Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel

by Tiphanie Yanique

  “Let Me go!” someone shouted. And then the others began to shout, “Let Me go! Let me go!” And there was no difference.

  Keeper Joseph—Papa Franky—released her, now clothed and shod, to the people. And she slip-walked, the shoes too big, to the crowd of protesters who were corralled in a big bunch in a corner of Honeymoon Beach. They cheered for her and made way, like a school of fish, simply opening and closing as one body to accept their own. She was more than a hero now. She was a thing to drown for.

  “What’s your full name?” shouted the reporter. But no one was hearing. And so in the paper her name was recorded as her brother had declared it. And that is how everyone would remember: Me save the protest. Me worth fighting for. Me is a beauty.

  The people were corralled on the sand, but the officials hadn’t taken Markie’s ukelele and he was inventing songs on the spot. “St. Thomas people crazy ’bout the bay! We going dance and sing until Me have the way!”

  It wasn’t clear to the Coast Guard or to the Gull Reef Club management what to do with the people now. The idea was to get them off the beach. Was it better to hold them on the sand until they could each be handcuffed or send them back to their boats in the water and handcuff them then? They had to get back to St. Thomas to be taken to jail or questioned or what have you. Now what was needed was that they get off the beach. As long as they were on the beach, they were successful. But what was the beach? The land or the sea?

  “I’m sorry, Me!” called the young handsome Guardsman to Eve Youme, as he stepped her from the dock to one of the Coast Guard ships. Franky, standing apart, sighed as this man lifted the plank, trapping her and the others.

  We people were held on the Coast Guard ships, where we all chatted like it was Food Fair day, just with no food, or like on Transfer Day so many years ago, which most of us could not recall because we’d not yet been born then. Only the organizers, who stood to give up themselves, were arrested. The others were docked at the waterfront and set free. It had been a little scary and a little thrilling and a little magical, but it had been successful and it had been entirely real.

  94.

  Frank was not with his sister when Youme walked into the door that afternoon to meet Anette. Frank was in jail.

  Within the hour, it was reported by radio that young Frank Joseph was staging a hunger strike, Anette looked to the ceiling and shook her head. Her boy was already stick thin though he ate like a hog. He wouldn’t survive a day on a hunger strike. She packed up some food, and she and Youme started off toward the local jail, which overlooked the sea.

  “Mommy,” asked Youme, her face betraying both eagerness and defiance. “What’s the plan for me? What did you and Dr. McKenzie figure out?”

  “Me, let’s worry about your brother for now.”

  At the jailhouse there was a crowd, mostly of protesters from the lime-in/swim-in, the salt dried on their faces like war wounds. The people gave way for Me. They hailed her loudly, “Me! Me!” but she only smiled and held her mother. Franky was standing at the front desk, barefoot in a damp undershirt and his Coast Guard white pants. He was whispering with the police chief. He raised his arm so his wife and daughter could find their way toward him.

  “The boy won’t take food,” Franky said.

  “He will from his mother,” said Anette.

  “Don’t do that to him,” Franky said to his wife. “Let him be a man.”

  Here it was. And so quickly. Her son belonged to himself now. Anette passed the food to Franky. “Me?” she asked her daughter.

  “We should go, Mommy,” Youme said. She could feel the crowd getting thirsty just watching her.

  During Frank’s airheaded hunger meditation in jail, he thought only on his sister and Auntie Eeona. He didn’t believe Auntie Eeona was dead, like they were all fearing. He didn’t believe she had gone off to drown like it was said was the Bradshaw way. Without food, Frank felt high and he felt that he knew, really knew, that his women didn’t just give way to slice of knife or wall of water or ceasing of a beating heart. They last. They rise like volcanoes, like a pustule on the skin. They explode and do their cleansing damage.

  Young Frank was released, no charges pressed, before twenty-four hours even passed. Franky had stayed all night at the station to wait for his boy because the police officers would only release Frank to one of their enforcement own.

  When Frank walked through the door that morning, he went to his sister. He turned the big ice vat over and sat on it while Eve Youme sat on the couch.

  “Why did you run to the water like that?”

  “I don’t know. It just come over me.”

  Frank watched his sister in the face and saw Auntie Eeona rising in her skin.

  95.

  The Beach Occupation Movement and Bacchanal was in full sail after the successful swim-in/lime-in over on Water Island. Eve Youme’s picture, the indecent one with her chest bare, the black strip of the censor like a dark slot for entry, appeared in the paper the very morning that Frank was released. The BOMB was over a month later. It didn’t take long for the Free Beach Act to be passed. It was the time, after all. If lunch counters in the State of Georgia were being made to serve Negroes, then it seemed that Virgin Islands beaches would be made to serve Virgin Islanders. Not that history always worked this symmetrically, but this time it did. The last mean hotel and the last stingy family had to take down their PRIVATE signs and remove their chains. We lay on the beach and felt our self-worth rise with the tide.

  Of course, the tourists kept coming and the hotels kept bursting. And imagine, not even months into the new freedom Franky came home and announced that the Muhlenfeldt Point land had been sold to a big resort chain. The lighthouse was in jeopardy, as was Franky’s life’s work. But in the grand scheme of things, that point was on a cliff. Not on a beach. At least not on a beach.

  The BOMB all happened and was over within three months. A month to represent each major island—for St. Croix and St. John were in it, too. Or perhaps a month for each Bradshaw sibling. Or a month for each manifestation of God. No matter. Because after those three months, after the beaches were peaceably free and justly occupied, Eeona returned.

  LOVE

  My name is love

  I am the beloved one

  The last romantic

  Coming out of the islands

  Of the sea

  Coming out of the mossed ocean

  —HABIB TIWONI, “AL-HABIB”

  96.

  JACOB

  If I may . . . once more. Please. I would like to make it clear that I made an attempt. When Anette left me at the restaurant, I waited . . . I called . . . but I did not want to disrespect her household. I was sure her husband knew nothing of our meeting in Frenchtown. My wife . . . per usual . . . knew nothing.

  Understand . . . I did see my daughter there in the newspaper when she was a protester. I cut her picture out . . . for her decency the black strip of the censor was across her chest. I kept the picture in my wallet until it wore to tissue. Please, know . . . I did not participate in the movement and bacchanal . . . Never in my life have I been asked to vacate a beach . . . But I understood the movement’s concern.

  During the dark months of the BOMB, I had been writing fellow physicians about my daughter’s condition . . . My letters were cast out but did not produce a yield. Fellow colleagues wrote suggesting other colleagues . . . I wrote to Puerto Rico and the United States, to England and Denmark. There was a French doctor . . . he suggested a Spanish doctor . . . he turned out to be a priest who had been a medic on the Nazi side in the war. “Bring her to me.” The Spanish doctor priest wrote his epistle in medical Latin.

  Believe me . . . This letter lay open on my desk. My good wife dusted my table and folded the letter, but I reconsidered the Spaniard’s offer every night. Here it was . . . a doctor who had been a priest. His cure would be codeine, exorcism, surgery . . . prayer. I contemplated this possibility without anyone to consult with.

  As
I deliberated, I would take out the picture of my daughter from the paper. In it she is the symbol, like a statue of liberty for the Virgin Islands. She’s wet and standing in the water . . . she looks strong and defiant despite the Coast Guardsman holding on to her. I would try to talk to this symbol of her. Ask this symbol of liberty and tether what was best for my daughter. I contemplated alone with that picture until I knew there was no option but to send her away. In a country like Spain there would be others like her. Know this . . . I didn’t like my decision, but it was the only one I had.

  I phoned the Joseph residence day after day . . . for weeks . . . until finally my daughter answered. The beach protests were over, and now any old common person . . . even those from other islands . . . could lie out on our best beaches. Yes . . . she had made that possible. For better or for worse. When she answered . . . well, I could hear the beauty in her voice.

  “You wouldn’t send me away,” she said.

  I had to admit it. “My Eve, I already have. I’ve called the Spanish priest doctor long-distance on the phone. He and I have agreed. You will be there in less than a month. I must talk with your mother about the plan.”

  And then Eve spoke to me in a very adult manner: “Dr. McKenzie,” she said, “don’t you think that, in a way, it is beautiful? Worth holding on to?”

  I felt my fingers grasp hard and sweaty around the phone receiver. I saw myself making love to her mother. I remembered making her. Yes, of course, every bit of her was beautiful. Of course . . . but beauty could be wrong. “Eve. My first child. I don’t believe that this thing is of God.”

  “And so? It’s of me.”

  Yes. It turns out . . . yes . . . yes . . . I admired my daughter for her bravery. I made the . . . well, momentous decision . . . I let Eve be.

  Understand. What I’m saying is that I remember. I remember myself singing in the middle of the street to a woman with red roots at the base of her hair. I remember playing the piano, and the photographer at school snapping me. I remember my mother bathing me in the sweet-smelling water . . . I remember . . . believe me. I remember shining my military shoes and stealing the shiny rifles. I remember choosing the fine white cloth and then the racy red and yellow. I remember that beauty can be dangerous . . . I don’t know . . . perhaps even that danger is worth it. I remember that I have been niggardly. I never intended to be.

  97.

  The rooms at Eeona’s inn were charged at a price better suited for 1935. Because Mother Eeona still hadn’t returned, the Josephs collected the rent and, after paying the staff, sent a bit of it to help Ronalda in college. They couldn’t spare their own funds now because Franky had been released from keeping the lighthouse. A political demotion, he felt, for being the father of a BOMB family. But the Coast Guard had said that there was just no more need for a lighthouse. A hotel was going up there. A Marriott hotel, to be exact. That would shine brighter than anything.

  Franky wasn’t relegated to mess duty or anything degrading. He would continue routine coastal laps around the islands, but he had nothing so special as his lighthouse again. At home he was his same self. Only he started polishing the faces of the flashlights. Checking and rechecking the batteries with the tip of his tongue. He was a nuisance, but Anette let him be. The island had won the beaches and it had seemed there were no casualties. But here was the casualty. Living in her house.

  And the family also fretted about Auntie Eeona. Anette did not feel the coming feeling. Maybe Eeona would never return. Perhaps Anette would even have to get on a boat and visit the inn. Make a decision about what to do with it.

  But the good thing is that the Joseph family was going, every Saturday, to a different beach now. Stumpy and Sapphire. Sugar Bay and Botany. Magens and Secret Harbor. Afterward they would spend the evening looking at one another over candlelight, reading books until their eyes were sore and telling stories until sleep took over. Some private homes on island had electricity, but the Josephs were still waiting.

  Then one evening Anette was grading history papers by kerosene lamp and Frank could be heard singing kaiso from the tub. Anette had just cleared out her now reddish-gray hair, for she was letting the black dye go, and there were stray tufts of it floating around her. The phone rang and it was the inn’s housekeeper who had been promoted to inn manager, what with Mother Eeona disappeared. Anette and the woman had a banal conversation about a backed-up toilet and a newlywed couple who seemed to have forgotten they had real lives and still, two months gone, made love loudly until three in the morning.

  “Well, thank you for the news.”

  “News, Mrs. Joseph? But I ain give you the news yet.”

  And that is when Anette found out that Eeona had been reliably spotted in town. A whole two days ago. Her human self, with her hair flying like wings, seen on the road, wandering as though lost. Seen talking to herself, muttering—so one report confirmed—about lobster. More than one person had fed her saltfish, figuring she was seafood hungry.

  There was nothing new to rumors of Eeona sightings. People had been sighting her since she was a girl. But the beggar banality of this one caused Anette to believe that something terrible had finally happened. Perhaps Eeona had had her own Villa by the Sea fright. Or perhaps winning the beaches had now brought her ghost back.

  Anette had never been to the inn before. She had never been curious. And after her recent Hibiscus Hotel visit, Anette was worse than uncurious. But now she prepared herself for the ferry ride to St. John.

  Little sister, Anette. She did not like boats or ships or any vessel of the sea, but now she walked up the swaying plank without anyone’s help. She spent forty eternal minutes on the boat, which included the time spent with the boat just sitting there, doing no goddamn thing but swaying and shuddering and preparing to sink—so Anette felt. She survived it all by standing at the railing and staring. This seemed brave, but it wasn’t. She was focusing on the sea so she would know where to dive if the boat suddenly broke into pieces. Swimming was natural, she knew. She’d long ago decided that boats were not. It was a late-afternoon journey but there was enough sunshine for her to see a huge sea turtle gliding beside the boat. She saw herself jumping onto the turtle’s back and coasting to safety. Her hands gripped the railing so hard that they ached.

  She arrived at the inn in the evening because she had been slow getting ready, reticent really, and had missed the ferry’s morning voyage. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The inn, unlike the Joseph house, was bursting with electricity. It glowed in the dusk.

  The groundskeeper opened the door before Anette could even knock on it.

  Eeona’s inn was painted blue on the inside and the out. It was ornate with dark mahogany chairs that seemed as old as antiques. It was baroque, old-fashioned. There were elaborate trimmings where the high ceiling and the walls of the foyer met. Cream curtains made of light linen separated the foyer from the kitchen and the kitchen from the hallway. It gave the feeling of an old galleon. Anette felt a bit unsteady on her feet. On one far wall there was a picture of Eeona herself, proprietress, with its own little spotlight perched above and shining on it directly. In the painting the madame was quite young, seventeen maybe, and her beauty tugged all the attention from the room.

  Anette sat in the foyer of the room and had the odd feeling again. As though she had been here before. Or somewhere quite like this. As the inn manager stood with her hands clasped at her belly, Anette trailed her own fingers along the windowsills. It was so familiar it was making Anette’s head swim. Finally, she asked to be taken to Eeona’s room, knowing, just knowing, that it would look more like Villa by the Sea than even Hibiscus Hotel had managed. But the inn manager said, with all her professionalism, that that was the one room for which she didn’t have a key. And it was quite locked.

  Anette left her one small bag in another room with a bed very much like the bed she had slept in as a small child. But Anette would never have remembered this. Then she hired a gypsy taxi to drive her through
the town of Coral Bay and then around the whole island of St. John. She held her aching hands in her lap and called out of the taxi’s window, “Eeona! E-on-a. He Own Her,” into the homes of Coral Bay, and people came out of their houses to watch. The evening stretched out until Anette lost her voice.

  Finally, the taxi took Anette to the Emergency Station on the opposite side of the island from the inn. The Emergency Station was the hospital, police, and fire station all in one. Strangely, Anette’s polite words came out in a croaking whisper, though when she cursed, she found the crass words came out clear and brassy. The emergency personnel looked at her in bewilderment, for wasn’t she the dignified lady who began the whole BOMB? Maybe not. They knew for sure, though, who Mother Eeona was. They had directed many a tourist couple to her inn. When last was she seen? Seen a few days ago, but before that, not for months.

  Then Anette waited. A group of teenaged St. Johnians came into the station making noise. Their car had crashed into a tree, but they were still well pressed and coiffed. They looked healthy and excited. Anette envied them. Their youth, their togetherness.

  Hours later, two police officers drove Anette back to the remote side of the island, back to Eeona’s inn. The officers rarely drove to this side of the island and they were weary of being out here in the darkness, for there was not one streetlight for the entire journey. But the officers were also thrilled to have the opportunity to drive someone around instead of the sacks of potatoes and rice their wives made them transport in the backseat. Anette sat quietly in the back of the cruiser and dusted off the grains of rice. With the bars between her and the men, she felt like something dangerous. The only illumination ahead of them was their own headlights.