I have no proof that my father was thinking about the advantages of a French Creole mother for his children when he first married. What I know is that my mother’s brown skin had not mattered to him. When he thought of having children with my mother, it was Mendel’s experiments with pea plants—which were being applied to all sorts of living organisms, reaching their diabolical apotheosis in Hitler’s gruesome experiments—that had given him pause and caused him, in 1942, to consult a physician, who, like other physicians at that time in Trinidad, did double duty as a psychiatrist. Ironically, though, it would be my father whose intellectual capacity would deteriorate. Until her last hour, in spite of a stroke, my mother’s mind remained as sharp as a tack. But my father’s hesitation to marry my mother did not last long, for he had fallen deeply and irretrievably in love with her. It was a passion that would endure, increasing, not lessening, through the years.
I know, though, that my father was humiliated because of his skin color. He never forgot those beatings he got from the Jesuits, but the story he often repeated to me, because it was the incident that hurt him the most, was about feeling like an outsider within his own family.
He is a young man, twenty or twenty-one, in his first job in the colonial civil service. He has stayed after work in the city to have drinks with friends. It is dark when he and his friends part, and my father takes the bus home to Diego Martin. He sits in the back. It is a long trip from Port of Spain to Diego Martin and he is tired and slightly tipsy. Soon he dozes off. He does not hear when passengers get on or off the bus, but suddenly he is awakened by the sounds of raucous laughter. A group of young women and men are sitting not far in front of him. The men are telling jokes that send the women into fits of laughter. The women are beautiful, the men are beautiful, all of them beautifully dressed. They are going to a party. He knows this because they talk about the people they expect to see there. They name names. The people they name are people from Trinidad’s upper-middle-class families, people like them, light-skinned, with straight or curly hair. They talk about who is going to play the piano, who is going to sing. These are the days before the gramophone reached most of the homes in colonial Trinidad. Music is live and most cultured young ladies and gentlemen are expected to have some fundamental knowledge of a musical instrument, or at least know how to hold a tune. They tease each other: who is the better piano player, who stinks at the violin, who sings off-key. Through the bursts of laughter and the animated conversation, three words slip out and galvanize my father’s attention: Diego Martin. Nunez.
“They were going to Diego Martin,” he tells me. “To the Nunezes. They were talking about my sisters: Lois, Ethyne, Jean, Pearl. One of the women turns and sees me staring at them. I think I was about to say something about it being my home where they were going, that Lois, Ethyne, Jean, and Pearl are my sisters, but before the words could leave my mouth, the woman wags her finger at me. What are you looking at, you silly boy? Mind your own business. Don’t you have friends in your own backwater village? Her friends hooted and howled with laughter. I slunk back down in my seat. These were people who had simply judged me by the color of my skin. I was coming from work so I was dressed in suit and tie, just like the young men in their group, but it was my dark skin that told them I was not of their class, not fit to be in their company.”
I was aghast when my father first told me this story, though I shouldn’t have been. Shouldn’t have been because I know our history. In 1829, mulattoes are freed. Five years later, in 1834, the Emancipation Act takes effect, but it is nine years in all before the enslaved Africans get their freedom in 1838. Chattel slavery is now wage slavery! the Africans had thundered through the streets when the British called for a transition of six years after the Emancipation Act—a needed period of apprenticeship, they claimed. The victory the Africans won was limited; not six years, but four before enforced “wage slavery” finally came to an end.
I have read Lawrence Scott’s remarkable novel Light Falling on Bamboo. He tells of the mulatto mother of the great Trinidadian painter Michel Jean Cazabon. She is forced to sit in the area for gens de couleur, far apart from the seats reserved for the grands blancs on the steamer that shuttles passengers back and forth from the south to the north of the island, but nowhere near where blacks are crammed in tight spaces below the deck. It was decades later when my father boarded that bus from Port of Spain to Diego Martin, but little had changed. He was still expected to know his place in the crammed quarters below the deck.
The humiliation my father suffered that evening had so affected him that it has shadowed him his whole life. He took over where my mother left off. She prepared us for primary school; he made certain we would get into the best secondary schools and then to university to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, professions that had been virtually closed to dark-skinned men like him. His sons would have the credentials to compete with any Englishman. He did not get involved in their schoolwork—he relied totally on their teachers—but if their weekly scores were poor, he doled out the punishment, though not as severe as the beatings he had suffered from the hands of his Jesuit schoolmasters.
My father never struck his daughters, though; it was a principle of his that men should never strike a woman. Women were after all the weaker sex, and given this line of thinking, he did not expect as much from us as he did from his sons. His daughters were not groomed to be doctors, lawyers, and engineers. He wanted us to be educated as a sort of insurance against an unfortunate marriage. He had seen what happened to women who were trapped in marriages for financial reasons. He did not want us to suffer the same fate. As the women’s movement gained traction, however, he was quick to change with the times. He deeply regretted he had not encouraged my older sister to become a physician. She was an excellent nurse, often selected by doctors to assist them in the operating theater. David loved working with her. He said she had the hands and nerves of a surgeon. My father did not make the same mistake with his two younger daughters: Karen he pretty much pushed into law; Judith he supported enthusiastically when she followed my older brother, becoming one of the few local actuaries in the Eastern Caribbean.
Our mother urged us to stay in our marriages because we had sworn an oath before God. Our father kept his opinion to himself, but he was the first to invite his daughters back home when our marriages became troubled. Twice he helped Jacqueline pack when she decided to leave her husband, taking her two children with her, and twice he helped her pack again when she returned to her husband. When I finally decided to get a divorce, my father supported me while my mother kept hoping and praying for a reconciliation even after papers were signed.
Jacqueline, who with Mary is the darkest of my sisters, tells me she was just twelve when our father set her expectations for the treatment he believed she deserved from any man who claimed to love her. One morning he roused her out of her bed and announced that he and our mother were taking her on a trip to Port of Spain. They did not tell her why or where they would be going, only that she should put on her best clothes. At the time our family was living in Point Fortin, in the south of Trinidad, many miles from Port of Spain in the north. The trip could take as many as two hours or more one way, for the roads were winding and potholed in many places. Generally we would spend the night when we went to Port of Spain, but my parents told Jacqueline they planned to return that same day.
As they wound their way along the mountain that sloped down to the city, Jacqueline could see the rooftop of the newly constructed Hilton Hotel—the upside-down hotel we called it, for the entrance was at the top of the hill, the rooms below. My father pulled into the driveway of the Hilton and solved the mystery of the early-morning trip. “There,” he said to Jacqueline. “Your mother and I wanted to take you to tea at the Hilton so you could know the life you deserve.”
Very early in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, the narrator tells us that his mother’s “dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother,” who wa
s unable to love her daughter, Mumtaz, “the blackie,” because of “her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman.” Though she is anxious to have her daughters married to men whose social and financial positions would improve the family’s status, the mother (she is referred to as the Reverend Mother) does not object to Mumtaz’s marriage to the penniless “lank-haired, overweight” Nadir Khan whose political positions have forced him into hiding with the flying cockroaches in the dark space below her drawing room floor. Mumtaz, the “blackie,” is lucky to have found someone willing to marry her.
At the wake for my mother, after the prayers have ended, I go with Jacqueline to wake my father who is still sound asleep on the couch in the back of the funeral parlor. Suddenly I find myself thinking of the unfortunate Mumtaz, of the time too when my father had taken Jacqueline for tea at the Hilton, his heart swelling with grief and fear for his young dark-skinned daughter. I think about my dark-skinned grandfather. Had he protected my father in the same way? Is that why my father had loved him so?
That’s that, my father said as he walked away from my mother’s coffin. He would have to live in the world without his wife and nothing he could do would change that fact. But at the wake his body betrayed him. It trembled; it twitched; it swayed; it took him jumping up behind a steel pan band, his arm around the waist of his wife, his children pressed against him.
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Did my mother love my father as much as he loved her? Did she love him at all? Or did she marry him, as I imagine her mother married my maternal grandfather, for financial support, trusting he would take care of her?
It is 1949. I have five siblings. There are six of us in all: Yolande, who is nine; Richard, who is eight; me, Elizabeth, who is five; David, who is four; Jacqueline, who is three; and Wally, who is the baby, not yet two. My father has been sent by the Ministry of Labour of the Trinidad and Tobago colonial government for training in London. He has left us with our mother. He has been gone six weeks, three of them on the ship that took him to England. We expect he will be in London for months. We have received many letters from him. After his first week in London, the letters seem to come almost daily in thin blue letter forms that are folded and glued at the top and sides, the way my paycheck arrives today, except the paper for my paycheck and paystub is stiffer and harder than the blue letter form which rips easily and has to be handled carefully or we could lose much of what has been written on it. We get postcards too, but the postcards are for us, the children. The letters are for my mother. She reads parts of them to us. My father writes about what he is doing, where he has been, who he has met. Inevitably, before she gets to the end, my mother begins to cry. Long tears roll down her cheeks, and she runs to the bedroom and shuts the door. We hear her sobbing through the thin walls.
One day I see her sitting near the window. My baby brother is on her lap but she seems hardly aware she is holding him. She is staring out of the window, into blank space, it seems to me. Soon her arms around my baby brother slacken and I fear he is about to fall. My mother does nothing to restrain him, her gaze remaining fixed outside of the room, her mind seeming to drift inward. My brother squirms and leans over her loosened arms. I reach over quickly and manage to save him just as he is about to fall and strike his head against the hardwood floor. He screams, startling my mother. Tears burst from her eyes. She mumbles something to me, something indecipherable, shoves my brother into my arms, and runs to her room.
Days pass. My mother hardly touches her food; she pays little or no attention to us. We have a live-in maid, Ena, who is happy to work for us because times are hard in a colony of a country that has suffered through two world wars in twenty-five years. When food is scarce in England, food is scarce on our island too; when the English people must use ration cards, we must use ration cards too; when they have no jobs, we have no jobs too; when they have no place to live, we have no place to live too. So though my parents pay Ena very little, she is grateful to be assured a bed and three square meals a day.
Ena and nine-year-old Yolande take charge. They make the meals, they feed the little ones, they bathe us, they put us to sleep. My mother helps too, but she does so in a trance, cooking sometimes, feeding the little ones sometimes, dressing us sometimes. For the most part, she cannot be relied upon. For the most part, she sits at the window reading my father’s letters and afterward staring into space. When she stands up, her cheeks are wet.
One day she announces she is going to London. She will have to travel by ship across the Atlantic to get there. Three weeks the trip will take. It is August, hurricane weather in the tropics, summer in the northern countries, storms very likely. My mother is warned: there could be roiling seas, mountainous waves, thunder and lightning. Even the hardiest of travelers get sick at this time of the year. My mother is terrified of the sea; she is even more afraid of being alone in a cabin at sea, but she is not dissuaded. She will take Yolande with her for company, she says. They go together to the passport office in Port of Spain.
Who will take care of us? I do not know if I asked that question aloud, but I am sure it was foremost on my five-year-old mind.
At the last minute, my mother changes her plans. She won’t take my sister with her. She will go to London without her. She wants to have her husband to herself when she gets there; there’ll be years yet to share him with their children.
What will happen to us?
My mother makes an arrangement with her good friend Anne-Marie, who is single and has no children. Anne-Marie will come every evening after work to the house to make sure the older ones have been to school, that all of us have eaten, that we have showered, said our prayers, and are tucked into bed. During the day, Ena will take care of us. Dr. Joseph, our parents’ friend and our family doctor, will check on us every weekend. If any of us get sick, Ena will call Dr. Joseph.
My mother leaves. Now we get postcards signed by the two of them. We get photographs too. At first our parents are wearing clothes we recognize. Our mother is in light cotton dresses, our father in short-sleeved shirts, but soon their clothes change. They are wearing sweaters. And my mother has on pants! I have never before seen my mother in pants. The fabric of the pants they are wearing is thick; it does not flap against their legs as my father’s pants used to do. Behind them the leaves on the trees hang dry and wrinkled on their stems. Some have fallen and are clustered in small mounds near our parents’ feet. Weeks pass and now our parents are bundled up in long heavy coats and thick scarves wrapped around their necks. They are wearing high boots, not shoes. “It was summer, then autumn, but now it’s winter in London,” Yolande explains to me—I have known only our two-season tropical weather, the wet and the dry.
Our parents do not neglect our education. They pose by monuments in London and write notes explaining the historical significance of each statue and pillar they see. In one photograph, which today hangs on a wall in my house, and on a wall in each of my sisters’ homes, our parents are arm in arm in front of the fountain in Trafalgar Square, broad smiles on their faces. “Our darling children,” the letter begins. Then we learn about Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and his victory over the combined forces of the French and Spanish navies under Napoleon Bonaparte.
It is the end of the 1940s, and in England people are celebrating. World War II is over, London is rebuilding, people are gay again. Our parents are gay again. No squealing babies to interrupt their lovemaking. My mother especially is gay again. No babies to feed, no clothes to wash, no food to cook. She and our father are having the time of their lives. They take the ferry to France. In Paris they go to the clubs. Our father writes that our mother hid her face when the girls did the cancan at the Moulin Rouge at Place Pigalle.
How are they able to afford this lifestyle? They live in bed-sitters; they share the kitchen and bathroom with strangers. They don’t mind. My father has a fellowship; it is enough to support his family, though not in any grand style. In Trinidad, we live in half of a rented house. Ena is glad to have meals every day, a p
lace to sleep, and a salary that keeps her off the streets. Dr. Joseph does not charge us for his house calls.
Did I resent my parents for abandoning us? For that is what they did for months. I remember missing them, crying myself to sleep. I remember having to grow up suddenly when my younger siblings got measles and then all of us got the chicken pox. I remember that at five years old I had to put aside my own discomfort to take care of two toddlers and a child who had just learned to walk.
Do I resent them now? I look back and realize how young they were. My mother was thirty-one, my father thirty-five. They were in love, having the time of their lives.
Life is short. I’m glad they had this time together. I am glad to know that my mother was as passionately in love with my father as he was with her. And we survived.
Mary, our parents’ seventh child, is glad to know she was conceived in this blissful period of carefree love, though in giving his sixth child his own name—Waldo—my father had hopes that he would be the last my mother would bear.
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Did my mother’s passion for my father last? Did it endure through the years, through the ups and downs of their sometimes tumultuous marriage, my father’s infidelities?
I am chosen to write my mother’s eulogy. What shall I write? My brothers and sisters gather around me and give me facts. Our mother was an upstanding member of her community, a pillar of her church, charitable to a fault with her time and money to those in need. She was an avid bridge player, the president of the Horticultural Society, admired and loved by her neighbors. Her children loved her. Her husband adored her.
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