by Sharon Maas
I’d been just as baffled as Mum now was. I sat up in bed, wiping the sleep from my eyes.
‘Church? What church?’
‘You mean y’all don’t go to church? The eight o’clock service! Hurry up, man, we ‘gon miss it!’
It took me half an hour to explain to Gran that not only did we not go to eight o’clock Sunday church services; we didn’t go to church at all. Though there was a church just a corner away from our house, I had no idea what denomination it was, what went on in there, or if they even had an eight o’clock service. I refrained from mentioning the fact that we were not even Christian. I was not baptised, and when asked, Mum called herself a Vedantist. I was by now extremely adept at navigating difficult issues by omitting certain relevant facts, or rewording others to make them palatable for Gran.
While she was upstairs I got Gran washed and ready for the day – she fretting all the time that we were going to miss the service – and then I helped her down again. After getting her dressed – she insisted on her best Sunday clothes, a navy-blue frock of some artificial silky material, with a white lace collar – I made breakfast for her, and by then it was 7:30. While Gran was eating I made some phone calls to find out if there actually was a church service at 8:00. But no one seemed available at this ungodly hour on a Sunday morning; all I got was recorded messages or musak. Gran was by this time quite irritable, shuffling from room to room with her rollator, fretting about how late it was. That’s when I spotted Mum’s laptop, on the dining table, where she’d been apparently been working the night before.
It’s amazing what Google can dig up in just a few seconds: the name of the church, and the times of services. They did indeed have an 8:00 am service. I decided I’d walk Gran over. It couldn’t be more than five minutes away. I’d push her wheelchair into the church, find a good position for her at the back, walk home, eat a nice breakfast, and go and pick her up an hour later.
But then Gran began to fret again.
‘Is a white pastor, or a black one?’
I stared at her. ‘I’ve no idea! Does it matter?’
‘I ain’t going to no church with no white pastor. And de congregation – white or black?’
Again I had no idea. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I hadn’t heard anything so blatantly racist in all my life, and when Gran insisted I call to find out, I refused – it was just too embarrassing. Gran tried to hassle me into obedience but I put up such a fight that she finally capitulated.
‘All right – give me the phone.’
‘You want to call yourself?’
‘Don’t bother youself. Just give me the damn t’ing.’
I shrugged. ‘Go ahead.’
I tossed her the phone. To my surprise she caught it in mid-air, sucked her teeth, clamped it under her arm, and shuffled off to her room with her rollator. It’s hard to imagine any human being shuffling away with a rollator with dignity, but Gran pulled it off. I don’t know how she did it. Something about the set of her face, the tilt of her chin. Her bedroom door slammed. I made a face at it and went upstairs, slamming my own door. I’d already called every church in London and nobody, just nobody, was answering. I went back to bed. I was still in my pyjamas; might as well make the most of them.
But just a few minutes later I almost jumped out of my skin. She was yelling my name. I swore aloud and called back:
‘What?’
‘Come down here right now!’
I got up and stood at the top of the stairs.
‘What is it?’
‘Get youself dressed and come downstairs.’
‘So you decided to go anyway, white pastor or not?’ If she’d capitulated, I’d stick to the plan: I’d walk her over, as agreed. We were late – it was long past 8 a.m.by now – but if Gran didn’t mind, I didn’t either.
‘Just do as I say. And hurry up.’
I shrugged. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs; I’d shower afterwards. But Gran wasn’t having it.
‘Is so you goin’ to church?’
‘I’m not going to church. I’m just walking you over.’
She cackled in triumph.
‘You think I goin’ to that white-people church? No sirree. We goin’ to a nice odder church, pure West Indian. An’ you not goin’ in that condition. Quick march upstairs and get youself smart. I not introducin’ no scruff to Doreen.’
And, bit by bit, I got the story out of her. All she’d done is call her old friend Doreen. I already knew that all the past week, while Mum and I had been at work, she’d caught up with all her friends and relations in London. According to Marion, there’d been a steady stream of them coming to the house while we were out, and Gran had held court on the living room sofa. I’d not yet had the pleasure of meeting any of them. Now Gran had taken matters into her own hands.
According to Doreen, there was a very nice West Indian church in West Norwood which she, Doreen, attended every Sunday. Lots of singing and dancing, clapping and cheering, just the way Gran liked it. It even had a Guyanese pastor. It was too late for the eight o’clock service, but the ten o’clock one was livelier anyway because that was the one all the families went to, including Doreen’s daughter and niece with their children.
‘You must be joking.’
‘What you mean, I joking?’
‘West Norwood. We’d have to take the train, or the bus. I’m not taking you on public transport with that wheelchair. No way.’
That silenced Gran, but only for a moment.
‘We’ll take a taxi.’
‘Ha! You have money for a taxi?’
That silenced her for another moment. Then:
‘When you mother getting back?’
I looked at the clock, made some mental calculations.
‘It depends on the traffic. Half an hour at the earliest, maybe an hour.’
‘We gon’ wait for she. Much better. She can drive we over. Then she could get the Lord’s blessing after all these years. And meet Doreen, Aunty Doreen to you.’
It turned out to be forty-five minutes. And that was how me, Mum and Gran ended up attending church together that Sunday. There was simply no escape.
* * *
It wasn’t technically a church. It was a large hall with a huge wooden cross just beside the wide open entrance. People were streaming in, all in their Sunday Best. Women all dolled up in last century’s formal fashion, boleros and white lace collars and crimplene hats. Men in suits, trousers ending two inches above their ankles, white socks showing. Little girls in frilly white, little boys in sailor suits or bow ties. A trip back in time, or else across the ocean. Or if you wanted to put a positive slant on it, totally retro. Everybody was black.
We were greeted with huge smiles of welcome. You’d think they already knew us, the way they clasped our hands in both of theirs. A tall thin smiling woman in a navy blue dress with white polka-dots and a blue hat decorated with white lace ushered us to a row of chairs near the front; as Gran shuffled forward with her rollator, people smilingly stepped aside to let her pass, like the parting of the Red Sea.
That’s when Aunty Doreen found us. Rushing up, she gasped,
‘No, no, no, I already got chairs for you, on the other side, come dis way, Dorothea, Rika, follow me!’ So Gran turned around and shuffled back the way she’d come and we kind of shuffled behind her and the Red Sea parted again and Aunty Doreen escorted us around the back of the hall to a row of chairs where her entire family was already parked; husband, sons, daughters, aunts, nieces, cousins, grandchildren, even a baby in somebody’s arms. All these smiling faces turned to beam at us as we edged our way into the row; first me, then Mum, then Gran, helped by Mum and Aunty Doreen, then Aunty Doreen herself. I found myself sitting next to a teenage girl totally overdressed in a pink crepe creation and white high-heeled shoes, the sort you find in charity shops, and white lace gloves.
She beamed at me. I made my best effort at beaming back, all the while considering my o
ptions of escape. Was it too late? The row behind us was still empty. Could I feign a trip to the toilet – I had seen a WC sign in the entrance lobby – scrape back my chair, and make a mad dash for the door? I wanted to do something – anything – to wipe that beam off my neighbour’s face. What was a girl her age doing in church anyway? She should be sleeping off a hangover from last night’s binge, or turning over in her boyfriend’s bed. It just wasn’t natural. I was glad nobody I knew would see me here.
The pastor walked up the aisle followed by a children’s choir, all of them in white gowns and carrying lit candles, and singing. Arriving at the altar, the pastor held up a hand to bless the congregation, then one by one took the candles from the choir members and placed them in a row of golden candlesticks behind the altar, beneath another enormous cross. The kid’s choir traipsed off to stand in a row immediately in front of a line of women, also in white robes. The choir was complete.
Completely without warning, it burst into song. “Greet somebody in Jesus’ name!” the women and the children cried, and next moment I was swept up in a body of sound, a rousting, reverberating chorus, voices bouncing off the ceiling, rising to the skies. ‘Everybody smile! Jesus loves you!” the congregation belted out, and if they had been smiling before, then now the smiles burst out of them, and all over the hall people turned to each other, left right, and behind them, shook hands with their neighbours, hugged, kissed, and smiled, smiled, smiled to kingdom come. It was a disgusting, saccharine show of fake jollity. Next to me, Miss Pious turned and held out her white-gloved hand for me to shake. I resisted the temptation to slap it away and instead put mine there, limp and listless, hoping she’d get the message. She didn’t.
‘You must be Inky, Aunt Doreen told me all about you, welcome to Trinity Church!’ she gushed. I mumbled something indecipherable and tried to pull away my hand. Nothing doing. She not only grasped it tighter yet; she placed her other hand on the other side of it, so that I stood there trapped in a white lace clasp.
‘I’m Lily and I really look forward to getting to know you at lunch afterwards!’ she whispered.
‘Lunch? What?’ I replied in shock, but it was too late, the second verse had started and Lily had turned away to join in, her chin lifted and her eyes glazed in a sort of rapture.
And that was just the beginning. I found out that I had entered some kind of revival tent gathering, the kind you find in places like Alabama or Kentucky or even Harlem. The moment one song ended, the next began, with hardly a breath between. These people seemed overflowing with some kind of inexhaustible vigour that escaped their souls through the medium of voice. Some of them had tambourines or castanets or even drums, and if they didn’t, they had their hands and clapped like there was no tomorrow; their bodies twitched and bounced as they sang, as if aching to dance. It was like one huge body of voice, an ocean wave that lifted the lot of us up and merged us into and transported us into some kind of translucent space where nothing existed except a vibrant, rollicking, resonant joy, and try as I might to resist it, I was taken up too, carried up in this surge of sound, that rose and sank and rose again even higher; and in between the waves the pastor cried out ‘Praise the Lord!’ and ‘Glory to the Lord!’.
In one song, the choir leader divided us into four groups and we sang a canon which ended up with the whole room resonating to the clarion cry of ‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!’. That was followed by a quiet hymn in which they all calmed down and the choir leader sang a solo with the congregation singing the refrain.
To my horror, I felt tears gathering in my eyes, running down my cheeks. I struggled against the tears but yet more came. I sneaked a peek at Mum next to me. Her eyes were closed and down her cheek ran a shiny streak, as if a small snail had crawled down it. And in that fraction of time I knew what it was all about, Life and God and everything, and my body tingled and my breath too was gone and tears rose up in my eyes and I wanted to grab hold of Lily and hug her to death, and everyone else in that hall, all these singing radiant people, and I knew, intimately and with absolute surety the meaning of that word, Glory.
It was too embarrassing for words.
* * *
Aunty Doreen had prepared a feast for us all, and I tucked in. Church seemed to have opened a yawning cavern inside me that had to be filled with something more substantial than light, and the sight and aroma of so many dishes, the likes of which I’d never seen or heard of or smelt before, except for that small sample at Brown Betty’s a few days ago, not even under Marion’s crash course in Guyanese cooking, made me almost drool. I ate as if I’d been in jail on a bread-and-water diet. It was a buffet, so everyone grabbed a plate and retired to a sofa or a chair or the garden to eat. Lily had latched on to me permanently, and led me outside, where, with a chicken drumstick, she discreetly pointed out the various individuals she promised to introduce me to later, she said, after the meal. And slowly, slowly as the hours slipped by, I passed from one hearty embrace to the other, and the names of this uncle and that aunt and second cousin so-and-so passed in one ear and out the other. All the women’s names seemed to end in ‘een’. Doreen, Lurleen, Eileen, Marleen, Charleen, Maybeleen. And everybody was Aunty. It seemed that you had to call women of your mother’s generation Aunty So-and-so; everything else was rude.
I grew drowsy. I was tired of it all. These were Aunty Doreen’s relatives, after all, not mine, though you wouldn’t have thought it from the enthusiasm with which they folded me into their midst. If it had been my relatives I might have been more receptive; I’d been hungry for family all my life. But these people seemed to think that, because we’d been in church together, we were all now one big happy family, and though I’d felt a bit of that during and immediately after the service, that notion now only made me cranky. I wanted to go home. A girl can only take so much Glory in one day.
Gran, of course, loved it all. She sat throughout the meal in place of honour on the softest armchair, where she graciously held court. People, men, women, children, brought her plates of food and glasses of drink. They sat at her feet as she held forth, wagging her finger and waving her hands to illustrate some point or animate some story. They gathered around her, faces still radiant, and Gran revelled in it. And I realised that this was the thing she must miss the most: back in her own environment she was the Queen Bee, respected and admired, and with us she was not. That’s why she made herself into Queen Bee. And that’s why I resisted.
Maybe back there in the village a person’s age is enough to earn him or her respect; but not for me. It was what you did and how you behaved that earned you my respect, and that was the cardinal flaw in the relationship between Gran and me. She’d done nothing yet to earn my respect, and so she didn’t have it. She was just an old woman I had to look after. Gran wanted more; I had no more to give. I feared all this fawning would do her no good; it would only go to her head.
I looked around, longing to escape. Where was Mum? I had no idea. I hadn’t seen her eating or talking to anyone. Abandoning sweet Lily I got up to look for her. She was nowhere to be seen; but fifteen minutes later she walked in the front door. I realised she had slipped out after the services and now had returned to pick us up.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I said in irritation. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘Where d’you think? Sitting on her throne, surrounded by her attendants.’
Mum threw me a sharp look, smiled ever so subtly and jiggled her head ever so slightly, and I knew we were as one on this. Gran hadn’t earned her respect either.
* * *
Sal came around that evening. Gran received him in her room, which by now had been transformed into her official reception area by the addition of a sofa, the smaller one of the living-room suite. The sofa was for guests; Gran sat enthroned upon Mum’s best armchair. Sal and Gran took to each other immediately, the only snag being that she entirely misconstrued our relationship. She thought he was my boyfriend.
‘Two y’a
ll suit nice together!’ she said, approvingly within the first five minutes of meeting him, and later, when she heard his career plans, she almost clapped her hands in glee.
‘You catch youself a good white man there, gyal!’ she said, loud enough for him to hear. ‘You better hold on to he good and tight.’ I blushed, Sal chuckled.
‘He’s just a friend. A good friend.’
‘Fren’? Ha! Rain a-fall a-roof, yuh put barrel fuh ketch am.’
Sal and I looked at each other, neither of us understanding, and thank goodness for that. Later, Mum explained the proverb to me: it had to with grasping opportunities as they arose. Now, I steered the subject away from Sal.
‘Gran, Sal knows a bit about stamps,’ I lied. ‘Can he see the albums?’
‘Of course. But go outside the room a minute. And shut the door.’
By now I knew better than to ask why: she’d hidden them. Sal and I went outside and shut the door. A minute later she called us back in. The albums were laid out on the bed. She gestured towards them.
Sal was put through the same process as I’d been: first she leafed through the two fat albums with the newer, more colourful stamps. When that was over, she placed the precious heirloom album into his hands.
‘Over one hundred and fifty years old!’ she proclaimed. ‘A real antique. Be careful. It’s worth a small fortune.’
Sal gingerly turned the pages. Next to him on the couch, I peered over his shoulder. Though I’d seen it before, Sal’s interest had aroused my own, and I wanted to take a closer look; I’d been much too dismissive of Gran and her precious possessions the day she’d arrived. Maybe Sal was right; maybe they were worth something.
Some of the older stamps were still on their original envelopes. The addressee’s name on the yellowed paper was written in an old-fashioned, spidery handwriting, the ink faded, yet still decipherable. It was always the same addressee: Theodore Quint, 217 Lamaha Street, Georgetown.
‘Who was Theodore Quint? An ancestor of yours?’