Remembering Miss Nita

In Floral Park where I grew up, the family living behind us had a maid. This was very unusual in our middle class town. The “M’s” were divorced. Mrs. M and her two sons lived in the house. The maid cooked, cleaned and watched the boys after school. I wasn’t supposed to play with the M boys – they were wild, used bad language, and according to my mother, were hoodlums in the making. But sometimes when I got bored I’d run around the corner, knock and the back door, and use the formal phrase we all used back then: “I’m calling for [names of the M boys]. Can they come out and play?”

The maids that worked for the M’s had starched sky blue uniforms with a white cap, white apron, and white nurses’ shoes. The first maid was Miss Jenny and I loved her. She would give me cookies and tell the boys how well behaved I was. No wonder they stopped playing with me for a while.

But it’s their second maid that I wish to tell you about now – Miss Nita.

Miss Nita came from Haiti. I didn’t know where Haiti was. I just knew she was the blackest black person I had ever seen – her skin was shiny and beautiful, with blue lights in it. She wore her hair in little braids with plastic ties with pretty colored glass balls on the end. The light would catch the colors in the glass balls and sparkle like jewels in the kitchen when she walked around. It was hard to understand Miss Nita’s accent. She yelled at a lot at the boys and hit them with a broom. She cooked delicious and exotic foods and she cleaned nonstop. The boys did everything to make her life miserable. They really were hoodlums in the making as my mother said.

Miss Nita sat at the kitchen table and chain smoked and sometimes she cried. I would sit on a stool and drink a glass of milk and watch her smoke while the M boys ate the magical food she prepared. I remember rice, chicken, pork chops, bananas (probably her equivalent of fried plantains?) and pies…oh, could that lady ever make a pie. She talked about her brother Claude in Haiti and her mother. She had come to America to make money and she sent her checks back to Claude so her family in Haiti and her mother could eat.

She told scary stories about Haiti. I remember how she said that gangs of boys would stick firecrackers in animals and blow them up. Sometimes they would do this to other children and laugh at their burns. She talked about gangs, and she talked about how frightened she had been growing up there. But her mother and her brother were there and you could hear the longing in her voice for the family she had left behind.

She was very angry. She would stub out her cigarettes and say in her beautiful voice, “These boys do not know how lucky they are.” This was before the two M boys would run out and do bad things in the neighborhood. My mother was right – I shouldn’t have played with them.

One day, Miss Nita saw me skipping around the corner to the candy store. She was standing on the M’s porch shaking out a rug. She waved me over and I ran up. “Hello Miss Nita.” I was probably around seven or eight years old.

“I’m going back to Haiti,” she announced. “I wanted to say goodbye to you. You are a good girl. My momma’s ill. I want to see Claude and my babies.” Her babies were her nieces and nephews.

That was her way of saying goodbye. Strangely enough, she gave me a hug, squeezing me as tight as my grandma used to. Her hands were rough and she smelled like chlorine bleach, probably because she was always doing laundry.

As I watched news coverage from Haiti last night, I started to cry, especially as the reporter showed a ward of children with legs amputated. In a poor country, would they get a prosthesis? Would they be able to function or will they starve once the relief workers leave because they cannot get work – they are now crippled? How can this be happening in one of the poorest nations in the world?

I remembered Miss Nita and I haven’t thought about her in 30 years or more. I wonder how old she is now? I’m guessing she’s in her 50’s…of course when you’re a kid, everyone seems old, but she was probably in her early twenties then. Did she go back to Haiti, or did she eventually get her family out and move them all to the United States?

When I worked for a ‘famous’ PR person, she taught me a PR trick. When we had to write materials for big and hard to understand projects for our clients (mostly non profit clients), she taught me to take a big concept and instead of writing about the concept, find a person to write about. So if we wanted to help people understand how a mathematics education could change a person’s life, instead of writing praise for math, we’d find a child. Preferably a poor child who had been inspired to take math, and who was now a nuclear physicist or something like that, and we’d write his story. Then people would be moved and understand the big idea. They would take action.

I don’t know if I’ve captured what Miss Nita was like with this essay. It is so, so hard to watch the earthquake relief and news coverage. I feel overwhelmed by the damage, by the pain and suffering. I start to cry and I get angry and then I swear a lot and then I have to go to confession or say an act of contrition, and then I get angry with God and I don’t want to do that. I just get angry all over. I want to jump on a plane and dig people out of the rubble with my bare hands. But I don’t know any useful skills to help the Haitian people. I’m not strong enough to dig them out. I have no medical training. My French isn’t even strong enough to order in a restaurant much less translate Kreyol (Haitian Creole).

So I will write about Miss Nita, and think about her today, and pray a lot, hoping that by remembering one of the few Haitian people I have actually met in life that my prayers can do some good, and help you think about them too.