In addition to the vegetables and the dozen eggs that Grama sent each Monday, she paid Cousin Alice for our room and board, with a little extra “so she won’t skimp on the meat and fish she gives you all.” On Friday afternoons we travelled back to Havre in Father Henderson’s car. On Monday mornings we were packed into the regular bus that carried one and one-half times the passengers it was licensed for, those Paul’s age and younger sitting on the laps of adults — the journey: a constant ascent and descent of almost perpendicular hills along the edges of precipices without guardrails, some spots with just enough space for one-way traffic; the sea: sapphire, lace-fringed, lapping against the beige-and-black cliffs 100 or more metres below. That was our routine for six years, except during vacation: two weeks at Christmas, one at Easter, and the months of July and August.
At first I had trouble studying because of Paul’s pestering questions. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll bop you. I have to study.”
“And I will tell Grama. You don’t have the right to hit me. I will tell her you threatened me.”
“Little good it will do you. I’ll just bop you again when we’re in town, and give you double every time you tell.”
“And you’ll be sorry, because one day I’ll be a king and I’ll make my guards cut off your head.”
“Yes. The name of your kingdom will be Wonderland, and your courtiers will be rabbits who’ll constantly disappear in people’s pots.”
I never bopped Paul, and the pestering never stopped.
“Jay, did you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Let me see what you’re studying. Oh gases! I want to learn it too. Read it out loud.”
“You are driving me crazy.”
“Explain what oceanic islands are.”
“I have a warning, not an explanation: leave my textbooks alone.”
“When will my penis get to be big like yours?”
“Never. For troublesome boys like you it shrivels up and falls off.”
“Oh, you’re so funny.”
Eventually I got Grama to buy us three 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. But it only lessened the pestering, and I had to arrange with Grama to free me from chores on weekends so I could get serious schoolwork done. She’d carry Paul to the store on Saturdays and leave him to read in the back or let him sit on a high stool at the front where he could observe the shoppers. Some Saturdays and the occasional Sunday he had practice at the Steelband Hall. On Sundays he was barred from disturbing me. He craved Grama’s praise too much to disobey her when he was in Havre. In town the only way I could get him to swallow his cod liver oil pills and the Sanatogen powder mixed into his milk was to threaten to tell Grama. Cousin Alice would observe our breakfast battles, shake her head and say: “Cynthia’s princes.” She prepared toast, juice, hot milk, and an egg each for us; sometimes instead of toast we got oatmeal; she sat with us long enough to down her cup of cocoa and a slice of bread slathered with guava jam. The jam was a gift from Grama, from guavas that came from her land.
Cousin Alice’s boyfriend, Mr. Bolo, was a security guard at the telephone company where she was a secretary. He was tall and bulky — had to bend to enter the main door — with coal-black skin, red lips, yellowish deep-set eyes, and an unsmiling face. Something was wrong with his throat: he was always clearing it. Secretly Paul called him Major Elly. He visited her without fail every Wednesday around 7 pm and stayed for two hours. The first time Paul saw him, he asked her if he was her boyfriend. Her brow wrinkled. “Yes. What else you want to know, you feisty bugger: the colour o’ me drawers?”
Paul shook his head, unfazed, his face stamped with a mischievous smile. Later he asked me: “Would she have shown me her drawers for real?”
I saw Mr. Bolo on Monday mornings as well. He collected from me the foodstuff that Grama sent as well as our weekly supply of freshly laundered clothing and took them to Cousin Alice’s place during his lunch break.
Cousin Alice’s Wednesday supper was special. “Wednesday, dessert day!” Paul would exclaim in her presence, and wink at me. She served sponge cake, always sponge cake bought from a bakery. On Wednesdays she didn’t eat supper with us. In a gold, green, or burgundy satin dress, her perfume strong, her line-like lips carmine, her grey eyes glowing, giving her usually sad but now freshly powdered face a younger, happy look — she’d wait for Mr. Bolo to come. She’d put a bottle of rum and two glasses on the sideboard and move about with a feather duster, peering here and there in the living-and-dining room for dust. Paul and I would eat supper quickly and then head to our room, where, when he was older, a giggling Paul would ask me how fast I thought Major Elly was driving into Chalice, and whether she would “get big and have a baby.” Once Paul remarked that it was “useless watering her garden. Nothing grows there.” I looked at him surprised and asked him what he knew about it.
“Lots. I read, you know; I see what animals do.”
He certainly watched all the episodes of “Nature” — not at Cousin Alice’s: she kept the TV in her bedroom — and the various programmes of animals in the wild. (Grama taped them for him and allowed him to watch them on Saturday and Sunday at home or in the backroom of the store, but restricted his TV time to two hours.) One time he said he’d want to be a cougar if he were a wild animal. I laughed, noting the obvious contradiction. “You’re laughing because you’re a toothless dog that can’t even bark.”
Mr. Bolo was married. His own home was six houses down the slope. One Wednesday his daughter, a girl of around 12, came to Cousin Alice’s house to tell him that Mrs. Bolo had collapsed at her gate, and an ambulance had taken her to the hospital. We’d heard the siren and would have been able to see where the ambulance had stopped, but Mr. Bolo and Cousin Alice and Paul and I were in our respective bedrooms. The next day, Tungkance — she was pale like Cousin Alice, freckled, two metres tall, and had melon-size breasts and a “bumptious” bum that rippled when she walked; “that harlot,” Cousin Alice called her — came out into the front yard, leaned her back against a white cedar tree there, and hollered up to Cousin Alice: “Adulteress, you hearing me? Adulteress, God wrath will come down on you, sure as the sun rise over Sion Hill and set in the sea. I’m warning you: leave Betsy Bolo husband alone; leave the man alone. His wife sick.”
Cousin Alice had just got in from work. She rushed to the front door, closed it, shut the louvres on both sides of it, and closed the curtains. “Listen to that cow!” she said to herself. “Just listen to that harlot! Listen to her sermonizing me!”
“What does adulteress mean?” Paul asked her.
“Look, boy!” She glared at Paul and stamped the floor.
Paul went to our bedroom, spent a minute, then returned. “I checked it in the dictionary,” he told her. “I know why you don’t want to tell me.”
“Cut it out, Paul!” I glared at him.
Paul quieted, his eyes squeezed small, his forehead wrinkled in protest, his breath raspy.
For several weeks after that Mr. Bolo’s visits were never more than half an hour, and I overheard the tenants whispering among themselves that Mrs. Bolo had a brain tumour.
Marcella, Tungkance’s daughter, a year older than I, lived in the room with her mother. (Two other children, darker than Marcella, visited Tungkance on occasion; they lived with their father and stepmother.) Marcella had long braids, was honey-coloured, unfreckled, sleek and pretty. She wore lipstick, short tight dresses that were then in fashion, and high heels. She attended Saint Stephens Secondary School: a ramshackle building across the street from the Grenadines Wharf. On occasion another tenant, Melvina, sometimes asked Tungkance what rich white or “mulatto” man she had lined up for Marcella. On evenings when it wasn’t raining the tenants sat on plastic chairs in front of their rooms, the lights of Kingstown gleaming below them, and conversed like this. Their laughter and teasing and gossip about the people they cooked and cleaned for
would drift up to Paul and me. “She got the right colour,” Melvina would say. Tungkance would tell her to lay off her daughter and mind her own business. But Melvina would continue: “When you is young and you is pretty, you is lucky. You don’ have to have education when you is pretty and you don’ have to sweat in a hot kitchen and take abuse day in and day out, ‘cause plenty rich man line up to take care o’ you.” (This on an evening when Tungkance was fretting with Marcella because she hadn’t done her schoolwork: “You want to be servant like me for rich people? Is that you want?”) Melvina was soot-black, knock-kneed, and duck-shaped — not exactly in the coterie of women who were taken care of. She had a grown daughter who lived in the country with Melvina’s mother.
A Tuesday when Cousin Alice was attending a meeting of the Anglican Women’s League and Tungkance and the other women hadn’t yet come in from work — they got home between 7:30 and 8 pm after the families they worked for had supped, Marcella and I had arranged to have sex. I was fifteen at the time. I only had time to fondle her breasts because Paul began banging on the door, shouting: “I know what you’re doing. Let me in. Let me in. I want to do it too.” For days after, Paul would giggle and pester me. His brown eyes flaming, he’d say: “Kuk-Kuk, you did the nasty thing,” and giggle. “What’s it like? I’ll tell Grama. I won’t tell if you stop forcing me to drink Sanatogen and take those awful cod-liver-oil pills” — his face all screwed up. “Yuk! Tastes terrible when I burp.” My answer was a firm no. He did tell and Grama responded: “Oh, Paul, when will you start writing novels?”
My second Christmas in Montreal Cousin Alice had scribbled in a Christmas card that she and Mr. Bolo were now married and that Marcella was the first runner-up in the Carnival Beauty Pageant that year. But when Cousin Alice attended Grama’s funeral, she needed help to get out of the car. Her back was arched into a semi-circle, and she couldn’t stand without the support of a walker. Mr. Bolo had died three months earlier from kidney failure. Caring for him, she said, had almost killed her. Marcella, beautiful: trim, svelte body, symmetrical face, seductive smile, perfect teeth, came with her to the funeral and stayed at her side. She’s now a civil servant and lives with Cousin Alice: “My hand and foot, Jay. My hand and foot. A blessing, you hear me, Jay — a blessing I don’t deserve.”
BOOK TWO
REBELLION
11
PAUL AND I arrived in Montreal in the summer of 1997. For the last week of July and the first three weeks of August, we explored the city: to Parc Jean-Drapeau, where Paul wanted to go on every ride — he plagued me to take him back a second time (it was easier to give Paul what he wanted than to endure his hounding); to Parc-Mont-Royal (it was near enough for us to walk to it: a 30-minute walk at a leisurely pace); to the Botanical Gardens, the Insectarium, and the Biodôme; to the Planetarium. He picked up all the pamphlets and absorbed every scrap of information in them. Grama had given me $300. “You looked after Paul without complaining. I shouldn’t have put such a huge burden on you. And you did me proud with your CXC results.” By the end of August, I’d spent every cent entertaining Paul and me.
As Labour Day approached, Paul became withdrawn and admitted that he was nervous about going to school. He had to attend French school because of Bill 101, but he’d done French at Excelsior and had a French teacher from Martinique. She’d taken him and his classmates to Martinique four times, one time for six weeks. (The week after he came back he wouldn’t shut up about the birds he’d seen there: the Martinique oriole, the blue-headed hummingbird, the ringed kingfisher; in his pedantic way, informing us about their plumage and habits, to the point where I offered to pay him to shut up.) And he’d peruse my French texts and brag that he’d already learned what I was studying, on occasion correcting my pronunciation. Anna had sent us conversational French and Spanish tapes.
The Sunday before school started, he told Grama on the phone that he needed her, that she should come live with us. She replied that in hot St. Vincent her joints creak like rusty hinges. Canada’s cold would cripple her.
***
In St. Vincent there was no chance for me to become an amateur actor, and there was none in Montreal. At 17 going on 18, I’d already completed the first year of community college, so I entered CEGEP. Paul was five months short of 12 and had already completed secondary I — always a year ahead of his classmates. Anna didn’t want Paul left alone at home. Someone had sketched for her a nightmare scenario of children left unsupervised from three until their parents got home, children who ended up being petty thieves and drug pushers. So, the first two years, I had to leave CEGEP no later than 2 pm to be home for Paul’s arrival. There was no time for extra-curricular activities. I fumed quietly. It didn’t help that, aside from her regular job at the Jewish General where she often accepted overtime, Anna also worked in another hospital on her days off — until one evening when she came up the stairs out of breath and dropped onto the sofa like a bag of stones. She was on two weeks’ vacation then, and had chosen to work at another hospital.
“Ma,” Paul asked, “when last you had a day off?”
She couldn’t remember.
“Ma, I like Michael Jordan sneakers, but I don’t want you like killing yourself so I can wear them.”
“It’s not that. It’s because I want us to have our own house.”
“At the rate you’re going,” I said, “you won’t be around to live in it.”
“Ma, all you do is work, work, work,” Paul said. “Ma, you need a life. Do like Grama. She’s cool: she gets together with friends, and they have a good time on a Saturday night. Every bank holiday she’d take us off somewhere and we’d all enjoy ourselves.”
After that Anna stopped doing double shifts and worked only occasionally on her days off, but she did nothing to enrich her life. Of course, shift work didn’t help.
She forgot Paul’s first birthday here. She’d had a night shift. The day before he’d received a money order for $100 from Grama. The morning after, as Paul was heading off to school, he asked her if she hadn’t forgotten something. She gave him a puzzled look. Tears welled up in his eyes. “Ma, yesterday was my birthday.” When she attempted to hug him, he raised his arms defensively. That evening she gave him a card and $20, and ordered in pizza. But Paul, who was accustomed to having a cake baked specially for him and all the foods he liked —curried goat, oxtail, callaloo . . . — on his birthday or the first day he got back to Havre from Kingstown, was not impressed. When he left for school, Anna told me that she had been counting on me to remind her. She hadn’t forgotten my birthday a month earlier — a fact Paul unendingly pointed out — but, apart from giving me $30, had been too tired to do anything else.
Now, nine years later, I realize these were crucial mistakes that wounded Paul, mistakes he had no coherent language for. She and Paul didn’t know each other, and she didn’t know she should have spent those first couple of years forging a bond with him. I see it now: Paul’s crying for Grama was his plea for help against the insecurity he’d been thrown into. I recall how Caleb prevented Anna from parenting me as she would have wanted; knocking her down when she tried to rescue me from his brutality — her flight. I should have told her that Paul felt she wasn’t meeting his needs and he didn’t trust her judgement. That I could have done. But I’d lived for the day when she and I would be reunited. Hurting her feelings wasn’t how I wanted our reunion to begin. Yep. That’s what it was. She’d left a hole in me the day she walked out on Daddy and left me behind, and I hoped to fill it when I got here. Not that I was fully conscious of this when Paul and I came here in July ’97.
In Montreal, Paul fought me all the way. Here nobody knew he was Ma Kirton’s Genius and wouldn’t have cared. In St. Vincent, his schoolmates and the community lionized him for his brilliance. After he’d won the Vincentian Spelling Bee in the under-nine category and his photograph was splashed on the front page of The Vincentian, Haverites began calling him Ma Kirton’s
Genius. I remember the agony on Geraldine’s face as pterodactyl was called. She was from Windsor Academy, Excelsior’s rival. They were already into overtime, and a few minutes earlier the adjudicator had allowed the American spelling for plough, and Paul was livid. They’d already aced words like epistle, gnat, knight, knob, and cyst. When Geraldine said “t,” Paul became electrified. He’d already read the couple of books on dinosaurs in the Kingstown Public Library. At ten and a half, he placed second on the island-wide high school entrance exam, and again his photograph along with the photographs of the girl who’d beaten him by a single mark and the boy he’d beaten by two marks took up the entire front page of The Vincentian. He was a year younger than both of them. Future Leaders was the banner on the front page of The Vincentian. SVGTV and NBC Radio sent journalists to interview the winners. Grama, Aunt Mercy, Paul and I sat in the living room and watched the TV interview. Tears rolled down Grama’s cheeks as she hugged Paul fiercely and told him how proud she was of him. “Our beginnings do not know their ends.”
In St. Vincent, Paul attended school with the children of the island’s wealthiest and most accomplished people. In Montreal, his classmates were the children of tradespeople, petty clerks, janitors, housemaids, factory workers, drug pushers . . . and he was shocked by their sparse knowledge and paltry (his word) vocabulary. “They can’t sit still and listen for five minutes. They never read. They aren’t curious about anything. They listen to vapid music and gab about the stupid TV shows they watch.” They called him geek, nerd, wimp, fag. Why else would he spend so much time in the library? He was one of seven of 16 Black students in his secondary II class who did homework (the other six were girls). To the Jamaican students, he was a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — because upon teasing him for the way he spoke, he replied that his vocabulary and grammar didn’t come from dancehall music. (Elocution was a part of Excelsior’s curriculum.) His schoolmates mocked, mimicked, humiliated, and, on occasion, assaulted him. He turned 12 that November. His Black classmates were mostly 13, 14 and one, Alfred — an unflagging persecutor — was 15. Exotic flora and fauna, ornithology, the customs of the world’s peoples were Paul’s interests. He loved to watch documentaries about almost anything and share the info with anyone who would listen. The films, videocassettes, and books in the Intercultural Library and the school library were the only things that pleased him about being in Montreal. And he was a news junkie. Every day he read the Montreal Gazette, and on weekends he added La Presse. Anna balked at the expense. Paul was shocked. (Current affairs was an informal part of Excelsior’s curriculum. One Saturday when Grama didn’t get The Vincentian, he’d come close to tears at the thought that he would be bested when his class teacher questioned them the following Monday about what was in the news.)
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