk, big headphones on, to pick Betty up from her work study job at the financial aid office, sure to avoid the super senior, this Sisqó dupe, lurking by the arches of the fountain, squawking at women who pass him by. Sure as sin, he’s there, so I turn up the konpa, watch him rub his hands together, holler at me mute-mouthed. I’m a yard away from him when, and when, when when my shoulder pivots, like it’s the core of the earth marionetting me. And just like that, I’m walking back the way I came, the music in my ears dwindles down to dead.
He says, “See, baby, you too pretty not to be noticing me.”
I try again to push, fight back against this pull of gravity, but I pivot once again until I’m faced with him. North and south poles, south and north, north and south. His eyes are yellow and mine are hot.
I hear, “Sierra!,” in the distance, turn to see Betty trotting toward me. She starts with a smile, big teeth, big heart, but drops it when she catches sight of me, takes a single sideways look at the Sisqó stunt double.
“You good?” She grabs my hips, I’m hers, she says, “This is my girl.”
He throws his hands up. “My fault,” he says, “you know, I actually got respect for the LGBTs.” He steps back. A bubble bursts, a breath of air.
I open my eyes to Betty frowning at them. “It’s just not coming out right,” she says, furrowed brows and pursed lips. I raise the mirrored pallet to my eyelids, the rainbows I’d requested for the pride parade came out all overcast, smudged. I give up and get the makeup remover while Betty lights a bowl. I’d stopped the stuff, hoping I could cure this—the everything.
I got my license and myself deeper into student loan debt, so I drive us in my brand-new-used Honda Civic down the freeway, to the beach, Betty snoozing against the window, sunshades down. I can almost smell the SPF and the six-foot dolls in drag—no, no. And no, no, no, and no, no. I cut the steering wheel, the steering wheel cuts me, a U-turn into traffic. Betty jerks awake to tire screeches, all of the freeway honking, horns, horns, horns, cursing me, cars cutting and running from mine like a zipper.
Betty grips the glove compartment. “Sierra, what the fuck? What the fuck?” But she turns to me, my wide eyes and white knuckles. She takes her two fingers, her short acrylics, her rose tattoos, to my wrists. “Please, please, turn around.”
“I can’t,” I cry out, “I’m not, I can’t, I’m not in control.”
“Okay,” she says, “okay.” She rubs my shoulder, she cuts the wheel this time, puts us at least over the median and back into the flow of traffic.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” I say in shuddered breaths, phlegm and tears. “It’s all wrong. I think, I think, I’ve been repelled.”
“By what?” she whispers, maybe neither of us wanting to say it too loud.
“Being gay,” I whisper back. As soon as I put words to it, I know where we’re headed.
I show up at the pastel pink door, ask Betty to wait in the car because this is my business to unburden. I tap at the door with the baseball bat I keep in the trunk. And there is Mummy, bright and thin-skinned. I burst in, I ask, “Where is it?”
“Thank God, you’ve come back to me.”
I wield the bat like a wand. Point it at my mom, coax her away from me as I step further into the home that once was so much home. “Show it to me! Show me the fucking token you used to make it so that you wouldn’t have a daughter like me anymore.”
Mummy clutches her muumuu, says, “Sierra, this isn’t you speaking right now.”
“You’re right, this isn’t me. It’s whatever you put on me.” I swing at the pre-owned China cabinet. The glass and the fake-ass China shatter.
“How could you?” I ask. She ogles me, always stoic. I gesture the bat to the banana tree. “You can wish what you want me to do. You can pray to whichever of your whack-ass spirits to control my body. Try to pull me from pussy, push me to all the men you want. But you can’t change me.”
I let her come close to me. Her pigeon arms. She unsticks the braids from my glistening forehead. “It’s okay, cherie. That is enough. This will work, will let me love you.” I sniffle.
I heel-turn to the banana tree, the peeling trunk, the fenestrated fronds, and start to smash it to bits.
“No!” she screams, “no.” But the plates are too broken, liquor too spilt, everything between us is too wide, the insides of the tree too white. Then I see it peeking up from the soil. A 3D crystal photo I had etched for her for Mother’s Day: me on one side, morphed into her on the other. It’s bound in cotton yarn. I drop it on the floor. I raise my bat.
—
In the car, right in my old parking lot, I sit on top of Betty. I put my hands up her shirt, she puts her hands on my waist.
“I’m gonna start my own altar,” I say, “summon lesbian spirits and shit.”
She smirks, says, “What are you going to put on it?”
I think. I say, “Sunflower seeds.”
“Fuck me.”
“Kiss me.”
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.