One Sunday morning, when I was eight years old and living with my aunt and uncle in Haiti after my parents had emigrated to New York, I woke up in a house with no money and no food. My uncle was a minister in an impoverished neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, where most people, without the hope of remittances from relatives abroad, were even worse off than we were. Buying food on credit would have advertised our dire straits and was, for my very proud uncle, out of the question. At other times when we’d been forced to skip a meal or two—often because the price of food staples had suddenly doubled or tripled, quickly exhausting our resources—miracles had happened. My uncle’s boss had come up with his overdue paycheck. A forgotten debt had been repaid to my aunt. The monthly allowance from my parents had arrived. Or, more often, one of my uncle’s parishioners had appeared with a luscious-smelling pot of food.
For a miracle to occur again this time, my uncle told my cousins and me, all we needed to do was pray. And no one, when hungry, could pray louder or longer than I could. Mostly, I prayed out of terror. What if my parents and my aunt and uncle died unexpectedly, leaving me to scavenge through garbage heaps for food? But I also prayed with hope, because things had always worked out in the past. This, my uncle liked to say, was because we had exercised our faith. Our faith had moved mountains.
That Sunday morning, we gloomily dressed for church, then gathered around our dining-room table to pray. Sitting there between my aunt and uncle, I imagined one of the church’s long-standing members, a large and boisterous woman we called Sè Victor (Victor being her husband’s name), appearing with an enormous plate of sweet plantains, swimming in a codfish-and-onion stew. Or maybe a giant bowl of spaghetti speckled with chunks of tomatoes and herring. This was faith, my uncle had often hinted: feeling and tasting what you desired, as though it were already yours. That morning, the food I imagined for us was so real that when I opened my eyes I almost reached out and grabbed it.
These days, those who suffer from the dire hunger situation in Haiti refer to their condition as “Clorox” or “battery-acid” hunger, for the way it seems to erode their insides. I have never known hunger of that degree, but if you had asked me that morning how mine felt I might have used similar terms. At church, I sat close to my aunt, glancing up every now and then at her worried face, and wondering whether she might have overlooked a few gourdes, or at least a piece of candy, at the bottom of her purse.
Before the service ended, my aunt left the church alone. Later, we found out that she had searched the house for bottles, jars, clay pots, buckets, and containers and had bartered everything she found to the neighborhood water seller for a bag of cornmeal and a few ounces of cooking oil. By the time we got home, our plain cornmeal lunch was ready. And again we sat around the dining-room table, clasping hands, thanking God. Afraid that our neighbors might see what we were eating, my uncle pulled down the shades and locked the door, but, before we could take a bite, there was a knock.
It was Man Gabriel, my aunt’s cousin, who was not a member of the church but was one of the best cooks in the family. She had brought us a big bowl of crabs, stewed with crushed eggplants and garlic gloves. “I made too much,” she said, allowing us some dignity. No one had too much crab lying around, any more than they had too much gold. She had probably heard about my aunt’s cornmeal barter and had decided to help us supplement it with the crab, the most luxurious of Sunday foods. As we feasted, I was sure that I had single-handedly brought about this miracle—that it was my prayers that had been so generously answered.
That is, until halfway through the meal, when I became violently ill, vomiting so forcefully that I could barely get up from the table. I jolted, doubled over, to the bathroom. The stomach cramps I experienced that day were a thousand times worse than my hunger pangs had been, and by the time I collapsed, dehydrated, on my bed, the thought of never eating again seemed relatively pleasant.
One of my cousins, who was a neighborhood nurse, guessed—correctly—that, since no one else had got sick, I had developed an allergy to crab. And though there were a few more missed meals to come, I never prayed for food again.