Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  And the next afternoon, still numb from watching the pallbearers lower Omar’s casket into the ground, Kath Ella ascends the granite stairs to the second floor of the courthouse, feeling as though the earth is trying to pull her down into it, too.

  She has come downtown for her hearing with the peace officer about the trouble she got into with Kiendra at 920 Gottingen Street. In the hot hearing room, she tries to formulate coherent answers to the peace officer’s questions. But it is difficult to concentrate. She should have eaten the egg sandwich Shirley offered before they left the house. But she was too busy pleading with her parents to attend the hearing without her. That was a foolish request. She knew they would refuse.

  “I have half a mind to send a letter to your college,” the peace officer tells Kath Ella.

  A thin man with narrow shoulders, he sits at the head of the long table. He does not seem at all swayed by the letters George has brought from teachers and neighbors. “But because of all the stress you’ve endured,” he says, “I’m going to put this matter of trespassing to rest without any punitive measures. Don’t expect the same leniency if you come before me again.”

  “She understands, sir,” George says. “She has learned.”

  Kath Ella tells the peace officer what she has learned, but on the bus ride home, she cannot recall what she said. What has she learned? If she has all this new knowledge, why do the streets look unchanged? Next week she will be downtown to shop for school clothes. A week after that, she will return to Montreal. At first, she saw George’s decision to have her leave the bluff and go back to college early as impossibly cruel. Now, after all these funerals, she cannot wait to get away.

  But she has a few things to do first.

  One thing Rosa got right at the funeral, Kath Ella believes, was the matching colors: pink and rose everything. But what about the other colors Kiendra wore? Kath Ella asks all over the bluff in the next few days. By the end of the week, she has twenty or so young men and women waiting in line at the Hardware Barn to pick up the cans of paint she has purchased with the money she took from the Sebolts’ account. Over the next few days, practically every shed on the bluff is painted white and green and blue and yellow. “Use red for the outhouses,” Kath Ella says. “Kiendra never liked that color.”

  By the end of August, a visitor to the bluff also sees plenty of color on the houses. When there is too little paint left in one can to finish a job, colors are mixed, producing nice blends. The schoolhouse gets one of these mixtures, a bluish-plum color some neighbors say reminds them of homes on the islands.

  September 17, 1936, comes much more quickly than Kath Ella had anticipated. In the afternoon she goes over to 920 Gottingen Street. It is a cool, sunny day and the lawn is coming in deep green. The corner of the building wrecked by the truck has been repaired. At a window on the ground floor, Kath Ella presses her face to the glass. The bedroom looks clean, but dirt must be hiding there someplace.

  A strong wind greets Kath Ella at the back door, where the men carried Kiendra out on a stretcher. The exterior wall has been cleaned of the paint the girls threw the day after Kiendra’s funeral. Kath Ella tests the doorknob, thinking some feelings ought to rise in her. But none come.

  Kath Ella carries the rock that Rosa gave her in the bedroom before Kiendra’s funeral. The farther she walks from the back of the building, the heavier the rock feels in her hand. Obviously, Rosa did not realize that Kiendra once swore this beautiful reddish-blue stone would never leave her bedroom.

  At the side of the building, Kath Ella halts and examines the rock. On the bus ride here, she had admired the gold specks in its smooth surface. In the sunlight she can see what looks like the oily impression of fingerprints where Kiendra once gripped the rock.

  She opens her hand and the rock shifts and comes to rest in her palm. When she grips the rock again, she squeezes tightly. Her fingers begin to hurt, but she keeps a tight grip. She takes a step back from the building and looks up at several high windows. The sunlight blazing off one pane is so strong it hurts her eyes. Could that be the window that Kiendra wanted to break?

  Before she realizes it, Kiendra’s favorite rock has left her hand, arching upward in an angry flight.

  Part Two

  New Jamaica

  New Assignments

  Montreal, 1952

  Hello, class. I am so happy to be starting school again.

  I am happy in autumn because I get to see all your happy faces. I see a few new faces, but I see plenty of familiar faces, too. I see you peeking there, Miss Allison. Sit up straighter, dear. Some of you know me already. And before I tell the rest of you my name, I am going to tell you something else about me. Years ago, before any of you were born, I moved to Montreal from Halifax, where I grew up. Halifax is a city on the map of Canada. You learned that in the first or second grade, didn’t you?

  I came to Montreal to go to college. The college I attended is not far from here. Sainte-Marie College. Mrs. Teggleston was a student there also. Of course, she is younger than I am, so we didn’t know each other there. I have a sister, Luela, who works at the Wales and London. That is a gigantic hotel in Halifax. Sometimes my sister spends her entire night at work typing up bills for hotel customers. My mother, Shirley, worked at the hotel. So did my grandmother, Pallis. My father, George, used to work at the speedway in Halifax. A speedway is where the cars race around fast. Now my father is retired. He’s old.

  This year of our Lord, I will begin my tenth year teaching the fourth grade here at Greeves Adventist Primary. I’ve also taught second and third grade. Never the first grade though. I wish I had. Of course I like teaching the fourth grade the bestest. That’s a made-up word. You can make up a word from time to time in my class. I don’t mind, as long as you tell me you know the word is made up. My favorite dish is beef Stroganoff. I like the gravy. My favorite color crayon is—well, I can’t decide on a favorite crayon. But I like tangerine and all the glitter tones. I love to go ice-skating in the park on Mount Royale.

  My husband, Timothee, works for a firm that makes drawings that show workers how to put together bridges and ice-skating rinks and the buildings at airports. My son’s name is Etienne. He attended primary school here at Greeves Adventist. But now he is in the tenth grade at Bratt Argonne International. Etienne is much taller than I am. He is this tall. Isn’t that something?

  As a child I loved my Lucy Kirchner in the Mountains books. Look there, you’ll see the newest editions. I hope you all will love reading them this year.

  What else? Oh, yes, silly me, I haven’t told you my name. When I was younger, they called me Kath Ella. During my last years of college, my classmates started calling me Kath. That is what I go by now—just Kath. But you will call me Mrs. Peletier.

  The passing of the months from fall to spring is more exhausting than Kath expects. By the end of May, she cannot wait to begin her summer trip. The plan is to begin on a large cruise ship out of Halifax. It is a vacation she has wanted to take for years.

  This morning in Halifax, in the crowded reception area of Arcadia Travel and Leisure, Kath and her son, Etienne, have been standing for nearly an hour, but finally a family relinquishes one of the long benches.

  “Why are you sitting so far away?” Kath asks Etienne after they are seated. “Slide over so other people can sit down.”

  When Etienne moves closer, Kath grabs a brass button on the leather bomber jacket draped over his shoulder and lifts one side. Underneath, the small red-and-gray snake wrapped around Etienne’s thin wrist lifts its head and flicks its tongue.

  Kath glances around the waiting area. Bad weather last winter delayed many departures. But in three days, hopefully, she and her husband, Timothee, will be boarding the ocean liner she saw by the docks yesterday, when they arrived here from Montreal. There are no faces she recognizes, even though most of the travelers yet to be assisted are colored.

  “I distinctly remember telling you to leave that pet in the car,” Kath whisp
ers to Etienne. “Why didn’t you?”

  “It’s too cold in the car.”

  “It’s quite pleasant outside.”

  “Not for a snake.”

  Kath lets go of the button and opens her purse. The cover of the small book she takes out reads Easy Italian Phrases. She has told her husband and son that she doesn’t need to study the book, but she does. The date of their cruise departure—Monday, June 8, 1953—is a week before Timothee’s birthday. What a surprise to hear several weeks ago that in addition to visiting Gaeta, Italy, to celebrate with his maternal grandparents, they will also be visiting Morocco. The side excursion is a present to her from Timothee for her speedy recovery from an operation last year. The doctor said he had lifted the spot from her lung as easily as lifting lint from a sweater. Political trouble in Casablanca and Tangier means the ship may dock farther down the Moroccan coast, in the city of Mogador. She does not mind the change. She is eager for a stroll down the stone streets and alleys in the charming historic city.

  “Do you see that gray thing there?” Kath asks, showing Etienne a grainy black-and-white photograph of the port at Mogador.

  “Everything’s gray,” Etienne says.

  “Over there. That’s an American ship.”

  “Why can’t I go to Vancouver?”

  Kath puts the photograph back between the pages of the phrase book and then feels around in her purse. “Go wait in the car please,” she says, dropping the car keys into Etienne’s lap.

  “Aunt Luela’s bringing me a treat from the candy shop.”

  “Off you go.”

  Etienne tries to work the car keys back into Kath’s hands, but she keeps a clenched fist. “Bean shit,” he says.

  Etienne stands, letting the jacket slide off his shoulder onto the bench. As he walks off, a boy points at the snake and says, “Wowie.”

  Finally, a moment to herself. Perhaps now she can select the pictures she intends to bring to the picnic on the bluff later. In the winter of 1945, when she received an invitation to Marcelina Higgins’s very first picture party, called A Splash of June, she wrote back to say her end-of-the-school-year obligations made it impossible for her to attend. That was not exactly true. Though it had been a decade since the horrible summer when she lost Kiendra, Omar, and Donnita, and though she missed her neighbors, she did not yet feel up to celebrating on the bluff.

  The children in my monthly Weekend Academic Enrichment Program will be doing a project on Sierra Leone later in the summer, Marcelina had written in the letter that came with the invitation to this year’s party. You’re a teacher. Bring me some ideas for the classroom when you come to the picture party.

  Despite being a teacher, Kath hates it when people give her assignments. Still, Marcelina’s request had some appeal. If she developed a lesson about Sierra Leone for Marcelina’s enrichment program, she could use it for her own students. But a bout with a nasty flu and several colds put her behind, and just managing her own schoolwork was a chore. She hopes the stack of fold-up maps of western Africa she found in a shop on Rue Bel-Air will be of interest to the students. There must be some future wanderers in the program.

  What could be keeping her sister? Kath wonders. Looking through the large window into the travel office, she sees no sign of her husband either. Given how irritated Timothee was by the long wait, he may well be complaining to the office director. When they first started going out in public—a colored woman with her tall white husband—the slightest sideways glance by employees in hotels, restaurants, or retail stores would merit a grumble from her. These days Timothee is more easily roused. Earlier, when a clerk told the crowd that some customers with reservations on the cruise ship might have to make the trip to Europe by airplane, Timothee demanded to see the office director.

  Kath returns to her phrase book, hoping that while the family is away, the neighbor checking on the apartment in Montreal will properly attend to her plants. When misting her three orchids, she likes calling their names: Cindy, Lindy, and Mindy. The first orchid she ever fussed over was a present from Timothee a week after they met. He now has a nice job as a projects manager, but he says he wants even better for Etienne. She appreciates the fact that Timothee cares so much about Etienne’s future, especially since the boy is not his biological son.

  How could she be pregnant? she wondered that year on her visit to the college infirmary. She left the infirmary and crossed the campus back to her dormitory in a daze. All three times she and Omar had been intimate, he had been careful to pull out before discharge. Then again, how trustworthy was her memory of the horrible summer she had just had? After Kiendra’s funeral, her thoughts were scattered but she knew she wanted to be held. One day while she and Omar were in the car heading to the bank, she had boldly reached over and squeezed his thigh. He drove to a secluded section of Haverill Park. Was that the afternoon it happened?

  She wanted a child but thought it would happen after she graduated. She would have gotten a job. And she would already have traveled to Morocco and Aix-en-Provence. Instead, with a baby already growing inside her, she would have to leave college. The thought made her head throb. She ought to have been more attentive. With a child, what type of man could she interest in marriage? Certainly not a well-educated professional, as she had imagined.

  She was grateful that she had wandered into East Campus, with its tall hedges and paths down which she could hurry if she spied someone she recognized. The warm September breeze did nothing to improve her mood. And then she began to fear that any minute a former neighbor from the bluff would jump out from behind a hedge and remind her of some mischief she had gotten into as a child. One neighbor might say the pregnancy came because Kath grew up in a neglected neighborhood. Another would put the blame on her wanton behavior. Where is your soul now? So much promise, and now look. And perhaps one would say she had become the one thing she feared becoming. A failure.

  She went to bed that evening imagining her future turning as brittle as a sand dollar. The next morning, among the chatting students in the dining hall, she felt an even worse fear. What did she know about raising a child? Luela always babysat the infant cousins. She had never even changed a diaper. She was making her own family, but she hadn’t a penny to her name to provide for it. Staring at her toast and curried eggs, she recalled the last time her future was threatened. Back then her parents had found a way for her to attend college. Now, she needed to find a way out of this pickle herself.

  In Byerly Hall after breakfast, she ascended the steps with her stomach empty but her brain full of reasoned thoughts. She would say to the matron of students, I’m going to have to leave the college. I don’t want to, but what else can I do? I don’t think I will ever return to finish my degree. Without a degree, I can’t get the job I need to raise a child properly. I had hoped to make my parents proud of me. Now I have disappointed them.

  Seated on the brushed-leather chair in the matron’s office, at first all she did was cry.

  “Let us not be rash, dear,” the matron said, after hearing a few blurted-out sentences. “With a bit of rationality, these matters can be managed.”

  And manage she did. The day after she returned home to the bluff, she started working again at Chevy Platt’s business. She got a few sideways looks when a stranger learned that she did not have a husband. But many seemed sympathetic when she told them the father of her baby had died. In the spring of 1937, two weeks after little Omar was born in her parents’ house on the bluff, she was selling insurance plans at the business so rapidly that Chevy was able to hire a new employee.

  Several of Omar’s former schoolmates came by the office to ask about his son. One of them brought a note from the school’s principal inviting her to come for a visit.

  “Do you have plans to return to college?” the principal asked in his office, where he gave her several boxes filled with baby clothes, diapers, and powdered milk.

  The envelope of money was a surprise. So was his question asking if she were
still interested in teaching. “Yes, sir, I still hope to teach,” she said. “Do you think you might have a position for me here?”

  Seeing the principal’s face redden, she quickly said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I misunderstand?”

  “I don’t have a position here in Halifax,” the principal said. “But I would be willing to put in a good word at one of the schools in Montreal.”

  She left the school building unsure how she felt about the principal’s counsel. By then, the idea of finishing college had receded deep into her mind. Over the next few days, however, she began to realize how unfulfilling working at Chevy Platt’s business had become without Omar there. Chevy no longer smiled when he saw her. And his son, Kiryl, was even less friendly, especially after she declined his offer to take her to a dance.

  Hearing someone suggest she might go back to college and become a teacher had made her feel wonderful. Leaving her infant son in Halifax with her parents just as he was beginning to recognize her would be difficult. But in short order, the decision was made.

  Walking the campus in Montreal, a mother now, she wanted everyone she encountered to notice how different she was in the world. But most of the women she knew had graduated. No longer could she cross the campus at a certain time of day, knowing which friend might exit a building to stop for a chat.

  During her last month of studies, she raced up the dormitory stairs to tell her roommate that she had been hired at Greeves Adventist Primary. She would start as a part-time teacher’s aide and would have to wait a year for a teaching position, but still she was elated. Those first months of work, she lived in a basement apartment, every day growing more determined to bring her son to live with her.