Not for Everyday Use

by Elizabeth Nunez

  We take trips with my father too. My friend Anne-Marie Stewart, who is in Trinidad, staying with her friend Maria Habib, invites my parents and me to Mount St. Benedict for afternoon tea. Once again I have occasion to witness the intimacy between my parents, how they live in the shadow of each other, trusting each other, looking out for each other, protecting each other. My father does not want to go, of course. He wants to sit in the shade of the entwined mango trees and sleep away the afternoon. My mother will not let him. “You need to exercise your mind, Waldo. You’ll like talking to Elizabeth’s friends.”

  Mount St. Benedict is the name of a Benedictine monastery. It sits high on the northern range in Trinidad. The monks used to run a boarding school for rich boys there, and now they counsel drug addicts and people afflicted with AIDS. They are famous for the honey they collect from the bees they raise and also for their special cakes and teas. They built a dining room for the public on their grounds where one can still have high tea, a tradition that endures in Trinidad though the British colonizers have been gone for over fifty years. This is where we are headed.

  The road up to the mount is torturous, twisting around tight bends that plunge down sharply at the sides. I hold my breath each time Anne-Marie puts the car into another gear and it grinds around another bend. My heart does somersaults and my chest aches from the pressure of my inflated lungs. I am certain that at the next turn we will go tumbling down into bushes below us. I say this and Anne-Marie laughs at me. “Close your eyes then.” I do as she says.

  My parents, though, seem quite at ease. My mother engages my father in chatter with Anne-Marie and Maria. “We used to come here a lot,” my mother says. “Not so, Waldo?”

  My father begins reminiscing about the times he and my mother had afternoon tea at St. Benedict’s, but soon he loses his way and is telling a story about his hunting days.

  My mother brings him back to the present. “Do you remember the last time you drove me here, Waldo?”

  “It was like yesterday,” he responds, and adds ruefully, “I don’t know why the children thought I should turn in my car keys.”

  I open my eyes and plead with my mother to defend us. “Tell him, Mummy.”

  “You were ninety, Waldo.” My mother pokes him playfully in the ribs. “It was time.”

  Anne-Marie is shocked. She has laughed at my fear of the winding roads, the precipices plunging steeply down their sides, but I can tell she is aware of the danger too. She is sitting up erect, her back forward, her neck strained, her fingers wound tightly around the steering wheel. “Ninety and still driving, Mr. Nunez?” She keeps her eyes on the road.

  “Would have been driving longer than that,” my father says. “But the children . . .”

  “But you don’t mean driving here, Mr. Nunez?”

  “Oh, he drove me here all right,” my mother says cheerfully.

  Anne-Marie is aghast. She tightens her fingers around the steering wheel as she shifts into another gear. The mountain is a solid wall on one side of the impossibly narrow road; on the other side the edge of the road drops abruptly down to the valley below.

  “Yep,” my father says. “Drove right up to the top. Remember, Una?” He is grinning from ear to ear.

  I am so frightened I am clutching the edge of my seat. I never would have been able to drive on this road. How did my father manage it? And at ninety! How my mother must have trusted him, placed her faith in his skills and his concern for her safety.

  We have tea and cakes outside, on an open patio on the flat top of a cliff. As soon as he has his tea, my father excuses himself and walks to the edge of the land. Below, the roots of dense tall vegetation cling precariously to the soil. Birds flutter in and out of the branches. My father walks up and down along the perimeter, his hands locked behind his back, a beatific smile on his lips. My mother is terrified. “Waldo!” she shouts. “Don’t be foolish. Come back here.” He ignores her. She sends me to bring him back.

  I walk to my father and stand next to him. I am awestruck by the beauty around us, the sky a bright blue and under it a cascade of dazzling greenery punctured here and there by dots of color—ripening fruit and a variety of flowers, red, orange, yellow, purple. In a dirt clearing at the bottom of the cliff, boys from the village are playing cricket. They are not in cricket whites. Colorful shirts, the fronts unbuttoned, flap behind their backs. Some wear vests; most are torn or powdered with dirt. Their pants, some long, some short, are frayed, no doubt hand-me-downs. I see a fast bowler; he knocks down the wicket. The boys on his side raise their arms and shout. Their voices do not reach us, but my father cheers. He cups his hands around his mouth and stands on tiptoe. “Well done!” he yells.

  My mother gives up. She does not call out to my father again, but from time to time she glances his way, her brow furrowed with worry.

  * * *

  In my last week before I return to New York, I give a lecture for the University of Trinidad and Tobago in the magnificent building in the center of Port of Spain that houses NALIS, the National Library and Information System Authority. Dr. Ramchand has invited Trinidad’s intellectual elite to hear me. My students at the university will be there too. I arrange for my parents to come. When they arrive, they are directed to the front row of the auditorium, to chairs reserved for them. My mother is bursting with pride: Her daughter, the child who came from her womb! A Nunez, but her child too. She sits with her head held high and acknowledges the people who wave to her with a self-effacing shrug of her shoulders.

  My father has the same expression of astonishment on his face that he always has whenever he sees me in an academic setting. I can almost trace the rumblings in his head as he tries to reconcile the image of the child for whom he had the least expectations, the one he never taught to drive, with this woman about to command an audience. I have a photograph of him on the day I graduated with a PhD from New York University. He is sitting apart from the group that is congratulating me. His legs are crossed, his arms are folded, his head juts forward on his neck. He is staring at me, his eyes bolted wide open, a lopsided grin on his lips. He looks at me the same way now as the audience gathers in the auditorium, but soon he is distracted by my students who crowd around him. He and my mother have met them before, at another event at the university. They exchange pleasantries. It does not take long before my father’s eyes are twinkling with mischievousness as he parries witticisms back and forth with them.

  These are not my usual students, the ones I teach at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. The age range is the same, but not the levels of education nor the skin color. Most of my students at the University of Trinidad and Tobago are already professionals: a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, a photographer, a visual artist, a poet, a journalist, a businessman, the headmistress of a secondary school, the owner of a liquor store. A few are university students, but they are in their senior year or graduate school. All have elected to take my workshop in creative writing because they want to work on a novel. Like the amazing diversity of skin color and hair texture in Trinidad, my students are dark-skinned, cocoa-pod brown, chocolate brown, café au lait, pale cantaloupe, sun-kissed pink. They are African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese, French Creole, English, or a mélange of some or all of those bloods.

  I think again of my response to my brother Richard. Perhaps I had been too quick to dismiss him. In all my years in America I have never taught a class with such a range of skin color, nor have I been part of an audience so casually diverse like this one I am about to address. In America there are assumptions about skin color. The incident at the hospital where my son was born would not be the only one I would experience when the color of my skin counted more than the content of my character or my years of university education. How often have I been taken for an usher at the opera, at a concert hall or theater, asked for a program or directions to a seat. The location of the restrooms! Once I was at the Met Opera House waiting for F— outside the restroom near one of the expensi
ve grand boxes where we were seated, and an old white man handed me his hat.

  America prides itself on being a multicultural country, but people live in silos, in distinct neighborhoods one can easily identify by color and ethnicity. Here the Jews live, there the Italians, on the other side the Irish, away from them the WASPS, farther away the African Americans, and on the outskirts the West Indians, the Chinese, the Indians, and so on and so on. To achieve the kind of diversity taken so much for granted by my students at UTT, the government in America has to mandate it, but even then there are protests curiously claiming the unfairness of racial preferences.

  I took my students at Medgar Evers College to see Chekhov’s Three Sisters. At the end of the play, a group of them accompanied a pregnant classmate who needed to use the bathroom. They were turned away. “The bathrooms are not for the public,” the usher told them. So perhaps Richard is telling the truth: he is not aware that he is black until he comes to America.

  Malcolm Gladwell speaks of the privilege of skin tone in Jamaica and, by inference, all the Caribbean islands, but I wonder if he has not enjoyed privileges in Canada where he grew up, and later in America where he lived in the northern cities, because his father is a white man. Did Gladwell have greater access to privilege than his darker-skinned peers because his father, an Englishman and a math professor, could open doors for him that were closed to the majority of dark-skinned fathers?

  But I digress.

  And yet . . .

  In 1968 my ex and his first wife, both African Americans, were looking for a house in Long Island. They wanted to be near the beach. The realtor took them to Long Beach Road on the edge of Hempstead where white flight had already reached panic proportions. “Yes, of course,” the realtor said, “Long Beach Road leads to the beach, to Long Beach.” What he did not say was that they would have to drive forty minutes to reach the beach. That same year, in 1968, my colleague whose father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe was also looking for a house in Long Island. He too wanted to be near the beach. His realtor took him to Merrick, not to a beach (he did not have money for a beach house), but to a house in front of a canal that opened up to the Great South Oyster Bay. Both men paid around $34,000 for their houses. Twenty-five years later, my ex sold his house for $138,000. My friend’s father had his house on the market for $875,000. He sold it for much more. He was a recent arrival to America. He spoke English with a heavy Eastern European accent, yet he was able to reap for his progeny a huge economic advantage over my ex who traced his family roots in America back more than two hundred years.

  My friend’s father and people like him, even arrivals from that great European migration at the turn of the twentieth century, claim innocence. Neither they nor their ancestors were here during the brutal days of slavery, they say. Recent immigrants from Eastern Europe also fail to acknowledge that it was the civil rights movement of the ’60s that forced the hand of legislators to widen the scope of America’s immigration policies. Yet white Americans continue to profit from the lingering legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. The color of their skin gives them a passport to access America’s largesse, access that people of color rarely have.

  I return to Gladwell’s Outliers.

  About the story of the success of Steve Jobs and outliers like him, Gladwell concludes:

  We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society.

  A special opportunity. But what if Steve Jobs had been black? Would his family have been allowed to live in Palo Alto, in the midst of Silicon Valley? Jobs was going to a troubled school and his family wanted to move him to a school district that was safer and better. Would a realtor have taken the parents of black Steve Jobs, as they did the parents of white Steve Jobs, to a house in such an area? My ex had no such choice; he paid Long Island’s outrageously high residential taxes, but we would have to pay more for his son and ours to go to private school if we wanted an education for them in a school that was safer and better than the public schools in our district.

  And would Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard personally give the teenage black Steve Jobs spare parts just because he asked for them? Would he have given him a summer job? Would black Jobs have had the access that ultimately paved the way for the success white Jobs achieved with Apple? If black Steve Jobs, like white Steve Jobs, had joined the wrong crowd in a troubled school, smoked marijuana, and allegedly done other drugs as well, he would have gone to jail.

  I have digressed too far.

  After the lecture, my students wait with me for the car my sisters have reserved to bring my parents home. When the car arrives, the driver jumps out and opens the back door for my parents. One of my students, already feeling warm toward my father who has been playfully teasing him, reaches for my mother’s elbow. “I’ll take it from here, Mr. Nunez,” he says. “I’ll help Mrs. Nunez in the car.”

  “Careful,” my father warns, “that is my wife.”

  My young student misinterprets the seriousness in my father’s voice. After all, they were joking with each other minutes ago. “That’s okay, Mr. Nunez, you can trust me with your wife. I’ll get her in the car safely.”

  “No!” my father snaps. There is no mistaking the command now. My student backs away. “I help my wife, nobody else does.”

  24

  I come back to Trinidad two more times. In May, not long after I have returned to New York, I take a stopover flight to Trinidad on my way to Grenada. I have been invited to a conference organized by the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, which is based in the States. Three scholars will be presenting papers on my novel Prospero’s Daughter: Dr. Sandra Pouchet from the University of Miami; Dr. Hyacinth Simpson from Ryerson University in Toronto; and Dr. Jennifer Sparrow, a colleague from Medgar Evers College. Jennifer and I decide to take her daughter and my granddaughter with us to the conference. The girls are around the same age. Sophie, Jennifer’s daughter, is seven and Jordan, my granddaughter, is eight. My parents have never met Jordan, and my mother, much more than my father, is eager to see her.

  Our stay in Trinidad is too brief on the way out to Grenada, but on the return flight to New York, the stopover is five hours long. We take a cab to my parents’ home. I have called my mother and she and my father meet us at the front gate. I introduce Jordan to my mother. “This is your great-granny, Jordan,” I say. I’ve already alerted her that grandmothers in Trinidad are called Granny, not Grandma. Still, Jordan is an independent American girl and I cannot be certain what will come out of her mouth. She giggled when I told her to address her great-grandmother as Great-Granny. To Jordan, grannies are the stuff of dark children’s stories. The wolf in Red Riding Hood was dressed like Granny. But Jordan steps forward and an extraordinary thing happens. My granddaughter, who is usually reticent, especially with people she does not know, wraps her arms around my mother’s waist and presses her head against her chest, and my mother, usually reserved, pulls Jordan to her in a tight embrace. Jennifer wipes away a tear and the muscles in my throat constrict. My mother is hugging the granddaughter of her daughter as if the years have rolled back and she is finally able to do what she has always wished she had done decades ago. Her arms are around Jordan, but it is me, her first child, her daughter, she draws to her heart.

  Petra brings us tea, and afterward my mother shows us her garden. June too soon, says the children’s song about the coming of the hurricanes that blast the Caribbean almost every year. Trinidad is lucky; it is situated in the doldrums, between latitudes just below the hurricane belt. It gets hit with rainstorms, but not hurricanes. This year, however, neither May nor June is too soon for the rainstorms. The rain poured down in late May, the week before we arrive,
and soaked the dry-season earth so my mother’s garden is resplendent with bright colors and new green foliage.

  The girls are not interested in the garden. To my surprise, I see they are chatting happily with my father. I cannot imagine what he could be saying to them to hold their attention. More and more, especially in the last few months, my father’s words have been drifting in and out of each other, rarely making sense. I wonder too, even if he has a moment of clarity, whether he would understand their strong Yankee accent, peppered as it is with the latest popular expressions I can barely decode myself, but my father seems to be responding to the girls and they to him, so I turn away and join my mother who wants to show us her prized orchids which have outdone themselves this year.

  Jennifer is in awe of the purple and white sprays that glitter in the sun. I am bowled over by the ginger lilies. My mother grows them in enormous clumps not far from the entwined mango trees. Out of a dense cluster of long dark green leaves come the long sprays of ginger lilies, some in groups of white, some pink, some dark red. These are not lilies in the usual sense one thinks of them in temperate climates, a single flower blooming at the tip of a long, thin stem. These are tropical lilies, the petals beginning almost halfway up thick stems and rising layer by layer to the top. I want to take them back with me to New York.