They Never Told Me

by Austin Clarke

  “But I would never forget that morning, that being a Monday, the whole of every Tom-Dick-and-Harry in this neighbourhood, the Marrish-and-the-Parrish watching. And listening. And screeling. And pulling at the boy. White people and black people, both. To hear the two o’ we, and the mistress woman who say in his face, ‘Oh God, you intend to brek-off the child’ two arms? And tekking way the woman lawful child? Oh God, man, watch out! You holding the child wrong. You holding the child by the neck! But, this child belongs rightfully to the child’ mother! This child is rightfully the mother-own. All you men, and your tom-pigeons!’

  “When I hear them words leave that woman’s mouth, my hatred for that son-of-a-bitch, all that bile, all that venom o’ hate come right up inside my head… my blood boiling… and I aim the kick. Good good good… and blam! Right in his two balls. Blam! Another kick. And he bend over, pulling my child’s two feet, holding my child round his neck… Blam! And he leggo my child… and my God, I just in time to catch my child from falling and cracking open his head on the cement and the rock-stone that the Stand-Pipe build with… on my feet… when he start fighting me, pulling me, a child that born before it was time for him to be born… premature… so small, so little, so fragile, so teeny, but such a beautiful child. Born, as they call it, a Caeseerian. I carry him round the neighbourhood, in my two arms, on a pillow. For the first two months of his poor life. But that Monday morning… I aim the blow… good good good. My left foot. Blam! Clean in his two stones. Good God! I myself was sorry for him, afterwards, after I kick him. Blam! And two more. Blam! Blam!

  “I never understand how he was able to walk straight upright after that! With only one ball. One testicle, only? A cheer went up, ’mongst the spectators. The biggest cheer went up from the women. The white women. The men just walk off. Black and white. Black and white. And the whole damn neighbourhood, in particular the women, laughing. And clapping. ‘Yuh win! Yuh win, girl!’

  “And that woman’s words cause tears to come to my two eyes. Just to see how close I had come to being a guest to Her Majesty’s Glendairy Prison… serving a life sentence… for murder in the first degree. But if that was the decision that God judge me by… as I was sure sure that God had put me in the position to execute that deadly blow, I would have serve my time, in complete complacency, as God’s decision… the payment for my deed. Payment for what that blasted man do to me… getting me big with child… and then having the nerve to try to take-way my first-born child from me? My only child? That boy out there, with his head buried in all them books… the Latin, the Geography… pardon me. I mean the Geometry… the Histories of the Whirl, that he have to read every night, for homework. And those books so hard to read! I happen to take the chance to peep in one, one afternoon when he went to the WC. The big words turn my head! My head start to spin and get giddy giddy. I had to put down the book. That boy, outside there, sitting down, doing his homework, or whatever it is that he doing… perhaps, even listening to me talking… and I hope he isn’t… that boy will, one day, crown my head… with a crown o’ gold, and… before he lift my head…”

  I can hear the knocking of my mother’s horse-comb on the table; I can imagine how her mouth tightens, and her lips become thin as shop paper; the sound of the comb knocking, knocking, keeping the beat of a church song on the tablecloth, a revival song, a hymn of salvation and redemption, sung at her Monday night congregations, when the married women in the neighbourhood gather for Mothers’ Union. Perhaps my mother meant to copy the beating of her horse-comb onto the white tablecloth, imitating steel drums and a rhythm which enters her blood like a pulse, calypso in constant beat… I imagine her sitting with her right hand at her face, this posture allowing the music to crawl over her body as she whispers aloud her secrets to herself, secrets she has already told one of her women friends, Mistress Gallup, secrets too tragic and too disturbing for the ears of her son. I do not know why I think this. But I am accustomed to seeing Mistress Gallup and my mother whispering; and then suddenly, a silence would fall between them. They would throw glances in my direction. This is when they are talking woman talk, as her whisper turns into a tune I have never heard, words: “Old pirates, yes, they rob I…” Perhaps she has heard this on the short-wave radio, the radio station that interrupts the song to say, “This is the BBC. Here is the news, from London… read by…”; and then she listens to the playing of “God Save Our Gracious Queen.” She knows all the words to this anthem and can follow the instrumentation of cymbal, kettle drum, trombone, and bassoon. Sitting at the Dutch-window in the front-house, she told me one day that, “I counted the number o’ times they play ‘God Save the Queen’ today! Guess homminy times, boy! Guess.” And before I could guess, she tells me the number, exuberant, proud and smiling, knowing that she has this knowledge and I do not.

  “Ten! Ten times, since the first time it play, at six o’clock this morning. It wake-me-up! Ten times!”

  In my dorm room at Harsun College, I listened to the Latin Master ask me to translate Hannibal Alpam transgresserat cum impedimenta. I told him the translation was, “Hannibal and his army crossed the Alps on the backs of elephants.” He closed his eyes, opened them, blinked, and then he said, pointing to the boy on my left, “Next ass!”

  “… there is things I wish I could explain to that boy. I wish I could disclose to him the circumstances of my marriage to Daddy, instead of to that blasted man, his real father, and the history of how he get to be living with me, fatherless with only a stepfather, my only son, Tawm! Out there, in the next room. Reading a book. Or lis’ning to me talking and pretending he not listening to me tell him about his patrimonies. Because these is things every boy should know… who father him? But for me to explain… how Daddy come to be my husband, making that boy out there his stepchild, Tawm! The name I give my only child. Yes, Tawm!… I hope God will not get vex with me for withholding, in all these seventeen long years, the patrimonies of my son’s birth from him. Who else am I going to keep it from? And hold it from? If not from him? In all these seventeen years, his stepfather, who is more like a father to him, in the way he treats my son… and he too, I must say, have never degradated the sanctity of this house by calling that man’s name, inside this house. Not once. And his name never cross my two lips in these seventeen years that pass. Not once. Not even when I am by myself. Alone. In this house. Not once.

  “I sitting down here the whole day. The whole morning already gone! And Jesus God, here I am, at this dining table, with this envelope that the postman bring yesterday. And it is Wednesday already. And four o’clock gone! Time catch me, still sitting down here! With this tortoiseshell horse-comb, in my one hand. Whilst saying these things to you whether you here or not with your ears open wide… and this envelope. I don’t know if you hearing my words. If you understand what I saying, cause I can’t see your two eyes. Hearing things I wish I could tell you, face-to-face, and put you in a seat, ’side-o’-me, and make you siddown and listen to me, as your mother. Looking into your two eyes, the only proof that my words was reaching you. Reaching your heart. No escaping from the truth in my eyes, my eyes touching your eyes. And your eyes would be the only proof my words are touching your heart. I wish it was possible to discourse the things I went through, to you.

  “But the two o’ we hiding from one another. So, what is he seeing in all them big books, that he can’t see in my words? And what, can he, as my child, pulled out of my womb, in a Caeseerian operation, bleeding in pain, cause he was born before it was his time to be born… what can he understand from what I am feeling, or thinking? My past? His present? Our present and past?

  “So, I will remain ignorant. Or dumb. I will never understand one word that he is reading. In them books. Nor what he is suffering. In the silence. In the silence I been spreading over his life?

  “Seventeen years o’ secrets, and silence? But I already admit to that. I am repeating myself. I know there is reason enough for a woman to repeat herself. Poor people, ’specially women lik
e me, have to repeat themselves. Is our only consolation. That boy, sitting down out there, in the shed-roof, should know everything about me, his mother. Well, not every everything…

  “But seventeen long years? Carrying this heavy burden o’ guilt? And, added to this, the heaviness of having to confess it? But, if he have to know… really have to know the truth, it can’t come from my two lips. I can’t confess it, act-by-act, to my son. To my own son? To my only son? What can I tell him about the man who got me pregnant? And the other one, that Canadian boy, the Sous-Chef… promising me to open a new life with him? Up in that cold country, Canada? Never mind he didn’t succeed. But would my life be more better with him, up in Canada?

  “So, you don’t think I have reason enough not to let that bastard’s name cross my two lips? To pronounce it? And in the hearing of that boy, out there fulling up his brains with foreign languages? All this Latin. All this Geometry. All this History about our beginnings. And such a terrible beginning, as he tell me, it was, that we had, in ancient times! In a different place! Born in one place. Tek from that place. Then, transported to a different place. With a stop-over in England… our Mother country! What kind o’ Mother England was to me? Or is? And my God, in Africa? To live in England and in Africa, is the same thing as ‘living at your aunt,’ as we say, the worst thing that could happen to a child, particular a little girl, is to make her live at her aunt. Lots o’ floggings. And little food. And the rest is unspeakable, as they say…

  Nobody know the trouble I see,

  Nobody know the trouble I see…

  “Ghana, they say. According to our resemblance to that breed o’ slaves… and they bring we here. If you was to ask me to tell you more than what the sum of two and two is; or anything more than the Pig-Latin language that we speak, if we want to hide what we say, the truth sometimes, from somebody… ’specially from the white people…

  “‘I ud-kay el-tay oo-yaa it-shay… and-a oo-yah o-nay…’

  “Who else but we, born here, or who was drop-off here, from Ghana, would know this new language? Or even know it exist? So, I am left back in the dark, no longer able to speak the language of Pig-Latin, that I born speaking?

  “Hey-haiii! I have to laugh! Here I am, sitting-down, looking at the envelope, all this time, using this high-faluting language, and I really don’t know what the arse I am saying. Even in this. Talking every day in a language… and every day hearing it spoken-back to me, by that boy out there, and really and truly, if I am going to be honest, I don’t know what the arse he says to me sometimes, when he talk to me in his greaty greaty English tones and accent… as if he is a white man! And as a consequence, he don’t know what the hell I am saying to him, neither… ”

  My mother is still sitting in the front-house. I am in the back room, the shed-roof we call it, from where I can see the backyard with the chickens and the fowls, and the flies, and the WC. She is looking out through the Dutch-window. She can see the people passing in the road. I can hear the comments she makes on their dress, on the clothes they are wearing, on the way they look. If she could sprain her neck, and look towards the Hill, which lords itself over the valley and the Hill itself, she would see “the Atlantic Ocean!” I hear her husband, my step-father, say so, many times. He says it with pride, boasting; showing off; showing me his knowledge of the History of Barbados, and the History of the Whirl. “The Atlantic is the sea that bring we here. From Africa. The sea that transport we here, in shit and ships, painted in doo-doo, across the Atlantic Ocean, boy!” And he leaves it at that, for me to drink-it-up, and digest it.

  My mother continues to look through the Dutch-window at the people passing; and she turns her head to the right, and then, to the left, following them for the short journey, the short time they come into focus, at the righthand corner of the window from the right, and then disappear in the left-hand side of the Dutch-window to the left, and then wiped out of the lens of her eyes… And she seems bored by this. To me, they all are dressed the same, and they walk with the same surrender, for they are late for their appointments: school or work; school or civil service. Teachers, perhaps. Chauffeurs.

  And she quenches her boredom by turning her head to look at the chickens in her backyard. She looks at them, as I follow her gaze. She looks at them now that her taste is deadly. She has chicken or duck or young turkey on her mind, in the taste in her mouth. In the palate of her desire. And the thought of killing comes into her head. She tastes the flesh of chicken, boiled or roasted, in her mouth. She tastes the blood. A chicken passes closer to me, where I am standing at the door leading into the kitchen. I can hear the tapping of her horse-comb change its tempo; and its rhythm. Perhaps, she is knocking the horse-comb to the new rhythm of the chickens and ducks and the young turkeys who march in circles. The circles are surrounding her. Look! A cock. Young and fluttering his wings and bragging about his feathers that grow out of his body like golden flashes of manhood.

  The sun has come out again. It adds glory and lust to the cock’s body of horns and sex, practising his jumps on to the back of a hen. The young cock does not balance his desire on the back of the hen. And he falls off. But, now! Look! They are stuck together, for a short time, practising their balancing, and oh!… then losing it. And to me, they are now two, rolling in the afternoon dust in the backyard. The cackling of the cock’s defeat increases. And the defeated fowl-cock surrenders. The cock is not able to jump on the hen, and still hold his balance. Then, the fluffing of his wings and feathers. My mother is thinking, I imagine, of the performances of the cock and the hen; of their gentleness, and their ignorance of the scales, balancing their two fates, hanging over their heads. She is no longer thinking of crunching their bones, and sucking out their eyes.

  I am suddenly aware that the house is quiet. Quiet. Still. Still as if the chickens and the ducks and the young turkeys cackling in the backyard have now turned into the men and women who pass her, from the left-hand, and the right-hand, as she sits, in all this silent time, at the opened Dutch-window.

  The quietness gobbles up the unmusical tapping of the horse-comb that she plays with, on the wooden table covered by the white cloth. I remember how I had watched her, patient, stitch by stitch, including the misses and the anger that stayed with her, as her large fingers had worked over the delicate white cloth.

  Now, the tapping replaces the stitching. The tap… tap… tap… tap-music that she makes with the tortoiseshell hitting the top of the table. The way I make music begins and ends with the one finger plucking on the one-stringed Stradivarious of the man who lives next door. But I know enough about music, and from listening to the neighbour’s Stradivarious, to understand the manner in which my mother slams the tortoiseshell on the table top, just like she slams the “seeds” in a Friday night domino game, after the stories about the Sinner Man. I know it is nothing more than her way of concealing her anger.

  I know that she will transfer this anger to the way she kills “this bloody bird,” her word for a chicken about to be killed. She will hold the “bloody bird” by its neck; tight; as if she is holding a child’s rattler. And with two swings, the “bloody bird” is just the fluttering of a weakened heart. And then, she cleans her hands, spotted in blood, on her white apron that hangs down to her shins. She has been sitting at the Dutch-window, for hours now. And I am hearing the crunching of chicken feet and their cackling, and the music that their cackling makes: the cackling of hunger; the currying and fluffing of their beautiful colours, like flashes of gold on this Wednesday of dying sunlight. She is paying more attention to the chickens and fowls than to the envelope or the people entering from the right and from the left in front of her Dutch-window.

  I am wondering about that envelope, that Griffoot the postman brought yesterday. And wondering about all the things she is telling me. That she won’t admit she’s telling me.

  A voice comes through the short-wave radio. It says, “The time now, is exactly four-thirty, Greenwich Mean Time.” And I wonder which “
bloody bird” parading in my mother’s backyard will lose its neck, on this humid, cackling, Wednesday “bloody” afternoon. I can, already in my mind, smell the aroma of boiling chicken, rising soft like the first kisses of morning mists; and I can taste the chicken boiling in the aluminum saucepan. This saucepan for boiling things reminds me always of the helmet of a Roman legionnaire; and “my God!,” as my mother would say, imagining the sweetness that lies within the legionnaire’s helmet, along with the sweet potatoes, and pulped eddoes and pigtails. All this is boiled-down in a bed of long-grain Indian rice. And fresh hot peppers. “To put a lil kick in this chicken stew, boy.”

  “… oh Lord, only if it was Friday! And not still this Wednesday afternoon! I could throw into this chicken stew some cloves; some hot nigger-peppers; some fresh ones, picked straight offa the tree; some onions; and some sprigs o’ fresh thyme that I growing in the backyard; my God!… and by the time she bake and I throw a little Mount Gay Dark Rum all over she, and pour some lard-oil over she!… oh my God, boy! Look out!

  “But today is only Wednesday! Overcast. A sad, dark, lonely lonely day!… this Wednesday! As if something bad is going to happen.

  “This Wednesday is more like a Friday… good Friday! Even with the sun still out…”

  I am still listening in the shed-roof, the small room off the kitchen, to the sound her horse-comb is making… tic… tic… tic… tic… tack… trying to find out what she is composing in her mind with the brown blood-smeared shining tortoiseshell… if there is an actual song she is composing and playing. Perhaps she has fallen asleep in the heavy humidity that is bathing her black silken skin. Perhaps she is not singing at all, for the door to the front-house is now shut. I am hearing now a humming song, with some words intermittent, sung by her; those she remembers. Perhaps, she isn’t singing at all. And that what I am now hearing is my own imagination displacing a melody that the afternoon’s warm, four-o’clock humidity gives birth to. Perhaps, the sound is that of the tortoiseshell. And she is punctuating her words and her imagination and my interpretation of her words in my mind, as if I am in a dream. Imagine. Perhaps I am dreaming. Dreaming from the moment I hear the tic, tic… tic… toc… beaten on the wooden table, made for her, by the man who lives next door, who plays the Stradivarious guitar that has one string, with one finger.