Page 69: You Were Watching From the Sand

 

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put Juliana Lamy's You Were Watching From the Sand to the test.

Set up Page 69 for us.

 My Page 69 is the second page of a story called “We Feel It in Punta Cana.” This is a story narrated by a young Haitian boy working as a domestic servant in the home of a wealthy Dominican businessman, circa 1998. Though young, this narrator has eked his way through a series of tense working months at the Rodrigo household, but while he is bringing Don Rodrigo his lunch one day, the plate slips and falls out of his hands. Though he is just as much of a migrant worker as those Haitians working on what many have called “modern-day sugar plantations,” or bateys, in the Dominican countryside, this narrator has had a certain degree of insulation from the batey pace-of-life. Agitated and impulsive, Don Rodrigo takes the narrator to a batey near Punta Cana, where he forces the narrator to witness a moment of shocking violence. This is one of the only stories in the collection whose narrator remains unnamed throughout, insisting on a nearness of consciousness that makes the shock-joy-horror of the narrator as unavoidable of an experience for the reader as it is for the boy whose mind hosts it. 

 

 What is the collection about?

 This collection is about zombie girls and vandalism and geopolitics and Haitianness and horror and the surreality of having to carry out life-making and life-sustaining tasks—eating and talking and singing and such—while mind, body, and country are under siege. It is about Miami and anger and muscle memory and humor and creating people from mud when the loneliness gods you like that. It is about capers and balding tires and children up to no good and grown-ups no to no better. But more than anything, this collection is a tribute to the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the collection is about? Does it align itself with the collection’s theme?

 I’m really surprised by how strongly this single page distills so many of this collection’s themes. Social power, loneliness, labor, displacement, family (or the lack thereof)—each has its own claim on this short interaction between the narrator and Don Rodrigo. Give me a few more months and a complimentary speech-writing course, and I’m sure that each of this collection’s stories could be re-worked into a full-throated declamation of power. “We Feel It in Punta Cana” definitely deals with power more explicitly than the other featured pieces do, particularly in the way that it depicts the physicality of power, its immediate and violent bodily collisions with the affected people. Some of the stories here look at ways of re-configuring and re-possessing personal power, as Arbor does in “belly” when she makes her mud person, or as two children named Ezra and Angel do in “Open House” when they keep away their apartment complex’s potential new tenants by destroying vacant units, holding out hope that their evicted friends will be able to return to the units that they’ve kept free of new residents. Other stories spit on entire systems of power, like the two teenagers who decry economic inequality by stealing things from the houses of their wealthy neighbors (“Muscle Memory”).

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“We Feel It in Punta Cana” 

Page 69

All I wanted to do then was be on the other side of what was happening. I wanted to be on the side that would let me forget.

But I’m feeling it all right now, with Don Rodrigo looking through me. I wonder what he’s seeing today. Sometimes I’m his little negrito, his niño listo. The best of my people, the first Haitian helper they’ve had here who never, ever cries even though he (who is me) is so young. Never cries, even when the nighttime comes and they’re sleeping in the back room closest to the chicken shed. Sometimes Don Rodrigo calls me into the living room from the kitchen and reads the newspaper to me.

Do you know who the president is?

No, Don Rodrigo. (I always say, even though I do. Don Rodrigo is happy happy happy when he’s telling me things he thinks I don’t know.)

Well, it’s un hombre de calidad, Leonel Hernandez.

And he’ll look at me and I’ll give him the surprise he needs to see. I’ll draw it on my face, like Rafi and me used to draw those houses in the dirt outside, with fallen sticks from the bannann tree, when we were really little.

He’s done a lot for your people.

Sí, Don Rodrigo.

I’ve done a lot for your people.

Muchas gracias, Don Rodrigo. Que dios le bendiga.

But I’m thinking, right now, while I’m looking at Don Rodrigo’s eyes light like the moon, that this is not going to be one of those times. I don’t say sorry because I know it will make it worse, whatever’s coming. When it rains too hard here all the cars go too fast. Juanma tells me it’s harder to drive. Whatever I say right now, it’ll

be the rain.

What scares me the most, while I’m watching Don Rodrigo get up from the table in the patio, is how quiet his face is. It’s like the pool outside in the backyard when no one’s using it

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Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer with a bachelor's degree in history and literature from Harvard College. In 2018, she won Harvard's Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. She spends much of her free time baking, because the measuring it requires is the best she's ever been at anything math-related. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workhop. Juliana currently resides in southern Florida.