1925 to 1937 · Haitianspan
A sickly child went to strangers' wakes to hear the dead described
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Suzanne Sylvain was often ill as a girl and spent enough time near her own death to grow curious about everyone else's. Her caregiver, Amise, told her folktales while nursing her, and the stories held her. She began attending wakes, funerals and burials for people she did not know, in order to hear families narrate a life. The wake drew her most, the night of sitting with a body or dancing around it while relatives, friends and elders tell stories over the dead. Her family said these rituals settled her body and fed her curiosity. She grew up to become a linguist and ethnographer of Haitian Kreyol and Haitian folklore, the first Haitian woman to make a scholarly career of that work. Her father's funeral in August 1925 gave her no comfort. It opened eight years in which her eldest brother Normil and then her mother also died. Madeleine, just back from the Immaculate Conception Academy in Jamaica, took charge of the three younger children.
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