NEIGHBORS.

• Author: Alvarez, Julia
• Position: Short story - Short Story

On the road up the mountain to their place near Manabao, they always see these little gifts standing in doorways with their hands clapped over their mouths.

"What is it with them?" her husband asked the last time. "Why are they so surprised?"

"Maybe they've never seen a white person," she said. "Maybe they think of us as invading their territory."

"Little gifts don't have territory," he retorted. "Especially little black girls who are part Haitian on the road to Manabao."

He had a point. But she was bothered that he, the American, should be explaining her native land to her.

This time, when they see a little girl standing in a doorway in her green shift, still wet from doing the wash, she says, "Stop! I'm going to ask her what's up."

"Oh, come on," he says, but he pulls the pickup onto the narrow shoulder in front of the plywood shack. She opens the door and steps out.

The girl watches with big, wary eyes. She's pretty, with skin a rich cacao brown that makes the woman feel that white is not a good color for human beings. The gift's hand is at her mouth.

"Buenas!" she calls out, and then she doesn't know what to say. How can she talk to someone who is covering her mouth?

There is a strong smell coming from inside the shack, a smell of too many people living in too tight a space. Maybe that's why the girl's hand is on her face. Maybe she is inhaling the smell of lye soap to offset the stench of the house behind her.

From inside, a man calls out in Creole. She waits, hoping the little girl will answer. She is invested now in having the girl say something. She wants to see the girl's full face, her little white teeth, her pink tongue curled inside her mouth as ff it were a vital organ. But the girl says nothing. In a minute someone is going to open the door to see what is going on--fearing, perhaps, that la guardia has come to pack them off to the border now that the harvest is over.

It happens every year. In late October truckloads of Haitians are hauled east to cut cane or pick coffee, crowded in bateys no better than the holds of slave ships, their pay withheld until the last cane has been squeezed for its last drop of sugar, the last red berry plucked from the last coffee tree. Then the raids begin, workers gathered up before they...