She has a special t’ing with one of them. He’s a Rasta in the fiberglass shop and he works with a piece of jersey tied around his head. It’s bright white and keeps the cutting dust from troubling his scalp and dirtying his plaits.
She’s 37 and he’s 23, which is how she likes it. “The young ones,” she tells me, “are very… enthusiastic.” She draws out the sound. En-thus-i-as-tic. She laughs then and that’s when I hear her wordless confession, hanging limp in the grinding pauses between each syllable. That’s when she admits that every day - right before she serves lunch - she meets him in the concrete shower block by the rigging shop, and there he picks her up and frankly fucks her against the tile wall. I almost missed this because I am too new and too foreign and too literal. I am still learning to see past the unsubtle.
I’ve posted this photo before, but I usually crop it. The lady in the gorgeous green and gold dashiki is Cheryl, who took care of Bean and also my grandmother.
This was Cheryl’s wedding day. My mom made her dress. She didn’t use a pattern. She claims that the dress just sort of sprung organically out of the fabric, which sounds kind of wacky, but she’s not kidding. I was there. She has a gift for sewing.
West Indian slang for ejaculate (both the noun and the verb) is “break”. I thought, at first, that this was kind of weird, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense.
Break? Break. Break! Yes. Exactly.
There’s also a saying, something that you ask people who are just not hearing what you’re telling them. If you find a person is obtuse or bull-headed or just needs to be reminded of the same damn t’ing over and over?
“Break stick in your ears, or what?”
I was so proud of myself when I sorted that one out. And I thought it was pretty hilarious. To ask someone if they had semen in their ears that was keeping them from hearing properly? That’s a real knee-slapper. I wondered if such an idea could be acceptably translated into the American lexicon. I made tentative plans to appropriate the concept, incorporate it into my personal idiom.
About a year later I realized that I’d completely misunderstood, and that the break stick question is actually asking if someone stuck a stick in your ear and broke it off, leaving the end of the stick in there, making you half-deaf. There’s some subtext there, and its juiciness is eclipsed only by its yuckiness.
I wasn’t proud of that realization, but rather relieved that I’d never explicitly stated what I had thought the slang phrase meant.
The learning curve when you live in another country actually gets steeper as you reach the top. When you first arrive in a foreign land, you’re overwhelmed by all the differences. The accents, the food, the daily words and actions that are small to you but hugely insulting to the lady in the market who sells you breadfruit or the taxi man who picks you up at the airport. After six or so months you get to a point where you think you’re on the level. You know the secret handshake. You get the joke. You stop worrying about embarrassing yourself. And it feels great, understanding and being understood. You breathe a sigh of relief, and you get comfortable.
But then a year or so later, a funny thing happens. One day you’re minding your own business when a memory is triggered, something that happened in your early days, probably something someone said to you, and suddenly you understand what they really really meant. The details aren’t important, but it’s a facepalm moment for sure. You groan, wonder what else you missed and try to convince yourself that your faux pas has been forgotten.
That moment when you first truly comprehend the steepness of the learning curve is a mixed blessing. Because from then on you know enough to know that you’re still a lifetime of layers away from truly getting the joke, and that maybe, just maybe, you always will be.
After Bean was born, I developed a keen interest in the details of his father’s heritage. He’d told me more than once that his mother had been a white woman, and that his grandmother had been born in another country. She’d arrived in Grenada via sea.
When I pressed him to tell me where, exactly, his grandmother had come from, he first said Austria.
Austria? This surprised me. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. But, hey. Sure. Austria.
But the next time the subject came up, the country he named was Australia.
Australia? I thought you said Austria. They’re very far apart, those two countries. Not the same place at all.
I ain’t too sure, you know, he admitted. Better if you ask my sister the next time you see her.
So I did. I went to the market on a Saturday and found her at her vegetable stand.
Was it, I asked, Austria or Australia where your mother’s mother was born?
Her eyes widened, and then she laughed. No, no, she said. Neither. Granny was from Scotland.
Bean was about nine months old the time we traveled - just the two of us - from Grenada to New York and back. I took this photo right before we boarded our return flight.
At an obscenely early hour of the morning, we found ourselves waiting at a gate at Kennedy Airport. In this photo he’s wearing pajamas with feet under his overalls. I’d already taken off his fleece vest, and each leg of the trip I removed another article of clothing. His dad picked us up at Point Salines, and as soon as we got in the car I stripped off Bean’s onesie, and his transformation back into a diaper-only Caribbean baby was complete.
And, oh yeah. I let him play on the skeezy carpeted floor in the airport. Why? Because getting dirty is nature’s vaccination. Also, I pick my battles.
and with good reason. Ironing your clothes / cooking your lunch / mopping your floor are activities best performed before the rise of the day’s heat.
I sleep in on Sundays, until maybe 8:30. I get up to pee and while I’m in the washroom, he takes the sheets off the bed and puts them in the washing machine. So I have to stay up. Which is just as well, because half an hour after that, it’s too bright to keep your eyes closed.
Also I have to drink hot coffee. Hot something. It took me three years to convince Bean’s father that drinking diet Coke first thing in the morning wouldn’t give me a stroke. That coming from a cold place, my issue was the heat of the sun, not the ice in my drink.
Today is a working day, and so I bathe and then stand naked in front of a fan until I manage to dry my skin. The fan is set on high and I have to squeeze most of the water from my hair with a towel, because the water has nowhere to go. There’s no room for it in the moist air. I dress gingerly, trying not to get sweaty before I leave the house. I slick my hair back with baby oil and pull it into a high ponytail. I cover my hairline with a piece of batik. The top of my forehead is already covered with enormous, brown freckles. I don’t want it, or my scalp, to get burned, so I’ve got baby sunscreen all over my head. I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.
We walk down a dirt road, and then down the concrete road, to the gap that marks the intersection with the main road. We stand in the gap, on the curb. I watch the tethered goats, who are well into their daily verge-trimming chores and completely oblivious to the morning traffic. I know for a fact that these two goats can see just fine, and will also move out of the way if any genuine threat presents itself, but in the absence of external enervation, they might as well be blind, for all the reaction to visual stimuli they exhibit. I am wearing my prescription sunglasses and yet I’m squinting against the sun. I curl my neck, lowering my eyes and offering my shoulders to the heat. It’s heavy, like a just-ironed shirt, and feels like a vaguely angry massage.
There’s a man standing on the far side of the road. He’s butchering an enormous tuna. The flesh of the fish is intensely pink, and he uses a machete to cut it free from the dark grey skin. He holds the machete the way I hold a paring knife.
The bus crests the hill, and I signal for it to stop using a hand signal that announces - again - that I am not a tourist.
The main road is made of asphalt, and today they are patching it. The bus, which is really just a very big van, slows at the bend right before the Governor General’s house. I look to the right, where there’s a steep cliff and hundreds of feet of air between the vehicle and the valley floor. I think of Left-Eye Lopez, The story is she was the only one wearing a seatbelt.
We are packed tightly in the bus, with special cushions made to sit in the open spaces between the seats. The passengers are a team. We are efficient. We make the best possible use of the available space. I am sharing a row with three secondary school boys. They are fifteen, I am guessing, and narrower than my purse, so they fold themselves and sit two deep in the bench seats. They are in uniform, long pants that are polyester and forest green and white collared shirts that are awesomely stain-free. I am not good with bleach. I try to imagine the mothers of these boys, who are probably younger than I am yet quite good with bleach, and a million other tasks at which I do not excel.
Other days, when the bus is full, I’ll take a seat and squeeze myself into a space that’s smaller than I am. That’s just what you do. Then the bus drives for a few miles and you’re jostled around a bit. And you find yourself somehow magically sitting in that impossible-that-you-fit space.
The wet asphalt smells worse than burning tires. The scent is bigger and has more personality. It drifts softly past my face, and I think it’s not going to trouble me, but when it reaches my nostrils it grabs them with both hands and flows sharply, urgently upwards into my nose. I hold my breath rather than allow myself to inhale any more of what I picture as Tinkerbells of tar, flitting kamikaze fighters determined to interfere with the child growing inside me.
It is pale celadon green, a color I simply do not understand, and these makeshift alterations are finished less than fifteen minutes before the ceremony. My friend does such a good job sewing me in that at the end of the night I’ll have to have the dress cut off me. We’ll have to borrow a giant pair of scissors (shears!) from the front desk of the hotel, and I’ll flinch slightly at the feel of the stainless steel against my skin. “Customized corset” are the words that jump, unbidden, into my mind.
I’ll imagine the mexican lady from hotel housekeeping finding and rescuing my ruined dress, which then changes hands a few times and finally is transformed (and cut down) into a Disney princess of a prom dress for a shy 17-year-old named Gloria.
But, more likely? She just clucked in disgust and threw it away.
Bean started going to school in Grenada when he was about two and a half. He was the youngest kid in the classroom, which worried me a little at first, but it worked out well in the end, because the older boys made him their mascot.
He loved school. He had a uniform, a yellow and white checked shirt and khaki shorts. His hair had never yet been cut, so every morning his father slicked it back into a neat (and manly!) ponytail. Then I we walked together the three blocks to a church with no roof. The roof had been blown off during Hurricane Ivan, and was being repaired the entire time Bean attended, and so the place was kind of like a construction site, which of course the child loved, because he gets almost as much glee from cement trucks as he does from chocolate.
I say the roof was missing, and it was, but Bean and his classmates were well-covered, because the church was two stories, the school was on the first and the floor of the second story was intact.
On Grenadian Independence Day, there was a class trip to Grand Etang, which is a beautiful natural lake in the rainforest that sits right in the center of the island. I tagged along, and it was a wonderful day.
I took this photo in front of the school, in the morning while we were gathered waiting for our bus to arrive. The kids are all dressed in their “national colours”. Independence Day commemorates the end of Grenada’s time as a colony of the British Empire. It should not be confused with Thanksgiving, which celebrates the anniversary of that time some United States Marines landed on the island, sent there by Reagan in response to the (socialist) Grenadian Revolution.
(A photo very similar to this one ended up in the inside cover of the Grenada Yellow Pages. Click here and here.)
My housekeeper is a champion phone-talker. All day, she does her work, one of three attached to her ear. Usually she’s just gossiping, catching up with one of her sisters, aunties, or friends. Sometimes she’s venting about her husband. Every once in a while, she’s moaning about her eldest daughter. This is the most infrequent topic, but it’s also the best time to eavesdrop. Nickie’s 15.
“You know Nickie, you know what she go and do? She got a Harry Potter book down there at the school. Can you imagine dey have dem t’ings? And they give them to children? Only wickedness comes from reading devil book. She hide it from me. Wickedness! Auntie saw her wit’ it and told me. Otherwise I don’t know when I’d a know. You remember what the pastor say about that Harry Potter? Now Nickie, she wicked. Wickedness she got from that book. And she run from me, you know? She run and she hide and for that I had to beat she.”
All while she’s talking she’s mopping my kitchen floor. Her neck, I think, must get sore, cricked to the side like that all the time.
I almost don’t say anything to her, but then I do.
I’ve read Harry Potter, I tell her. I really dig those books, actually. You see I’ve got all of them here on my shelf, hardcovers that I carried all the way from New York on the airplane, because I love to read them over and over. There’s no evilness in there. It’s about bravery, and sticking up for your friends…
She’s not hearing me, I can tell. She’s grinning wide, wide and she’s looking down at the floor, her toes turned in towards each other, like she’s some lickle schoolgirl being scolded by she teacher. I can’t see her eyes.
I’m doing this wrong. Cheryl’s three years older than me, and the mother to six children. She can make a quarter pound of flour and a banana last for a week when she has to. And I’m standing here in front of her with my education from up the road, embarrassing her. Beating a child for reading isn’t right, but neither is this.
I take a deep breath.
“All I’m trying to say is that maybe all Nickie’s going to remember about this is that you beat her for reading. And maybe that’s not the message you want to send.”
Yes, Miss Maria, she says. She smiles at me, and then walks down the hallway to my grandmother’s bedroom. Her back is straight and her head is held high, and she sways when walks, regally.
I met Nick first. He was Canadian, from Toronto. Maybe he was 50, but he could have been younger. It’s hard to gauge the age of the white-haired. He walked around the yard with his shoulders titled slightly back, as if he were getting ready for his turn under the limbo stick.
He was cute. My mother and I agreed on this point, which was awkward and made me glad neither of us was single.
Strictly speaking he had been hired as an electrician, but he was also a mechanic and a rigger. He lived on his boat, alone, and sailed from island to island. Unfettered. He was younger than most of the yachtie retirees. He was different from them in other ways, too. He hadn’t come to the Caribbean to enjoy his sunset years, but rather to escape the suffocating rat race up North.
Bean’s father liked to say Nick and I came from the same place. No, baby, I explained to him. Canada’s not the United States.
Whatever, he said. Both allyuh from up de road. Which was true. We were both in full possession of our dipthongs.
Isabella was from Colombia and - to borrow a phrase from Virgil - spent her days wandering around aimlessly yet with great effort, like a deer with an arrow stuck in her flank. She was wounded, grieving. Later she told me why. She told me that her brother had been murdered in Bogota, something to do with drugs. He had been her only sibling and she was heartbroken.
I don’t know how Isabella and Nick got together. One night I noticed the two of them sitting, heads close, in a corner of the beach bar. He had his foot on the bench of one of the picnic tables. His head was raised and his shoulders were loose, and he laughed as be brought his bottle of beer to his mouth. I’d never heard him laugh before.
Nick’s Spanish was terrible, the remnants of what he’d learned in high school, and her English was slightly worse. But they were both utterly unembarrassed by their clumsy verbalizations. Their language barrier did not impede their communication, but rather enhanced it. They listened hard and they spoke with their bodies and faces as well as their mouths.
I envied them. They were the oddest couple, sure, but they were also deliriously happy together, like puzzle pieces who’d been lost to each other for lifetimes. Whenever Isabella said Nick’s name, she blushed a little bit. I found her joy contagious. It filled my heart.
The other day I overheard a conversation about energy-saving lightbulbs. It reminded me of a funny thing that happened while I was living in Grenada.
Now. Regardless of your feelings about Cuba, and/or whatever diplomatic issues the United States has had with Castro, historically… You should know that in the Caribbean, Cuba and Castro are generally seen as (for lack of a better word) saviors. Sugar daddy, even. Castro, apparently, has some brilliant PR. For example. The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina got a huge amount of coverage in Grenada. It was a news trifecta for them. It was about the United States. It was about racism. And it was about suffering due to a hurricane. Shortly after the hurricane Castro made a speech in which he offered to send one hundred of Cuba’s very finest doctors to Louisiana to help with rescue efforts. The complete text of this speech was (translated and) published in one of Grenada’s two weekly newspapers. (There were no dailies.)
Many people, including Bean’s father, demanded that I explain why the United States had not responded to this gracious and generous offer. Why we were – and I quote – “ignoring the best-trained doctors in the world”. My only answer to this, because I was trying to be noncontroversial, and also because I’m not about to try to change anyone’s mind on this particular issue, was simple. We don’t need them, I said, and left it at that.
Several months later, the lightbulb business happened. Emissaries allegedly from the Cuban government arrived at our house. They were on foot. They were young, they were pleasant and one of them spoke English quite well. I offered them ice water, which they accepted gratefully. Then they asked us to tell them how many light fixtures we had in the house. We obliged. They left and went on to our neighbor’s house. They did this throughout the entire neighborhood, and, as far as I know, all over Grenada. (That’s what they told us. But I don’t recall ever hearing anyone mention it.)
A couple of weeks passed and they returned. They had lightbulbs for us. These lightbulbs, they declared, would last for seven years. All we had to do to get the lightbulbs, free of charge, was give them the bulbs we were currently using. This was, they explained, a gift from the people of Cuba to the people of Grenada. And so we obliged. We accepted their magic Cuban lightbulbs and gave them ours.
The magic Cuban lightbulbs lasted four months.
[Update: When I posted this story on my “real” blog, Letters from Grenada, I heard from a Jamaican reader who said the same thing had happened in his country and that it had turned into a major political scandal. Which I found very interesting. Because, seriously? What is the point of all that, Cuba? I would very much like for someone to explain this to me like I’m four years old, because I don’t get it. Is it just propaganda? Are you just shoring up your already stellar reputation within the Caribbean? Do you think that people will not notice that your lightbulbs suck? Or have you been gaslighting the world and your own people for so long now that you believe your own baseless stories?]
It’s not Aruba, but it is indeed the Caribbean. Grenada. I’m from New York, but I moved to the island in 2005 and stayed until 2009. Bean was born there and his father is Grenadian so he’s got dual citizenship. Two birth certificates. The works.
(For the Bean-curious, there are more photos here on Tumblr and also on Flickr.)
The day of the storm he’d gotten home and found the contents of his house afloat and the dog perched atop the refrigerator. Bean’s father - though he was not yet Bean’s father, had not yet even laid eyes on Bean’s mother - he opened the door and the water rushed out, soaking his feet. He gathered some clothes and his TV and DVD player. The electronics he laid out in the sun to dry. He didn’t expect them to work but they did. The clothes too, of course, were fine once he’d rinsed and hung them. Everything else was lost, destroyed by the wind and rain or simply washed away. He abandoned the house, leaving behind a mattress and his family photos. All were waterlogged beyond recognition.
He’d never gotten the passport replaced. It intimidated him, the prospect of going to town, speaking to officials, filling out forms. He was much more comfortable climbing a mast, swinging his cutlass, driving that forklift, holding an iguana. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t leaving the island. Why would he? Everything he needed was right there.
It was almost three years later, in the summer, that a friend of mine was getting married. One of my best friends - I was to be a bridesmaid - and so I wanted him to come with me to the States, meet my friends and family. By then he was the father of my child.
He needed a copy of his birth certificate in order to get a new passport, and that too had been lost, so we went to the Registrar’s Office in Saint George’s. The building sat on the crest of a steep hill, and as we walked up it I felt the muscles in the backs of my thighs pleasantly pull. Pleasantly because by then I was accustomed to such exertion and noticed but no longer minded the tropical sun that poured itself over my head on its way to the steaming asphalt beneath my feet. The asphalt was black and they say that black absorbs heat, which it does, I guess, but it also has an energy saturation point, and once that point is reached the heat bounces off the asphalt and hits me behind the knees and under the chin, and I’m reminded of those foiled, reflective triptychs of cardboard that American women, desperate to be bronze at any cost, hold beneath their faces, amplifying the light of the North American Spring.
There had been a lot of back and forth, from one office to another, this place to buy the necessary tax stamps, another to fill out the proper form and a third where the records are actually kept. It’s in that third place that we wait, on metal folding chairs in a small office, while the registrar herself retreats to look up his original birth paper. While she’s gone I imagine it’s like the Library of Congress, where you fill out a slip and they bring you your book. Or perhaps more like wherever Dickens’ Marley stored his completed ledgers, shelved and dusty; cramped and in chronological order.
She’s gone for close to 20 minutes, which feels too long, and when she comes back she’s empty-handed. She asks us to confirm the year. 1967, I tell her. She smiles. She disappears.
When she returns for the second time she holds a slip of paper in her hand, and I breathe, relieved. I watch her as she writes out our copy. She uses a real fountain pen and her penmanship is flowery, filled with old-fashioned curlicues and other details I haven’t seen since Paris.
She fills in the year, affixes the stamps and hands it to us. 1966.
He’s a year older than he realized. There must be a mistake, he says. No, she assures us. She’s quite sure. 1966.
We make our way back down the hill, towards the oceanfront bus terminal. I’m smiling, more than a little amused. He asks me what the joke is and I tell him: Sweetie, you missed your fortieth birthday.
On our way home we buy a jug of red wine, because, as I explain and he is easily convinced, we simply must not miss the opportunity to fete this occasion.
He’d slide his fingers under the laces of his sneakers, which were invariably sparkling bright, white and clean. Slowly, almost sensually, he’d pull on the laces, and only when they were fully loosened would he slide the sneakers off his feet.
That’s what he was doing the day he told me about his dream. The dream in which we’d been liming at the beach bar and I’d had too much to drink and refused to come home with him. The dream in which I’d danced with half the guys in the yard, close close. The dream in which I’d cussed him every time he said it was time to go.
“Now why would you do that, babes?” As he asks this he’s still looking down, still working his laces.
“I don’t know, sweetie. Why would I? “
“That’s what I’m asking you.” And that’s when I finally hear the accusation in his voice.
“You… You want me to explain my behavior? In YOUR dream?”
He blinks and nods slowly and I know he’s dead serious, I know he believes in the power and truth of dreams and loup-garou and obeahmen. So I know, I know I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help it, because all I can hear is Harvey Keitel saying,
You shoot me in a DREAM, you better wake up and apologize!
I lose control of my laughter. It spills out of my mouth and leaks from the corners of my eyes, then floats on the cool night breeeze, up up until it’s carried out over Westerhall Bay. My mirth is so heavy that in spite of himself and the overproof rum in his blood, he finally cracks a smile, stands up, kisses my mouth, roughing my lips with his beard, and goes to the kitchen to see if I’ve seasoned the meat the way he taught me.
And all is well. For the evening.
