Free In Darkness by Nick Lake

was, Dread Wilmè was doing a lot of good in the Site the way Manman saw it. He paid for people to go to hospital, he had houses repaired, he supported the schools. For this, he got some money from Lavalas, but Manman felt it wasn’t enough. I didn’t understand anything much of this at the time, you realize. I filled it in later.
    Anyway, Manman had come up with a way to raise money for Lavalas, for Dread Wilmè. And that was where me and Marguerite came in. That day, we were in a peristyle deep in Solèy 19, far from where we lived. This was where Dread Wilmè’s power was the strongest. A mambo, a female vodou priest, was leading the ceremony. She did the call to Papa Legba to open the gates, the usual. This wasn’t the first time Marguerite and I had taken part in such a ceremony, so we didn’t really listen. The place was a basement and it was concrete and gray, filled with gray smoke. It was like a world with all the color taken out. All around the walls were people, gangsters really, it was obvious to me, but Manman didn’t care. Dread Wilmè himself sat on a big chair, his dreads a deeper dark in the darkness. They all chanted along with the mambo – Dread Wilmè, too.
    Me and Marguerite, we sat in the middle. We were special. We were like mascots for the Lavalas, you know. We were delivered by Aristide, the hero of the party. We were Marassa. We were capable of maji, of performing spells.
    The basement was small. There were lots of people packed in there: young, old, gangsters, and not gangsters. The room, it seemed to contract, to expand, and was filled with noise like thunder. After a while, we felt the atmosphere shift. We had felt it before; we knew what it was. It was like a prickling on our skin. Then everyone was looking at us through the smoke, and we knew that the Marassa were coming. We looked at the mambo, and we saw that she was drawing the Marassa veve on the ground, drawing it in chalk. I say we looked, but I don’t mean I assume Marguerite looked as well. I say it cos I know. Everything we did in those days, we did together. I looked at the veve. That means Marguerite looked, too.
    We were twins. We were one soul, halved.
    Back in the day, Manman said, they would have taken two chickens and cut their throats, a gift to the Marassa, the pwen to make them pleased. But people didn’t do that kind of thing anymore, even Dread Wilmè, who loved old vodou. Instead, a skinny kid came up to us with a lale, a basket kind of thing, and on it were all these sweets and chocolates and shit like that and we would have loved to eat them, but we knew that wasn’t how it worked. We were smart, me and Marguerite, we didn’t need to learn the same lesson twice.
    No. We didn’t try to take the sweets. We just nodded to the kid, and he went round the peristyle, scattering them on the floor. There were a couple of toys, too, cos the Marassa love toys – plastic things, figures, like tiny dead people. Even so, I would have liked them. I never had any toys; I never saw a toy till the first time Manman took us to the peristyle. But I knew they weren’t for me; they weren’t for us. We were Marassa, but we weren’t the Marassa. Even at that age we understood we were only a door. A pipe. A window.
    The chanting started.
     
    — Marassa Simbi,
    Mwen engage dans pays-a,
    Marassa Guinin, Marassa la Côte,
    Mwen engage dans pays-a!
     
    It was a song to the Marassa of Africa. It called to the Marassa; it told them the people loved Haiti, and they knew the Marassa loved Haiti, too. You know I don’t believe in this stuff – I’ve told you that already – but when you’re in a dark place and the mambo is singing, it’s kind of powerful, even I will admit that.
    The chanting got louder and louder.
    Me and Marguerite, we knew what we had to do. We did it together, like we did everything. You looked at us, you saw a person in a mirror – someone reflected to make two people. We were in sync, like drums, man. We