Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel

by Tiphanie Yanique

  He went to his knee four times with hibiscus and each time he would reveal a new color: red, yellow, orange, and white. When these failed to entice, he moved to orchids: drown-me-in-your-love orchids, dagger-in-my-chest orchids, I-will-cry orchids. Soon Mr. Barry had a pattern. He proposed to Miss Eeona every third Friday evening. Mr. Barry was one of these dull men who believe in wearing a woman down. They never consider that a woman worn away by insistence is not the same thing as a woman swept away by love. By proposal number forty, he was on anthuriums, and she had dumped hundreds of flowers in the small yard behind the flat where she tied up the donkey. Such a dune of beautiful dead flowers was reminiscent of her last days at Villa by the Sea.

  One evening Mr. Barry was fastening the big windows at the front of the building. There was glass fastened into the window holes so that he and Eeona could have both the air-conditioning and the daylight. Eeona was taking her time. As always, she knew what she was doing. There was no one to go home to any longer. There was no one who invited her for tea. It was a Thursday and there had been no beseeching with flowers. Eeona was a human being after all, despite what else she may be.

  Mr. Barry had closed the door and all but one window before Eeona cleared her throat. He turned as though her voice had grabbed him from behind. “Dear me. Miss Eeona, I thought you had left. I apologize. I didn’t mean to close the windows on you.” As he was saying this, however, he was closing the final window.

  Remember, it is the 1940s and it is the Caribbean. Eeona had never been inside an entirely closed building before, a building void of any natural light. At Villa by the Sea they had kept their windows open even in the evenings, cracked even in the rain. The starlight and the moonlight rushing in to mix with the kerosene lamp. Suddenly, Mr. Barry and Eeona were in a closed building with artificial light. It was frightening, even to Eeona. It made her feel brave just to sit there.

  Mr. Barry’s thick body lumbered about his desk as he shuffled papers and packed other papers as if he was leaving, though both he and Eeona knew they were not going just then. He was the kind of man that, had he been younger, many women would have found attractive. He was a big man. He was called towering. But he always seemed small to Eeona, drowning in the huge chair behind his desk. It is true, of course, that when she most often noticed him he was kneeling at her feet.

  This evening Eeona sat erect, her hands curled like tree roots in her lap, and watched him. He did not look at her as he asked, “Miss Eeona. What, if I may inquire, are your plans for this evening?” He was folding his newspaper carefully into his leather briefcase as though the paper were made of something stiff and heavy.

  Eeona smiled softly to show him that he was foolish. “I have no plans, Mr. Barry.”

  “Well, then.” Perhaps he wondered why he had not brought some hibiscus on this odd Thursday. Perhaps tonight Miss Eeona would say yes. He was not in the crude habit of wearing his hat indoors, but now he placed it on his head. He adjusted it carefully, as though it held his dignity. “Miss Eeona, since you are not otherwise committed, would you care to join me at choir practice? I am a Moravian and that is where I am heading now, as I said, to practice for the choir. I am, you may not know, but now you shall know, the head of the Moravian Men’s Choir, which is renowned across the island. I am, indeed, the men’s choir leading baritone and the director. By which I mean that I also play the organ.”

  “Well, that is fascinating information, Mr. Barry. However, I would like to stay here for just a little while. My feet are positively aching.” She was not telling a lie. Today she had rented Nelson out to someone she hoped would buy the beast. This was a move toward her real life, for she had decided to purchase a car. All the landed families had a vehicle or two nowadays. Besides, she could roam farther with a car than by burro. However, not having Nelson was quite the sacrifice. The kitten heels she wore today were not sensible at all.

  Mr. Barry knelt beside her. This was nothing new. At proposal twenty-eight Eeona had felt generous and allowed him to hold her hand while he salivated his entreaties, but he had never touched more than her fingers, the palm of her hand, or, once, her wrist. When he did touch her hand, she could feel the paths of his fingerprints. She could feel the stones of his hangnails. Afterward, she would soak her hands in mint water to relieve them. Now she prepared her hands by willing them to relax. Instead, Mr. Barry gently lifted her foot and took it out of its shoe.

  She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and now Mr. Barry lifted his hands up her calf with the expertise that suggested he had done this before, found the tip of her calf stocking, and rolled it down past her toes and off her feet. She could feel his hands grow sweaty even in the air-conditioning that was now snorting irregularly. Mr. Barry’s breathing, too, became irregular. He leaned down and brought Miss Eeona’s foot to his nose. She could feel his breath between her toes. She could feel his hand cradling her heel.

  Mr. Barry was a man who was the age Owen Arthur would have been. He was a man who had made a business for himself. He would not be a bad man to settle with and for. He had a decent house up Garden Street, not a grand estate, but still.

  Oh, but there was the hair sprouting at his knuckles. Eeona wanted a man who was bare, as smooth as Papa had been. Eeona looked up to the ceiling.

  One foot now rested in this man’s lap and she could feel his manhood growing taut. Her other foot was cupped in his gripping and releasing palm. She could feel his warm breath and then his cool tongue suddenly slipping between her toes. She felt his mouth open like an underwater cave. Jesus. She was alarmed and then anxious, and then she leaned back slowly into the chair and felt herself turn into something other than a lady.

  —

  When Eeona left that evening, Mr. Barry remained kneeling on the floor, as though in supplication or repentance. He had not removed even his jacket or his hat. He had missed choir practice entirely. As she slipped on her shoes and pulled down her dress, she could hear him softly chanting Psalm Twenty-three over and over again. When he said “the valley of the shadow,” she knew the part of her that was the valley. When he said, “cup runneth over,” she knew which silver part of her had run over. Though all she had seen during the whole lusty affair was his hat bobbing up and down as though it were floating.

  What great ignorance had she just done? It was already dusk. Eeona walked home quickly, her feet chafing for she had forgotten her stockings at the lounge. She knew she would never make it to the flat before night fell, and she hoped that her transgressions were not obvious to everyone she walked past. Mr. Barry was now the only living man to know her silver secret in her secret place. Yes, she fancied the air-conditioning. Yes, she fancied the check he signed over to her every fortnight. She even fancied his flowers. She did not fancy him.

  He had hair coming out, not only out of his knuckles, but out of his ears and nose as well. He wasn’t even an American, she thought, but someone from a small colonial island where they still labored over sugarcane. Now perhaps he would spread a true rumor of her around her own island. Was she so resigned or so desperate that she was handing herself over so easily?

  Eeona walked into her apartment just as the sky was turning purple and opened the door to a hollow feeling, as though the apartment were a deep water hole. She walked in and sat at the table across from the two empty chairs—Anette’s chair and an extra for a guest. She put Antoinette’s gloves on slowly.

  Elder sister Eeona sat there and thought what she should do. What she should do and what she wanted to do were different things. Perhaps she was having another one of her mother’s episodes of wanting. She wanted to lower herself to the floor and bang it with her gloved fists.

  Tomorrow, instead of accepting Mr. Barry’s mouth as offering, she would pass by her sister’s. She had told herself that she would never venture to Anette’s new abode. After all, Anette’s leaving was just the freedom she’d been craving. It made no sense to haul herself down to see the sister who’d held her back all these years. But she didn
’t allow herself to remember any of that now. Anette’s husband had been home recently from his basic training and had already left for the States. The man hadn’t even paid elder sister Eeona the expected and respectable visit. She hadn’t cared. No, she hadn’t. Well, a bit, but not much. Now Eeona told herself that Anette must be needing some family company after being there with her in-laws all alone.

  —

  Ronnie’s mother was the real Mrs. Smalls. Her husband was a professional philanderer and so never spent more than a few minutes at home, where Mrs. Smalls served him limeade she had made from limes in her backyard and coconut tart—she had grated the coconut herself. It was known that she was an excellent cook, but even her cooking couldn’t hold her husband. All it had done was produce a son who was as good as any woman around the kitchen.

  Eeona could see now that Anette had been eating. Sitting there on the couch in a housedress, Anette looked positively plump. Eeona observed that Anette might even look a bit pretty. Eeona’s hair had been pinned up, but now she loosened it, feeling the need to assert herself before Anette’s comeliness. Poor Mrs. Smalls, used to abuse, stood up and left the room as though Eeona had just stripped naked.

  Though Ronald had returned from basic, he’d immediately been called back to P.R. and then shipped off to Louisiana. Anette leaned in close to her sister and told her what Ronald had managed before going to the mainland. “I’m pregnant,” Anette said excitedly, as though it was she receiving the news. “I know, I ain think Ronnie had it in him either.”

  Eeona, who had never desired a child ever in her life, felt the slightest feeling of challenge.

  Anette, so full of herself, didn’t notice the sudden change of gravity come over the room.

  36.

  Sudden changes in gravity. Bright flashing light. Loud clanging noises. The usual hot and cold. All this, his brother, who was a dentist, had said would make the pain throb in Jacob Esau McKenzie’s tooth. Why light? Why noise? Teeth couldn’t see or hear. But like a sense he hadn’t learned to harness, his teeth could feel sound. Could feel darkness and be comforted by it. This was America, his brother insisted over the phone. Strange things happened in America. Jacob Esau had gone to Howard University, two years younger than his peers, and then finished in three. He knew firsthand how strange America was. How mulatto Caribbean men like he was, who were educated and high-bred, could go to American colleges and become Negro overnight.

  The soldier boys all knew some things, but Jacob, younger than all of them and more handsome than most, seemed to have a bit more. Jacob was college educated, played the piano, and knew how to swim. In the Army the officers had thought the other Caribbean boys were useless, born surrounded by water but having nothing to show for it. But Ronnie Smalls had thought it through. “I walk over a mountain without flying. What’s the big deal that I walk in the water without swimming?” So swimming was like flying. Something witches could do.

  The mistake was made. The Virgin Islands men were put together. Only West Indians in companies 872, 873, 874, and 875 on the base in New Orleans. Over meals in the food shack, the boys discussed this. Ronald Smalls slurped on rubbery pancakes. “It’s for cohesion,” he said between his moving teeth. “It’s so we don’t get lonely for home.” Ronald was very lonely for home. He was a good man who did all he could to be the opposite of his philandering father. His wife was pregnant with a baby he dreamed would be the first of many. But Ronnie’s dreams were only dreams.

  “No, Smalls,” said Jacob, “it’s so we don’t break free. It’s so we watch one another and keep one another in line.” Jacob knew what he was talking about. His mother was a woman who was expert at watching and keeping people from breaking free. She had warned Jacob about the toothache. She’d told him to use certain herbs to ward off the pain and wait until she herself could take care of it. But Jacob had defied her; he’d consulted his brother who was in dentistry school at Meharry, way in Tennessee. He wanted a real doctor and his brother was almost one. Jacob knew also that he would become a real doctor. Not a witch doctor like his mother. But still, it was she who had warned him that the Caribbean-only company was a curse.

  Spice was from Grenada. He respected Jacob McKenzie because with all that learning and ability and sand-colored skin it was hard not to. Spice thought Ronald Smalls was naïve for thinking the Americans could mean them well, and pitiful for pulling out the picture of his nice titi wife if anybody even mentioned pum pum. Spice knew that it was these Americanized ones from the USVI and Puerto Rico who couldn’t seem to understand America. “Listen, man. The Yankees don’t want to be with us.” Spice was Grenadian trying to become an American citizen. He knew things that no else knew . . . and not because he’d been to school. He was the eldest of the bunch, but his father and mother had been dead since he was six. He had lived bouncing between distant family scattered on different islands. He knew Spanish and French and Dutch and English. All the Caribbean languages. So even though he was already the eldest, he seemed elder still. He knew the Caribbean. And so he knew the world.

  “Why wouldn’t they want to be with us?” Ronald asked, thinking about how the Puerto Rican soldiers had beat him up. Thinking that perhaps the separation by region and language had to do with women.

  “The Yanks think we smell,” answered Spice with authority.

  “Bad?”

  “Yes, bad, you coconut head.”

  “But is they smell like uncooked meat.”

  “True,” said Spice. He was known for his conspiratorial views. He wouldn’t even eat the food-shack grub. He ate the rations instead. He poured water over the shrunken steaks and dried packs of peanuts. They fed this to the guys on the line. It was stay-alive food.

  “I don’t know why they don’t want to be with us,” said Jacob, answering Ronald Small’s earnest question. Ronald sighed, took out the picture of his wife, and thumbed it gently. Jacob pressed his fingernail into his gums where the pain was. In college Jacob had experienced the condescension of white Americans. Those who visited campus for lectures were sweet but syrupy. And yes, he’d heard the dismal stories from his schoolmates. But those students didn’t study as hard as he did. They didn’t have the good name that he had. Niggardly, Jacob knew, was a real word. It meant stingy and mean. Some people were niggers. Jacob just wasn’t one.

  Before they’d left for America, Ronald Smalls had made love to his wife for what would be the last time ever. Then he’d sailed to Puerto Rico and joined the rest of the company, which was also Jacob’s company, on a boat for New Orleans. His first time in real America. His life was a dream come true. All he had to do was keep living. He didn’t want to believe in anything that could mean maiming or death or trouble even a bit.

  “See, Spice,” Ronald shouted, when they were all in the back of a tented truck heading toward the base. “If they had hated us, they would have sent us to the Nazis.”

  Spice had shaken his head. “You scunt. This is Naziland, U.S.A.”

  Jacob, who felt protective of Ronald, slapped the Grenadian on the back. “Give him a break. Just give him a break, old man.” For it was true that at his college job waiting tables Jacob had been called boy. But he was a boy. Always had been. Youngest in his class. Baby of the family. He was a boy even now in the Army among all these men.

  When they had all first arrived, their superiors had told them that New Orleans wasn’t so different from the Caribbean. That was when they’d hoped the Caribbean boys would be helpful in the water, but only Jacob among them could swim. The truth was, however, that the city was below sea level, like Atlantis. Like they were all underwater but somehow still breathing.

  Jacob’s tooth pulsed dully and constantly. His brother had sent him a paste, so it wasn’t so painful. Still, each time he breathed deeply, a sharpness lit though his face so that his lips twitched. Other men began to see this as something stylish and self-assured, like holding a cigarette or pulling out a comb to run through your conch-straightened hair. Soon Jacob’s twitchin
g became a mark of West Indian Company 875. The lip-twitching making them look ready, just ready for something. This made the real Americans, the officers, watch them closely.

  The company stayed in for the first two weeks, fixing and cleaning and following orders. Ronald Smalls whistled and twitched. America! Land of freedom! It felt good. There was no ocean around telling you to stop. There was just land and land. To be roamed. And admired. To be conquered and tamed and called one’s own. Ronnie was so happy he wrote to Anette telling her to name the child Ronald, please, Anette, please. He was sure he would create a legacy during this war. He was too happy.

  We were at war. Happiness wouldn’t do.

  37.

  The music from Jacob’s little wooden box sang loudly because Jacob’s tooth didn’t mind the blues. A woman was crooning. My, my. A woman could croon. A woman could sweep a man from his feet. The world was changing. Yes, indeed. The boys pomaded their low-cut hair. Spice had a conch and his hair was pitch-black. Like the pit in Trinidad. Jacob creased his own uniform pants. They all shined their shoes. They had leave that night. They were going out on the town. They were gonna drink. They were gonna dance. Maybe meet a few nice pretty women who could sweep men off their feet.

  Ronald’s lips were full and soft. Anette had come to enjoy pressing her own mouth against them. His hands were smooth despite his job of washing dishes. He was a regular man in every other way. He knew this. He felt that regular was something to be proud of. Spice was thick bodied and dark and angry with straight hair that grew like weeds. The French Quarter women loved being forcefully seduced by him. They had only to catch him in their eyes like a speck of dust and he was in them until he alone wanted out.

  Jacob’s body was lean and tall, like the trunk of a coconut tree. He always had a mist on his upper lip, which made women want to lick his mouth. He trimmed his brown pubic hair with delicate scissors. His underarms were always moist and his body gave off the smell of soil. His skin and eyes and hair were all the same wet-sand color. Even the white sergeants could not explain their own desire to root into him. In her letter his mother had reminded him that “there is more schooling still. Do not settle.”