The Dew Breaker

“Seven” does not relate to the preceding part in an immediately obvious way. This part is narrated in the third person. It deals with a male character living in the basement of a single-family home along with two other men. He is awaiting his wife’s imminent arrival from Haiti. He has not seen her for seven years. Seven is an important number to this character because it represents so many things: the number of hours spent working each of his two jobs (including a night job as janitor at Medgar Evers College), the second number in his age (37), and now the number of hours before his wife arrives at JFK Airport in New York, where he lives.

Early in the story, he ascends the stairs to the kitchen to inform his landlady of his wife’s arrival. Her only concerns are that the man’s wife is tidy and that living with his wife and two others in a cramped basement could pose a problem. He informs her that he intends to move out to a new apartment with his wife at the earliest opportunity.

Following this conversation, the man dwells upon the fact that he has addressed the landlady as “Madame” and that he acts inferior to her. He considers that this sense of class inferiority is something that he carried with him to America from Haiti.

The man further discusses the situation with his roommates, Dany and Michel. He tells Dany that no one can bring up the matter of the nights that the three men spent dancing and drinking at clubs in New York or the women that they sometimes brought home.

After the discussion with his roommates, the man goes to the airport, and the narrative abruptly shifts to the perspective of his newly arrived wife. At customs, she is held up for bringing loads of fruits and vegetables that cannot pass into the country. Husband and wife arrive home together, and we realize she is only now coming to America because it took her husband this long to acquire a green card and hire a lawyer to help her immigrate. They make love seven times.

When the husband returns to his two jobs, he gives his wife instructions on how things in the house work. She adjusts to life in the basement apartment and to her husband’s hectic work schedule. The one shadow over her happiness is that after they married and he left Haiti, she allowed herself to be consoled by a male neighbor who laid by her side for a few nights.

As the wife thinks of the nights she allowed another man to sleep beside her, the husband recalls how they met at Carnival in the town of Jacmel. At the time, the husband was preparing to come to the United States. He fell in love with her after witnessing her passion as a hired weeper for the festivities, and he married her so they could one day live together again in America.

At the end of the story, they go to Prospect Park in Brooklyn and then walk around the Flatbush neighborhood. Their thoughts are of Carnival, particularly the practice in which a couple would dress up in costumes as a bride and groom (the man as the bride and the wife as a groom). The couple would ask strangers to marry them, and the punch line would occur when the people they solicited realized the reversed gender roles. The man and wife did this one year, but they eschewed the reversed gender roles for their version.

It is only at the conclusion that we learn the wife speaks only Creole, not English. They walk silently, and the narrator contrasts this silence to the “temporary” silence that would come upon them in their early days together.