A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  Maps

  The French took Gorée Island in the seventeenth century. It became a major station for slaving. On the upper floor of the “Maison des Esclaves” were quarters for the slave traders. The slaves were held in cells below. There were no amenities. The traders packed these cells to overcapacity. Chained and cramped in filth and excrement, many died from the inhuman conditions.

  Town

  At the top of Soufrière in St. Vincent I meet three children. They are slender and inquisitive, as children here are. They are curious about everything and frank in their questioning. Though they have a shyness, a deference toward adults, once you address them they quickly come close as if you have been their friend for a long time. They are playing outside a school now closed for the evening. They are collecting tiny bits of chalk thrown out the window during the day by the teacher. They are two girls and a boy. Friends or brother and sisters, perhaps cousins.

  Soufrière is a small village. It is a small village after a long drive from the capital. The road there is a road which leaves the capital, circles and climbs into the volcano. The volcano is called Soufrière. The earth is red and yellow. It is the dry season and every gust of wind raises dust. As we were driving to the top everyone on the road seemed covered in this reddish dust.

  We arrive at the top, a baked village, houses along the road and some farther in on the sides of hills; some hidden in the recesses of the volcano. Near the school, I meet the children. One girl is playing the teacher, pointing to the boy, then the other girl, then her imaginary class for answers to her question. Anxious to deliver punishment for ignorance just like the real teacher. I see them and I walk toward them to talk. I used to be a child like this, fine boned and curious, playing school even when school was over. The boon of being the teacher was not to dispense knowledge but to dispense order and power. Mostly our game of school involved the teacher writing on the board some law of the classroom and the students whispering behind her back until they got caught, to wit the teacher would give strokes to the palm of the hand with a ruler. I walk toward them out of memory. They are talking away. Sometimes I look at children deep in discussion and I cannot remember what we spoke of as children. What talk did we fill all that time with? We rushed outside of houses, of classrooms, to be with each other and we chattered away at our own lives. So many hours we filled, but I cannot now remember how.

  I am drawn across to where they are playing, to enter their childhood as if it were mine. To find there the warm simplicity of my own childhood, albeit interlaced with the dramas of hunger or violence or grief. Those recede as I see the children. Instead the childhood of play appears to me. There is a sureness in them which belies my own presence and what I have brought to this Soufrière with me. I have brought doubt. I have brought pity. I have brought a kind of condescension. I work for a development agency and I am here with others, including some local leftists, some progressive church people and some trade unionists, talking about development and underdevelopment. Our meeting is over and we decide to see Soufrière, to walk up to the volcano. There is a small village up here near the summit. The volcano last erupted in the 1980s, yet there is a small village here. There is this small village defying the earth, yellow and reddish, dry now. The volcano is silent now, sitting in the light mist it makes. This is not any place I know but I recognize the school and the children. One of the girls looks like someone I’ve been; someone I left behind long ago on another island, Trinidad. Happily.

  I go over to the three playing at the side of the road near the school and I say hello. They answer tentatively. I have intruded and they are shy. They look at me with a mix of frankness and demur. I ask them what they are doing and they jump to explain since it is a question from an adult. Just playing … nothing … I stoop down beside them and take a piece of the chalk and begin to write my name on the asphalt. I say, “This is my name.” They ask, “That is your name?” and they write their own. Before long we are friends. All three of them want to claim this stranger who has come up to Soufrière in the back of a truck and who comes over to talk to them. Before long I am asking them about school, about where they live. One of them looks at me and asks, “Miss, you from Town?”

  From “Town.” I am dumbfounded. I suddenly realize that I cannot answer this simplest of questions. I don’t know where I’m from. I am from nowhere that I can explain to them. Town is their sense of the outside world. Town is the farthest that they can imagine. And I am from beyond Town. They have probably never been to Town but only heard of it as I had as a child. They have put me in a quandary. Where am I from? They seem sure that it must be Town, since Town is where everyone they do not know must be from. I feel like a child called on in the game of school but who doesn’t know the answer to a simple question.

  I arrived in Toronto before going to Town. Port-of-Spain, in my case. I had passed Town on my way to the airport without ever seeing it. Town. The word had summoned an old wonder. Town — one could get lost in it, one could be robbed, one could get into an accident, one could pick up with bad people, one could shop in high-class stores, one could be robbed. One would have to stay with Aunt Tina, who lived in Barataria, because Town was far. One would come home the next day with goods never seen before, with sweets never tasted before, with stories of how long the streets were, how busy, how one outsmarted a town person, how one got lost and found again, how hungry one was and how sick or how happy, how confident and how sophisticated one now was having been to Town. Town was nowhere that I was from. Town always frightened me. What if I was asked to go to Town by myself? I dreaded it. What if I could not find my way? What if I didn’t look right? Would all the people in Town jeer at me? Would I end up crying on the corner of Frederick Street because I looked poor and could not find my way? Would I be taken away, kidnapped, by Mano Benjamin, the man who had kidnapped and tortured two girls, Dulcie and Lucy? But Town was a place one had to go eventually. It was a place one went to if one was lucky; if one wanted to be anything but a country-boukie. I was not from Town. Town was a sophisticated place and in the face of that word, I was suddenly a plain girl who had never been to Town. So when the children asked me about Town with envy and wonder, I was speechless. Town used to be the furthest place in my imagination, too, the most horrific and the most glamorous. I had skirted Town a long time ago. I knew somehow that I had to avoid Town at all costs. I knew that I would never get to Town. I was afraid of Town. Town was like an axe waiting to fall. If I could get away, away, away, before having to go to Town, I would be thankful. It had been thirteen years since I’d left the country, but I had never been to Town.

  When you travel everything goes with you, even the things you do not know. They travel; they take up space; they remain the things you do not know; they become the things you will never know. It had been a long time since I’d been from “there” and never ever had I been from Town. I had gone beyond Town. Town is a still-unexplored, still-unvisited, still-only-imagined place. Even now, decades later I am still afraid of Town. I am afraid that I would get lost there. It is bigger than any city I have been to: New York, or Boston, or Vancouver, or the city I live in, Toronto. I have navigated many cities — Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Paris — but Port-of-Spain is much more complicated. It is larger, impossible to navigate, ungraspable. It is still only a place in a calypso. I only know it because of newscasts on the radio many years ago: “In Port-of-Spain today crowds gathered …” I’ve only read about it in lines of poetry by Derek Walcott, lines like “The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails/ round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.” It is the most unknowable place in the world.

  When the children asked me if I was from Town I became frightened. They were from some place. Here, where we stood. And they felt to me so assured, so certain, that they were from a place and I knew that I was not. I was from beyond Town. I could not describe where. I was therefore even out of my own reach. I envied them this assuredness. When I did not answer they looked at me with s
kepticism. I felt them lose interest in me. I recovered, saying, yes, I was from Town, and they began to pepper me with questions about Town which I could not answer. Then I said that I was from Town but I was living in America. “America!” they said, looking at me fabulously. “Yes, America,” I said, having no word for Canada that was understandable. There was Here, there was Town, and there was America. That much I knew. Canada would have to be explained. It would be an awful mess and not as romantic. There was no sound of marvel like the sound that followed after “Town” or after “America.” So I said, “Yes, America.” That stopped them. They lost interest in me anyway, because America was too big. I had overwhelmed them with America. Showing off. All to cover the fact that I was really from no place at all that I could describe. But I didn’t really fool them; they were from someplace solid, this volcano, this hill, these people whom a volcano could not persuade to move. Their eyes took me in steadily. This was where they lived and I, I lived in the air.

  The dusk was coming and they would have to go home. We would soon be leaving. A woman called a name from a house and the oldest girl turned, the one who had asked me if I was from Town. What a look she had. A look like being needed somewhere not for anything except to fill a familiar space on a lap, to receive a look of love, to be touched. She looked at the other two and said it was time to go home. I asked them where they lived and they pointed in a general way to the red earth out of which a zinc roof rose, a clothesline and faint voices lifted on the intermittent breeze.

  They ran off toward the place, waving at me, saying, “Miss, we have to go.” Forgetting me.

  Maps

  My imagination was all rapture as I flew to the Register Office, and in this respect, like the apostle Peter, (whose deliverance from Prison was so sudden and extraordinary, that he thought he was in a vision) I could scarcely believe I was awake. Heavens! Who could do justice to my feelings at this moment! Not Conquering heroes themselves in the midst of a triumph — Not the tender mother who has just regained her long-lost infant, and press it to her heart — Not the weary, hungry mariner at the sight of the desired friendly port — Not the lover, when he once embraces his beloved mistress after she had been ravished from his arms! — All within my breast was tumult, wildness, and delirium!

  Olaudah Equiano, on buying his freedom from slavery,

  taken from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah

  Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

  Written by himself, 1789

  Arriving at Desire

  It is only now I recall, when recalling is all art, that the first book I read and fell into like a fish falling into water was a book about the Haitian revolution of 1791. It was owned by my uncle, a teacher, and it had no cover. The pages were thick and absorbent, their colour a yellowish cream from age, the ink still dark and pungent. The book had lain in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe for as long as I could remember, with a book on mathematics — geometry — and a bible that was my grandmother’s.

  It was in the same drawer where my grandmother kept stores of rice and sugar, syrup shine breads, just-in-case goods, and, around Christmas, black cakes. She stored them under her good tablecloth, her good sheets, and the good pillowcases. So the book was walked over by little red sugar ants, it was bored through by weevils. It was mapped by silverfish. It was thick with the humidity of rainy season days and dry with the aridity of dry season days. It had no spine, though it had a back. It had no front cover. It had been sewn together, though the sewing was loose in some places, the thread almost rotted. It had been glued. The glue now caked off in caramel-like flakes from the original binding.

  I recall the title running over the top of each page: The Black Napoleon. I recall that the first letter of each chapter was larger than the rest of the words. I remember certain names — Toussaint, Henri Christophe, Dessalines … I cannot recall the author. I’ve never checked to see if such a book actually existed. I’ve never looked for or found that particular book again. I prefer to think of it still at the bottom of the wardrobe drawer, waiting for me to fall into its face.

  The wardrobe brown, the colour of mahogany. The bottom drawer was deep. It was heavy and it stuck at times, a pillowcase caught in the groove, wood lice altering its tracks, requiring some skill to open it quietly. There was always a fine dust in the base of the drawer, the work of colonies of insects moving their unseeable world to and fro. The book moved around from corner to corner, too. I do not remember if it began with the first chapter. I suspect not. The front cover had long disappeared.

  What made me fall into this book was probably some raid on my grandmother’s cakes or sweet breads. I was probably trying to steal her Klim milk powder or the sugar she buried there also, as if it were not the sole ambition of children to seek out secrets. She rotated her hiding places of course, but the wardrobe could always be counted on because before we ruined it there was a lock. And she kept the key in her bosom or under her pillow. My grandmother read the bible from that drawer, putting her finger under each word, then tiring, her eyes or her grasp giving out, she placed it in the recess at the head of her bed before falling asleep, some psalm dying on her lips: “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength in who I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower …” The psalm was a prohibition to our desire and a sign of her power attached so intimately, so ardently, to the Lord. It was a psalm denoting her territory, the breadth of her command. But when she was asleep we forgot her power. Then the wardrobe drawer was a lure of tablecloth-covered cakes soaked in rum to keep them moist and crumbling shortbreads in tins from away, powdered milk and Ponds pink face powder, dates, chocolates melting to cherry centres in the heat, Andrew liver salts which frothed in the mouth, avocados left in brown paper to ripen. What led me to this book, then, were my senses, my sweet tooth, my hunger, my curiosity, the intrigue, the possibility of outsmarting my grandmother.

  The geometry book I only remember as pages of drawings, signs and symbols with thick dense writing which I could not follow, though I remember elaborate structures, a kind of inexplicable intelligence which I knew I would never conquer but felt I ought to. It had lain in the drawer for years as companion to The Black Napoleon. But I never got close to it. I have always been bad at geometry.

  I cannot recall the day I decided to read the book, but it must have been the day after my uncle said not to touch it. Then it became as irresistible as the other contents of the drawer. I opened the book, at first leaving the drawer open with the book lying inside, and began to read. Then I took it to my spot behind the house, then to my spot below the bed. After slipping into this book I understood that my uncle must have fallen into its face, too, and he didn’t want any more pages torn out. This book filled me with sadness and courage. It burned my skin. I lay asleep on its open face under the bed. It was the book that took me away from the world, from the small intrigues of sugar and milk to the pleasure and desolation of words on a page. For days I lived with these people I found there, hoping and urging and frightened and elated. The book was about the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture against the French on St. Domingue. In it I met a history I was never taught. The history I had been taught began, “In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Santo Domingo … with his three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria he discovered the New World.” I had been given the first sighting of land by Cristobal Colon as my beginnings. His eyes, his sight, his view, his vindication, his proof, his discovered terrain. These were to be mine. All the moil and hurt proceeding from his view were to the good, evolutionary, a right and just casualty of modernity. Everything was missing from the middle of that story. Empire was at the end. So I had never met Toussaint L’Ouverture until I saw him at the bottom of the wardrobe drawer with the cakes and sugar. Perhaps I also met there things I had never felt before. I did not know about slavery; I had never felt pain over it. In fact I had never felt pain except the kind of pain that chi
ldren feel, immediate and transient; I had never seen — well, what can one see in eight years or so of living? — suffering. I did not yet know how the world took people like me. I did not know history. The book was a mirror and an ocean.

  Dessalines was said, on the pages of this book, to have been voracious in battle, Toussaint a diplomat. When I was twenty-five or so, I would write in a poem, “Toussaint, I loved you as soon as I saw you on that page.” I loved his faith, though it betrayed him. But Dessalines’ ardour never would. I loved his ferocity. The poem ended, “Dessalines, Dessalines, you were right …” This book I had found inhabited me with its terror and revolution. I was eight or so. It was the first “big” book I read to its end. When I was finished, I was made. I had lost innocence and acquired knowledge. I had lost the idea that desire was plain.

  I recall the passion I felt for those people fighting the French. I recognized them. I was them. I remember my small chest — my grandmother called it a bird’s chest — wracked with apprehension over the outcome. I would continue to hunt down sugar and milk and black fruitcake and cream wafers, certainly, but The Black Napoleon and falling into the face of a book were now entwined and indistinguishable in my sensual knowledge. I read the book over and over again, returning to passages. To Toussaint and Dessalines.