In my arsenal of the writer’s craft and the art of storytelling, I fiercely protect what I have learned from these British writers. They continue to be my most influential teachers. I am grateful, too, to the British for making me memorize long passages from their literature, which to this day I can recall in an instant and are a comfort to me. Yes, I am grateful to the British colonizers for this, for this literature, but not because it is the literature of their people, but because it is the literature of the human race to which I belong. Because it is part of the human heritage and so mine.
But for years, when I was a child, I rooted for Tarzan, willingly suspending not only disbelief but all logical thinking. For even a child knows it does not make sense that a European man, unaccustomed to the heat and humidity of the African rainforest, practically naked, wearing only a skimpy loincloth and carrying no weapons of any kind, would be able to kill the most ferocious animals with his bare hands (a hungry lion, for God’s sake!) and outwit natives with their poisonous arrows. And yet I never doubted Tarzan’s prowess, never doubted his right (God-given?) to rule the jungle.
In the creative writing workshop I took with John O. Killens, he would make his point to us, aspiring writers, about the value of fiction, especially fiction by writers of color, by referring to the universal image children seemed to have of Tarzan. “Tarzan will continue to be the king of the jungle,” he would say, “until the lion learns how to speak.”
My paternal grandmother—God bless her soul—was a fierce Anglophile. How could she not be? Her father was an Englishman, though we know with a name like Fitt, he was most likely one of those Irishmen from Northern Ireland who swore fidelity to the English Crown. He had a proper English wife, of course, and proper English children, but he had sired several more children with the local women, including my grandmother’s mother. It seemed he loved her best. He gave her children his name and kept her in style. My sister Judith has a photograph of my grandmother when she was about twelve or so. Her skin is white, her hair is blond, two long plaits that fall over her shoulders. She is standing next to her mother, an elegant woman with polished black skin who is dressed in Victorian finery. My grandmother, too, is wearing a beautiful lace dress that clutches her neck and falls down to her ankles. Her dress is white; her dark-skinned mother’s dress is black. Was this choice of color deliberate? I can only guess at an answer.
An Anglophile, my grandmother had nothing but scorn for the Catholic Church and loathing for the practitioners of obeah and voodoo. The Catholic Church was ruled by Rome, not England, and the practitioners of obeah and voodoo insisted on holding on to their links to Africa, to our “savage past.” In her defense I would say that my grandmother’s loyalty to England stopped with her children. When it became obvious to her that her darker-skinned children—my father in particular—was discriminated against both in school and at work, she did not hold back her tongue.
So what were my beliefs? Who was I? The color of my skin linked me to Africa, but my beliefs and attitudes seemed grounded in the beliefs and attitudes of the people who had colonized my island. I could not begin to write a novel until I had untangled these threads that left me uncertain of my identity. The first novel I wrote had to lead me on the path to self-discovery.
It happened that I was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study at Yale with the late Michael Cooke, who was conducting a seminar entitled “African Patterns of Thought.” That seminar would be a pivotal point in my development as a person and a writer. It confirmed for me the accuracy of George Lamming’s contentions in The Pleasures of Exile. There are ways of seeing, of viewing the world, of arriving at the truth through routes other than the ones I had been taught by my teachers and my church. I began to write a novel set in late-nineteenth-century Trinidad, before oil was discovered in the south of the island. I wanted to know why families such as mine who owned cocoa lands in the south had not become rich. I had discovered they’d either sold the land or abandoned it. I wanted to know why. What logic or pattern of thinking had they used to make their decision?
I remembered the stories my father had told me about his hunting days, how he found his way out of the forest in the thick of night. He would make a flambeau by wrapping a piece of cloth around a stick, dipping it in one of the pools of oil that he could find almost anywhere among the cocoa trees, putting a match to it, and lighting his way to safety. “Didn’t your family own some of this land?” I asked him. I knew his Portuguese grandfather worked on a cocoa plantation, and after he died, his wife—my father’s grandmother—inherited some of the land. “Yes,” my father said, and before I could ask the obvious question, he added, “but who knew about the value of oil in those days? The British were heating their homes with coal from Newcastle and Ford had not yet built his motorcars. World War I had not yet happened. Who knew they’d need oil to fuel the bombers?”
Who knew? No one had a crystal ball. So what would you do if the cocoa trees on your land were being destroyed by the oil that was surfacing around their roots? Cocoa was a main source of income for the planters, but now they were facing the end of their livelihood. What if you were a planter and someone offered to buy your land, someone who had no notion of the insidious oily substance silently choking the life out of your trees? Would you sell the land? Logic, scientific thinking, would lead you to do just that. How clever you would be to sell the land before the trees died! How foolish the buyer would have been not to have done his research! But what if you decided to consult the resident obeahman before making your decision? This was the question I chose to pursue in my first novel, When Rocks Dance.
I had read Oedipus Rex. Oedipus goes to the prophet Tiresias for advice on the cause of the plague that is devastating his people. And Tiresias lashes out at him: “You are the curse, the corruption of the land!” In my novel the local landowner consults the obeahman whose response is just as scathing. It is you, you are the cause of the plague infecting your cocoa lands, the obeahman says to the landowner. The oil destroying your cocoa lands is a sign from the gods, a message that you have offended them in some way. To save his cocoa plantation, the landowner needs to examine his soul, he needs to find out what he had done wrong in his life and make amends, make a sacrifice to the gods. But above all, the obeahman warns the landowner, do not sell your land, for the earth does not belong to man; the earth belongs to the gods. This, of course, is not logical, scientific thinking; it’s magical, mystical thinking, but it leads to the truth about the importance of self-examination, of cleansing one’s soul, of making reparations. It is telling too of the respect we should have for our planet. And there is material reward for this way of thinking, for this way of seeing the world. Because if the landowner holds on to his land, he and the generations to follow will have riches far more than they could ever have imagined.
When I came home, to Trinidad, for the celebration of the publication of When Rocks Dance, my sister Jacqueline pulled me aside. Her face feverish, her eyes darting with fear, she whispered hoarsely in my ear, “All that obeah business you wrote about, Elizabeth, you don’t believe it, do you?”
I did my best to calm her down. “It’s a novel,” I responded. “Fiction. Make-believe.”
But I could tell she was not convinced. In the Caribbean the fit was perfect between African and Amerindian spiritual retentions and Catholic mysticism. Statues, lighted candles, indulgences, prayers for the dead, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ that was eaten and drunk at Mass had their appeal to memories hardwired in the genetic coding of people who had used sacrifice, symbols, and prayer to appease their gods. My sister was afraid there could be some truth in the story I told.
And there was. I would not go to an obeahman, I said, putting her at ease, but in writing this novel I discovered that there are other routes to the truth. I found a new respect for my African past, for the beliefs of my ancestors denigrated by the British colonial masters. I came closer
than I had ever been to knowing who I am, to knowing myself.
I remain a seeker of truth, a position that has not always served me well. I say too much, my sisters claim. Today, though, I find myself useful to them. In the fog of grief, my sisters divvy up responsibilities according to our professions. The ones with business acumen will discuss finances with the funeral director; the ones with medical backgrounds will gather details from the hospital about my mother’s last hours; the more religious of us will speak to the parish priest to arrange a suitable Mass—nothing less than a High Mass, to be sure. The ones who understand Caribbean protocol and style—that is, the ones who have remained in the Caribbean—will be in charge of the flowers, the program at the church and at the cemetery, the meal that will follow the internment, the guests to be invited to our parents’ home.
I am the writer in the family. My siblings choose me to draft my mother’s eulogy. They are not in the state of mind to weigh the risks of putting this assignment in the hands of someone who exposes too much. They do not give me specific instructions, but I know what they want. They want hagiography, something flowery, something that leaves no doubt about the goodness of our mother. Something that will not embarrass them. “Elizabeth knows grammar,” they say. “She teaches composition. Let her do it.” They leave the wording in my “capable hands.”
___________
1. See Stephen Greenblatt’s magnificent book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) for more about this ironic twist on how the conquered became the true colonizer.
13
My sister-in-law Beverly finds Mary; I finally remembered the name of the cruise ship. With just this little information and using all her contacts, my sister-in-law has managed to persuade the cruise line to let my sister off the ship so that she can come to Trinidad.
Mary arrives in a flood of tears. The moment she spots me, she runs toward me and throws her arms around my neck, practically strangling me. Tears flow steadily down her cheeks and onto my back, dampening my blouse. Her sobs are loud, rasping. I stand against her, stiff with shock. Unaccustomed to such displays of emotion, my body freezes.
The Nunezes carry on; they pick up the pieces; they move forward. “Well, that’s that,” my father said when he viewed his wife’s body. It was over; the past belongs to the past. No use crying over spilled milk. But Mary collapses against me, her chest pressed into mine, her tears coming so rapidly and with such volume she chokes on her breath. Words on the tip of her tongue come out as unintelligible gibberish. All I can distinguish are snorts, gasps, gurglings.
My father used to tell us a joke about an English overseer and an inexperienced worker to bring home his point about the futility of lamenting something you have no power to change. An English overseer was out carousing with friends, leaving the local brown-skinned worker with the job of boiling the sugarcane juices until sugar crystals began to form. This was not a job for an inexperienced man such as this one. Soon the poor man found himself with a hard brown clotted mess on hands. When the Englishman came back, he greeted his worker. “So how was your day, old man?” “Well, massa,” the man replied, “what ent bile (boil) yet, ent spile (spoil) yet; what biling, spiling; and what done bile, done spile.”
My father repeated that joke to us dozens of times. What has already boiled has already spoiled. The results are irreversible. Nothing can be done to turn that brown clotted mess into sugar crystals. This is a lesson my father very much wanted us to learn. We can do nothing to bring our mother back to life. That’s that.
The Nunezes do not break down; they do not let misfortune stand in their way. When I came simpering to my father about my poor grades, complaining that I had studied hard, expecting him to sympathize, he responded with Mark Antony’s eulogy to Caesar: “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”
My great-great-grandfather had soldiered on though he was enslaved, but once freed, he made sure my great-grandmother, Ann Rose Dormor, his only daughter, was educated even if that meant driving her to school by horse and buggy through muddy country roads four hours a day. Ann Rose soldiered on when her husband died and she lost her only means of financial support. She baked pies and cakes and sold them at the market in St. Joseph. She had to take my grandfather out of school because she could not afford the fees, and because she needed his help to take the baked goods to the market in St. Joseph, a distance of six miles from her home that my grandfather had to travel by foot. Luckily, a Chinese shopkeeper there was so impressed by my grandfather’s intelligence that he offered to pay for his education; my grandfather was able to finish school at the top of his class.
My grandparents, Antonio and Georgiana Nunez, soldiered on too, though the colonial bosses did their best to throw obstacles in their way. Education was the only escape from a future of menial labor in colonial Trinidad, and my grandparents, like my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandfather newly freed from slavery, were determined their children would not be at the beck and call of some ignorant overseer. Their children would be educated; they would go to the best secondary schools on the island. The best ones were private schools and they were expensive. There were four: two for males and two for females. The oldest, established in the late 1800s for the children of the English colonizers and the French Creole plantation owners, were St. Mary’s College for boys and St. Joseph’s Convent for girls. Those were the schools where my grandparents intended to send their children.
They had nine—five sons and four daughters. When my grandfather was headmaster of the only school in the country district of Arouca, they had been able to pay the tuition for their two oldest sons, but when my father’s turn came (he was their third child) my grandfather was sixty and at the age when all government civil servants were required to retire. My grandmother, who was much younger than my grandfather, pitched in. She bought a cow and hired a woman to milk it. She would sell the milk to pay for my father’s tuition, she decided. So at four thirty every morning, in the deep darkness before dawn, my father had to wake up and get out of his bed to find the cow, which had been allowed to graze on any grassy field in the neighborhood, and tie it to a tree for the woman who would come to milk it. By five thirty, he had to be out of the house again to catch the bus for the hour-long ride to school in the city.
But there were other children to educate, so my grandfather returned to work as district warden of Diego Martin, and, later, as district water warden. He was sixty-five when he was forced to stop working again. By then my grandmother was bringing in more income, as postmistress of the district and, quite extraordinary for a woman of her time, as an entrepreneur. She could not drive, but she ran a taxi service. She rented one car and hired a driver, and soon she was renting more cars and collecting more fares. With my grandfather’s paltry pension, and my grandmother’s income, they were able to give the rest of their sons as well as their daughters the best education available on the island.
So my father knew a lot about sterner stuff. When his income was barely enough to feed us, he bought food on credit at the local grocery, something he so totally detested that he would never buy anything on credit again when his fortunes changed—but he did it in those early years to pay for private lessons for his children so they could compete for scholarships to the best private schools on the island. He was gentler on me and his other daughters than on his sons when we did not meet his expectations. I had to take the exhibition test twice—the scholarship exam for high school—before I was successful. My father was sympathetic when I didn’t succeed the first time. My brothers were successful on their first try; David was only ten, perhaps the youngest in his class, and yet I don’t remember my father celebrating. “Study harder,” he admonished his sons when they slipped from first or second place in class. “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”
Where is Mary’s sterner stuff now? She tightens her hold around my neck and I am left with no choice but to do the decent thing. I raise my arms from my sides
and wrap them loosely around her body. Her tears continue to fall.
14
There were consequences. We have paid a price for this sterner stuff handed down from our great-great-grandparents to our great-grandparents, and then to our grandparents and our parents, and ultimately to us. I recount the wreckage of our marriages: nine ending in divorce or unresolved separations.
But surely we have been successful. We are doctors, business executives, actuaries; one of us is a lawyer, another an entrepreneur, another a midwife. I am a professor and a writer. Surely it has served us well to be made of sterner stuff. Surely our grandparents would have been proud of us. Not one of us has had to earn his or her living by menial labor, not one of us is at the beck and call of an English overseer.
My father was not ignorant of Mark Antony’s intent. He understood the man meant to undermine Brutus. Brutus says he slew Caesar because Caesar was ambitious, and Mark Antony, master of irony, uses Brutus’s very words to trap him. How was Caesar ambitious? Mark Antony asks the fickle crowd gathered for Caesar’s funeral. Caesar shared his coffers with the people of Rome. He wept for the poor. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
Still, for my father there was wisdom in Mark Antony’s words in spite of the malice lurking beneath them. Surrendering to emotions might distract us from our goals, he warned us. We should be made of sterner stuff. And now there is Mary letting her guard down, weeping as if her world has come to an end.
Not for Everyday Use Page 10