So how was my mother to compete? How could she set the mess of her family background against the stability and grandeur of the talented Nunezes? My mother’s ambition for herself became her ambition for her children. We were programmed to succeed; we had no other choice. Before we reached the starting gate, our mother prepared us. She taught us to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. From our first day in school we were already ahead of all the other children, and my mother made certain we remained there. To come second in class was not good enough. We had to be first. I was reading by the time I was three years old; my brother David was so prepared that he was barely ten when he won a scholarship to the prestigious St. Mary’s College secondary school.
My mother’s aim seemed to be to prove to her mother-in-law, Georgiana Nunez, that her daughters too could go to St. Joseph’s Convent, the secondary school my paternal aunts attended, and her sons would go to St. Mary’s College like my paternal uncles. Yet my mother wanted more. Her in-laws had all traveled abroad when they were young adults. She wanted us to go abroad too; she wanted us to have a university education in the big countries. The umbilical cord that bound us to her was cut when we were born. She cut her apron strings if we held on too long. My older sister was dry-eyed when the ship carrying her to England left the dock, though she knew it would be years before she would see us or her homeland again. I too was dry-eyed when, at nineteen, I left my warm and sunny island for the frigid landscapes of Wisconsin where I knew no one.
I try to put my mother’s reasoning in perspective. The mother bird fails if her babies remain in the nest. She succeeds when they fly away on their own. Yet it seems to me that my mother was driven by a more pressing goal. She needed to prove to the Nunezes that her blood, tainted as she assumed they thought it was, could produce doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, mathematicians. She would show them. So she sent us away; she pushed us out of our home. And in the end, didn’t her gamble pay off?
In Anna In-Between, Anna Sinclair chokes with resentment over the pleasure her mother takes in her success. For years she has allowed her mother to believe that she is a major player in one of the most important publishing houses in New York. The truth is that she is merely the head of a small imprint within that publishing house. Her anger toward her mother is unremitting: “You wanted me to lie to you. I am important to you because of what you can boast to your friends about me. Not because of me. I am a trophy for you to put on your shelf, to dust off when you are entertaining your friends.”
Anna must find a way to release herself from her resentment before it destroys her future.
I faced the same predicament.
17
There is the wake. Except for one of us, whose absence still baffles me to this day, we are all there, my father and ten of his children. Chairs are placed in a semicircle a short distance from my mother’s coffin, which is raised on a dais. Against the back wall, at the opposite end of the room, is a comfortable overstuffed couch. My father stands in front of it, his shoulders caved in. He looks drained, exhausted. He takes a step forward and I think he means to sink himself into the couch. I am wrong; he totters for a second, almost losing his balance, but then he straightens up. I notice the return of the twitching around his temples, though, the fluttering I saw the day I arrived. It is barely perceptible, and at first I think nothing of it, but then the twitching increases, snaking down his arms and legs in tiny rolling waves. Soon he begins to drum his fingers against his thighs, his fingers moving faster and faster, pressing the fabric of his pant legs into his flesh. His eyes stretch open wide and a vacuous grin parts his thin lips. I nudge one of my brothers. “Go to him,” I say.
Two of my brothers approach my father, but now he is no longer standing still. He is dancing. It is a strange dance and we stare at him in astonishment. He stomps one foot on the ground and then the other, each time his body shaking rhythmically to a beat he alone hears. Inch by inch he moves forward, the dance taking him toward the front of the room where my mother lies stiff and still in her coffin. The image of scantily dressed Africans in a village ceremony dancing to the beat of tribal drums flashes across my mind. I chase the image away. This is my father, the collector of fine art, the lover of classical music, the man who quotes Shakespeare to me, the man who oversaw billions of dollars for an international oil company. But my father is dancing faster now, the grin on his face full blown into soundless laughter, his eyes darting mischievously across the room, not directed toward us, not at my mother’s still body either, but at something in the far unseen distance, something that fills him with joy.
And suddenly a curtain parts, and I know what he sees; I know what he hears. It is not the dancers he sees—hip-writhing, bare-breasted women in an ancient village ceremony—nor does he hear the thrum and boom of African drums. It is the color-splashed Carnival of his days and mine that glitters before his eyes; it is the music of the streets, the heart-pounding rhythms of the steel pan that pulsate through his ears.
On the last day of our two-day Carnival, just as the sun was beginning to set, my father would take his daughters and wife for a last lap, a jump-up with him through the city streets. How we had waited for that moment! For two days my brothers were free to follow the bands, but my sisters and I were forced to stay with our mother and the younger children on the sidewalk of the car park behind my father’s office. He would check on us from time to time, but mostly he was gone, jumping up with his friends in the Carnival bands.
Is this the memory that travels through my father’s head now, filling him with joy, with remembrances of mischief? Is he recalling those late Carnival afternoons when he slipped back to us, his face alive with the beat of the steel pan music pulsating through his ears? As darkness began to fall, he would return from the company of his friends, teasing a smile on his wife’s face, enclosing her in his wide arms, and we, his daughters, relieved to see them happy together, would press our faces against them.
How we danced and danced through the streets of our city, hands waving in the air, feet slapping against the asphalt cooled in the evening breeze, the heat of the day swept away with the descending sun, the sky a canopy of bright stars above us! Our mother was young again, in love again, her head flung back against her husband’s shoulders, her arm encircling his waist.
But now, as my father comes closer to my mother’s coffin, he slows down. He slides one foot forward and then the other, all energy seemingly drained from his legs. My brothers tighten their hold on his elbows. They have reached the edge of the dais, and the wide smile that seconds ago broke across my father’s face has disappeared completely. His lips form a tight, thin line, his chest caves in, his head lolls to one side on his neck. One of my brothers whispers something in his ear, and my father looks down on my mother’s frozen face. The dull, empty expression that was in his eyes when he first entered the room returns, but even duller now, lifeless. He does not resist when my brothers lead him away to the couch in the back of the room. He slumps down on the cushioned seat and closes his eyes. Mercifully, he falls asleep.
Jacqueline says we should pray the rosary. It was our mother’s favorite prayer. We sit on the semicircle of chairs. Jacqueline chooses the Glorious Mystery. There are five parts to this mystery: the first, the Resurrection of Christ; the second, the Ascension of Christ into heaven; the third, the Descent of the Holy Spirit; the fourth, the Assumption of Mary; the fifth, the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin. As Jacqueline calls out each section of the Glorious Mystery, it becomes clear to me why, of all the mysteries of the rosary, this was my mother’s favorite. The Assumption of Mary: not only did Christ rise from the dead, but His mother too ascended, body and soul, into heaven.
My mother loved Mary. The mother of God was a comfort to her. She had lost her mother not long after the birth of her second child. I was two; my brother was one, my mother likely pregnant again. My mother needed a mother; she turned to the mother of God.
I too needed a mother when I had my son, al
one in America, without family or friends to support me, my husband itching to return to his lover. But I did not have my mother’s faith to call on the mother of Christ for comfort. Now, though, I find myself praying that Mary has not abandoned my mother. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
18
I have never seen my father cry. I did not expect to see him cry when he looked down on the body of the woman he had loved for sixty-five years. He told me he had cried only once in his life—except of course when he was a child and hurt himself or someone else hurt him. But since he became a man there was only one time he had allowed himself to yield to the pressure that sometimes built up behind his eyes when he was sad. My grandfather had just turned eighty and my father was cutting his hair, as he usually did once a month. Suddenly it struck him that his father would not have long to live. He said he broke down. He said he could not hold back his tears.
My father adored his father. His father was the sort of man my father aspired to be. I do not mean that my father wanted to be a district warden or a headmaster like my grandfather; I mean he aspired to be the kind of man who was capable of appreciating and enjoying both man’s achievements and God’s creations. My grandfather was a humanist, a true Renaissance man. He painted, he sculpted, he played the piano and violin; he taught himself ancient Greek and Latin; he hunted, fished, and was nearly unbeatable in chess as well as on the cricket mound. My father inherited most of his father’s qualities. He too was a humanist, and a sort of Renaissance man. He hunted, he fished, was a master at chess (though not at cricket), and an admirer of the arts and nature, but I never heard him play a musical instrument—though I knew he played the violin in his youth—or saw anything he sculpted or painted, and as far as I know his reading was limited to P.G. Wodehouse and the newspapers, especially the comics.
I knew my grandfather fairly well, for my father took us often to visit him, generally once or twice a week. Though my father despaired that at eighty my grandfather would soon be taken away from him, my grandfather in fact lived many more years, his mind sharp when he declared he’d had enough and days later lay down on his bed and died, two years shy of his hundredth birthday. In that last year he was frequently in pain, but the year before he was still vigorous, climbing the pommerac tree in his backyard and feeding the stray dogs that came to his door. He was in his nineties when he helped me with my doctoral dissertation that was partly based on The Tempest.
I was trying to make sense of Trinculo’s scornful description of Caliban:
A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of not of the newest Poor John [dried, salted fish]. A strange fish!
“Why like a fish?” I asked. “Was it because Caliban ate fish?”
“Oh no,” said my grandfather. “He was probably someone like a Warao.”
My grandfather used to trade goods with the Waraos in the open market in the forests, not far from the middle of the south coast of Trinidad. He was a young man then, not yet married to my grandmother. The Waraos would come over on their pirogues from Venezuela, place their goods—mainly fruits and vegetables—in the middle of the clearing used for the market, and then hide in the bushes. My grandfather and his neighbors would take the food and in exchange leave clothes, utensils, and trinkets for the Waraos.
“Even though we couldn’t see them,” my grandfather explained, “we could smell them. I wouldn’t say they stank. But they did have a very strong scent of fish.” He told me that the Waraos covered themselves from head to foot with fish oil to ward off mosquitoes and other insects that brought disease. “Very clever, but you wouldn’t want to get too close to them even if they would let you. The smell was pungent.” That story so fired my imagination that it found its way into my first novel.
But though my father admired my grandfather for his love of nature and the arts, I think he was especially close to him because they shared physical features that made them both outsiders in their social class. My grandfather, like my father, was dark-skinned, the color of a ripened cocoa pod. Genes from his pale-skinned Portuguese father were not strong enough to lessen the intensity of the melanin he inherited from his African mother. I was told that he changed his surname from Nunes to Nunez because of his outrage over the refusal of the colonial government to add a footnote to the books schoolchildren used, explaining Keats’s error in his poem, but my father told me another story. He said that the light-skinned Portuguese community had disassociated itself from my dark-skinned grandfather, so he in turn disassociated himself from them. “Anyhow,” my father added scornfully, “they were shopkeepers. My father was a headmaster.” Be that as it may, my father’s older brother Winston saw value in capitalizing on his Portuguese surname, Nunes, when he chose to pass for white as an evangelical minister in Canada.
My grandfather’s brother also kept Nunes as his last name. He was pale-skinned, but when he immigrated to America, he discovered that one drop (and he had many more than one drop) was all that was needed to make you a Negro. In America, even in so-called liberal New York, Negroes were corralled in specific places. My great-uncle lived in Harlem. He became a successful dentist, but without family in America to take care of him in his old age, he ended up in the nursing home at Harlem Hospital. He died a pauper, all his holdings, magnificent houses on Strivers’ Row, appropriated by the hospital to pay for his boarding and medical fees.
Only one of my father’s siblings, a younger brother whom my father outlived, was as dark as he, and I would hazard to guess that he, like my father, had felt the brunt of color discrimination on the island. I say my mother’s ambitions for us were motivated by her insecurity, but my father was insecure too. My mother was driven to prove to the Nunezes that she could produce brilliant and successful children. My father was driven to prove to his family that even a dark-skinned Nunez could produce brilliant and successful children.
My father told me stories of the beatings he endured from his schoolmasters at St. Mary’s College. Not only he, but my grandmother too, believed the Jesuits picked on him because he was dark-skinned. Neither of her older sons, my father’s two light-skinned brothers, was beaten as viciously or as frequently as my father was. He was beaten for the smallest infractions—say, for mispronouncing a Latin word, making an error in his mathematics homework, or arriving late for school after having to wake up before dawn to tie up the cow that was the source of income for his school fees. Would that the Jesuits could have seen my father at the height of his career! Of all his siblings, my father was the most successful—and I daresay of all his classmates as well.
Trinidadians are fond of claiming that the island has fortunately escaped the scourge of racism that continues to plague America. It is a myth that keeps Trinidadians from looking too deeply into that mirror where the face of the colonizer could be reflected back as their own. My brother Richard tells me that only in America is he conscious of his skin color. He says that from the moment he crosses the threshold of an airport in America, he realizes, as if for the first time, his difference from whites. This is the same brother who says he was spurned by the family of his biological mother because his skin was darker than his sister’s. His sister, like her French Creole mother, is light-skinned and my brother is convinced that this is the reason she was often invited to spend holidays with their French Creole family, he very rarely. To this day, now a grandfather, Richard continues to retell this story. Still, though this experience burns in his chest, he insists that discrimination in Trinidad, where it exists (and for him it rarely exists), is based on class rather than color.
How that distinction soothes the souls of so many Trinidadians who disavow their darker and, as inevitably it turns out, their poor relatives! For as if it remains an unsolvable mystery to them, too many Trinidadians claim not to see the observable reality that, with rare exceptions, the shades of skin color of the upper class in Trinidad, often the moneyed class, run from European pale-beige to café au la
it. The darker the skin color, the more likely it is that the person is poor or from the working class. And why not? Color was valuable currency in the colonies; it could help make you rich or poor, working class or upper class.
So did my father marry the French Creole mother of my older brother and sister in part because she was light-skinned? Was he thinking that if his children inherited their mother’s light skin, more doors would be open to them than were open to him when he was growing up?
At the end of his wildly popular book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell turns to his family. For most of the book he has focused on supporting his thesis that social environment, the influence of parents, and the historical events that occur during a person’s childhood are fundamental to the shaping of the outlier. Now, giving us a window to the success of his mother’s family in Jamaica, he adds another factor. He tells us that his great-great-great-grandfather, William Ford, was Irish. He had a son, John Ford, with an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa, and from that moment began “the privilege of a skin color” his mother’s family enjoyed as colored Jamaicans on an island where people benefited for generations on a hierarchy based on the shade of their skin. “The brown-skinned classes of Jamaica came to fetishize their lightness,” Gladwell adds. “It was their great advantage.”
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