by Shani Mootoo
Dolly snapped at her, “You, hush your mouth. He have no right in here.” She turned to her son. “What you doing in this room and in that drawer? And who tell you you could drag that stool in here? You can’t see it will scratch up the floor? What trouble is this? You can’t mind your own business? Look, child, I leave you home next week, yes.” She knew that she could not leave him back in Raleigh.
Mrs. Sangha rushed in, tea towel in hand. The boy, who had not shed a tear as yet, set his face up to cry when he saw her. His mother raised her hand to him. “Look, don’t start up with that stupidness now, you hear me?” He looked at Mrs. Sangha, who looked back, the corners of her mouth drawn in pity. He watched her, his mouth taking on the downward turn of hers, and squeezed his eyes hard. She reached for him, and the moment he was in her arms, the tears and the heaving sobbing began. Mrs. Sangha chuckled, pleased that she had such a predictable effect on him. He pressed his face in her shoulder. Dolly glared at Mrs. Sangha. Mrs. Sangha patted and rubbed his back, rocked her body side to side. Dolly reached for him, but Mrs. Sangha pivoted swiftly on both feet, turned her back to Dolly, and wrapped her arms around the boy tightly. She laughed at Dolly and said, “But like you don’t have enough clothes to wash or what? Why you running up here every few minutes so? Leave the children alone. They doing nothing wrong. They break anything? I have one eye on them. If they was doing wrong, I would have stopped them long ago. What? You think I can’t mind child?”
Dolly felt her cheeks redden and her lips thicken with rage she could not, in her position as servant, express. She wanted to grab her child out of her employer’s arms, to scream “Put down mih child,” but she needed this job.
Mrs. Sangha kept her back rigidly turned to Dolly. She did not want to see Dolly’s face set up. She rocked the boy, still rubbing his back. Then she set him down, took his hand and her daughter’s, and led them out of the room. Dolly, near tears of fury but determined not to let them fall, watched the three of them. Her son didn’t even turn back to look at her. He went so easily with Mrs. Sangha. Dolly shook her head as if trying to dislodge a strange confusion there: anger as tight as a fist for her employer, and for both Mrs. Sangha and her son, simultaneous compassion. Mrs. Sangha sent her home with so much she herself could not afford to provide him with. Like the clothes he wore even now. She treated Dolly and the boy like relations, poor ones perhaps, but nevertheless like family rather than servants. And no matter how good Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako were to Dolly and her son, they were different. Regardless of the mind those two old people paid them, the fact that they were of African descent loomed large in Dolly’s mind. They looked different, they had different ways, different values. Dolly didn’t want her child to grow up boldface, boldface, like Uncle Mako and the other black-skinned men in the village. Or growing up to be a fisherman; when they were not catching fish, they were standing up on the beach idle so, listening for drums and voices calling them from across the sea. They gathered on the beach as if they were a council with authority, pointing up the horizon and down the horizon, arguing with one another. One saying, “It over there,” the other saying, “No, no. Is over there. You don’t see how the coconut does come in a stream traveling from that direction, man? You have to follow that stream if you want to go home.” When all she ever heard was pounding waves and thunder, they mouthed nonsense all day long about how one of these good days they would follow sounds beckoning them, all the way back to their homeland. She saw how the boy, when he was with Uncle Mako, watched wide-eyed when they jumped up and danced on the beach, shouting that the day, praise the Lord! would certainly come when they would see land in the distance, and that land would either be heaven or the home from which their ancestors had been taken, and to which they themselves would, praise the Lord, return. Even her Indian used to talk so, and she never understood what he meant. He had become so much like them that he had forgotten his own history. She didn’t want her child dreaming of places that didn’t exist. If she’d had her way, they would have left that place in two twos. But to go where? Not across any sea, but to the town, to Marion, right here, and she would live in and work for Mrs. Sangha as she saved her money to send her son to a town school. She and Mrs. Sangha were Indians and Indians alike. Their circumstances were different, it was true, but their ancestors had all landed up in Guanagaspar the same way, by boat from India and as indentured servants. Mrs. Sangha’s family came as indentured servants, and it was only chance that had led them down different paths. Mrs. Sangha was a madam and Dolly was a servant, and the boy would have to learn that difference, too.
Dolly knew also that the same child who would not now come to her would expect her to go outside with him in the coming night to look up at the black sky and tell him, as she had done from the time he was born, which constellation was which, and which star which. Can Mrs. Sangha do that? she mockingly thought. He would, on the coconut-fiber mattress behind the sugar-sack curtain dividing the house into two rooms, lie close against her. He would fall asleep, as usual, as she rubbed his back and mumbled songs to him, songs she barely remembered from her mother—whom she hardly thought of anymore, having not seen her since she and her son had banished Dolly. She knew, come tomorrow, weather permitting, the child would sit on her lap on a fallen coconut tree on the beach and ask her to tell him over and over the same stories, stories about his father, stories Mrs. Sangha could not have known.
Dolly retreated downstairs. There, she let herself go, and tears came steadily, like rainy-season rain. Tante Eugenie had asked her countless times to let her keep the child on Saturdays. But Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako were old now. Minding a child was full-time work. What if they turned their backs on him and next thing you knew he was out on the beach, or worse, running into the sea? Uncle Mako had his eyes on that horizon half the day, mumbling his nonsense about how he was sure he had family over there, how he was neglecting his great-grandparents across the water—an old man like that expecting to have grandparents—how they must be wondering about him, and how he would surely meet them one day soon. What if he decided to take the boy with him? All the foolishness he did, showing the child things to frighten him. Like the magic he did with his finger, making the forefinger disappear and telling the child it got cut off. Besides, if Uncle Mako was not frightening or filling the boy’s head with ideas about seeing what lay out there on the other side of the water, the other fishermen were always collecting in his yard, drinking, cussing, talking all kinds of adult business without care for which child might have been listening.
There was nobody else to leave him with. Besides, if indeed there had been somebody, she wondered if she could, in all honesty, let him out of her sight for a whole day. Tears ran down her cheeks, searched out the corners of her mouth. She opened her mouth and licked in the comforting saltiness. She scrubbed clothing so forcefully, so fitfully, against the concrete that her fingers and knuckles reddened and bruised.
FELLAS LIKE WE
In the days when the house belonged to Narine Sangha’s nana and nani, it had been little more than a barracks-like box sitting atop wood posts. Over the course of three generations, walls had been put up to make extra rooms and other walls taken down to enlarge others. The house was raised; the original packed dirt underneath was paved and enclosed on two sides by lattice woodwork. Unadorned pillars that once had been purely functional were embellished. The original four wood ones at the back were replaced with straightforward concrete ones. And the newer section of the house sported custom-made molded concrete ones with opulent bellies and Corinthian-like crowns. Stairways that connected upstairs and downstairs were erected, a concrete one with wrought-iron banisters at the front, and a plain one of wood at the back. A portion of the downstairs area was walled off in the course of time to make servants’ quarters and to enclose a laundry area. A verandah with arched framing eventually wrapped around the house. Decorative vines grew on the latticework, and potted bread-and-butter begonias lined the banister of the verandah.
He allowed them to think they helped him by letting them drop seedlings of flowering plants into beds of rich black manure. The children would pull up weeds for no longer than just a few minutes, but to them, in the hot sun, it would seem as if they had been out in the yard with the gardener all day, and so they would boast of their labor to Mrs. Sangha and to Dolly, wiping their brows and necks of imaginary perspiration. With a tin watering can belonging to the girl, they watered plants but mostly themselves. Quickly they tired of chores and resorted to digging holes into which they poured can after can of water with an aim only they knew. They picked periwinkles and strung them on lengths of thread. One day the gardener caught the boy struggling to get one of these garlands over the girl’s long, frizzy hair, with the aim of hanging it around her neck.
“Ey, boy. What is this? Wedding? You taking dulahin so young, boy?” he teased. Once the girl had run off upstairs for one of her frequent visits to her mother, he called the boy into the shed that housed the garden supplies under the back stairway and seized the chance to more quietly advise, “You and she different, boy. That is Narine Sangha daughter. You and me is yard-boy material. She is the bossman daughter. Oil and water. Never the two shall mix. You too young to know what I saying. But I saying it anyway. She will grow up pretty. You so young, and already you have taste. But girls like she does only make fellas like we cry. Hear what I telling you!”
The boy stared into the dark shed, mesmerized by the variety of spades, the coil of hose, the concrete-crusted wheelbarrow, clay pots, saucers, and cans of paint. But he was thinking about what the yardman had just said to him. It sounded like a stern warning. It sounded like the man was saying something unkind about his friend. He did not understand, and he did not like this man who was not always allowed to enter Mrs. Sangha’s house saying bad things about his little friend. In any case, why would a child make a big man cry?
The gardener approached him. “You daydreaming, boy? Awright. Come. You going to plant something in this yard. This little number here is a Norfolk pine. I’ll dig the hole for you, and you can put it in. One day when you is a big man, you will pass this tree. By then it will be fully grown, and you will be glad of what I tell you when you was a child.”
The child patted the earth around the pine while the gardener held it steady. He stood up. He stared at the gardener. So many letters of the alphabet swallowed, there must be words by now inside of him. Finally they came. “Uncle Mako say big people don’t cry. If you cry, you is a baby. And you mustn’t say bad things about people. And I don’t cry.”
The gardener set his face in a look of shock, shook his head in mock disbelief, then laughed. “Awright, awright, big boy. You answering back, eh! Well, you get me. You get me there, in truth!”
ART MY ARSE
Their house was small. High-tide nights, in darkness and quiet, the roaring ocean would seem to be upon them. The house itself, though, lifted a yard off the sand by nine stumps of shaved teak, three sets of three, had never so much as swayed in any of the storms that frequented this unprotected archipelago strewn to one side of the Caribbean Sea. It was but a room, well built, and thanks to Seudath her Indian, it was hers.
One Saturday evening, tired and looking forward to a restful evening—she had in mind a dip in the ocean—Dolly returned with her son to find her house unrecognizable. Except for the placement of the outhouse, the cooking lean-to, and the pawpaw tree with the cock sprawled off in it, she might as well have gotten out of the taxi at the wrong trace. The house ahead, her house, had been—well, she didn’t know what to say it had been. Its walls were a garish mishmash of color and pattern. It had been attacked. Attacked by the man known, by reputation only until this day, as the wallpaperer. Her son was too short to see what over the bushes had made her shriek, but when she broke into a run toward the house, he followed right behind. This man, not a resident of Raleigh, had heard about the foreign art of decorating walls with patterned paper. He had decided to become a wallpaperer. Finding jobs hard to come by, the art as yet little known, little desired, in Guanagaspar, he took it upon himself to give gifts of his services as a form of advertising. Dolly had heard about him but had not seen evidence of his skills anywhere, and had only, along with other beach gossips, laughed at the idea of his outrageousness. Suddenly two walls of her own house had been papered with pictures and articles from newspapers and foreign magazines.
She was stomping and cursing, pelting her own house with stones from the yard. Same time, some people who been walking along the beach heard her above the roar of the ocean. Coming up the shore, they saw the startling cacophony of color jumping out of the greenery and clashing with the blue sky. They came running to the front of the house along the path that connected to the beach.
They stood, watched, walked around, inspected, and gasped.
“Oh God, the wallpaperer reach Raleigh. Miss Dolly house get attack!”
“And he calling this art? This is a art?”
“It colorful.”
“Ey, all you. You lucky it ent your house. If it was your house, you wouldn’t be talking free so, na.”
“But what wrong with this fella, in truth?”
“Let he come near my house, I go catch him and buss his arse. Art my arse!”
Dolly sank on her knees and regarded the handiwork. “He trying to make a fool of me? He don’t see I is a hardworking woman? And them useless birds can’t even keep away a vandal?”
Tante Eugenie huffed her way down the path and went directly to Dolly to throw her arms around her and console her. “And yes, you right, you working hard for so, and this worthless fellow, worthless-worthless, come and deface your house.”
Those in the yard made a quick decision: they ran to the back of the house, where they broke off thick lengths of guava trunks, dispersing, promising Dolly to catch the “asstist,” as they dubbed him, and to bury him alive right there and then.
The boy didn’t understand why the new look of the house was so troubling to everyone else. In some places the concoction of found, weather-beaten wood boards on the house overlapped for no reason besides lack of carpentry expertise on the part of his father. To his mind, the work of the wallpaperer had transformed the structure into something to walk around and admire. Inside and outside had, up until this morning, flowed easily through the unmatched planked walls of this house, but the wallpapering, he saw, had sealed the gaps between the warped boards. He stood not three feet high, his hands on his hips, mannish, his mother would say, and contemplated the new look of his house. True, from inside there wouldn’t be the view of coconut trees and the ocean, or the sandy yard all the way past the cooking shed. During the days when the windows would be shut against heat and sandstorms, he wouldn’t be able to peep through the cracks and watch his hen and her chicks, or see the pigeon pea boundary and the outhouse beyond. But to him, the side of his house, previously bleached dry and gray by the sun, worn thin by rain and sea breeze, was now decorated. It was pretty. He hoped Mrs. Sangh
a and her daughter would have the chance to see it. He waited until his mother went inside the house, accompanied by Tante Eugenie, as Dolly was afraid of what might be found there, too. Then he went around to one of the walled sides. The cock came fluttering down noisily from the pawpaw tree, falling with a clumsy thump onto the dry ground. It fluffed its feathers and strutted alongside the boy, as if it, too, were surveying and approving. The child stooped to stroke the coarse, oily back feathers of the bird. He stood up and went closer so that he could see the pictures on the paper covering the side of the house. He was rather pleased that he recognized a number of words plastered on his house. He found the words “at,” “a,” “the,” “this,” “man,” and “he.” He looked long and longingly at the shapes of thousand of others, could almost taste them, feel them fully formed in his belly.
DREAMING AND THEN WAKING UP
Although there was an adequate fish market downtown, a visit to the open-air one in Raleigh involved for Mrs. Sangha an outing. She knew better than to imagine an outing for its own sake, so she made the excuse that she wanted to buy fish, fish so fresh that it was still dreaming. So fresh that even after it had been stuffed and baked, shredded morsels of it slid down her throat, revealing to her news of far shores visited that very day before it had landed in a fisherman’s net. The children laughed when she talked that way. Hoping to be contradicted, her daughter would plead, “Fish can’t dream, Mammy. Not so? Mammy, tell me for true: fish can talk to you?” But Dolly wondered if it could have been this kind of chatter that drove Mr. Sangha to take up elsewhere.